Henry Moore (1903-1975)

Family Group

Details

Henry Moore (1903-1975)
Family Group
bronze with brown patina
Height: 5 7/8in. (15cm.)
Cast in 1944 in an edition of nine

Provenance

Milton Sperling, Beverly Hills
Marlborough Gallery, London (acquired by the present owner, 1972)

Literature

ed. A. Bowness, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings, London, 1957, vol. I (1921-1948), no. 233 (another bronze version illustrated, p. 147)
ed. D. Mitchinson, Henry Moore Sculpture, with Comments by the Artist, London, 1981, no. 170 (another cast illustrated, p. 94)

Lot Essay

Moore first considered the subject of the family group in 1934 in discussions with Henry Morris, the organizer of the village college school program in Britain. The first school was built at Impington, near Cambridge. Morris and his architect Walter Gropius asked Moore to undertake a public sculpture that would express the connection between family and school. Money for the project ran out, and it was not until 1949 that Moore installed a family group before a school, this time the Barclay School in Stevenage. Moore had already returned to the theme of the family group in the mid-1940s as a development of his interest in the subject of the Madonna or mother and child. As noted in the entry for Christie's New York, sale, April 29, 1996, lot 51, the birth of Moore's daughter in 1946 provided a personal impetus for the ongoing series of family groups. The present sculpture was done two years earlier; Moore's conception of the subject had already fully matured, having become fertile ground for numerous variations on this theme.