Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

Purchased from the artist through the Berkeley Galleries (Knapping Fund) in 1945.

This maquette of a seated woman holding a child in her lap is a solid bronze cast with no hollow cavity. The original model for this sculpture was made in clay and would have been used to make a mould from which the final bronze version could be cast. Moore made small impressions into the clay model to denote facial features and drapery, which are replicated in the bronze sculpture. The level of surface detail on the bronze suggests that it was made using the traditional lost wax casting technique. Although it is possible to see where casting flashes have been filed away and chased to blend with the surrounding surface, there is otherwise little post-cast finishing.

The bronze surface has been coloured using chemical patination techniques. First, a slightly transparent brown colour was applied over the surface, followed by a more opaque green colour, which was then rubbed back on high points using a light abrasive to pick out the details of the form (fig.1). The patina was then finished with a coating of wax. The brown base colour is often used on bronzes and is likely to have been applied using a solution of potassium polysulphide (otherwise known as ‘liver of sulphur’) in water. There are many different patina recipes used to produce green colours on bronzes but they often contain mixtures of copper and ammonium salts. Areas of unpatinated, pink-coloured bronze can be seen between the woman’s feet and on her chest.

The signature ‘MOORE’ is inscribed at the back of the bench towards the bottom using a sharp point, possibly into the clay model or the pre-cast wax. The sculpture is in generally good condition and has not required treatment.

Maquette for Madonna and Child is a small bronze sculpture cast from a study originally modelled in clay. It depicts a woman seated on a low bench holding a small child in her lap. She is dressed in a long-sleeved robe and sits with her knees apart. The child sits with its back to the woman’s chest and is supported by her arms and hands, which are placed together in her lap in front of the child. The knees of the child are raised and it has its right hand resting on the woman’s right arm.

The sculpture was intended as a representation of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, and is one of a series of preparatory maquettes sculpted by Moore in the spring and early summer of 1943. These maquettes were made to test designs for a large stone sculpture of the Madonna and Child, commissioned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the consecration St Matthew’s Church in Northampton. The final sculpture, Madonna and Child 1943–4 (fig.1), was carved in Hornton stone and was Moore’s first major public commission, providing the artist with an opportunity to develop his long-standing interest in the mother and child theme in line with more traditional representations of the subject, which suited the commission’s demands.

The commission came about after the vicar of St Matthew’s, the Reverend Walter Hussey, saw a number of Moore’s Shelter Drawings in an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, in the autumn of 1942. The exhibition had been organised by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC), a governmental body set up under the auspices of the Ministry of Information to boost British morale during wartime by commissioning images of British endurance from recognised artists. In 1940, having been forced to give up sculpture due to a lack of available materials, Moore produced a series of drawings of women and children sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz, which he showed to Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery and hairman of the WAAC, who invited him to become an Official War Artist.

Although some visitors to the National Gallery found that Moore’s Shelter Drawings did not accurately convey the reality of their wartime experiences, on his return to Northampton, Hussey signalled his admiration for the work to Harold Williamson, Director of the Chelsea School of Art, which had been relocated to Northampton in 1941 to escape the bombing in London.1 As Hussey recalled in his memoirs, ‘I remember shaking my finger at him and saying: “That is the sort of man who ought to be working for the Church – his work has the dignity and force that is desperately needed today”’.2 Moore had taught sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art since 1933 and so was well known to Williamson, who arranged for the two to meet the following week when Moore was visiting Northampton. It was then that Hussey proposed the commission to Moore: ‘I asked him whether he thought he would be interested in the project; he replied that he would, though whether it could go further, whether he could and would want to do it, he just couldn’t say at present’. Hussey also asked Moore if he felt able to believe in the commission, to which the artist responded ‘Yes, I would. Though whether or not I should agree with your theology, I just do not know. I think it is only through our art that we artists can come to understand your theology’.3 Moore’s attitude to Christianity was ambivalent; he stated in 1973 that ‘although I was baptised and made to go to church as a boy, I am not a practicing Christian’.4

