Henry Moore: From Castleford to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park
Henry Moore was born in Castleford, West Yorkshire, on 30 July 1898, the seventh of eight children of Raymond Moore, a coal miner who had educated himself and risen to be an undermanager. The family was working class, ambitious, and church-going. Castleford in the late Victorian and Edwardian period was a mining and industrial town – potteries, glass works, coal mines – and the landscape Moore grew up in, the Yorkshire moorland and the industrial Aire valley, stayed with him throughout a career that took him to London, to Italy, to international fame, and back to Yorkshire for the last thirty years of his life.
Leeds College of Art
Moore won a scholarship to Leeds College of Art in 1919, after his return from the First World War. He was 21 and had served in the Army, been gassed at Cambrai, and returned to teaching in Castleford before the scholarship released him to study. Leeds at that point had a college of art that was serious about its training and connected to the broader national culture of art education that was producing significant artists across Britain in the early twentieth century.
He was at Leeds for only one year before winning another scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London. But the year in Leeds was formative in ways he acknowledged throughout his career – the access to the collections at Leeds Art Gallery, the engagement with the European art tradition in a context that remained connected to the Yorkshire landscape and culture he had grown up in. The drawings he made in the Kirkstall Abbey ruins are among the earliest works that show the characteristic Moore combination of landscape feeling and structural abstraction.
The Development of the Mature Work
Moore’s career in London and then internationally produced the large-scale figurative sculptures that made him the most famous British artist of the twentieth century. The reclining figures, the mother and child groupings, the abstract forms that retained human references – all developed through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s into a body of work that was immediately identifiable as his. The formal influences were diverse – Mexican pre-Columbian sculpture, African masks, the Elgin Marbles – but the emotional and atmospheric quality came from somewhere more specific. Moore himself pointed, consistently, to the Yorkshire landscape as the underlying reference: the smoothed stone forms, the boulders on the moors, the sense of forms shaped by long geological and meteorological process.
The wartime drawings – the Shelter Drawings of Londoners sleeping in the Underground during the Blitz, and the coalminers of Castleford and the surrounding collieries – are among the most significant documentary art of the Second World War. The coalminers especially bring Moore back to Castleford and to his father’s world with a directness that the abstract sculpture does not.
The Yorkshire Sculpture Park
The Yorkshire Sculpture Park at Bretton, near Wakefield, holds the largest collection of Moore’s work in the UK outside the Henry Moore Foundation. The Open-Air Museum at Bretton Hall was developed from 1977 and the relationship with the Moore Foundation – which loans works to the park – has been central to its international reputation. The experience of encountering large-scale Moore bronzes in the Yorkshire landscape that shaped his imagination is the closest thing to understanding the work in its intended context.
The Henry Moore Institute
The Henry Moore Institute on the Headrow in Leeds, opened in 1993 in the former Permanent Building Society building, is a research centre and gallery for the study and display of sculpture. It is part of the Leeds Art Gallery complex and holds an archive of Moore’s working documents as well as hosting exhibitions of sculpture from across periods and cultures. The connection between the most significant sculptor born in the region and the city where he trained is properly honoured by an institution of genuine quality.