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Lot Essay
The present work was used for the artist as a maquette for Family Group, 1949, a life-size piece commissioned for the Barclay Secondary School, Stevenage New Town, Hertfordshire. Susan Compton (Henry Moore, Royal Academy exhibition catalogue, 1987, p. 224) comments on the evolution of the final piece, 'in a letter to Dorothy Miller [31 January 1951], he described how the idea had originated before the Second World War, when the architect Walter Gropius was working in England and was asked by Henry Morris to design a Village College at Impington near Cambridge. Morris, the local Director for Education, felt that many rural areas were lacking in facilities and he wanted local schools to provide opportunities for parents as well as children. Impington College was to include space for films, plays, lectures etc. and become the heart of the community. Gropius asked Moore to make a sculpture for the school and Moore 'suggested that a family group would be the right subject'. However, no money was forthcoming for the scheme and Gropius left for Harvard University.
When Impington College was finally built to Maxwell Fry's revised design after the War, Moore was again approached by Morris and he worked for about nine months on 'Family Group' themes and ideas ... [but] it was not until 1947 that a new opportunity arose, when a friend of Morris, the director of Education for Hertfordshire, asked if Moore would be prepared to do a piece of sculpture for Barclay Secondary School at Stevenage. There was a scheme in force at the time for spending one per cent of the building estimates on pictures and sculptures for new schools. The architects of Barclay School, F.R.S. Yorke and Partners, had designed a curved baffle wall and Moore tried out a 'rough life-size silhouette made in cardboard of the Family Group for its scale' ... Moore's considered attention to the family does not only imply a personal response to a subject near to his heart [the artist's only daughter, Mary, was born in 1946]; it consolidates his move towards a wider and more humanist approach appropriate for public sculpture. Originally trained as a school teacher himself, his imagination was fired by the ideal of the extension of education to all sectors of the community'.
When Impington College was finally built to Maxwell Fry's revised design after the War, Moore was again approached by Morris and he worked for about nine months on 'Family Group' themes and ideas ... [but] it was not until 1947 that a new opportunity arose, when a friend of Morris, the director of Education for Hertfordshire, asked if Moore would be prepared to do a piece of sculpture for Barclay Secondary School at Stevenage. There was a scheme in force at the time for spending one per cent of the building estimates on pictures and sculptures for new schools. The architects of Barclay School, F.R.S. Yorke and Partners, had designed a curved baffle wall and Moore tried out a 'rough life-size silhouette made in cardboard of the Family Group for its scale' ... Moore's considered attention to the family does not only imply a personal response to a subject near to his heart [the artist's only daughter, Mary, was born in 1946]; it consolidates his move towards a wider and more humanist approach appropriate for public sculpture. Originally trained as a school teacher himself, his imagination was fired by the ideal of the extension of education to all sectors of the community'.