Three Piece Reclining Figure: Maquette No.5 is composed from three discrete components arranged in a relationship that suggests a deconstructed human figure. The upright portion includes a head, in which the lineaments of a face—eyes, mouth and nose—are indicated by slight incisions. The two horizontally inclined components suggest amputated limbs and their protuberant forms evoke knee, hip and ankle joints. The shape of these components is primarily rounded and organic, although the upright component has flat, faceted surfaces, which imply an interface with some absent, severed limb. The composition was modelled in plaster, a pliable material which permitted this mixture of rounded shapes and sharply delineated facets. This bronze was cast from an original plaster model that now belongs to the Henry Moore Foundation.

The reclining female figure was among the definitive images of Henry Moore’s career. He first adopted it in the late twenties and returned to it perennially throughout his life. Whereas his earliest reclining figures in the twenties were treated as complete bodies with swelling, exaggerated limbs, he rapidly progressed to a dematerialised treatment of the human body in the thirties. A sculpture of 1934, Four-Piece Composition: Reclining Figure (Tate), uses four discrete pieces of Cumberland alabaster to evoke swelling limbs, crooked joints and the outlines of a body lying flat. This idiom of deconstructed forms has a formal austerity; the qualities of shape, volume and material are foremost while the quality of representation only emerges gradually with interpretation. Moore later returned to the fragmentation of the figure in 1959, at which time he produced a series of ‘two piece’ figures. He sustained this theme in bronze sculptures made in a variety of sizes up until his death.

Three Piece Reclining Figure: Maquette No.5 is the final version of a theme that Moore explored perennially between 1961 and 1977. A total of nine sculptures were given the title ‘Three Piece Reclining Figure’. The first of these were made in 1961–63, and a second group of five works followed in 1975–77. (He also made during this period a significant number of ‘Two Piece Reclining Figure’ works.) Each of these multi-part sculptures creates a visual tension between the harmonious interlocking of the three ‘pieces’, which implies a sense of unity and bodily coherence, and the varied shapes and orientation of the individual pieces, which creates a jarring counterpoint and disjuncture between the constituent parts. This strategy of fragmentation produced several tentative allusions. These collected objects might suggest a cluster of flints or twigs or other natural objet trouvé, a leitmotif of surrealist art, or perhaps the disfigured remains of antiquities.

Moore’s creative process involved the sustained reiteration and downward development of a small number of narrowly defined themes, and his drawings and sculptures were often produced in concentrated groups. As he wrote to the clergyman Walter Hussey about a commission in 1943, he wanted ‘to begin playing about making note-book sketches to get ideas for it.’ His sketchbooks were a site of artistic genesis where his ideas meshed with the complex specificity of shape, volume and gesture, and where his inexhaustible visual imagination found expression in fluent draughtsmanship. Although he first established his reputation as a sculptor who carved in stone and wood, in the late thirties Moore began to create bronze sculptures modelled with clay or plaster. This allowed him to replicate sculptural ideas using plaster casts, and he would continue to develop an idea in multiple versions until it was suitable for casting in bronze. The same motif or motifs would be repeated and then specified and altered as Moore invented new combinations of shape and volume. Later in his career, monumental bronze sculptures often inspired a quantity of related work, both sculpture and drawings, through which Moore explored a series of variations before deciding upon a final version. In the case of Three Piece Reclining Figure, Moore produced a large-scale version in 1975, Three Piece Reclining Figure: Draped [LH 655], which presumably inspired him to continue developing the subject two years later in Three Piece Reclining Figure: Maquette No.5.