Henry Moore Studios & Gardens 2024 Season: Sculpture, Inspiration and Our Natural World

Henry Moore Studios & Gardens, the home of 20^th century sculptor Henry Moore, will reopen to the public with an outdoor display featuring 23 of the artist’s iconic bronzes, six studios preserved as Moore would have used them, and tours of Moore’s family home, Hoglands.

The 2024 season entitled ‘Sculpture, Inspiration and Our Natural World’ runs until Sunday 3 November and includes a programme of events inspired by the relationship between sculpture and nature.

Nature was always at the centre of Moore’s work. In 1951, he famously declared:

“Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me its best setting and complement is nature. I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on, the most beautiful building I know.”

In the hamlet of Perry Green, Hertfordshire, Moore was able explore the relationship between nature, landscape and the human form. The open countryside allowed him the freedom to create outdoors sparking an enduring dialogue between his work and nature.

Visitors in 2024 will be able to trace this relationship through a selection of sculptures displayed in the landscape he shaped. These works highlight Moore’s common themes – the reclining figure, the mother and child and the contrast between internal and external forms – and are joined by some of his purest organic abstractions that reveal the journey from handheld pebble to monumental work.

This season’s events programme draws inspiration from the natural world with creative workshops, artist talks, film screenings, and open archive sessions.

Studios & home

Visitors to Henry Moore Studios & Gardens can explore the six on-site studios where Moore brought his vision to life. These authentically preserved spaces where countless masterpieces were conceived now feature curated displays of the tools of Moore’s trade, the sketches that laid the foundations for his sculptures and insight into his artistic practice.

Lining the walls of Moore’s Bourne Maquette Studio are shelves crammed full of animal bones, flints found in the local fields, seashells, pebbles, and gnarled bits of driftwood, all intermingled with ideas for sculpture at various stages of completion.

“The observation of nature is part of an artist’s life, it enlarges his form-knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration… There is, in Nature a limitless variety of shapes and rhythms (and the telescope and microscope have enlarged the field) from which the sculptor can enlarge his form-knowledge experience.’’

Henry Moore, 1934

Visitors can also book onto an intimate tour of Moore’s family home, Hoglands. The house was the centre of his life and work, visited by dozens of well-known artists, curators and collectors, as well as many royals, film stars and politicians. It is filled with an extraordinary collection of both artworks and natural objects that inspired him.

Family events

Families can enjoy a free Activity Sketchbook created in collaboration with illustrator and designer Lizzie Lomax. Using the view finder to explore the Moore works and seventy acres of countryside, visitors are encouraged to find some flint along the way and send a pull-out postcard to a friend.

Offering an interactive trip around the site, the Sketchbook shares information about Henry Moore’s art and life and encourages you to develop your own ideas with prompts to write, draw, make, move & imagine.

Many events in the 2024 programme are included in an annual ticket to the Studios & Gardens, allowing visitors to return as often as they wish to explore new elements and ideas.