Working Model for Seated Woman

Alongside the ‘reclining figure’ and the ‘mother and child’, the ‘seated woman’ is one of the central motifs of Henry Moore’s oeuvre. Executed in 1980, Working Model for Seated Woman is one of Moore’s last great sculptures on this theme which first originated in his early stone carvings of the late 1920s and early 1930s, came to prominence in a series of post-war bronzes of the early 1950s and then remerged with a renewed vigour around the time that his daughter Mary gave birth to his grandchildren in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Working Model for Seated Woman of 1980 is a sculpture that derives from both these later periods, being a work that was first conceived in the 1950s and finally brought to full realisation in the 1980s. Moore’s first maquette for this work was created in 1956 as a part of his UNESCO commission and a final enlargement of this 1980 sculpture, ultimately unfinished, was in the process of being created when Moore died in 1986. Working Model for Seated Woman of 1980 is the first full and complete sculptural realisation of this, evidently an important idea for Moore. It was completed by Moore in 1980 and cast in an edition of 9 bronzes and one artist’s proof.

An eloquent fusion of a wide range of forms and motifs that had preoccupied Moore for many years and which also informed and distinguished several of his earlier sculptures, it depicts a lone woman seated on a low block base with her legs firmly planted on the ground. She sits naked from the waist up, while the lower part of her body is covered with the kind of tightly-wound drapery that Moore favoured in the 1950s and in a manner reminiscent of both his Northampton Madonna of 1942-3 and some of his famous wartime shelter drawings. The elegant, regal, upright pose of the sculpture is, by contrast, more reminiscent of the ancient Egyptian seated figures that Moore had admired in the 1930s for what he called their ‘strong, taut and poised’ backs and ‘a stillness of waiting’ (H. Moore quoted in ibid, p. 35). At the same time, the quiet, totem-like form of this woman, her features and the blank look on her face recall that of Moore’s Queen in his well-known sculpture of a seated King and Queen of 1952.

Working Model for Seated Woman is different from many of Moore’s solitary seated female figures, however, in that it is a work that clearly invokes the artist’s deep-rooted fascination with the theme of the mother as nature’s great protector and nurturer. This was a theme which Moore addressed frequently in his many sculptures of families and of mothers and children and it has often been argued that this work too belongs more amongst Moore’s ‘Mother and Child’ sculptures than amongst those of his solitary seated figures. The origins of Working Model for Seated Woman appear to derive, for example, from a 1934 drawing, Two Seated Women (HMF 1077) depicting a seated female figure with a face bearing the hands of a clock and nurturing another form also with a clock face, seated in her lap. The suggestion of both time and of waiting given by this drawing, along with the delineation of a separate interior form for the woman’s breast and stomach strongly indicate that the woman is pregnant. This same motif is extended in Working Model for Seated Woman where the figure’s breasts and stomach have been rendered as a separate, almost autonomous, sculptural form that is being sheltered and protected by the arched back and rounded shoulders of the figure curving over them. Indeed, everything about this sculpture conveys a strong sense of maternity and pregnancy: from the gentle watchfulness of the woman’s face and her guarded posture to the protective nature of her arms and the architectural shelter she offers between her lap and shoulders to this, semi-abstract, embryonic and Jean Arp-like form.

The sculpture therefore appears to be frozen in a transformative state of becoming: halfway between being a single sculptural form and two. As such, Working Model for Seated Woman is a work of particular significance in Moore’s oeuvre and also extremely rare at auction, with only one other cast appearing 15 years ago. Along with the archetypal themes of motherhood and the Great Mother, the elemental relationship between exterior and interior form and also between the singular shape and the double or multiple form were concerns that stood at the very heart of all Moore’s oeuvre throughout his career. Executed late in life, Working Model for Seated Woman of 1980 is a unique sculpture in which all of these themes have been successfully brought together and eloquently resolved.