Henry Moore’s King and Queen — ‘probably the most graceful of all his works’

In a BBC documentary filmed in 1960, the sculptor Henry Moore is shown at work in his studio at Perry Green in Hertfordshire, England. With his tweed jacket and comb-over hair, he looks like a conventional man of his time. Only his hands give him away — as animated as the ‘driven tools of creative obsession’ ascribed to Michelangelo in Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy.

At the time of filming, Moore was the pre-eminent British sculptor. In 1948, he won the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale, a success that led to major public commissions around the world. No new plaza, office block or government building seemed complete without one of his monumental bronzes hewn into its fabric. Moore had come to represent Britain, from India to Japan.

The picture, however, was more complicated than that. In 1951, Moore turned down a knighthood. The following year, he denied that his majestic sculpture King and Queen had been made in anticipation of the coronation of Elizabeth II, explaining that it was in fact inspired by Egyptian art. If the British establishment considered Moore to be their man, the sculptor seemed to suggest otherwise.

This ambiguity lies at the heart of Moore’s work. On the one hand, he was a profoundly British artist: his dense forms, in their colour, mass, and texture, seem cleft from the Yorkshire landscape of his birth. Yet there is also something alien and brooding in them, as if they contain a threatening existential mystery that sets him apart from the English Romantic tradition.

Born in 1898, the youngest of eight children, in the mining town of Castleford, West Yorkshire, Moore showed early artistic promise. Encouraged by his family, he set his sights on art school, but the First World War interrupted these ambitions. He served on the Western Front and was badly injured in a gas attack — an experience that would profoundly shape his later sculpture.

After the war, Moore received a serviceman’s grant to study at Leeds School of Art, and later at the Royal College of Art in London. He travelled to Paris, where he encountered Surrealism and saw works by Picasso and Hans Arp. At the British Museum, he discovered pre-Columbian art. It was the power of this ritualised sculpture — its forbidding, elemental presence — that set Moore on his unique path.

If Moore knew where he was going, others were less certain. His breakthrough came with The Helmet (1939-40). This harbinger of war — with its gleaming, armour-like exterior enclosing a figure that seems to shelter within — pushed his work towards a more psychologically charged abstraction. His experiences on the front line held him in a kind of savage chokehold, and they filtered out in the angularity of his sculpture.

Moore’s enduring subject, however abbreviated or distorted, was the human body. He possessed an uncanny ability to transform wood, stone and bronze into flesh and bone. He attributed this to his belief in ‘truth to materials’, working with rather than against their organic qualities, incorporating flaws, veins and discolourations into the carving, much as prehistoric artists had done in the cave paintings at Lascaux some 20,000 years earlier.

This approach led to his greatest contribution to modern sculpture. Moore saw the landscape in the body, and the body in the landscape. The contours of his reclining figures echo the natural world: the slope of a hill, the shadow of a passing cloud, the line of a horizon. The wild, unexplored aspects of the Yorkshire moors of his childhood became the secret, unknowable world of the female form.

Moore rarely sculpted the male body, but one powerful work, the aforementioned King and Queen, features both a male and a female figure. The two sit as if in command, their bony, fossil-like forms recalling Etruscan sculpture. There is something fierce and supernatural about them, with the spirit of ancient warriors. The art critic Robert Melville described the sculpture as ‘Moore’s finest achievement since the war, and probably the most graceful of all his works’.

Moore traced his inspiration for the artwork to a range of influences, including the fairy tales he read to his daughter and an 18th-dynasty limestone double portrait of an Egyptian ruler and his wife in the British Museum. The sculptor was fascinated by the way the forms in this ancient work were differentiated from one another, yet retained a sense of intimacy and togetherness. ‘For me, these two people are terribly real and I feel the difference between male and female,’ Moore said. ‘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.’

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). A cast of this powerful, totemic sculpture — the last to remain in private hands — will be offered in the 20th/21st Century: London Evening Sale on 5 March 2026 at Christie’s in London.

It is a strange and hypnotic work, the distorted heads evoking symbols of ancient royalty — the beak, the bird, the crown. (The angular, biomorphic head of the king emerged spontaneously as Moore was moulding a piece of wax.) In contrast, the hands and feet are rendered with striking realism: when Moore came to model them, he said he sought ‘to bring out the contrast between human grace and the concept of power in primitive kingship’.

For all their majesty, there is a vulnerability to the pair. Moore sets their faces towards an unknowable future, and in doing so aligns their fate with our own.

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Related artists: Henry Moore