In early December 1942 Hussey wrote to Moore enquiring whether he had considered the scheme any further. Hussey was at pains to express his desire for Moore to undertake the commission while also respecting the sensibilities of both the artist and the congregation of St Matthew’s. A sculpture that offended the ‘religious susceptibilities’ of the congregation was to be avoided, but he was also anxious that Moore should not have to compromise his artistic integrity.5 Moore replied on 6 March 1943, stating, ‘I’ve not forgotten the scheme and I’m very keen to begin thinking seriously about it and I think that in a couple of weeks’ time I shall get the chance to begin playing about making note-book sketches to get ideas for it’.6 On 29 April Moore wrote to Hussey confirming that he had at last ‘begun notebook sketches for it’.7

Between April and June 1943 Moore created what is now identified as the Madonna and Child Sketchbook, and it is from these sketches that he modelled twelve clay maquettes between June and July. Each of the three-dimensional maquettes appear to have been drawn to varying extents.8 Among the sketches Moore produced at this time, the closest immediate precedent for this Maquette for Madonna and Child can be found on a single sheet, on which two similar representations of the subject were drawn (fig.2). On the left of the page the Madonna is depicted seated on a bench with her right foot resting on a raised step. Her right elbow rests on her raised right knee as her forearm crosses in front of the child seated in her lap. The child also sits with raised knees, but while both figures face the front, they look in different directions. The sketch on the right of the page presents the seated figures in similar poses. However, in this drawing, which is less finished than its counterpart, both the woman’s arms wrap around the child’s waist, while the child sits on the woman’s right thigh with its feet resting on her left thigh and its head and torso twisted to face forward. Tate’s Maquette for Madonna and Child features characteristics from both drawings, suggesting that the sculpture is a composite of the two.

Perhaps because the work was commissioned, rather than conceived by himself, Moore produced twelve different clay maquettes presenting the Madonna and Child in different poses (fig.3).9 These models are some of the earliest examples of Moore’s preparatory experiments using clay. The critic David Sylvester argued in 1948 that modelling in clay helped Moore ‘grasp the tactile as well as the visual plasticity of forms because he could reconstruct them with his hands and thus attain a profounder sense of their volume’.10 The properties of clay enabled Moore to model his works with greater spontaneity and freedom, making it easier to transform an idea conceived on paper into a three-dimensional form. On 23 June 1943 Moore wrote to Hussey stating:

When seen together, the maquettes reveal how Moore experimented with the position and size of the Christ child and the pose of the Madonna, and testify to Moore’s growing interest in drapery. Moore later acknowledged that the folds of the mother’s dress in the maquettes were directly informed by his Shelter Drawings: ‘I had never used drapery in sculpture prior to making the shelter drawings. Then I saw sculptural form in the folds of the material and employed it’.12 The fact that Moore knew where the final sculpture was to be positioned in St Matthew’s Church also informed how he modelled the figures. The allocated site was against a wall, and as such Moore paid little attention to the backs of his maquettes. In his discussion of the commission, the art critic Herbert Read noted that the final sculpture had to confirm to what he called ‘the law of frontality’, by which Moore had to convey mass and volume without ‘an all round perambulation’.13

Of the twelve maquettes produced in clay five were selected by Moore to show to Hussey on 23 July 1943. This maquette was one of the five selected, and although it was not Moore’s preferred design for the final sculpture, he informed Hussey that he would ‘be prepared to base the finished statue’ on any one of the five.14 The production of multiple models provided Hussey not only with an element of choice but also a clearer idea of what the finished work might look like. After viewing the five proposed maquettes in London, Hussey took them back to Northampton to show members of St Matthew’s Parochial Church Council, who selected the sculpture to be commissioned. This Maquette for Madonna and Child was not chosen as the design for the final sculpture, which Moore carved throughout the latter half of 1943 and early 1944, and which was dedicated in St Matthew’s Church on Saturday 19 February 1944.

