Henry Moore at Tate

John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows  exhibited 1831

This stormy painting is thought to reflect John Constable’s worries about the effect of political reform on the Anglican Church. The subject was suggested by his close friend John Fisher, an Archdeacon who lived in Salisbury. The storm may also represent Constable’s grief following the death of his wife, Maria. When he first exhibited this painting in 1831, debates about political reform were intensifying. The rainbow may have been added later, however, suggesting the storm is passing.

Gallery label, August 2024

Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait on Folding Bed  1963

A partially clothed male figure, wearing a rolled sleeved shirt, lies on an unmade folding bed. The head and lower body are rendered with distortion and ambiguity, with the texture and visceral colours evoking the flesh, bone and blood. The dribbles and splatters of paint give the appearance of leaking bodily fluids. Francis Bacon found the image disappointing, regretting the oval at the bottom and the absence of the carpet, remarking ‘I wish they (Tate) would burn it.’

Gallery label, October 2025

John Constable, Chain Pier, Brighton  1826–7

This blustery coastal scene was part of Constable’s attempt to prove that he could paint different kinds of subjects on a large scale. From 1824, Constable regularly spent summers in Brighton in the hope that the sea air would restore the health of his wife, Maria. Brighton was then the fastest growing and most fashionable town in Britain. Tourists flocked to attractions like the Chain Pier, which opened in 1823 to receive steamboats from France. Constable has silhouetted the pier on the horizon here. Around it we see fishermen and ladies huddled under their parasols as well as rows of newly built terraces lining the seafront.

Gallery label, January 2025

John Constable, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows  ?1829

On his final two visits to Salisbury in 1829, Constable planned his last and most impressive image of the place, Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, exhibited in 1831. The finished painting is in a private collection but is currently on loan to the National Gallery.

This is a studio sketch, about a quarter of the size of the final picture. It was preceded by smaller oil sketches and drawings, and followed by a full-size oil sketch. It represents a crucial stage in the development of the work, with the horse-drawn waggon now moved to the centre of the composition.

Gallery label, September 2004

John Constable, The Glebe Farm  c.1830

From around 1828, Constable’s paintings became darker. He conjured turbulent skies and applied paint using dabs and dashes. He grew obsessive about white highlights, believing they created ‘freshness’. The critics, however, called this effect ‘Constable’s ‘snow’. ‘Glebe’ means church-owned land. Constable’s supporter, the Bishop of Salisbury, had lived in this house during his time in Suffolk. Constable painted at least four other versions of this view after the Bishop’s death in 1825. He experimented on this one, adding a spire to the church and a rainbow on the right. He also tried changing the church into a windmill.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, Cloud Study  1822

In 1821 and 1822, Constable studied clouds and the sky intensively, mainly over Hampstead Heath, north of London. He often inscribed the date, time of day, wind direction and general weather conditions on the back of the painting, indicating an interest in meteorology. In this instance, the inscription on the back includes the time of day ’11 o’clock’ and ‘noon,’ suggesting Constable painted this in an hour. Capturing the changeability of clouds as they drifted above him was a challenging exercise. Constable’s lively brushwork, colour tones and understanding of the structure and movement of clouds made him adept at expressing mood in landscape painting.

Gallery label, October 2023

John Constable, Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with a Boy Sitting on a Bank  c.1825

By the early nineteenth century the open landscape of Hampstead Heath, north of London, was increasingly appreciated as a refuge from the ever more crowded and polluted city. This is one of many views of the Heath that Constable painted. His picture revels in the wildness of the landscape, both in the choice of scene and in the freedom of his painting style. It was created for his friend, the actor Jack Bannister, who, the artist reported, wanted a landscape in which he could 'feel the wind blowing on his face'.

Gallery label, September 2004

John Constable, The Sea near Brighton  1826

Brighton, on the south coast of England, was a place many Londoners escaped to. Some went there for fun, others for rest. Constable rented a house for his family there in the hope that the fresh sea air and change of scene would restore the health of his wife, Maria. This painting is one of only a handful of oil sketches Constable made outdoors in winter. He had written on being impressed by ‘the magnificence of the sea’ and of how seabirds, like those seen here, ‘add to the wildness and to the sentiment of melancholy’ at the shore.

