HENRY MOORE

(1898-1986)

Family Group

Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has been confirmed by the Henry Moore Foundation.

Provenance
Amalia de Schulthess Collection, Santa Monica (possibly acquired directly from the artist).
Thence by descent to the present owners.


The present lot is a preliminary drawing for Henry Moore's first monumental bronze sculpture Family Group (LH 269). In 1935-1936, Moore was commissioned to create the large-scale sculpture for a school in Impington, near Cambridge, by the architects Walter Gropius and Maxwell Fry. The intention behind the college's design was to create a space which acted as a focal point for the entire community and catered to the entire family, children and adults alike. In 1951, Moore wrote about the commissioning: "Later the war came and I heard no more about it until, about 1944... the idea right from the start had appealed to me and I began drawings in notebook form of family groups. From these notebook drawings I made a number of small maquettes, a dozen or more" (Henry Moore quoted in 'Henry Moore Talking to David Sylvester,' June 7, 1963, transcript of Third Programme, broadcast BBC Radio, July 14, 1963, p. 13). Moore proceeded to fill almost two sketchbooks with drawings of family groups in various poses, describing this process as not just a way to generate ideas, but also of "sorting them out" (Henry Moore quoted in ibid., p. 16). Executed in 1945, Family Group depicts four figures representative of the nuclear family. Gathered around a table, a father reads to his child while a mother rocks a newborn in her lap. The poses of the two adult figures seem to mirror each other as they both turn slightly inwards, framing the older child as the natural focal point. Moore believed Family Group to be the last important sculpture he developed from drawings such as the present lot.

In 1957, Moore started to visit Tuscany, Italy frequently as he was working on the marble sculpture UNESCO Reclining Figure 1957-58, that was being completed at a marble company in Querceta. He ultimately decided to buy a home in Forte dei Marmi and was smitten with the area, particularly the pocket-size town of Pietrasanta. An area known for its renowned Carrara marble, the quarries of the marble crests of the Apuan Alps transformed the small town of Pietrasanta ("Holy Stone" in Italian) into the country's most treasured sculpture capital. First discovered by Greek sculptor, Phidias, who imported the material from Carrara to Rome in the time of Augustus, today the town's mere 16 square miles counts approximately 55 marble workshops and bronze foundries.

In Pietrasanta, Henry Moore worked with and shared a studio with Amalia de Schulthess. The California-based artist, previously focused on painting, moved to Florence after it was suggested to her that the abstract quality of her two-dimensional works would translate well to sculpture. In the early 1960s, De Schulthess moved to Pietrasanta, seeking inspiration from the natural landscape and indigenous materials, there within the lustrous, wintry-white mountainous peaks of marble. It was during these early years that De Schulthess shared a foundry with Moore, and likely acquired the present lot directly from him – perhaps as a sentimental token of the shared importance of the two-dimensional medium in both their sculptural processes.