'Out of an exaggerated respect for the material, I was reducing the power of the form.' —Henry Moore

A Distinguished Provenance 

Coming to auction for the first time from the collection of American artist and esteemed collector Lilliam H. Florsheim, the provenance of this Family Group is unparalleled. A prominent patron of the arts, Florsheim possessed a keen eye, and her collection included notable works by Barbara Hepworth, Naum Gabo, Jean Arp, and Henry Moore. A sculptor herself, Florsheim began studying in the late 1940s, not long after the present work was first conceived. After a period of more academic training, she found herself drawn to abstraction, enrolling at Chicago’s Institute of Design in 1951. Working well into her 80s, her sensitivity to materials and intuitive sense of form draws comparison to Moore’s own. Florsheim’s plexiglass works have been exhibited widely over the years and are represented in important private collections and The Art Institute of Chicago. 

 

Henry Moore and The Family Group

 

One of British sculptor Henry Moore’s most beloved and enduring motifs, the Family Group brings together key formal and thematic elements that have come to define the sculptor’s prodigious output. The quintessential image of family unity and harmony, in the present work two parents are presented frontally, an older child standing between the legs of the father, while a small infant sits playfully on its mother’s lap. Executed with a masterful sense of compositional balance, the mother sits to the left of the father, their bent legs perfectly mirroring one another while the positioning of the softly shaped children one above the other creates a subtle upward diagonal force that charges the piece with a sense of vitality and motion. 

So central was this motif to Moore’s thinking during these years that he returned to it again and again across drawings and sculpture. Completing over 14 different sculptural variations on the Family Group, Moore also created 4 monumental versions of family groups, one of which – still installed at the Barclay School in Stevenage – is significant as Moore’s first ever large-scale bronze sculpture, formally commissioned by Hertfordshire County Council in 1947. 

Expanding the composition to include two children, the present work is often considered as one of the more complex versions of this theme, a fact that is greatly complemented by Moore’s less naturalistic depiction of the figures here. Adopting a more fluid treatment of form, this version of the Family Group highlights the important dialogue that Moore established with his international contemporaries notably the undulating lines, hollows and biomorphic shapes that dominated Pablo Picasso’s work in the 1930s. Although a relatively new medium to him at this point, Moore’s command of bronze here also lends the piece a softness and mutability that speaks to the emotive power of his subject. Particularly apparent here in the softly rounded forms of the heads and sloping line of the shoulders, the elegant square void in the father’s chest and rounded cavity in the mother’s right breast gives weight to Moore’s comment that ‘if both abstract and human elements are welded together in a work, it must have a fuller, deeper meaning.’ⁱ 

 

A History of the Family Group  

 

As Moore described in a letter to The Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Miller in 1951 shortly after this version was cast, it was Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius who first discussed the idea of a family group with Moore in the 1930s as part of a progressive school project spearheaded by Henry Morris. As the Director for Education in Cambridgeshire, Morris had enlisted Gropius to design an ambitious project for a ‘Village College’ in Impington, which would not only offer education for children, but facilities accessible to the wider community, including a lecture theatre, and sleeping accommodation for families should the need arise. It was Gropius who approached Moore with the idea of creating a large sculpture especially for the project, and Moore eventually suggested a family group as image that best encapsulated the spirit and vision of the school. Sadly a lack of funds, the departure of Gropius for America and, eventually, the onset of World War II all conspired to ensure that the project was all but forgotten until 1944, when Morris approached Moore once again. 

 

Drawing and Sculpture

'The Family Group ideas were all generated by drawings.' —Henry Moore  The Family Group works especially highlight the fundamental relationship of drawing to Moore’s sculptural practice, a point emphasised by Moore himself in conversation with the late and highly esteemed critic David Sylvester where he identified the direct relationship between the resulting sculptures and his drawing practice. In addition to also having recently lost his mother, Moore became a parent himself in 1946, no doubt intensifying his feelings on this emotionally charged subject. Moore made many preparatory drawings of families in a variety of different arrangements and configurations during this period, several of which were then modelled in clay before being cast in bronze. Filling nearly two sketchbooks with drawings of variations on the family group theme, Moore found ways, not only of developing his compositional ideas, but of ‘sorting them out.’ⁱⁱ A sketch included on a drawing titled Family Groups: Ideas for Sculpture from 1944 highlights the central role that preparatory sketches played in this respect, clearly echoing the arrangement and presentation of the figures in the present work. 

 

In addition to this, the intervening years between the original Impington project and the casting of this variation of the theme in 1946 had witnessed a particular concentration of Moore’s drawing practice, including his highly celebrated Shelter Drawings. Featuring tender scenes of families huddled together during the many bomb raids endured by Londoners during the Blitz, Moore’s appointment as an Official War Artist led him to focus particularly on enduring images of love and protection, extended in the family group sketches and resulting sketches in their optimistic promise of a better future. Moore’s own family unit was indirectly threatened by the war in 1940 when their Hampstead home was hit by shrapnel. Leaving London for a quiet hamlet in Hertfordshire, Moore and his wife built a family home where they lived, worked, and raised their daughter in peace. 

 

Collector’s Digest

•    Family Group was first cast in 1946, the same year The Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a major retrospective of the sculptor’s work, it was only 2 years later in 1948 that Moore was awarded first prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale, the highest acknowledgement of his status as a leading post-war artist on an international stage. 

•    Examples of Moore’s sculptures can be found in the permanent collections of major international institutions including The Tate, London, The Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. His work can also still be enjoyed in public parks and spaces across the world. 

 

ⁱ Henry Moore, quoted in Philip James, ed., Henry Moore on Sculpture, London, 1966, p. 72.
ⁱⁱ Henry Moore in ‘Henry Moore Talking to David Sylvester’, 7 June 1963, transcript of Third Programme, broadcast BBC Radio, 14 July 1963, Tate Archive TGA 200816, p.13.