s 'Woman and Child in Ladderback Chair' by Henry Moore (1952) - Hull Museums Collections

'Woman and Child in Ladderback Chair' by Henry Moore (1952)

In his lifetime Henry Moore was one of the greatest sculptors in the world. He was born in Castleford in Yorkshire and his dad was a coal miner. Henry did lots of sculptures of mothers and children. It was a theme he liked to try and capture. With this sculpture he worked with wax first. This helped him to develop tricky bits like the back of the chair. Once finished in wax it would all be cast in bronze. Henry Moore is recognised as being one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century. He was born in 1898 in Castleford. Henry Moore served in British Army during World War I and later trained at Leeds School of Art. He then won a scholarship at the Royal College of Art. He died in 1986. Henry Moore began by carving his sculptures and only later worked in bronze. Mother and child relationships are one of Moore’s favourite themes. He explored how we can be together and alone at the same time. The reclining figure was another favourite theme. This sculpture was given to the Ferens Art Gallery by the Contemporary Art Society in 1956. In an interview in 1960 Henry Moore discussed how the lost wax process helped his work: “Working direct in wax has many possibilities, since wax has a toughness about it that will allow you to do very thin forms – for example take that rocking chair sculpture of mine in which the back of the chair is in struts like a ladder. You could not make that construction in clay, nor in plaster without awful trouble, whereas that was modelled directly in wax, easily and straightforwardly. Then all one had to do was to cover that with plaster and ground up pottery and melt the wax out and cast in bronze.”