Henry Moore OM, CH

Three Points is a highly polished, single-piece bronze sculpture mounted on a wooden base (fig.1). It takes the form of a C-shaped wedge positioned on its curved back. The two arms of this shape curve up and arch over the thicker middle from which they grow, converging into two sharpened points that turn towards each other and come within a few millimetres of touching. Running up through the centre of this almost oval composition is another sharp spike, which rises up rigidly towards the two other points and almost meets them.

One arm of the sculpture rises higher than the opposite arm, so that the point extending from the taller side points downwards on a diagonal, while the tip from the shorter side points upwards at the same angle (fig.2). The central conical point also extends on a diagonal from the concave inner surface of the bronze.

The outer surface of the sculpture is smooth and rounded, and does not show any tooling marks, although a number of pinpoint holes can be seen in the inner concave bronze surface (fig.3).

Versions of Three Points exist in three different materials: lead, iron and bronze. The first version of Three Points was cast in lead in 1939–40, and it is likely that that this version was one of a number of small metal sculptures cast by Moore and his assistant, Bernard Meadows, in a kiln constructed in the garden at Burcroft, Moore’s cottage in Kent. This practice of ‘backyard casting’ was relatively common among artists making small scale metal sculptures in the 1930s, and lead was a particularly favoured material due to its low melting point. On 9 December 1987 Tate curator Judith Collins interviewed Meadows with particular reference to his role in the creation of Moore’s lead sculptures. She recorded that Meadows ‘remembers casting lead pieces during the summer months of 1938 and 1939’, and that he ‘then stayed on alone at Burcroft in the winter holidays of 1938 and 1939 working on the lead casts’.1