King and Queen

A serene vision of power and poise, King and Queen (1952-53) is among Henry Moore’s greatest artistic achievements. One of the most inventive and celebrated sculptures within his extensive oeuvre, the work is a rich study of the human figure, marrying subtle nuance and intimacy with a commanding sense of presence. The only example of this extraordinary sculpture to remain in private hands, the present cast was purchased directly from the artist and has remained in the same private collection for the last seventy years, a testament to the captivating aura conjured by this mysterious, enigmatic subject. All other examples of the sculpture are now held in the collections of prestigious international museums and institutions, including the Tate, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Norton Simon Museum, Moa Museum of Art, Middelheim Museum and Open Air Sculpture Garden, and The Henry Moore Foundation.

Focusing on two stylised, regal characters seated side-by-side on a bench, the work draws on a myriad of historic and contemporary references for inspiration, creating a sculpture that is at once rooted in the twentieth century and inherently timeless. Rather than heavy, imposing forms, Moore favours a pared-back aesthetic in King and Queen, reducing the couple’s bodies to thin, elegant planes, with flowing, sinuous lines and gently curving contours. The two bodies are very similar in their structure, slender with broad shoulders tapering towards narrow waists, their forms semi-abstract and attenuated, limbs honed into slender, elongated columns. The only differences lie in the subtle swell of the Queen’s breasts, the shape and scale of their hands, their dynamically shaped heads, and the weight and style of the drapery that stretches across their legs.

The protagonists appear independent from one another, yet connected – the space between the two figures shifts as the viewer moves around them, reducing and expanding depending on the angle. At the same time, their proximity and relaxed poses suggest an ease and intimacy between the pair. The male figure’s right hand reaches down to steady himself against the edge of the simple bench they perch on, anchoring him to the structure as he leans his weight back. The Queen acts as his counterpoint – she remains upright and poised, her form positioned slightly further forward on the bench, so that at points she appears to sit in front of the King. There is a vivid, internal sense of life to the pair, an effect all the more striking as it is achieved without resorting to bold, expressive gestures or movement. Instead, they exude a calm, open and gentle air, as they look into the distance.

First shown at public exhibition in 1953, King and Queen swiftly became an emblematic work for Moore’s pioneering sculptural idiom in the post-War era. Photographs of the work situated in the wild, windswept moors of Scotland, with the intriguing forms of the two benevolent rulers placed against the vast sky, proved crucial to shaping Moore’s artistic legacy within the public imagination, leading Roger Berthoud, the artist’s biographer, to note that King and Queen had become ‘the most famous of all Moore’s bronzes and the anthology piece which big collectors and museums ardently seek’ (The Life of Henry Moore, London, 1987, p. 239). Invoking archaic monuments and ancient fairytales, the traditions of double portraiture and a historic lineage of royal imagery, the figures appear as otherworldly monarchs, surveying their realm with a steady, penetrating gaze and presence.

International Acclaim and Success

King and Queen emerged at a pivotal turning point in Moore’s career, as his popularity and renown reached new heights, both at home and abroad. The numerous awards, exhibitions, accolades and public commissions he received during the early 1950s cemented his status as a leading figurehead of European modernism. Since the end of the Second World War, Moore’s reach and reputation had been growing steadily, most notably through a series of seminal exhibitions that transformed the public understanding of his work. In December 1946, a major retrospective of Moore’s sculpture and drawings opened at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, organised by James Johnson Sweeney, and welcomed over 150,000 visitors over the course of its three month run. In Europe, it was the Biennale di Venezia of 1948 that ensured the artist truly became a household name across the continent. Marking the first time the event had been staged since the end of the War, the festival was intended as a grand showcase and celebration of art and culture. In the British pavilion, a selection of Moore’s most important recent works were shown alongside masterpieces by J.M.W. Turner in a much lauded display. Moore was awarded the Biennale’s International Sculpture Prize, which secured his reputation among critics, curators and scholars.

These international events were matched by a great surge in Moore’s popularity on the homefront. As the 1950s dawned, a distinct sense of renewal and regeneration swept through Britain, as lingering traces of austerity and darkness from the War years were subsumed by a new spirit of recovery and rebuilding. Moore believed profoundly in the civic responsibility of the artist, and responded by creating a remarkable sequence of public sculptures, intended for schools, hospitals, and new housing estates that were then under construction. With these works, he sought to bring modernism directly to the general public, liberating it from the confines of the gallery, and making it accessible to all. Thanks to projects such as the Family Group sculptures for the new towns of Stevenage and Harlow (LH 269 and LH 364), Moore’s distinctive sculptural idiom became embedded in the physical landscape and national identity of post-War Britain.

