Henry Moore O.M., C.H.

(British, 1898-1986)

Mother and Child: Round Head 28cm. (11 in.) high (including the base)

Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist, from whom acquired by
Sir Philip Hendy
With The Sladmore Gallery, London, where acquired by the present owner, 15 December 1995
Private Collection, Switzerland

Literature
Alan Bowness, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1955-64, Lund Humphries, London, 1965, Vol. III, p.32, cat.no.512, pl.170 (ill., another cast)
Robert Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1921-1969, Thames and Hudson, London, 1970, pp.290-291, 364, cat.no.659 (ill.b&w, another cast)
Alan Bowness, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1955-64, Lund Humphries, London, 1986, Vol. III, pp.58-59, cat.no.512 (ill.b&w, another cast)
John Hedgecoe, A Monumental Vision: The Sculpture of Henry Moore, Collins & Brown, London, 1998, p.228, cat.no.480 (ill.b&w, another cast)

The present cast was acquired directly from Moore by Sir Philip Hendy (1900-1980), the renowned curator best remembered as the longest serving director of London's National Gallery (1946-1967).

Hendy began his career in 1923 as a lecturer at the Wallace Collection, subsequently taking the position of Assistant Keeper before securing a three-year scholarship to research the collection of Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Hendy returned to the UK in 1933 to take up the directorship of the Leeds City Art Gallery, transferring to Temple Newsam in 1937. It was whilst in Yorkshire that Hendy garnered a reputation as an innovator and moderniser, arranging for numerous public acquisitions of works by modern British artists including Matthew Smith, Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth, Graham Sutherland, and Walter Sickert.

Hendy was a friend to Henry Moore and championed his work both domestically and internationally – contributing catalogue introductions, reviews, and lectures to the discourse on Moore's work. When considering the present cast perhaps it is Hendy's following observation that is most relevant.

"[Moore] treats the human form with every degree of freedom. At one time he will take the mother's protective embrace of her child and merely simplify and exaggerate, so that the stone stands for this elemental relationship only more emphatically and more universally than it could if it were chiselled into a more detailed and normally proportioned group." (Philip Hendy, 'Henry Moore: his New Exhibition', in Britain Today, no.158, June 1949).

Other casts from this bronze edition are in the collections of Didrichsen Art Museum, Helsinki and The Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago.