Stones in a landscape

'In 1936 Moore made drawings inspired not only by the stones ready for carving that he had set up in his field in Kent, but by landscapes seen or imagined on the motoring holiday he had taken two years before in France and Spain. On that occasion he had been impressed by the deep valleys of the Dordogne and its prehistoric caves, a memory which contributed to another wash drawing of 1936, Figures in a Cave, (private collection). Thus, although the present work has been interpreted as Moore's first usage of a Greek temple motif, the sets of vertical lines topped by horizontals merely evoke that analogy in the viewer's mind: they could equally be interpreted as grids, or as a presentiment of the strings and wires that Moore began to use in his sculptures the following year. The stones themselves blend with the landscape for Moore has here created an effect like an old and faded photograph, very different from the contrast of black and green forms on a terracotta background that he had used the previous year, Stone Figures in a landscape setting, 1935, (The Henry Moore Foundation). In the 1930s Moore began to make use of photography to gain an idea of what small sculpture would look like if enlarged; there are black and white photographs of many of them seen against the open fields' (see Exhibition catalogue, Henry Moore, London, Royal Academy, 1988, loc. cit.).

Clark refers to the landscape setting as 'a magnificent and unique example'. Before the decade had finished, Moore was to depict several sculptural objects set against a landscape (see A. Garrould, loc. cit).