Over the course of 1951, a series of watershed events further bolstered Moore’s public reception, and launched him into a different realm of recognition. On 30 April, the BBC broadcast a documentary focusing on Moore’s practice, directed by the filmmaker John Read. Recorded over the course of six months, the film showed the artist at work in his studios as he crafted a grand new sculpture, following the idea through its life cycle, from drawing, to maquette, to full-size plaster, and finally, the full bronze casting. The film was aired to coincide with the opening of Moore’s solo exhibition at the Tate Gallery and his participation in the Festival of Britain’s South Bank exhibition in London, where a major new commission from the Arts Council of Great Britain, Reclining Figure: Festival (LH 293), was unveiled.

Bronze: A New Understanding of Form

Moore’s desire to challenge himself never waned. Alongside these professional successes, this was a period filled with experimentation and evolution, as he plumbed the depths of his imagination and tested his technical skills, exploring different materials in order to reach a novel approach to the human figure. During his early career, Moore had been a strong advocate for direct carving, following the philosophy of ‘truth to materials,’ whereby the final artwork responded to the essential principles of the material it was made in. After the War, however, Moore began to work increasingly with bronze, creating models and maquettes which could then be scaled up and cast on a monumental scale. Bronze allowed Moore to expand his visionary style, using its tensile strength and flexibility to create pieces that were more dynamic and daring in their construction. As a result, the early 1950s are considered a high-point in Moore’s production, resulting in a masterful sequence of sculptures that stand among the most important works of his entire oeuvre. Filled with a powerful sense of poise, majesty and mystery, King and Queen is among the most striking of these works, a testament to Moore’s extraordinary vision.

The idea for King and Queen seems to have emerged by chance one day in the artist’s studio, as Moore was in the process of shaping a piece of modelling wax. As his practice had shifted in the late 1940s and early 1950s, transitioning away from making extensive preparatory drawings before embarking on a new sculpture, he began to work increasingly with his hands, moulding an inventive array of new forms in wax, clay and plaster. Adding and subtracting different elements as he went along, this technique allowed Moore’s ideas to develop and evolve organically as he manipulated the malleable materials, arriving at a possible sculptural composition spontaneously. According to the artist, in the case of King and Queen, the spark of inspiration came about when he fished out a small piece of wax that had fallen into a bowl of water beside him. As he continued to pinch and press, pull and stretch the material in different directions, he arrived at a form that reminded him of ‘a horned, Pan-like, bearded head. Then it grew a crown and I recognised it immediately as the head of a king’ (Moore, quoted in J. Hedgecoe, ed., Henry Moore, London, 1968, p. 221). Later, the artist would connect the idea for these regal figures to the fairytales he had been reading to his young daughter Mary each evening, the stories of kings and queens, princesses and heroes, magic and adventure, permeating his imagination.

The resulting maquette, which was later cast in bronze in an edition of ten, established many of the key principles of the sculpture, from the essential structure and attitude of his male and female protagonists, to their orientation and connection to one another, and the play of negative space surrounding their forms. Most notably, Moore imagined an unusual framing device around the two figures, adding a thin band of metal that stretched from the base of the sculpture into the air above their heads in a large rectangle. The sharp geometry of this feature contrasted with the more naturalistic, smoothly contoured forms of the figures, its presence enforcing a strict boundary to their domain. As he began to increase the scale of the sculpture, however, Moore decided to eliminate this frame, explaining: ‘In life size they didn’t need the reference to an upright and a horizontal, as the pose of each figure became obvious’ (quoted in ibid., p. 216).

Moore then proceeded to translate King and Queen into a full-size plaster model, a medium which allowed him a high degree of flexibility as he considered the potential effect of his proposed designs in relation to the human body. Plaster was a material that could be both modelled and carved, transitioning from soft and malleable when wet, to a hard, tactile finish when dry that was strong enough to withstand chisels and other cutting tools. Moore revelled in this aspect of the process, using an assortment of utensils, including metal files, dental equipment, cheese graters, and even toothbrushes to achieve a dynamic texture across the surface of the plaster sculpture. These marks would then be translated through to the bronze, catching the light and disrupting the smooth finish of the cast metal. In King and Queen, these complex, overlapping passages of scoring and cross-hatching lend an intricate pattern to the work, the short, linear marks following the curves of the figure’s forms, accentuating their long limbs, and emphasising the materiality of the sculpture.

