Early life Moore was born in
Castleford,
West Riding of Yorkshire, England, to Mary (née Baker) and Raymond Spencer Moore. His father was of Irish descent and became pit deputy (responsible for safety) and then under-manager of the Wheldale
colliery in Castleford. He was an
autodidact with an interest in music and literature. Determined that his sons would not work in the mines, he saw formal education as the route to their advancement. Henry was the seventh of eight children in a family that often struggled with poverty. He attended infant and junior schools in Castleford, where he began
modelling in clay and
carving in wood. He professed to have decided to become a sculptor when he was eleven after hearing of
Michelangelo's achievements at a Sunday School reading. On his second attempt he was accepted at
Castleford Secondary School, which several of his siblings had attended, where his headmaster soon noticed his talent and interest in
medieval sculpture. His art teacher, Alice Gostick, broadened his knowledge of art, and with her encouragement, he determined to make art his career; first by sitting for examinations for a scholarship to the local art college. Moore's earliest recorded carvings – a plaque for the Scott Society at Castleford Secondary School, and a Roll of Honour commemorating the boys who went to fight in the First World War from the school – were executed around this time. Despite his early promise, Moore's parents had been against him training as a sculptor, a vocation they considered manual labour with few career prospects. After a brief introduction as a student teacher, Moore became a teacher at the school he had attended. Upon turning eighteen, Moore volunteered for army service in the
First World War. He was the youngest man in the
Prince of Wales' Own Civil Service Rifles regiment and was injured in 1917 in a
gas attack, on 30 November at
Bourlon Wood, during the
Battle of Cambrai. After recovering in hospital, he saw out the remainder of the war as a
physical training instructor, only returning to France as
the Armistice was signed. He recalled later, "for me the war passed in a romantic haze of trying to be a hero." This attitude changed as he reflected on the destructiveness of war and in 1940 he wrote, in a letter to his friend Arthur Sale, that "a year or two after [the war] the sight of a khaki uniform began to mean everything in life that was wrong and wasteful and
anti-life. And I still have that feeling."
Beginnings as a sculptor {{multiple image After the war, Moore received an ex-serviceman's grant to continue his education and in 1919 he became a student at the Leeds School of Art (now
Leeds Arts University), which set up a sculpture studio especially for him. At the college, he met
Barbara Hepworth, a fellow student who would also become a well-known British sculptor, and began a friendship and gentle professional rivalry that lasted for many years. In Leeds, Moore also had access to the modernist works in the collection of Sir
Michael Sadler, the university
Vice-Chancellor, which had a pronounced effect on his development. In 1921, Moore won a scholarship to study at the
Royal College of Art in London, along with Hepworth and other Yorkshire contemporaries. While in London, Moore extended his knowledge of
primitive art and sculpture, studying the
ethnographic collections at the
British Museum. The student sculptures of both Moore and Hepworth followed the standard romantic
Victorian style, and included natural forms, landscapes and figurative modelling of animals. Moore later became uncomfortable with classically derived ideals; his later familiarity with primitivism and the influence of sculptors such as
Constantin Brâncuși,
Jacob Epstein,
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and
Frank Dobson led him to the method of
direct carving, in which imperfections in the material and marks left by tools became part of the finished sculpture. Having adopted this technique, Moore was in conflict with academic tutors who did not appreciate such a modern approach. During one exercise set by
Derwent Wood (the professor of sculpture at the Royal College), Moore was asked to reproduce a marble
relief of
Domenico Rosselli's
The Virgin and Child by first modelling the relief in
plaster, then reproducing it in marble using the mechanical aid known as a "
pointing machine", a technique called "pointing". Instead, he carved the relief directly, even marking the surface to simulate the prick marks that would have been left by the pointing machine. In 1924, Moore won a six-month travelling scholarship which he spent in
Northern Italy studying the great works of
Michelangelo,
Giotto di Bondone,
Giovanni Pisano and several other
Old Masters. During this period he also visited Paris, took advantage of the timed-sketching classes at the
Académie Colarossi, and viewed, in the
Trocadero, a plaster cast of a
Toltec-
Maya sculptural form, the
Chac Mool, which he had previously seen in book illustrations. The reclining figure was to have a profound effect upon Moore's work, becoming the primary motif of his sculpture.
