Trinity House Paintings

"Reclining Figure: Cloak" by Henry Moore - Price Upon Request

HENRY MOORE (1898-1986)
Reclining Figure: Cloak
Bronze with brown patina
6.75 x 15 ins / 17.14 x 38.10 cms
Signed, numbered and stamped with foundry mark ‘Moore 3/9 Noack Berlin’ on the back
Conceived and cast in 1967
 
Provenance:
Private Collection, London;
Louis Stern Fine Art, Los Angeles;
Private Collection, Los Angeles;
Private Collection, United Kingdom
 
Literature:
A. Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture, 1964-73, London 1977, vol.4, p. 49, no. 565 (another cast illustrated, p. 48 and pl. 67b)
Henry Moore’s sculptures have made the transition from private gallery to art museum to general public appreciation with such success that his work has become both instantly recognisable and synonymous with British Modern art. The very large works that we have become accustomed to seeing at Kew Gardens, London, in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and in city squares nationwide are impressive and impactful, but in fact it is Moore’s table-top size maquettes that have been described as having a ‘delicacy and emotional resonance that is missing in the big bronzes’ (Jane Ure-Smith for the Financial Times Arts supplement, 19 August 2011).
By the time this bronze was conceived and cast, Moore was well-established, both nationally and internationally. He had staged his first one man show at the Warren Gallery in 1928 and had gone on from there to a burgeoning career which saw him exhibiting all over the world by the 1940s. His role as an official war artist between 1940 and 1942 would have only served to increase his profile and popularity (Source: Tate).
This bronze maquette, though less than the height of a standard ruler, still manages to reflect all the elements of Moore’s larger works: the crags and wildness of the Yorkshire landscape, the juxtaposition of angular sharpness side by side with flowing undulations of the bronze and the sublime texture of the honed and worked metal itself. It also tells a story of the artist’s own history and post-war anguish.
. . I have an idea, or an idea comes to me, and then I find the material to make it in, and to do that, the ideas that I may be concerned with, I’ll produce several maquettes – sketches in plaster – not much bigger than one’s hand, certainly small enough to hold in one’s hand, so that you can turn them around as you shape them and work on them without having to get up and walk around them, and you have a complete grasp of their shape from all around the whole time. If the form, the idea, that you’re doing is much bigger than that, then to see what it’s like on the other side, you have to get up, walk around it, and this restricts your imagining and grasping what it’s like as you can when it’s small. But all the time that I am doing this small model, in my mind it isn’t the small model that I’m doing, it’s the big sculpture that I intend to do. It’s as though one were drawing in a little sketchbook a tiny little sketch for a monument, or a tiny little drawing might be on the back of an envelope, but in your mind would be the equestrian statue that is over life-size. In the same way, these little plaster maquettes that I make, to me, are all big sculptures.