MOORE, Henry (1898 -1986)

Henry Moore is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century and from the late 1940s until his death was recognised as the most celebrated British artist of his time. The son of a Yorkshire miner, he served in the First World War, after which he trained at Leeds School of Art before gaining a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. In the 1930s he taught in London but in 1940, after the bombing of his studio, he moved to Much Hadham in Hertfordshire where he lived for the rest of his life. By the 1930s Moore was already recognized as the leading avant-garde sculptor in England but it was his war drawings of people sheltering from air raids that brought him to the attention of the British public. His wider reputation became assured in 1948 when he won the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale and from then on came public commissions from all over the world. Moore started printmaking in 1931, and in 1958 met the master lithographer Stanley Jones at the Curwen Press with whom he continued to make prints until the end of his life. The reclining female form and the mother and child were the two themes that preoccupied Moore, both in his sculpture and printmaking