Three Reclining Figures

Three Reclining Figures presents three successive studies of a subject that occupied Henry Moore throughout his career, each body reduced to a different arrangement of weight, curve and internal space. Although all three figures recline, none repeats the same solution: the upper figure resembles an enclosed, segmented shell, the middle figure opens into a broad rhythmic curve, and the lower figure becomes heavier and more architectural. Seen together, they reveal Moore’s habit of treating the body and landscape as related forms, with limbs, torsos and hollows suggesting hills, rocks, shelters and passages through solid matter.

Moore used ink to test the figures’ underlying structure and watercolour to establish areas of warmth, mass and emphasis without closing the forms into firm sculptural outlines. The varied pressure of the pen, diluted washes and incidental splashes preserve the exploratory character of the drawing, giving the sheet the immediacy of an artist thinking on paper and making visible the quick decisions through which he turned the human body into a sequence of possible sculptural ideas.

The sheet carries an exceptional personal history. Moore signed it twice, in the lower left and again beside a dedication reading “For Gérald Cramer from Henry Moore 1962”, and gave it directly to the Geneva dealer and publisher Gérald Cramer. The two had met in 1961, at the start of a twenty-five-year professional collaboration that helped expand Moore’s activity as a printmaker and led to the publication of major graphic projects; made and presented at the beginning of that relationship, the drawing records a personal exchange from the moment Cramer was becoming one of the most important publishers and cataloguers of Moore’s graphic work. It passed by descent to Cramer’s son, Patrick Cramer, before its purchase by Fairhead Fine Art.

The sheet is catalogued as AG 62.9 and HMF 3076, and is reproduced on page 165 of Ann Garrould’s Henry Moore Complete Drawings 1950-76, volume 4. It was exhibited at Sims Reed Gallery, London, in Henry Moore and Gérald Cramer: 25 Years of Art and Friendship (November-December 2014), where it was reproduced on the catalogue cover and on pages 24-25.

The drawing is in very good condition, with a small semicircular paper loss at the left margin.

“Drawing, even for people who cannot draw, even for people not trying to produce a good drawing, makes you look more intensely.”

— Henry Moore