Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

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

This maquette of a seated mother holding a child 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, fingers and drapery in the clothing, 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 entire surface, followed by a more opaque green colour, which was then rubbed back on the 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.

The signature ‘MOORE’ was inscribed on the side of the base using a sharp point, possibly into the clay model or the pre-cast wax (fig.2). The maquette 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 with a child on her lap (fig.1). She is dressed in a long sleeveless robe and sits with her knees apart. The child sits upright with its back to the woman’s chest, balanced on her right thigh and supported by her hands, which rest on the child’s right shoulder and chest. The woman’s head is turned slightly towards her right while the child faces straight ahead.

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 of St Matthew’s Church in Northampton. This was Moore’s first major public commission and provided 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. Of the five maquettes presented to the commissioner in July 1943, this design was ultimately chosen to be enlarged into the final sculpture, which was carved in Hornton stone and dedicated in St Matthew’s Church on 19 February 1944 (fig.2).

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 Chairman 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 This Maquette for Madonna and Child relates closely to a partially complete drawing that depicts the subject from the front and fills the whole page (fig.3). In this sketch Moore has drawn hatched lines to define the mother’s draped clothing, her neck and her face, but the infant remains a hazy outline, seated on the mother’s right thigh, facing towards the right. In 1968 Moore reflected that one of the greatest challenges posed by the commission was how to depict the infant Jesus: ‘one problem lay in trying to make the child an intellectual looking child, that you could believe might have more of a future than just an ordinary baby’.9 Another page from the sketchbook contains two sketches, the one on the right of which is a near mirror image of the final design of the maquette.10 The only significant difference between the sculpture and this sketch is that the drawing has the mother’s hand on the child’s shoulder rather than his upper arm. These two pages demonstrate how Moore experimented with the poses of each figure, making slight variations that ultimately informed the composition of the sculpture.

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.4).11 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’.12 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’.14 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. Discussing the final sculpture in 1944, Moore explained that ‘the Madonna’s head is turned to face the direction from which the statue is first seen, in walking down the aisle, whereas one gets the front view of the Infant’s head when standing directly in front of the statue’.15 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’.16

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 was Moore’s preferred design, but he informed Hussey that he would ‘be prepared to base the finished statue’ on any one of the five.17 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 and noting Moore’s preference, Hussey took them back to Northampton to show members of St Matthew’s Parochial Church Council, who ‘agreed to the one preferred by the artist’.18 This Maquette for Madonna and Child was chosen as the design for the final sculpture, which Moore carved throughout the latter half of 1943 and early 1944. In the brochure published in late 1943 to announce the commission, Moore wrote that, ‘of the sketches and models I have done, the one chosen has, I think, a quiet dignity and gentleness’.19

However, following the unveiling of the full-size Madonna and Child an unnamed journalist writing in the Northampton Independent reported that ‘there were few at last Saturday’s unveiling who could repress a gasp of astonishment when the drapery fell to reveal the work ... Thereafter, astonishment was submerged by a flood of emotional reactions varying from rapt admiration, in the upper reaches, down to a torrent of rank disgust in the lower, according to individual tastes’.20 In the same edition of the newspaper the editors published one of a number of criticisms sent in by readers:

But it was not just the ‘untutored’ who raised concerns over Moore’s sculpture. In May 1944 the critics Geoffrey Grigson and Eric Newton voiced their reservations about Moore’s sculpture in the journal Architectural Review. While they agreed that the work was an imaginative and successful example of modern art, they questioned its success as a religious work of art. Grigson stated that looking at Moore’s sculpture left him ‘uneasy’ because he could not ‘see Henry Moore’s belief’.22 He suggested that since the sculptor was not a practicing Christian, the sculpture could not be a true expression of faith. Newton concluded that although Moore’s Madonna and Child was ‘both a descendent of and a challenge to a thousand enthroned Madonnas of the past’, she would be seen in the future as a manifestation ‘of a deep seriousness somehow inherent in the mid-twentieth century’, rather than as an inherently religious icon.23

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.5) 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’.24 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 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’.26 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 1946 the critic Mary Sorrell proposed that Moore’s Madonna and Child drew heavily upon Italian Renaissance depictions of the subject, noting that, ‘The perfect foundation was Masaccio, idealistic but at the same time human, and he again stimulated the sculptor by his simple and unerring form’.27 Moore’s Madonna and Child certainly shares compositional affinities with Masaccio’s Madonna and Child 1426 (fig.6), in which the infant Jesus is positioned on his mother’s knee, looking straight out towards the viewer while the Virgin turns to the side. Moore was familiar with this painting, which is in the National Gallery, London, and expressed his admiration for Masaccio’s work in his 1937 essay ‘The Sculptor Speaks’.28 Moore had also 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.7).29 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 and Taddeo Gaddi, as well as 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’.31 According to the art historian Christa Lichtenstern, the wartime context of the commission may also have informed how Moore chose to represent his Madonna and Child:

In Moore’s catalogue raisonné the clay studies for Madonna and Child are described as being made in terracotta.33 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’.34 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 1944–5.35 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 one on the list, and a small sketch of the sculpture is annotated with the phrase ‘original for Northampton’. The notes indicate that five bronze casts were wanted and that three had been cast by 28 March. The sculpture exists in an edition of five plus one artist’s cast, although additional examples may have been cast. There is some uncertainty as to whether the unnumbered bronze maquettes were cast in editions of five or seven due to discrepancies between the foundry paperwork and Moore’s catalogue records held at the Henry Moore Foundation.36

In an article published in the Burlington Magazine in July 1948, David 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’.37 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.

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’.38 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’.39 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 this maquette cost thirty guineas because it was the version from which the final full-size sculpture had been scaled up.40

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.41 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.

All four of Tate’s Madonna and Child maquettes were exhibited in Moore’s solo exhibition at the British Pavilion at the 1948 Venice Biennale, at which Moore won the International Sculpture Prize, cementing his position as Britain’s ‘greatest living sculptor’.

Other examples of this sculpture can be found in the collections of the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, Northampton; Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, Norwich; and the British Council, London.42 The original clay maquette is held in the collection of the Moore Danowski Trust.