Reclining Figures: Ideas for Sculpture (recto); Listen (verso)

The drawings of 1939–40 are among the most richly inventive of all of Henry Moore’s studies for sculptures. Although none of the sketches on this sheet resulted in a finished sculpture, this drawing is, nonetheless, an instructive example of the way in which Moore filled a page with a flood of ideas when starting a new sculptural piece.

Notice how he set different images on top of earlier pencil studies he had rejected, and sometimes he reworked to a higher degree of finish the original underlying pencil sketch of a design Moore particularly liked. Despite the re-workings and crowding of images, order prevails in the horizontal stacking of the many reclining figures. At times, the artist underscores this principle by the suggestion of a ground-line or natural setting that establishes a fictive context for the individual forms.