Sheep Drawing depicts a lamb suckling from its mother, the ewe. Henry Moore made this drawing from life along with several others in a single sketchbook. That sketchbook was entirely dedicated to sheep and was subsequently published as a facsimile by Thames & Hudson, with comments by both the artist and Kenneth Clark, who was a long-term supporter of Moore’s work. In the drawing, the artist’s presence is registered by the sheep’s watchful gaze, its head turned round to see who is there. There is an equally acute sense of the sheep’s presence and its animal personality. The drawing is naturalistic and registers the varied textures of sheep’s hair, grass, and the hedgerow beyond. It is classically organised into three evenly spaced bands, which describe the foreground, midground and background. The upper and lower bands are shallower, describing the carpet of grass and the fence and gate beyond. The sheep stand in their own space, positioned at the centre of the picture and balanced in relation to the supporting elements: they are the centre of this modest agrarian landscape.

In the Thames & Hudson sketchbook facsimile, the artist described the circumstances in which this cycle of drawings emerged. There was a field close to Moore’s studio, which he rented to a local farmer for grazing sheep. He justified his interest in the sheep as follows:

"These sheep often wandered up close to the window of the little studio I was working in. I began to be fascinated by them, and to draw them. At first I saw them as rather shapeless balls of wool with a head and four legs. Then I began to realize that underneath all that wool was a body, which moved in its own way, and that each sheep had its individual character. If I tapped on the window the sheep would stop and look, with that sheepish stare of curiosity. They would stand like that for up to five minutes, and I could get them to hold the same pose for longer by just tapping again on the window."

In his commentary, with characteristic ease and laconic wit, Clark asked rhetorically: ‘What could the master of pure form find in the shapeless bodies of these woolly animals?’ Clark explained Henry Moore’s sustained interest in sheep as a matter of the receptive artist, continually interrogating his surroundings and responding to them. In short, Moore became interested in sheep because his studio in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, was surrounded by them:

"He walks down to his studio in the morning – there are the sheep to greet him; for two hours he hammers away at some huge stone reclining figure, and then goes out for a cup of coffee. There are the sheep, still looking at him. No wonder they became a visual obsession."

Clark went on to observe that the drawings reflect ‘a feeling of real affection for their subject’. ‘It is no exaggeration to say that many of his sheep are drawn with love.’

One of the definitive themes of Moore’s art was the relationship between a mother and her child. This emotional connection was usually expressed through human figures, redolent of the Madonna and Child iconography that Moore derived from historical Christian art. The sheep drawings translate the self-same pathos and intimacy into the bodies of animals. A common composition, also adopted in this drawing, was that of a lamb suckling from the ewe. In Moore’s drawing, a rural commonplace becomes strangely profound. The connection between mother and child is vital, and the action of the bodies is vigorous and animated.

The Henry Moore Foundation catalogue this work as HMF 3352.