Gallery label, October 2023

Francis Bacon, Triptych August 1972  1972

This work is generally considered one in a series of Black Triptychs which followed the suicide of Bacon’s lover, George Dyer. Dyer appears on the left and Bacon is on the right. The central group is derived from a photograph of wrestlers by Edward Muybridge, but also suggests a more sexual encounter. The seated figures and their coupling are set against black voids and the central flurry has been seen as ‘a life-and death struggle’. The artist’s biographer wrote: ‘What death has not already consumed seeps incontinently out of the figures as their shadows.’

Gallery label, September 2016

Henry Moore OM, CH, Reclining Figure  1951

In the late 1940s, the Arts Council invited Moore to submit ideas for a sculpture to be sited at the South Bank site of the Festival of Britain. Although the organising committee suggested a family theme, Moore chose to make this tense, skeletal reclining form. The work on display is the plaster model for the bronze, which was cast in an edition of five.

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Maquette for Madonna and Child  1943, cast 1944–5

The mother and child had been a major theme in Moore’s work since the 1920s. Yet when the vicar of St Matthew, Northampton, invited Moore to make a sculpture of the Madonna and Child, he was reluctant to accept. He felt unsure how to adapt his secular interests to the Christian tradition. These bronzes are casts of the original terracotta models he made for the project. They are unusually naturalistic and steeped in references to Renaissance religious art. This suggests Moore was trying to produce a sculpture that people would find both modern and familiar.

Gallery label, September 2016

John Constable, A Windmill near Brighton  1824

Though he didn’t like the crowds that flocked to Brighton, Constable found its setting inspiring. Exploring the quiet of the downs behind the town, he discovered a working landscape of windmills, crops and grazing animals. Constable’s composition, with the windmill partially obscured by a mound, gives a good sense of this undulating landscape. It falls away on the right to offer a glimpse of the sea. This sketch was painted on 27 July 1824. He wrote a note about weather conditions on the back: ‘very fine morning after rain’.

Gallery label, October 2023

Henry Moore OM, CH, Reclining Figure: Bunched  1961, cast 1961–2

By the mid-1950s Moore had almost entirely eliminated drawing from his creative process and explored his ideas through small maquettes. These had an intrinsic quality of immediacy or spontaneity and allowed him to imagine the finished product in the round. In order to translate the scale of the work more effectively, he often made larger working models as an intermediate stage between the maquette and the finished sculpture. Moore’s maquettes were typically cast in bronze in editions of up to ten. The sculptor strove for monumentality in his work and tried to imbue the same quality in the small maquettes. He also took a great deal of care with their finish. Some were more polished than others, some darker, some greener. Moore did all the patination himself, treating the bronze with different acids to achieve different effects then working on it by hand, rubbing and wearing it down.

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Helmet Head and Shoulders  1952, cast date unknown

Henry Moore first explored the theme of helmets and the bodies they protect in the late 1930s, in the run-up to the Second World War. He returned to it in the 1950s, in the war’s aftermath. Where his pre-war helmets contain a complex series of forms, his post-war helmets, such as this one, are hollowed out. The helmet’s asymmetrical curves highlight the void inside and its uneven lines give it the feeling of recovered battlefield debris.

Gallery label, February 2025

Henry Moore OM, CH, Falling Warrior  1956–7, cast c.1957–60

The sense of movement in this pose was very important for Henry Moore. He said, ‘I wanted a figure that was still alive... [I made] the action that of a figure in the act of falling, and the shield became a support for the warrior, emphasising the dramatic moment that precedes death.’ Moore only ever created six sculptures of large male figures. Falling Warrior is one of them, one of only three to show the male figure alone.