In Moore’s catalogue raisonné the clay studies for Madonna and Child are described as being made in terracotta.15 In 1963 Moore addressed any misunderstanding, explaining that ‘the original maquettes of the MADONNA AND CHILD ... sculptures were all modelled direct in clay and then baked, and so became terra-cottas. It was from these terra-cottas that the small bronzes were cast’.16 Moore’s catalogue raisonné also indicates that six of Moore’s preliminary terracotta maquettes were cast in bronze editions. This Maquette for Madonna and Child was cast at the Art Bronze Foundry in London. Notes made by Moore for the owner of the foundry, dated ‘March 28’, identify five Madonna and Child maquettes for casting, along with three maquettes for Moore’s Family Group, which date from 1944–5.17 The inclusion of Maquette for Family Group 1945 (Tate N05606) as the seventh sculpture on this list suggests that Moore made these casting notes in 1945. This Maquette for Madonna and Child is numbered three on the list, and a small sketch of the sculpture is annotated with the phrase ‘big Madonna + small child | bronze pattern’. The notes indicate that five bronze examples of this particular maquette were wanted, and that two had been cast by 28 March.

In an article published in the Burlington Magazine in July 1948, Sylvester, who had worked as Moore’s personal assistant in 1945, noted that ‘Moore had always made maquettes for his larger sculptures, but it was not until he cast about half-a-dozen of the ten or so clay studies for the Northampton Madonna that he began to make bronzes of them’.18 The bronzes were produced to be sold privately, and probably helped off-set the cost of the commission. Moore’s turn to making multiple bronze casts drastically altered the type of work he was able to produce, and provided more opportunities to sell his work.

During the 1930s Moore carved several stone sculptures representing a mother with a child. At this particular time Moore was less concerned with depicting human bodies naturalistically than he was with sculpting essentialised bodily forms. For example, in Mother and Child 1932 (fig.4) the mother’s head is disproportionately small when compared to her enormous left shoulder and large paddle-like feet. Reflecting on his later Madonna and Child sculptures in relation to these earlier works, Moore explained in 1945 that ‘this group was intended to have a religious interest, quite different from secular sculpture. It could not be too abstract or it would have forgone the traditional deep meaning of the subject’.19 On 26 August 1943 Moore wrote to Hussey, reflecting on the differences between representations of a mother and a Madonna, stating:

To create his Mother and Child sculpture in 1932 Moore had used the technique of direct carving, which involved working directly on the stone without reference to a model or preparatory sketches. In the early 1930s Moore and other contemporary sculptors, including Barbara Hepworth and John Skeaping, believed that by working directly on the stone, and in response to its particular physical properties, a sculptor could create a work of art that had more authenticity than one that eschewed the true qualities of its material. Moore later recalled that he ‘liked the different mental approach involved’ in direct carving, ‘that you begin with the block and have to find the sculpture that’s inside it’.21 By making small clay maquettes of the Madonna and Child prior to making the full-size stone carving, Moore therefore departed from this pre-war working method.

In 1968 the art critic John Russell suggested that Moore’s maquettes could be seen as a negotiation ‘between his previous practice and his recollections of Florentine sculpture’.22 Moore had studied examples of fifteenth-century Italian sculpture while he was a student at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London in the early 1920s, during which time he carved a copy of the Virgin’s head from Domenico Rosselli’s relief sculpture Virgin and Child 1450–98 (fig.5).23 On graduating from the RCA in 1924 Moore was awarded a six-month travel grant intended to facilitate the study of the arts of Renaissance Italy. Although he wanted to spend all of his time in Paris, Moore nonetheless travelled throughout Italy during the first part of 1925 and was impressed by the wall paintings of Giotto, Orcagna, Lorenzetti, Taddeo Gaddi and Masaccio. However, in 1947 he recalled that,

