As a schoolboy, Moore showed a talent for art but was encouraged by his family to train as a teacher, as they feared he would not make a great living at what they considered manual labour. Moore found little pleasure in teaching, however, and signed up to serve in the British Army during World War I. He was exposed to a gas attack by German forces at the Battle of Cambrai and was invalided from his service.
As a schoolboy, Moore showed a talent for art but was encouraged by his family to train as a teacher, as they feared he would not make a great living at what they considered manual labour. Moore found little pleasure in teaching, however, and signed up to serve in the British Army during World War I. He was exposed to a gas attack by German forces at the Battle of Cambrai and was invalided from his service.
“If God were ‘Almighty’, the things I saw and experienced, the great bloodshed and the pain, the insufferable agony and depravity, the tears and the inhuman devilishness of the war, would, could never have been,” Moore penned to a friend between 1919 and 1920.
In 1919, thanks to an ex-serviceman’s grant, Moore became a student at the Leeds School of Art. He went on to study at the Royal College of Art in London in 1921, where he later became a teacher and met Irina Radetsky, whom he married in 1929.
Moore received many commissions from his exhibitions in the 1930s, which allowed him to build a reputation as a leading avant-garde artist. Unfortunately, in 1939 war broke out again, curtailing all art exhibitions. However, Moore was fortunate to be recruited as an official war artist and produced his now-famous drawings of people sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz.
Henry Moore’s Shelterers in the Tube (c. 1941)
In September 1940, the Moores’ London apartment was damaged by bombing. This forced them to move to Perry Green, Hertfordshire, where Hoglands, a farmhouse in the hamlet, became their home for the rest of their lives. Over time, as Henry Moore developed outbuildings into studios and Irina created beautiful gardens, they eventually purchased the entire hamlet.
Henry Moore was greatly inspired by natural and flowing forms of rocks, stones, trees and bones that he encountered during his countless countryside walks. These shapes, combined with his love of nature and the landscape, influenced the forms of many of his sculptures. The hamlet’s verdant nature also led to Moore working with various natural materials during his lifetime.
International success characterised Moore’s career from the 1950s onward and he reaped huge financial success, especially in America. Despite this financial success, he lived with his wife and daughter quite frugally in the same house, concentrating his wealth on the creation of the Henry Moore Foundation in 1977, to encourage wider enjoyment and opportunities in the arts. Henry Moore passed away in Perry Green in August 1986.
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