Hampstead On returning to London, Moore undertook a seven-year teaching post at the Royal College of Art. He was required to work two days a week, which allowed him time to spend on his own work. His first public commission,
West Wind (1928–29), was one of the eight reliefs of the 'four winds' high on the walls of
London Underground's headquarters at
55 Broadway. The other 'winds' were carved by contemporary sculptors including
Eric Gill with the ground-level pieces provided by
Epstein. 1928 saw Moore's first solo exhibition, held at the Warren Gallery in London. On 19 July 1929, Moore married Irina Radetsky, a painting student at the Royal College. Irina was born in
Kiev in 1907. Her father was killed in the
Russian Revolution and her mother was evacuated to Paris where she married a British army officer. Irina was smuggled to Paris a year later and went to school there until she was 16, after which she was sent to live with her stepfather's relatives in
Buckinghamshire. and shows the influence of
Michelangelo's figures for the
Medici Chapel and the
Chac Mool figure. Irina found security in her marriage to Moore and was soon posing for him. Shortly after they married, the couple moved to a studio in
Hampstead at 11a Parkhill Road NW3, joining a small colony of
avant-garde artists who were taking root there. Shortly afterward, Hepworth and her second husband
Ben Nicholson moved into a studio around the corner from Moore, while
Naum Gabo,
Roland Penrose,
Cecil Stephenson and the art critic
Herbert Read also lived in the area (Read referred to the area as "a nest of gentle artists"). The area was also a stopping-off point for many refugee artists, architects and designers from continental Europe en route to America. In 1932, after six years teaching at the Royal College, Moore took up a post as the Head of the Department of Sculpture at the
Chelsea School of Art. Artistically, Moore, Hepworth and other members of The
Seven and Five Society would develop steadily more abstract work, partly influenced by their frequent trips to Paris and their contact with leading progressive artists, notably
Pablo Picasso,
Georges Braque,
Jean Arp and
Alberto Giacometti. Moore flirted with
Surrealism, joining
Paul Nash's
modern art movement "
Unit One", in 1933. In 1934, Moore visited Spain; he visited the
cave of Altamira (which he described as the "Royal Academy of Cave Painting"), Madrid, Toledo and Pamplona. In 1936, Moore joined a group of surrealist artists founded by
Roland Penrose, and the same year was honorary treasurer to the organising committee of the
London International Surrealist Exhibition. In 1937,
Roland Penrose purchased an abstract 'Mother and Child' in stone from Moore that he displayed in the front garden of his house in Hampstead. The work proved controversial with other residents and the local press ran a campaign against the piece over the next two years. At this time Moore gradually transitioned from direct carving to casting in bronze, modelling preliminary
maquettes in clay or plaster rather than making preparatory drawings. In 1938, Moore met
Kenneth Clark for the first time. From this time, Clark became an unlikely but influential champion of Moore's work, and through his position as member of the
Arts Council of Great Britain he secured exhibitions and commissions for the artist.
Second World War At the outbreak of the Second World War the Chelsea School of Art was evacuated to Northampton and Moore resigned his teaching post. During the war, Moore produced powerful drawings of Londoners sleeping in the London Underground while sheltering from
the Blitz.
Kenneth Clark, the chairman of the
War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC), had previously tried to recruit Moore as a full-time salaried war artist and now agreed to purchase some of the shelter drawings and issued contracts for further examples. The shelter drawings WAAC acquired were completed between the autumn of 1940 and the spring of 1941 and are regarded as among the finest products of the WAAC scheme. In August 1941, WAAC commissioned Moore to draw miners working underground at the Wheldale Colliery in Yorkshire, where his father had worked at the start of the century. Moore drew the people in the shelters as passively waiting the all-clear while miners aggressively worked the coal-faces. It has been suggested that Moore's wartime drawings of the Underground and coalmines were inspired, in part, by Gustave Doré's illustrations for Dante's 'Divine Comedy'. Moore's drawings helped to boost his international reputation, particularly in America where examples were included in the WAAC
Britain at War exhibition which toured North America throughout the war.
