Henry Moore: Photography and Scale

Henry Moore is best known for his public monumental bronze sculptures which can be seen around the world. His practice in making these large bronzes was to start with a small “maquette”, which he enlarged to make the final monumental sculpture.

Earlier in his career, before he had begun to work at the large sizes of his later sculpture, Moore was already interested in scale. In 1937 he wrote that “if practical considerations allowed me … I should like to work on large carvings more often than I do”.  At this time he was already experimenting with photographing sculptures up close against neutral backgrounds or natural landscapes to give the illusion of enormous size.

Many of the photographs in the Henry Moore Archive collection attest to Moore’s preoccupation with this photographic ambiguity.

An early example shows a model of his 1938 Reclining Figure against a backdrop of the Kent landscape. It wasn’t until 1984 that the figure was finally enlarged, and a bronze cast is now permanently sited at Henry Moore Studios & Gardens in Perry Green.

Other works Moore photographed in this way, such as his 1937 stone Reclining Figure, now in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, were never enlarged. They appear at monumental scale only in Moore’s photographs and imagination.

Errol Jackson was a photographer with whom Moore worked for many years. Jackson kept a log of every roll of film he shot, listing the artworks and including notes on the circumstances of the shoot. These provide valuable evidence of how Moore used this practice in the later part of his career.

The idea that photographs of a sculpture should not reveal the scale of the work occurs several times in Jackson’s early notes. Considering another set of images, from July 1964, Jackson writes: “None of these backgrounds reveal the size of the maquettes, which was another of Moore’s rules.” One of the backgrounds used in this session was the landscape outside Moore’s studio, “so that the maquette looks like a full-scale model”.

Moore started to use this photographic technique to visualise how a large-scale work would look in a particular setting. In 1964, Jackson photographed three of Moore’s maquettes for upright motives in a tray of sand, to see how they would look on the base he designed for the Kröller-Müller sculpture park in the Netherlands.

In 1972, Moore and Jackson used this technique on a larger scale to help plan the exhibition at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence that year. The exhibition was phenomenally successful, but Moore’s use of photography in planning it and other major installations is rarely remembered.