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Lot Essay
Conceived in 1947, Family Group belongs to a sequence of sculptures in which Henry Moore – during the years immediately following the Second World War – extended his long-standing preoccupation with the mother and child motif into a broader, tender image of the family. Two parents sit side by side, each holding a child, and the children lean towards one another across the centre of the composition, joined by a single curving form that recalls the shape of a cradle. Mother and daughter occupy the left of the group and father and son the right, so that the sculpture is at once balanced and divided, its four figures held together by gesture as much as by the continuous flow of the richly patinated bronze.
Moore’s engagement with the theme dates from the 1930s, when the architect Walter Gropius was designing a village college at Impington, near Cambridge, for Henry Morris, the county’s Director of Education: "Gropius asked me to do a piece of sculpture for the school… I suggested that a family group would be the right subject" (Henry Moore).
The war intervened, however, and when Morris revived the project in 1944 Moore produced numerous drawings and a dozen or more maquettes, only for the funding to fall through once again. He nevertheless enlarged several of the models, as he put it, ‘for my own satisfaction’ (ibid.), and the present work belongs to this group of bronzes. The theme would finally be realised in 1948-49, when John Newsom, Director of Education for Hertfordshire, commissioned a three-figure Family Group for the new Barclay School in Stevenage, bringing to fruition – on a monumental scale – the idea first discussed with Gropius at Impington.
These years also brought a profound change to Moore’s own life. On 1 March 1946, after sixteen years of marriage, his wife Irina gave birth to their only child, Mary. For the critic John Russell, the event meant that ‘the image of the family took on a new, leaping, unpredictable intensity’ (quoted in R. Berthoud, The Life of Henry Moore, New York, 1987, p. 197). The tenderness of the present group, in which each parent turns a protective arm around a child, carries a particular resonance in light of the attentive father Moore became.
Within the Family Group series, the present work also marks a move away from the relative naturalism of Moore’s earliest models towards a more abstract treatment of the figures: heads are reduced to small, upright forms; bodies smoothed into continuous, flowing volumes; and seats opened into arches through which space passes freely. Such a frontal, seated arrangement nonetheless invites comparison with far older precedents, among them the paired statues of ancient Egypt. When visiting the British Museum in the 1920s and beyond, Henry Moore was deeply struck by the quiet, monumental stillness and dignified partnership of the ancient Egyptian double sculpture. In a limestone Seated Pair Statue of the Eighteenth Dynasty, husband and wife sit side by side on a shared bench: equal in scale and bearing, yet clearly distinguished from one another, he by the darker painted tone of his skin and she by her paler complexion and long, braided wig. Linked by the arms placed behind them, the two figures form a harmonious pair, their differences held in balance rather than opposition. The parents in Moore’s group – conceived more than three thousand years later – share that same quiet companionship: two distinct presences, seated side by side and joined by an embrace, from which the life of the family unfolds.
Moore’s Family Groups soon came to be seen as emblems of post-war renewal in Britain. Another cast of the present lot was included in the exhibition of Moore’s sculpture and drawings mounted at the Tate Gallery for the Festival of Britain in 1951, at a moment when the nation was looking to art, education and public life as instruments of post-war reconstruction. The image proved powerful enough to endure for decades afterwards: in 1993, Royal Mail reproduced a cast of the sculpture on a stamp, choosing it as one of four works to represent British art of the twentieth century, alongside pictures by Stanley Spencer, Edward Bawden and Ben Nicholson. From its beginnings as an unrealised commission for Impington to a lasting emblem of British art, Family Group traces the course by which a private idea – shaped by war, renewal and the birth of a child – became one of the most widely recognised images of twentieth-century sculpture.
Moore’s engagement with the theme dates from the 1930s, when the architect Walter Gropius was designing a village college at Impington, near Cambridge, for Henry Morris, the county’s Director of Education: "Gropius asked me to do a piece of sculpture for the school… I suggested that a family group would be the right subject" (Henry Moore).
The war intervened, however, and when Morris revived the project in 1944 Moore produced numerous drawings and a dozen or more maquettes, only for the funding to fall through once again. He nevertheless enlarged several of the models, as he put it, ‘for my own satisfaction’ (ibid.), and the present work belongs to this group of bronzes. The theme would finally be realised in 1948-49, when John Newsom, Director of Education for Hertfordshire, commissioned a three-figure Family Group for the new Barclay School in Stevenage, bringing to fruition – on a monumental scale – the idea first discussed with Gropius at Impington.
These years also brought a profound change to Moore’s own life. On 1 March 1946, after sixteen years of marriage, his wife Irina gave birth to their only child, Mary. For the critic John Russell, the event meant that ‘the image of the family took on a new, leaping, unpredictable intensity’ (quoted in R. Berthoud, The Life of Henry Moore, New York, 1987, p. 197). The tenderness of the present group, in which each parent turns a protective arm around a child, carries a particular resonance in light of the attentive father Moore became.
Within the Family Group series, the present work also marks a move away from the relative naturalism of Moore’s earliest models towards a more abstract treatment of the figures: heads are reduced to small, upright forms; bodies smoothed into continuous, flowing volumes; and seats opened into arches through which space passes freely. Such a frontal, seated arrangement nonetheless invites comparison with far older precedents, among them the paired statues of ancient Egypt. When visiting the British Museum in the 1920s and beyond, Henry Moore was deeply struck by the quiet, monumental stillness and dignified partnership of the ancient Egyptian double sculpture. In a limestone Seated Pair Statue of the Eighteenth Dynasty, husband and wife sit side by side on a shared bench: equal in scale and bearing, yet clearly distinguished from one another, he by the darker painted tone of his skin and she by her paler complexion and long, braided wig. Linked by the arms placed behind them, the two figures form a harmonious pair, their differences held in balance rather than opposition. The parents in Moore’s group – conceived more than three thousand years later – share that same quiet companionship: two distinct presences, seated side by side and joined by an embrace, from which the life of the family unfolds.
Moore’s Family Groups soon came to be seen as emblems of post-war renewal in Britain. Another cast of the present lot was included in the exhibition of Moore’s sculpture and drawings mounted at the Tate Gallery for the Festival of Britain in 1951, at a moment when the nation was looking to art, education and public life as instruments of post-war reconstruction. The image proved powerful enough to endure for decades afterwards: in 1993, Royal Mail reproduced a cast of the sculpture on a stamp, choosing it as one of four works to represent British art of the twentieth century, alongside pictures by Stanley Spencer, Edward Bawden and Ben Nicholson. From its beginnings as an unrealised commission for Impington to a lasting emblem of British art, Family Group traces the course by which a private idea – shaped by war, renewal and the birth of a child – became one of the most widely recognised images of twentieth-century sculpture.