Later years '' (1950) bronze,
Barclay School,
Stevenage,
Hertfordshire. Moore's first large-scale commission after the Second World War. in Henry Moore's Gallery, Tehran, May 1971. After the war and following several earlier miscarriages, Irina gave birth to their daughter, Mary Moore, in March 1946. The child was named after Moore's mother, who had died two years earlier. Both the loss of his mother and the arrival of a baby focused Moore's mind on the family, which he expressed in his work by producing many "mother-and-child" compositions, although reclining and internal/external figures also remained popular. In the same year, Moore made his first visit to America when a retrospective exhibition of his work opened at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Before the war, Moore had been approached by educator
Henry Morris, who was trying to reform education with his concept of the
Village College. Morris had engaged
Walter Gropius as the architect for his second village college at
Impington near
Cambridge, and he wanted Moore to design a major public sculpture for the site. The County Council, however, could not afford Gropius's full design, and scaled back the project when Gropius emigrated to America. Lacking funds, Morris had to cancel Moore's sculpture, which had not progressed beyond the maquette stage. Moore was able to reuse the design in 1950 for a similar commission outside a secondary school for the new town of
Stevenage. This time, the project was completed and
Family Group became Moore's first large-scale public bronze. In the 1950s, Moore began to receive increasingly significant commissions. He exhibited
Reclining Figure: Festival at the
Festival of Britain in 1951, and in 1958 produced a
large marble reclining figure for the
UNESCO building in Paris. With many more public works of art, the scale of Moore's sculptures grew significantly and he started to employ an increasing number of assistants to work with him at Much Hadham, including
Anthony Caro Roland Piché Maurice Lowe and
Richard Wentworth. On the campus of the
University of Chicago in December 1967, 25 years to the minute after the team of physicists led by
Enrico Fermi achieved the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, Moore's
Nuclear Energy was unveiled on the site of what was once the university's football field stands, in the
rackets court beneath which the experiments had taken place. This 12-foot-tall piece in the middle of a large, open plaza is often thought to represent a
mushroom cloud topped by a massive human skull, but Moore's interpretation was very different. He once told a friend that he hoped viewers would "go around it, looking out through the open spaces, and that they may have a feeling of being in a cathedral." In
Chicago, Illinois, Moore also commemorated science with a large bronze sundial, locally named
Man Enters the Cosmos (1980), which was commissioned to recognise the
space exploration program. The last three decades of Moore's life continued in a similar vein; several major retrospectives took place around the world, notably a very prominent exhibition in the summer of 1972 in the grounds of the
Forte di Belvedere overlooking
Florence. Following the pioneering documentary 'Henry Moore', produced by
John Read in 1951, he appeared in many films. In 1964, for instance, Moore was featured in the documentary "5 British Sculptors (Work and Talk)" by American filmmaker
Warren Forma. By the end of the 1970s, there were some 40 exhibitions a year featuring his work. The number of commissions continued to increase; he completed
Knife Edge Two Piece in 1962 for
College Green near the
Houses of Parliament in London. According to Moore, "When I was offered the site near the
House of Lords ... I liked the place so much that I didn't bother to go and see an alternative site in
Hyde Park—one lonely sculpture can be lost in a large park. The House of Lords site is quite different. It is next to a path where people walk and it has a few seats where they can sit and contemplate it." As his wealth grew, Moore began to worry about his legacy. With the help of his daughter Mary, he set up the Henry Moore Trust in 1972, with a view to protecting his estate from
death duties. By 1977, he was paying close to a million pounds a year in
income tax; to mitigate his tax burden, he established the
Henry Moore Foundation as a registered charity with Irina and Mary as trustees. The Foundation was established to encourage the public appreciation of the visual arts and especially the works of Moore. It now runs his house and estate at
Perry Green, with a gallery, sculpture park and studios. In 1979, Henry Moore became unexpectedly known in Germany when his sculpture
Large Two Forms was installed in the forecourt of the
German Chancellery in Bonn, which was the capital city of
West Germany prior to German reunification in October 1990. Moore died on 31 August 1986 at his home in Perry Green. His body was interred at the churchyard of St Thomas's Church. 's Henry Moore collection is the largest public collection of his works in the world == Style ==