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Henry Moore, the seventh of eight children of Raymond Spencer Moore and his wife Mary, was born in the small coalmining town of Castleford, Yorkshire, on 30 July 1898. Moore went to infant and elementary schools in his hometown, and entered Castleford Secondary School via a scholarship when he was eleven years old.

He was determined to sit the examinations for a scholarship to the local art college, but his father, ever a practical man, thought that he should follow an elder sister into the teaching profession. After a brief period of training, Moore began teaching full-time at his old school in Castleford, but didn’t take to the profession.

He enlisted at the age of eighteen and joined the 15th Battalion, the London Regiment, known as the Civil Service Rifles. Shortly afterwards he was sent to France, where he and his regiment took part in the battle of Cambrai. Moore's active participation in the war ceased when he was gassed; he was sent home, spending two months in hospital in Cardiff. He returned to France for a brief period as an instructor before the armistice. Unsatisfied by teaching, he then applied for and received an ex-serviceman's grant to attend the Leeds School of Art and at the end of his second year won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London.

In 1924 Moore was appointed as sculpture instructor at the Royal College. It was there that he met Irina Radetsky, a painting student, whom he married in 1929. The couple lived in Hampstead, where they mingled with many aspiring young artists and writers, including Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Stephen Spender and Herbert Read. His first commission, received in 1928, was to produce a sculptural relief for Charles Holden’s London Transport Headquarters at St James's. His first one-man exhibition, which consisted of forty-two sculptures and fifty-one drawings, opened at the Warren Gallery in the same year. By 1931 Moore had become the first teacher of sculpture at Chelsea School of Art.

In the 1930s came three more one-man shows, all at the Leicester Galleries. Moore also participated in major group exhibitions of the time. In 1931 he exhibited three works in the Plastik exhibition in Zurich. In 1936 Moore signed the manifesto urging the end of a policy of non-intervention in Spain. He attempted to go to Republican Spain as part of a delegation of English artists and writers, but their request for permission to travel was rejected by the British Government. In 1940 their Hampstead home was damaged by a nearby bomb, and the Moores rented a house in Perry Green, a small hamlet in Hertfordshire, forty kilometres north of London. Here the artist would remain for the rest of his life.

In 1940 he had begun to make sketches of people sheltering from air-raids in the London Underground. These drawings, together with those made subsequently in the coalmines for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, are considered among his greatest achievements.

Moore’s daughter Mary was born in 1946, the year of his first foreign retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Demands for exhibitions of his work began to increase, both in number and in scale. In 1972 came the Florence exhibition, the largest and most impressive of his career. A gift of over two hundred sculptures and drawings and a complete collection of graphics was made to the Art Gallery of Ontario in 1974. Over thirty major pieces and another collection of graphics went to The Tate Gallery in 1978. Other gifts have included drawings to the British Museum and graphic work to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Council in London. He was the recipient of a great number of coveted awards, from honorary degrees to the Order of Merit, both here and abroad.

A few years before his death in 1986 Moore gave the whole estate at Perry Green with its studios, houses, cottages and collection of works to the Trustees of the Henry Moore Foundation to administer in perpetuity, charging them with the allocation of grants, bursaries and scholarships to promote sculpture within the cultural life of the country.

Learn more about Henry Moore by following the links on the right.