Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

 Thank you for your letter of 2nd May.

 My secretary has looked through my past accounts and finds that my wife purchased the AFRICAN WONDERSTONE COMPOSITION from Michael Ventris, in November 1955, before he died.

 The STRINGED FIGURE is just ordinary bronze, but highly polished, it is not a special alloy, so it could be called polished bronze with elastic string.

 About the Tate Horton Stone RECUMBENT FIGURE: Serge Chermayeff, the architect, had it at the end of a terrace on a house he built at Halland in Sussex. Later Chermayeff (it was a vey bad period for architecture generally) told me he was not able to pay for he figure, and asked me to take the figure back because he was selling the house, and emigrating to Canada, so the figure came back into my possession, and Kenneth Clark, who that year was the buyer for the Contemporary Art Society purchased the sculpture and it was presented to the Tate.

 FAMILY GROUP: The first cast of this was done in 1949 for F.R.S. Yorke, for his school at Stevenage, and was put up there, and is still there. Further casts of it went to the Museum of Modern Art, New York; - the Tate Gallery; - and Nelson D. Rockefeller, New York City.

 KING AND QUEEN: The first cast of this sculpture was shown at the Open Air exhibition, Middelheim Park, [end of p.1] Antwerp in 1953, and was bought by them, and is part of the Middelheim permanent collection.

 It is perfectly all right for you to keep the photographs as long as you like, in fact, perhaps hold onto them permanently, if you wish. Perhaps they may be very useful should the Gallery intend to do any postcards from them.

 I have always got copies of them since they are my own negatives, and where you might think my photograph is satisfactory, there might be no need for your photographer to take them again.

 Yours sincerely,