The Evolution of an Idea

The subject occupied Moore’s imagination intensively for much of the following year, resulting in a sequence of fourteen sculptures either based on, or extrapolated from, the central pairing of King and Queen. Across this concentrated series, particular elements and features were picked out and examined in detail, such as the subjects’ hands and the Queen’s head, as Moore refined and reworked his forms multiple times to achieve a more expressive quality. As a result, the characters are a combination of carefully observed, naturalistic details, and a more playful, stylised anatomy, that straddles the boundary between abstraction and figuration.

‘Perhaps the “clue” to the group,’ Moore wrote in an exhibition catalogue in 1954, ‘is the King’s head, which is a combination of a crown, beard and face symbolising a mixture of primitive kingship and a kind of animal, Pan-like quality’ (quoted in P. James, ed., Henry Moore on Sculpture, London, 1966, p. 246). By invoking the Ancient Greek god of the wild, Pan, who roamed the forests and mountain groves and was traditionally depicted as a satyr, Moore pushes the figure into the realm of myth, suggesting an intriguing combination of nature, animal and man. In many ways, the distinctly organic quality of the King’s visage, marked by swooping planes, concave hollows and rounded edges, echoes the natural weathering of such materials as pebbles, flint, shells, and driftwood.

Unlike Moore’s King, who retained the essential qualities the artist had spontaneously arrived at that day in his studio, the head of the Queen took longer to define. Moore created several different versions, as he sought a form that would counterbalance and complement the powerful tête of the King, while still retaining its own sense of individuality and feminine character. Several photographs of the sculptor at work on the plaster for King and Queen in his studio in 1952-53 illustrate the numerous different versions of the Queen’s head. Some iterations were more naturalistic, others blocky and geometric, while some recalled the medieval sculptural detailing of English church architecture. In the end, Moore decided upon a thin, elegant fin-like form, that indicates the Queen’s features in a flowing line, the sweeping plane perforated with a single hole to denote her eyes. Atop her brow, a curvilinear line juts out from her temple, suggesting she is wearing a modest diadem that correlates to the King’s crown, while her hair is arranged in an elegant, tripartite chignon, held in place by a decorative, geometric comb.

Moore finalised the plaster working model for King and Queen in early 1953, and the piece was realised in bronze shortly thereafter, cast in an edition of four plus one artist’s copy. It swiftly became one of the artist’s most celebrated and best-known sculptures. In an article for Architectural Review in 1954, Robert Melville proclaimed it to be Moore’s ‘finest achievement since the war, and probably the most graceful of all his works,’ while Will Grohmann noted it to be ‘a highwater mark in Moore’s creative work’ (R. Melville, ‘Henry Moore and the Siting of Public Sculpture’ in Architectural Review, February 1954; W. Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, London, 1960, p. 148).

Inspiration, Ancient and Modern

In King and Queen, the two figures are presented as static beings, recalling classical statuary devoted to mythological heroes, deities or rulers of an ancient civilization. However, as Will Grohmann has noted, ‘There is nothing imperious about this royal pair’ (op. cit., 1960, p. 147). Rather, Moore sets up an intriguing dichotomy within the composition, counterbalancing the regal air of the King and Queen with a striking, and profound humanity. This juxtaposition can be seen most clearly in the contrast of the figures’ inventive, otherworldly faces and the precise rendering of their hands – in particular, the Queen’s gently clasped hands resting lightly in her lap. In 1968, Moore explained that ‘hands, after the face, are the most obvious part of the human body for expressing emotion. That’s why I concentrated on the hands in the King and Queen, in order to add to the sculpture an extra interest and meaning’ (quoted in J. Hedgecoe, op. cit., 1968, p. 232).

As he worked on the full-scale version of King and Queen, Moore found himself struggling to capture this expressive power, and felt the need to model the hands of his subject from real life. First, the artist asked his wife Irina to pose for him, requesting she set her hands together in a soft interlocked position. However, she gave up after fifteen minutes, saying she had to get lunch ready, and was replaced by the couple’s six-year-old daughter, Mary. Later, Moore’s secretary, Tam Miller, also sat for the artist, as he refined certain details of the Queen, while the King’s hands and feet were reportedly modelled after those of his fellow Yorkshireman Philip Hendy, then director of the National Gallery in London. As Moore noted, ‘When I came to do the hands and feet of the figures they gave me a chance to express my ideas further by making them more realistic – to bring out the contrast between human grace and the concept of power in primitive kingship’ (quoted in P. James, op. cit., 1966, p. 246). In this way, King and Queen achieves a totemic quality, its protagonists appearing as timeless icons, otherworldly and mysterious, yet intensely familiar and human, figures we can connect to and understand.

