Henry Moore Works in Public
This is a guide to Moore's sculptures on public display throughout the world. We strive to ensure that all information is accurate, however we recommend that you contact each venue before making a visit. Please also contact us if you spot any mistakes. In some instances it has not been possible to source an image of the actual sculpture in-situ, and on such occasions an alternative image has been used.
Leeds
Leeds Art Gallery
bronze
length 221cm
on loan from the Henry Moore Foundation
This is among Moore’s last large-scale reclining figures. He selected it as particularly appropriate for display on the exterior entrance terrace to the Moore Sculpture Gallery extension to Leeds City Art Gallery, which was opened in November 1982 by Her Majesty The Queen in the sculptor’s presence. In the summer of that year, a few months before the completion of the new gallery, Moore visited Leeds to sort out problems of siting. The sculpture itself had not yet arrived. To give some idea of scale and mass in relationship to the façade, David Mitchinson (Curator at the Henry Moore Foundation) and the then Principal Keeper at Leeds were volunteered into acting as the surrogate figure, posing on the platform as its head and rump, while Moore, by then confined to a wheelchair, was wheeled back and forth across the piazza.
The possibility of an upright sculpture was briefly discussed and then dismissed. Moore liked the horizontality and the full rounded female forms of Reclining Woman: Elbow, its lustrous, deeply polished bronze set against the straight-edged, cliff-like Yorkshire limestone walls of the building, partly glimpsed through the cavernous openings between arms and legs. It was vitally important to get it right, for the image had to stand as a symbolic reminder of Moore’s youth in Leeds, sixty years earlier, when he began his sculpture training at the College of Art just around the corner. It also served as a fitting introduction to the gallery, with its outstanding permanent collection of twentieth-century British sculpture housed in the spacious and dramatic top-lit spaces within, which includes his celebrated early masterpiece, the brown Hornton stone Reclining Figure 1929 (LH 59), and Three Piece Reclining Figure No.2: Bridge Prop 1963 (LH 513).
● In addition to the sculptures listed on this website the Leesds Art Gallery usualy has on display other sculptures by Moore. Their collection compirses the sculptures.
Maternity 1924 (LH 22)
Double Head 1928 (LH 53)
Mask 1929 (LH 62)
Mother and Child 1936 (LH 171)
Reclining Figure 1938 (LH 192)
Stringed Figure 1945 (LH 206)
Upright Motive Maquette No.3 1955 (LH 380)
Maquette for Unesco Reclining Figure 1957 (LH 414)
Head: Boat Form 1963 (LH 509)
Three Piece Reclining Figure No.2: Bridge Prop 1963 (LH 513)
Maquette for Three Piece No.3: Vertebrae 1968 (LH 578)