Bucolic pleasures

It’s tempting to think we know everything about Henry Moore (1898–1986), household name that he is. As early as the 1950s, Percy Cudlipp was composing satirical ditties for magazines like Punch with rousing first lines such as ‘Don’t do any more, Mr Moore’, which suggests an over-familiarity perhaps bordering on satiety. But it’s all too easy to shoot down a leviathan — the most miserable shot can hardly miss. It’s far more profitable to consider Moore’s strengths and look at some of his real and substantial achievements. One of these was to make large-scale sculpture that looked at its best in the landscape.

Moore always maintained that sculpture was an art of the open air. He once said in an interview, ‘I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on, the most beautiful building I know.’ Architects, who so often resent sculptors cluttering up their pristine spaces, would no doubt agree.