Henry Moore OM, CH

Maquette for Madonna and Child is a small bronze sculpture cast from a study originally modelled in clay. It depicts a woman seated on a low bench with a child on her lap (fig.1). She is dressed in a long sleeveless robe and sits with her knees apart. The child sits upright with its back to the woman’s chest, balanced on her right thigh and supported by her hands, which rest on the child’s right shoulder and chest. The woman’s head is turned slightly towards her right while the child faces straight ahead.

The sculpture was intended as a representation of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ, and is one of a series of preparatory maquettes sculpted by Moore in the spring and early summer of 1943. These maquettes were made to test designs for a large stone sculpture of the Madonna and Child, commissioned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the consecration of St Matthew’s Church in Northampton. This was Moore’s first major public commission and provided the artist with an opportunity to develop his long-standing interest in the mother and child theme in line with more traditional representations of the subject, which suited the commission’s demands. Of the five maquettes presented to the commissioner in July 1943, this design was ultimately chosen to be enlarged into the final sculpture, which was carved in Hornton stone and dedicated in St Matthew’s Church on 19 February 1944 (fig.2).

The commission came about after the vicar of St Matthew’s, the Reverend Walter Hussey, saw a number of Moore’s Shelter Drawings in an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, in the autumn of 1942. The exhibition had been organised by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC), a governmental body set up under the auspices of the Ministry of Information to boost British morale during wartime by commissioning images of British endurance from recognised artists. In 1940, having been forced to give up sculpture due to a lack of available materials, Moore produced a series of drawings of women and children sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz, which he showed to Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery and Chairman of the WAAC, who invited him to become an Official War Artist.