In 1950, Jacquetta Hawkes, the geologist, archaeologist, poet and wife of playwright J.B. Priestly, commissioned Henry Moore to produce two works for her lyrical book, ‘A Land’. An exploration of the topography, mythology and history of Great Britain told through memory, recollection, rumination and extended poetic discourse, Hawkes’s book spoke to the avant-garde tradition of seeking a unified, macrocosmic understanding of knowledge systems, begun by works such as D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s ‘On Growth and Form’. Throughout the writing, Hawkes made references and connections to artwork by various contemporary British artists including Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson, and Paul Nash but it was Henry Moore’s “’A Land’: His lines follow life back into the stone” that was the frontispiece for the book, and another work, "Knights and Kirtled Ladies Waiting for Creation" was Plate B towards the end of the book. Jacquetta Hawkes purchased both works from Henry Moore in 1951. The title of Hawkes's book was adopted for the most recent Moore retrospective at the Wakefield Yorkshire Sculpture Garden in 2015, and both drawings were in the exhibition. Writing in the preface, Hawkes explained that 'A Land’: His lines follow life back in the stone' “may be said to exemplify what I have written about his [Moore's] own work, while Plate B is more closely allied with the text. In writing the passage about effigies lurking in the alabaster, I saw so clearly how Henry Moore could render the image that when, afterwards, he showed me his drawing I felt a most curious confusion between my anticipation and his fulfilment of it”. This sensation of time subverted and disordered, of uncanny coincidences and synchronised dreams and thoughts, pre-figures the atmosphere of ‘A Land’. In the body of the book, Hawkes discusses a visit to Moore’s studio: “It is hardly possible to express in prose the extraordinary awareness of the unity of past and present, of mind and matter, of man and man’s origins which these thoughts bring to me. Once when I was in Moore’ studio and saw one of his reclining figures with the shaft of a belemnite exposed in the thigh, my vision of this unity was overwhelming. I felt that the squid in which life had created that shape, even while it still swam in distant seas was involved in this encounter with the sculptor; that it lay hardening in the mud until the time when consciousness was ready to find it out and imagination to incorporate it in a new form.” Moore worked up “’A Land’: His lines follow life back into the stone” in pencil, wax crayon, coloured crayon, chalk, watercolour wash, and gouache. Three forms arranged vertically down the paper seem to reveal the emergence of a woman, her evolution from the stone form at the top into an outstretched form suggestive of something near-human and finally into a reclining woman. The reclining female form was a recurrent theme of huge significance to Moore’s career. Just the year before ‘A Land’, Moore cast his ‘Recumbent Figure’, 1949, for the Festival of Britain at the South Bank, a work that he placed amongst his four most important pieces of sculpture, and is now in collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. The evolutionary progression of the three figures unites Moore’s most fundamental themes of the organic and inorganic, the abstract and human form, the curves of the landscape and the corresponding shapes within the female form, the fecundity of a natural environment and the maternal motif. The trio are romantically dream-like, surreal with their metamorphosing sequence, and speak to man’s mythological primeval origins. Realised in an unusually delicate, pastel palette of blues, pinks and yellows for Moore, with hints of earthy brown, the work is suggestive and sensual, with beautiful graphic details of texture on the three figures, and yet macrocosmic in its artistic intent.