Henry Moore

Henry Moore was born in Yorkshire in 1898, and enrolled as the first sculpture student at Leeds School of Art after serving during World War I. Moore received a scholarship to pursue studies at the Royal College of Art in London. While there he spent ample time at the British Museum studying their ethnographic collections, which strongly informed his later monumental figurative works. He lived in Paris, enrolling in classes that periodically met at the Louvre, and encountered an Aztec sculpture at the Musée d'Ethnographie that would be a crucial influence on his early work. This sculpture encouraged his inclination to create direct carved, single figures focused on their mass and form. He made his first prints in 1931 and altogether made something over 700 prints during his career. From the late 1960s printmaking became an increasingly important part of Moore’s artistic output and as with his sculpture and drawings two abiding themes were reclining female forms and mother and child. Moore’s artwork has been exhibited extensively at notable venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Royal Academy of Arts, London, Shanghai Art Museum, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, Tate Britain, London, Kremlin Museum, Moscow and many other institutions around the world.