Seated Woman is a terse, skilfully executed drawing from a period of international recognition and critical acclaim in Henry Moore’s career. The work depicts a monumental figure swathed in a classical mode of drapery, which relates to the ‘seated figure’ theme that Moore used from the early thirties onwards. The treatment of the figure in Seated Woman is telling of Moore’s mature personal style. The figure’s shoulders are asymmetric, with the left-hand side bulging outwards. Its head is disproportionately small in relation to the body and is reiterated as a sequence of precisely drawn, echo-like keyholes, which carry a surrealist inflection. Looping lines of force run through the figure, with repeated pencil lines coursing through the arcing shoulder and crooked knees. Moore was one of his generation’s most original sculptors and the subject of Seated Woman has a plastic, three-dimensional presence.

Moore had a keen ability to combine eclectic source material in a personally distinctive style. The use of damp-fold drapery in Seated Woman, which clings to the bulbous figure in tightly bunched folds at the shoulder and knees, is an imaginative reinvention of a style used in Hellenistic Greece, found most notably in the east pediment figures of the Parthenon. Although the massive, exaggerated quality of Moore’s figure relates to ‘primitive art’ of Aztec and Mayan cultures, which was a formative point of reference early in his career, the use of the damp-fold style reflects the artist’s omnivorous modernist outlook.

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. The same motif or motifs would be drawn and re-drawn, sometimes on the same sheet of paper, as Moore rotated the subject in pictorial space, examined it from new elevations, and progressed his invention in progressively more nuanced configurations.

Seated Woman belongs to a group of thirteen or so similar full-page drawings made in a sketchbook used in 1958 and 1959. Several other closely related drawings from the group are dated ‘1959’, which is also the most likely date of Seated Woman. These sheets achieved the status of autonomous artworks when Moore disbound the sketchbook and began to sell, exhibit and make gifts of them. The interrelation of figure and gridwork background was a key pictorial device explored in these drawings, with Seated Woman setting the grid naturalistically behind the figure where others entrap the figure within the cubist pattern. The motif of a seated woman against a wall was the subject of a bronze sculpture by Moore two years earlier, and this group of drawings from 1959 shows his continuing interest in the theme.

In the catalogue raisonné of Moore's drawings, Seated Woman is listed under the reference number AG 58-59.10. However, it was also mistakenly used to illustrate a second work, also entitled ‘Seated Woman’ (reference number AG 58-59.8). (The work is illustrated in the book twice, appearing in consecutive thumbnail images.) The cataloguing for the two works shows that Seated Woman is correctly illustrated: the second work is unsigned and dated lower right, while Seated Woman is signed at lower left.