Gallery label, February 2025

Henry Moore OM, CH, Woman  1957–8, cast date unknown

This is one of the largest of Moore's sculptures of a seated female nude, and it was cast in an edition of nine. The original plaster is in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the curator there, Alan Wilkinson, has described this sculpture as 'one of the most potent images of fertility produced in the 20th century'. He also related it to Moore's early interest in Palaeolithic sculpture, an influence the artist readily acknowledged. Moore wrote of the work: ''Woman' has that startling fullness of the stomach and breasts. The smallness of the head is necessary to emphasize the massiveness of the body - if the head had been any larger it would have ruined the whole idea of the sculpture.'

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Helmet Head No.4: Interior-Exterior  1963, cast date unknown

This work is part of a series Henry Moore created in which a hard outer ‘helmet’ shell encloses a smaller, contrasting ‘head’ form within. According to Moore, ‘the idea of one form inside another form may owe some of its incipient beginnings to my interest at one stage when I discovered armour. I spent many hours in the Wallace Collection, in London, looking at armour.’ In the context of Moore’s other work, this series can also be seen as an abstract development of the theme of mother and child.

Gallery label, February 2025

Henry Moore OM, CH, Atom Piece (Working Model for Nuclear Energy)  1964–5, cast 1965

In 1963 Moore was invited by the University of Chicago to make a sculpture commemorating the first controlled nuclear reaction, conducted at the university in 1942. This work is a model for the larger Nuclear Energy, unveiled in 1967. Moore intended it to convey ‘a contained power and force’ appropriate to the subject. The upper shape suggests a human skull or a mushroom cloud. The city of Hiroshima, which had been destroyed by a nuclear bomb in 1945, purchased one of the seven versions of this model in 1987.

Gallery label, February 2025

Henry Moore OM, CH, Mother and Child  1953, cast c.1954

Many of Henry Moore’s sculptures show a nurturing mother-child relationship. Mother and Child depicts a darker and more disturbing dynamic. Moore wanted to explore the more complex side of rearing a child. Sometimes, he said, ‘it’s as though they want to devour their parent... as though the parent, the mother, had to hold the child at arm’s length.’ The jagged style enhances the menacing feeling of the figures and their relationship to one another.

Gallery label, February 2025

Henry Moore OM, CH, Working Model for Unesco Reclining Figure  1957, cast c.1959–61

This sculpture is related to the UNESCO Reclining Figure at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters shown in the photograph above. That work is carved from travertine marble and is unique. This smaller bronze sculpture is in an edition of six. As with his other public sculptures Moore sought to avoid narrative or overt rhetoric. The universal significance attributed to Moore’s sculpture made it particularly appropriate for a global organisation such as UNESCO.

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, King and Queen  1952–3, cast 1957

According to Henry Moore, this sculpture was inspired by ancient representations of monarchs. He said it was ‘connected with the archaic... idea of a king... the head of the king which is a head and a crown, face and beard combined into one form.’ Although Moore emphasised anonymous and universal themes of rulership, he created King and Queen around the same time as the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Images of the ceremony were widely published in the media.

Gallery label, February 2025

Henry Moore OM, CH, Two Reclining Figures  1976

Henry Moore OM, CH, Stone II  1977

Henry Moore OM, CH, Standing Figure Storm Sky  1978

Henry Moore OM, CH, Eight Sculpture Ideas  1980–1

Henry Moore OM, CH, Head of Girl III  1981

Henry Moore OM, CH, The Artist’s Hand II  1979

Henry Moore's subject is the aged body. He made these drawings of his own hands when he was eighty-one and suffering from ill-health. 'Hands can convey so much' he said, 'they can beg or refuse, take or give, be open or clenched, show content or anxiety. They can be young or old, beautiful or deformed'.

Moore saw these prints as belonging to a long tradition of fascination with hands as vehicles of expression: 'Throughout the history of sculpture and painting one can find that artists have shown through the hands the feelings they wished to represent.'

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Two Standing Figures  1963

Henry Moore OM, CH, Reclining & Standing Figure and Family Group  1973

Henry Moore OM, CH, Reclining Figures on Beach  1975–6