Reclining Figure is a richly patinated bronze sculpture which uses the defining imagery of Henry Moore’s career. The figure is not entirely human and has been shaped and moulded to evince the flowing silhouettes of a landscape. The work accommodates two simultaneous interpretations: the jaunty shoulder and the attenuated breasts are boulder-like excrescences; the parting between the legs forms a ravine; the profound void in the torso, a punctuation of the sculptural form, echoes the effects of erosion. The ruggedly worked volumes of the figure were achieved by modelling in clay, the product of which was then cast in bronze. Beside the massing of forms, the sculpture’s surface is carefully patinated and incised. The head is marked with two pinhole eyes, the throat is textured with scratch marks, and many areas of the body are raked and churned. These surface effects contribute to the organic quality of the sculpture, suggesting a subtle elision of man-made material and found natural objects such as leaves, pebbles and lichen.

Moore’s reclining figure imagery is one of the most important subjects of his career. He was a leading modernist artist in Britain between the world wars, a member of Unit One, and his ingenious compromise between representation and abstraction was profoundly influential to art of his generation. Writing in 1951, the art critic Herbert Read described Moore’s as ‘the most fully integrated and authentically personal art of our time’. It was, in Read’s estimation, ‘a decisive new departure in the evolution of modern sculpture’. Since that time, alongside Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, Moore has become one of the few British modern artists to achieve widespread global recognition.

Though Moore did not cast this work until 1955, he conceived a closely related composition in several pieces of the mid-1930s. An elmwood carving of the same title (fig. 1) used a similar configuration of the human body. In his catalogue raisonné of Moore’s work, Alan Bowness catalogued this bronze as a work related to the Wakefield elmwood carving. Other bronzes cast in the 1930s are also closely similar, including, for example, Reclining Figure (1936-37) (fig. 2). Where Moore’s later large-scale treatment of bronze tended to rely upon a smooth, polished finish, these small-scale figures conceived in the 1930s are distinguished by a raked, textured surface.

The imagery of a reclining figure was long-established when Moore began to use it in the 1920s. In antiquity, it was the ideal shape to fill the pediments of Greek temples, and it was later repurposed in the Renaissance by Michelangelo. Bernini used the format to depict river gods. Though these examples of Western art were familiar to Moore, he drew upon a wider range of sources to develop his work. A ‘primitive’ energy was definitive to his conception of this bodily attitude. Saxon stone-carvings, Romanesque and pre-Columbian art, and the large-limbed post-war paintings of Pablo Picasso all contributed to the unique, resonant and personally distinctive figures which are the definitive of Moore’s oeuvre.