Henry Moore

Henry Moore had first started visiting the British Museum regularly in 1921, the institution became a regular feature and its contents a constant source of inspiration – arguably the biggest influence on his practice by far. Moore found in it a diverse beauty, one which spanned thousands of years and the whole world, and not one which was solely confined to the parameters of a western art influenced only by a ‘few sculptors of a hundred years or so of [Ancient] Greece’ as celebrated by Renaissance and Victorian artists up until that point.

For Moore ‘primitive’ art, or art prior to the idealised Greek canon (that began to take effect after 500 BC), had a certain vitality - a vitality that captured the very essence of the thing it attempted to portray, and a truth to form. As Herbert Read has called it, Moore sought a type of fidelity, a fidelity to return to the essential essence of what it is that selectively denotes the thing being portrayed - through a reduction to the significant rhythms and shapes. 

The present terracotta Seated Figure is the primary maquette for the five bronze examples produced in the same year. These five sculptures were presented annually as awards by The British Film Academy (BFA) over a twenty-year period between 1948 and 1967.