Moore’s Family Group works have become synonymous with his infuence on post-war and contemporary sculpture, a legacy which is celebrated still today. He frst explored the subject in the mid-1930s when asked to create an outdoor sculpture for a local college near Cambridge, England. Originally a schoolteacher and born the seventh in a family of eight children, Moore decided on a humanist image that would promote the values which fuel education. As Moore recalls of the commission, “The idea of the family group crystalized before the war. Henry Morris, the Director of Education for Cambridgeshire, asked me to do a sculpture for the Impington Village College, the frst of the modern schools in England…designed by Walter Gropius. As the College was going to be used for adult education as well, the idea of connecting parents to children came into my mind” (Henry Moore, quoted in John Hedgecoe, A Monumental Vision: The Sculpture of Henry Moore, London, 1998, p. 106). While the project did not come to fruition due to a lack of funds, Moore continued to explore the motif of the family unit in drawings and small-scale maquettes throughout and afer the war. Indeed, Moore’s family group sculptures are ofen thought of as direct successors to his shelter drawings made during wartime, which depicted fgures huddled together seeking shelter from the bomb raids in London. As he explained, “…the scenes of the shelter world…remained vivid in my mind. I felt somehow drawn to it all. Here was something I couldn’t help doing” (Henry Moore, quoted in James Johnson Sweeney, “Henry Moore”, Partisan Review, New York, March - April 1947, p. 184). Moore’s preoccupation with the subject would culminate with his frst realized public commission in bronze by the Barclay School in London in 1948-1949, for which he made a fve-foot-tall Family Group cast in an edition of 5. Examples of this large-scale Family Group are housed in important museum collections such as Tate, London and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the latter of which hosted the artist’s frst major solo exhibition in 1946, just one year before the
present work was conceived. It was this project that solidifed Moore’s reputation as the internationally recognized sculptor that he is today, making the late 1940s the most crucial years in the artist’s career and the Family Group works indisputably his most famous. Originally housed in the collection of Ewan Phillips— renowned art historian, critic and dealer—and later in the collection of British abstract painter Frank Avray Wilson, the present example was cast in an edition of 7, two of which are housed in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Göteborgs Konstmuseum.
Early Cycladic marble fgurine, circa 2300-2200 B.C. British Museum, London.