Family Group: M.409-1985

Titles

Family Group

Maker(s)

Sculptor: Moore, Henry Spencer

Entities

• Figure group

Categories

• Sculpture

Description

Bronze. A mother and father seated, with one child standing between the father's knees and another smaller child sitting on the mother's lap. The father places his right hand on the mother's left shoulder and his right hand on the standing child's left shoulder.

Legal notes

Bequeathed by Miss Diana E.M. Hunter

Acquisition and important dates

Method of acquisition: Bequeathed (1985) by Hunter, Miss D. E. M.

Dating

20th Century, Mid
1940s
George VI
Production date: AD 1944

Note

Henry Moore was one of the most important English sculptors of the twentieth century. As a student in Leeds and London, he admired the solidity and power of pre-classical and non-European sculpture, and from the outset of his career in the mid-1920s, he abandoned the representational idiom which had characterized European sculpture since the Renaissance. In the 1930s, Moore’s work was influenced by both Abstraction and Surrealism, but the human form, remained central to his work, especially the reclining female figure, and the mother and child.

In 1944 and 1945 Moore made a series of drawings, and terracotta sketch models of family groups of a mother and father with one or two children. These were initiated by a commission from Henry Morris, Director of Education for Cambridgeshire, for a large bronze for Impington village college, designed by Walter Gropius and his partner Maxwell Fry. This project was never realised, but several of the small sketch models were cast in bronze, including this example.

One of an edition of seven.