Henry Moore OM, CH

Shelter Scene: Bunks and Sleepers

1941

Image released under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported)

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On loan

Henry Moore Foundation (Perry Green, UK): Henry Moore Drawings

Artist: Henry Moore OM, CH 1898–1986
Medium: Watercolour, gouache, ink and chalk on paper
Dimensions: Support: 483 x 432 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by the War Artists Advisory Committee 1946
Reference: N05711

Display caption

This picture was exhibited at an exhibition called War Pictures at the National Gallery in 1941. It was also reproduced in the exhibition catalogue. In his catalogue essay, the critic Eric Newton compared
the war between Germany and Britain
to 'the fundamental opposition between the sea's restless power and the land's opposing firmness'. The wave-like undulations of the figures lying in the foreground of the drawing and the vertical cliff of figures on the bunks correspond remarkably with Newton's analogy.

Gallery label, September 2004

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Catalogue entry

N05711 SHELTER SCENE: BUNKS AND SHELTERS 1941

Not inscribed.
Pen, chalk, watercolour and gouache, 19×17 (48×43).
Presented by the War Artists' Advisory Committee 1946.
Exh: National War Pictures, National Gallery, 1941–2 and 1945, and R.A., October–November 1945 (190); Wakefield and Manchester, April–July 1949 (100).
Repr: Eric Newton, War Pictures at the National Gallery, 1941 (in colour); Studio, CXXIII, 1942, p.11; Read, 1944, pl.191a.

See N05706. The Shelter Sketch-Books contain a much less detailed version, inscribed ‘People in bunks’, as well as a similar composition in reverse (repr. Editions Poetry London, 1944).

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, II