Henry Moore
Coal miner's son who put the hole through the figure and filled the world's plazas with reclining women.
Henry Moore was born at Castleford in Yorkshire in 1898, the son of a coal miner, was gassed at Cambrai, and studied at Leeds alongside Barbara Hepworth before the Royal College. Pre-Columbian and Cycladic sculpture in the British Museum mattered more to him than the classical tradition. The reclining figure, the mother and child, and the pierced form are the three subjects of a sixty-year career. The Shelter Drawings, made in the London Underground during the Blitz, are the best-known works on paper. He gave away most of his fortune through the Henry Moore Foundation and died in 1986.
Bronzes are editioned, generally in numbers of seven or nine plus artist's copies, and cast number, foundry, patina and whether a cast was made in the artist's lifetime are the substance of a valuation; the Foundation holds the archive and unauthorised casts are a known problem. The carvings in wood and stone are unique and sit far above the bronzes. Maquettes are numerous. Drawings and the Shelter Drawings are a significant separate market, and Moore's lithographs and etchings from the 1970s onwards are plentiful and modestly valued.
If you own a work by Henry Moore
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.