This renewed focus on the humanism of his work may be traced back to Moore’s extraordinary Shelter Drawings, executed at the height of the Second World War. These richly detailed works on paper depicted intimate views of life in the unofficial shelters of London during the Blitz, as people sought shelter in the capital’s underground transport system. Quietly observing people as they waited for the night’s bombardment to end, Moore witnessed first-hand the full spectrum of human emotion – fear, joy, despair, grief – among the array of people who gathered there. ‘I think I would have been a far less sensitive and responsible person – if I had ignored all that and went on working just as before,’ Moore later said. ‘The war brought out and encouraged the humanist side in one’s work’ (quoted in P. McCaughey, Henry Moore and the Heroic: A centenary Tribute, exh. cat., Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 1999, p. 9).

At the same time, Moore’s sculptural idiom was underpinned by his extensive knowledge and passion for art from the ancient world and non-Western civilizations. From the sculptures discovered in the archaeological sites of Mexico and South America, to the ceremonial artefacts and totems of tribes from Sub-Saharan Africa, Moore delved into these stimulating artforms and traditions, in search of a pure, universal expression of form. During his earliest visits to the British Museum as a student, Moore found himself drawn back time and again to the Ancient Egyptian galleries, where the ‘monumental impressiveness’ of the sculptural artefacts proved a revelation (quoted in P. James, op. cit., 1966, p. 159). While working on the figures in King and Queen, Moore was particularly reminded of a favourite sculpture at the British Museum – a limestone double portrait of an Egyptian official and his wife from the late Eighteenth dynasty (circa 1350-1295 B.C.). Dignified and self-assured, the couple are shown seated, side by side, on a small bench, their simple dress and frontal poses offering striking parallels to Moore’s regal pair. Fascinated by the manner in which the artist had managed to differentiate the two upright, static seated forms from one another, yet retain a sense of intimacy and togetherness, Moore proclaimed, ‘For me, these two people are terribly real and I feel the difference between male and female. The sculptor has done it in an obvious way by making the man slightly bigger than the woman, but it works, and this influenced me when I came to make my bronze King and Queen’ (quoted in Henry Moore at the British Museum, with photographs by David Finn, London, 1981, p. 38).

Scholars have also noted that at the time of King and Queen’s creation, the notion of royalty was at the forefront of British life, permeating all aspects of the media, political discourse and society. The untimely death of King George VI in February 1952 and the subsequent ascension to the throne of Queen Elizabeth II ushered in a great flurry of official events and ceremonies, as optimism around the birth of a new Elizabethan age swept through the nation. Though he denied a direct connection to such contemporary events, the sense of continuity within the pageantry, of ancient traditions being observed for time immemorial, must have resonated with Moore’s creative vision. At the same time, the proliferation of official photography of the new Queen around the time of her coronation, particularly those that included her husband, Prince Philip, may have prompted Moore to investigate the tropes and expectations of such royal imagery. In these portraits, Queen Elizabeth is transformed from a young wife and mother into a powerful and commanding figurehead, a symbol of monarchy and royal power, at the moment she begins her reign.

Weaving together the threads of these disparate sources, allowing them to percolate and gestate before finding new expression in his three-dimensional work, Moore creates a sculpture that is rich with symbolism and potential meaning. ‘Sculpture should always at first have some obscurities and further meanings,’ he explained. ‘People should want to go on looking and thinking; it should never tell all about itself immediately’ (quoted in J. McEwen, op. cit., 1993, p. 11). Portraying a universal and enduring vision of monarchy, King and Queen continues to captivate viewers to this day, slowly revealing its secrets as we contemplate its majesty.

King and Queen was cast in bronze in an edition of four plus one artist’s copy by the Galizia Foundry, London in 1952-53. Two subsequent bronzes were cast specifically for the collections of the Tate Gallery, London (1957) and the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham (1985). The present cast is the only example to remain in private hands, with all others now held in important museum collections. It was acquired directly from Moore’s studio shortly after its completion, and has remained in the same collection for the last seventy years.