Executed in 1938, this study dates from a period in Henry Moore’s development when drawing and sculpture were closely intertwined in his practice. Throughout the 1930s, Moore used works on paper not simply to record ideas for sculpture, but as a means of thinking through form itself. In the present work, pencil and charcoal are handled with a sculptor’s concern for volume and structure: the figure is built up through line and tone, its body conceived as a solid object occupying space.

The human figure had by this point become the central subject of Moore’s art. During the preceding decade he had moved steadily away from conventional naturalism, looking instead to ancient and non-Western sculpture and, increasingly, to the formal experiments of the European avant-garde. His encounter with Surrealism and abstraction during the 1930s encouraged a greater freedom in the treatment of the body, yet Moore never abandoned the figure altogether. It remained the point from which even his most abstract investigations began.

This sheet presents several studies exploring the positioning and relationship of mother and child. As scholar Gail Gelburd observed, Moore’s engagement with the subject extended beyond maternity itself to broader ideas of birth and artistic creation: ‘Moore’s involvement in this theme reaches beyond maternity to an inquiry into birth and creativity. The theme of the mother and child, the mother giving birth, the child struggling to emerge from the maternal womb, is like the stone giving birth to the form, the form struggling to emerge from the block of stone.’

From the earliest years of his career, the mother-and-child motif, with its rich art-historical precedents, was a central preoccupation for Moore. It allowed him to engage with the subject’s iconographic significance while also exploring the formal and compositional possibilities presented by the grouping of two figures. As Moore stated, “The ‘Mother and Child’ idea is one of my two or three obsessions, one of my inexhaustible subjects. This may have something to do with the fact that the ‘Madonna and Child’ was so important in the art of the past and that one loves the old masters and has learned so much from them… It is a rich subject, both humanly and compositionally, that I will always go on using it.”

The theme was central to Moore’s sculpture as well as his work on paper. Recalling the extent to which it shaped his visual imagination, he explained, “I discovered, when drawing, I could turn every little scribble, blot or smudge into a Mother and Child… So that I was conditioned, as it were, to see it in everything. I suppose it could be explained as a ‘Mother’ complex.”

In Figural Study, the line does more than describe the edge of the figure. It suggests an underlying structure, while the charcoal gives density to the form. The effect is distinctly sculptural: the figure seems to possess weight beyond the surface of the sheet, as though Moore were considering how the body might exist in three dimensions.

Drawing offered Moore a freedom that carving could not. Ideas could be repeated, altered and compressed within a single sheet, allowing him to explore variations of a form before committing himself to stone or wood. It was in drawings of this kind that many of the motifs most closely associated with his mature work were developed. The reclining figure, the mother and child, and groups of closely connected bodies recur throughout the decade, gradually acquiring the simplified, monumental character that would become unmistakably Moore’s.

The present work was made at an important moment in this evolution. By 1938 Moore was established among the leading figures of the British avant-garde and had participated in the major exhibitions that introduced Surrealism and international abstraction to British audiences. At the same time, his own work remained markedly independent. Rather than embracing abstraction as an end in itself, Moore continued to return to the body and to the natural world, finding correspondences between anatomy, landscape and organic form.

These associations were especially important to his treatment of the reclining figure. Moore recognised that a horizontal body could suggest the contours of a landscape: knees, shoulders and torsos might become hills and valleys, while spaces within or between forms could assume an equal importance to the solid mass surrounding them. This relationship between figure and landscape would occupy him for the rest of his career and would eventually find monumental expression in his large-scale bronzes.

The concerns explored in Moore’s drawings of the late 1930s also anticipate the celebrated works on paper he produced during the Second World War. His Shelter Drawings, begun after he witnessed Londoners sleeping on Underground platforms during the Blitz, transformed rows of reclining bodies into haunting, almost sculptural forms. Wrapped in blankets and reduced to elemental volumes, the shelterers appear both vulnerable and enduring. Moore’s subsequent appointment as an Official War Artist in 1941 brought these drawings to a wide public and established his reputation as a draughtsman beyond the circle in which his sculpture was already known.

Although Figural Study predates the Shelter Drawings, the formal language from which they emerged is already apparent. The emphasis on mass, the reduction of anatomy to essential shapes and the use of shadow to suggest depth all belong to the sustained investigation of the figure that occupied Moore before the war.

Moore’s interest in the figure was never purely formal. The body offered him a means of addressing fundamental human relationships without resorting to narrative. This is particularly evident in the mother-and-child and family-group compositions that became increasingly important during the 1940s. Ideas of protection, dependence and physical closeness could be expressed through the simplest conjunction of forms. The emotional force of these works derives precisely from their economy: Moore reduced the figure while preserving its essential humanity.