Henry Moore (1898-1986)

The present work forms part of a series of maquettes produced for Family Group, 1949, a life-size sculpture commissioned for the Barclay Secondary School, Stevenage New Town, Hertfordshire. This theme of the family unit had first materialized in Moore's work when the artist was asked by Henry Morris and Walter Gropius to create a sculpture for a village college at Impington near Cambridge. The college's ideal of both child and adult education in a single institution appealed to Moore, who had originally trained as a school teacher himself and for whom the theme of the 'Mother and Child' had been something of an obsession throughout his oeuvre. The occasion of a commission for a public sculpture, this time on behalf of an educational institution, encouraged the sculptor to consider the importance of the family, whose close interpersonal relationships provided an exemplary guide for wider communal values. The Impington sculpture, which had been under discussion as early as 1934, was never completed for this site because of funding problems, but Moore continued to work obsessively on numerous related drawings and maquettes from 1944 to 1947, when he was approached to create a work for Barclay Secondary School.

The present maquette was conceived in 1945, by which time the family group had become a poignant reflection of the artist's wish for peace and harmony in a world shattered by war. The war had of course greatly disrupted family ties not only through wounding and death, but through conscription and mass evacuation and Moore's preoccupation with the link between parent and child (the 'community of life' as he termed it), can be seen as a manifestation of the common anxiety to reassert traditional home life at this time. Moreover, as Susan Compton noted, 'it consolidates his move towards a wider and more humanist approach appropriate for public sculpture' (Henry Moore, London, 1988, exh. cat., p. 224).

This cast was initially owned by the Dominion Gallery, Montreal, whose late owner Max Stern transformed the gallery into a beacon of modernism in North America. Stern was a German émigré who had escaped to Canada via England during the Second World War after being forced to sell his Cologne gallery by the Nazi's, but his passion for extraordinary sculpture took him back to Europe and he soon became the representative for Moore, Jean Arp, Aristide Maillol and had the largest holding of Rodin sculpture outside the Musée Rodin in Paris. Much of Stern's vast collection has since been generously donated to various public institutions, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal and the Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery of Concordia University. Additional casts of this maquette can be found at the Henry Moore Foundation, Hertfordshire and the Tate Gallery, London.