Ideas for Sculpture: Reclining Figures is a presentation drawing that shows the definitive subject of Henry Moore’s career – the reclining human figure. The sheet includes a sequence of minutely varied physical attitudes, showing figures with and without limbs, some lying back flatly and supported by their elbows, and others depicted in gestural, semi-abstract configurations. Moore’s grasp of three-dimensional forms is evident and each figure has a convincing physical identity. The image was initially composed in graphite pencil, with Moore drawing a mixture of fully-formed figures and less resolved doodles. At a later stage, the more resolved figure studies were developed with pen and ink to reiterate their silhouettes and modelling, and each was given a wash of pale, off-white body colour. Finally, a wash of warm, vermilion watercolour was added around the figures, partly obscuring the doodles and bringing together the isolated figures in a unified space, with the areas between made to suggest an informal but continuous landscape.

In the mid-fifties, Moore went through a phase of redeveloping drawings from his earlier sketchbooks. Ideas for Sculpture: Reclining Figures is dated ‘1954’, the year it was reworked. Although most disbound works on paper in Moore’s oeuvre can be related to a specific sketchbook, this is not possible in the case of this work. Nevertheless, on the basis of its style, the Henry Moore Foundation has determined that the initial work on this sheet was executed in 1934.

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. Ideas for Sculpture: Reclining Figures is one such example of this process.

This work was owned by the prolific collector and arts patron Contessa Anna Laetitia Pecci-Blunt (1885–1971) (fig. 1), known to her friends as Mimì. Her name is inscribed on the reverse of the sheet. She lived for much of her life in Rome, where she founded the short-lived Galleria della Cometa, which operated between 1935 and 1938, and was also involved with encouraging music and theatre. Her considerable art collection included work by Salvador Dalí, Pavel Tchelitchew, Giorgio de Chirico, and many others, most of whom she was personally acquainted with. Upon her death, a significant portion of her collection was bequeathed to the Museo di Roma.