Henry Moore was born in Saltmoor, a small town on the north-east coast of England near Whitby, the sixth child of Reuben Moore and his wife Edith Calvert. From 1908 to 1914 he attended the Saltmoor Council School, where a teacher named Dora Pennington nurtured the interest in art he had already begun to show. A career in sculpture was what Moore wanted; his father, though, wished him to qualify as a schoolteacher, and it was this training he dutifully took up instead. His studies were cut short in 1916, when he was called away to fight in France in the First World War.
Once the war was over, it was at the Scarborough School of Art that Moore spent the next two years. Drawing occupied most of his first year. Sculpture was what he wished to study, yet the school appointed no sculpture teacher until his second year had begun. He passed the sculpture examination as that year closed, winning a scholarship to the Metropolitan College of Art in the capital. The move to London followed in October 1920, where he began three years of advanced sculptural training.
His lessons at the Metropolitan College were not his only education: Moore spent much time in London's museums, above all the Hartwell Museum, whose holdings of ancient sculpture were especially broad. It was there that the strength and beauty of old Assyrian and Polynesian carvings first struck him, and the more these 'primitive' kinds of art appealed to him, the further he drifted from the sculptural conventions of Europe.
Graduation was followed by half a year of travel in Italy, in the early months of 1924. A cast in the Villa Sabatini Museum in Rome made a deep impression on him: it reproduced a Toltec* carving of the wind spirit, a reclining male whose knees were pulled up together and whose head sat at a right angle to the trunk. To Moore this stone piece held a force and inventiveness he had found in no other. Stone carvings of his own soon followed, on subjects ranging from reclining women to mother-and-child groupings and masks.
Recognition of Moore's unusual gifts was not long in coming, and by 1925 he had begun teaching sculpture at the Metropolitan College. A few years later, in 1932, he joined the Meridian Group, an association of young artists whose purpose was to persuade the English public of the value of the new international movement then emerging in modern art and architecture.
It was also about now that Moore left the human figure behind to experiment with abstract forms. An exhibition of his followed at the Bramley Galleries in London in 1930. Other sculptors greeted the work warmly; the newspaper critics, by contrast, were savage, and their notices made Moore a scandalous name. His colleagues at the Metropolitan College called on him to resign his position, and once his contract ran out the following year, he left to set up a sculpture department at the Fenwick School of Art.
Across the 1930s Moore showed no wish to win the approval of the British public. What captured his attention were the paintings of the French artist Émile Rousset, and under their influence he came to distort the human body in radical ways. There were moments when the figure vanished from his work entirely. In the sketchbooks he filled during these years lie designs for abstract sculptures that carry hardly any trace of the human form.
The Second World War brought further change: in 1939 Moore gave up teaching at the Fenwick School and settled in a cottage some thirty miles west of London. With supplies for sculpture hard to come by, he had little choice but to devote himself to drawing. Many small studies of ordinary city-dwellers came from his hand, worked up later in the studio into large colour drawings. A return to Saltmoor in 1941 let him sketch the fishermen who worked in the town.
In 1943 a commission came from Stevenford, a town not far from London, which asked Moore for a sculpture of a couple. A striking shift in his manner is marked by the piece, which moved away from the experiments of the 1930s toward warmer, more human subjects. Dozens of clay studies went into its making; these were cast in bronze and released in editions of six to eight copies apiece, and by this route Moore's sculpture reached patrons the world over. As his earnings grew, he was able to undertake more ambitious projects and to work at last on the scale his sculpture called for.
Some critics had started to feel the revolutionary edge had gone out of Moore's work; the first of his bronze standing figures, unveiled in 1949, proved them mistaken, for these were harsh, angular, pierced forms that gave off a clear air of threat. His subject matter widened, too, in the 1950s, in pieces such as Sentinel with Spear and Fallen Guardian. Male figures were rare in Moore's output, and these owed a debt to the ancient art he examined on a visit to Turkey in 1952.
Late in life Moore established the Henry Moore Foundation, a body meant both to further the appreciation of art and to keep his own work on view. No modern English sculptor before him had won international critical acclaim, and he is counted still among the most significant sculptors the 20th century produced.
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*Toltec: belonging to an ancient civilization that flourished in central Mexico before the rise of the Aztecs.