By depicting drapery and evoking the postures and poses of historical examples of the Madonna and Child, Moore found that it was possible to draw upon the idealised representations of Renaissance art without compromising his own ‘elementary’ figurative style. In 2003 the art historian Margaret Garlake proposed that Moore’s turn to figuration with the Shelter Drawings and the Northampton commission ‘encouraged him to acknowledge that a more easily read figurative art was capable of being both radical and popular’.25

This maquette was one of four bronze studies for the Northampton Madonna and Child bought by Tate in 1945 and was thus one of the earliest works by Moore to be purchased for the Tate collection. The purchase of these works illustrated the desire of the director Sir John Rothenstein to represent Moore’s work in the collection. In contrast, Rothenstein’s predecessor, J.B. Manson, had previously told the Tate trustee Robert Sainsbury ‘over my dead body will Henry Moore ever enter the Tate’.26 Rothenstein’s appointment thus signalled a shift in the direction of Tate’s ambitions. One of his first actions as director had been to accept the donation from the Contemporary Art Society of Moore’s Recumbent Figure 1938 (Tate N05387). Then in 1941 Rothenstein encouraged the appointment of Moore to Tate’s Board of Trustees.

In 1944 Rothenstein wrote to Moore asking whether Tate could commission another full-size Madonna and Child based on the existing maquettes. Moore politely turned down the suggestion, writing ‘its now more than a year since these little figure studies were done, + that’s whats [sic] making me hesitate now over your suggestion – for it would mean putting my mind back in working to a year ago’.27 Instead, Moore suggested that the Tate might be interested in some of the studies for a ‘Family Group’ he had recently begun working on. This proposal was accepted and Tate bought four maquettes for the Madonna and Child and three maquettes for the Family Group. Three of the Madonna and Child maquettes were bought at the relatively affordable price of twenty-five guineas each, while the maquette from which the final full-size version had been scaled up (Tate N05602) cost thirty guineas.28

The four maquettes for Madonna and Child were purchased from the artist through the Berkeley Galleries in early 1945 with money from the Knapping Fund.29 The Knapping Fund was the residuary estate of Miss Helen Knapping bequeathed to the Trustees of the National Gallery in 1935 to be spent on work by living or recently deceased British artists. A fraction of this money was allocated to the Tate by the National Gallery, as Tate’s purchasing power continued to rely on charitable donations and private patronage until well after the Second World War.

This Maquette for Madonna and Child was cast in an edition of seven plus one artist’s copy. Another example of this sculpture is held in the collection of the Henry Moore Foundation, while others are believed to be in private collections. Tate’s Madonna and Child maquettes were exhibited in Moore’s solo exhibition at the British Pavilion during the 1948 Venice Biennale, and the exhibition label can still be seen on the underside of this sculpture (fig.6).

Despite rejecting Rothenstein’s proposal to enlarge one of the Madonna and Child maquettes for Tate, Moore returned to his maquettes in 1948–9 and enlarged this Maquette for Madonna and Child in brown Hornton stone (fig.7). The slightly smaller than life-size sculpture had been commissioned by Sir Jasper Ridley as a memorial to his son and three other men from the village of Claydon in Suffolk who had been killed in the Second World War. Ridley had been Chairman of the Trustees of the National Gallery during the war and had attended the viewing of Moore’s five maquettes with Hussey and Kenneth Clark on 23 July 1943. It is uncertain when exactly Ridley proposed the commission, but Moore carved the sculpture, which has become known as the Claydon Madonna and Child, between 1948 and 1949. Moore’s biographer Roger Berthoud has recounted that ‘as first completed, Moore reckoned she [the Madonna] lacked sufficient majesty, so he added a crown, building it up over several days with ground stone and fixative’.30 The sculpture was unveiled in St Peter’s Church, Claydon, in December 1949 but was moved in 1978 under Moore’s supervision to the nearby church of St Mary’s in Barham (later renamed the Church of St Mary and St Peter), where it is installed in the north nave aisle.31