A History of Sculpture in Leeds

Leeds City Art Gallery opens to the public on 3 October.

Designed by W.H. Thorp and funded by public subscription as part of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebrations. It costs £10,000 (equivalent to over £900,000 today).

For the opening ceremony a sculpture display filled the Tiled Hall, formerly a library reading room.

‘Leeds Mercury’, 3 October 1888. Image © The British Library Board’

The Tiled Hall, Leeds City Art Gallery.

Henry Spencer Moore is born in Castleford on 30 July, Yorkshire, the seventh of eight children.

30 Roundhill Road. A narrow terrace cottage, two up two down (3rd front door from left) where Henry Moore was born. It was demolished in 1974. Photos: Henry Moore Archive.

The Leeds Art Club is founded. A radically progressive organisation mixing socialist and anarchist politics with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, suffragette feminism, theosophical spiritualism and modernist art and poetry. It becomes one of the most advanced centres for modernist thinking in Britain in the pre-First World War period.

Barbara Hepworth is born in Wakefield on 10 January, the eldest of four children.

Barbara Hepworth as an infant with her parents, her paternal grandmother and her paternal great grandmother, 1903. © Bowness.

The Leeds Art Collections Fund is established with an annual subscription of one guinea.

Leeds Art Fund still exists to this day and continues to buy art and place it on permanent loan to the city as well as supporting publications, conservation and educational activities.

So far they have acquired over 430 works by artists including Francis Bacon, Henry Moore and Andy Warhol.

Leeds City Art Gallery closes during the First World War.

The building is used to temporarily house over 300 Belgian refugees.

Henry Moore starts studying at Leeds College of Art (now Leeds Arts University) helped by an ex-serviceman’s grant.

His fellow students include Barbara Hepworth and Raymond Coxon. Moore completes the two-year drawing course in a single year.

Above: Henry Moore (second row, centre), with fellow students Raymond Coxon, Horace Brooke, Geoffrey Kniveton, Connie Castle, George Stevenson, Doris White, Harry Taylor and Jack Elvin, taking the drawing exam at Leeds School of Art, June 1920. Photo: Henry Moore Archive.

Henry Moore and his friend  Raymond Coxon in Leeds,  c.1920. Photo: Henry Moore Archive.

Leeds War Memorial is erected on City Square (relocated to the South of Leeds City Art Gallery on the Headrow in 1937). The memorial is dedicated to those fallen in World War I and was designed by Charles Henry Fehr.

Leeds City War Memorial in Victoria Square, outside the Henry Moore Institute. Photo: David Cotton.

Leeds City Art Gallery builds an extension to house the collection of Leeds woollen manufacturer Sam Wilson in a purposebuilt series of rooms.

The collection includes over 300 examples of 20th century British Impressionist paintings, sculpture, ceramics and furniture.

Leeds City Council sets up an annual purchase grant fund to grow the collection with more contemporary work.

Leeds City Art Gallery’s reputation for perceptive collecting continues to grow. It has become one of the best collections of Modern British and contemporary art outside London.

Today there are now over a thousand sculptural works in the collection, by artists including Phyllida Barlow, Alexander Calder, Jacob Epstein, Antony Gormley, Barbara Hepworth, Hew Locke, Henry Moore, Alison Wilding and Bill Woodrow.

On the outbreak of the Second World War, the collections at Leeds City Art Gallery move to Temple Newsam House for safety.

Meanwhile, Leeds City Art Gallery becomes a central resource for the preparation and distribution of war materials.

Moore’s carvings on display in Temple Newsam House, Leeds, 1941. Photo: C.R.H. Pickard & Son.

Moore and his wife Irina move to the hamlet of Perry Green in Hertfordshire after their own home in Hampstead, London is damaged by bombing.

They temporarily rent the farmhouse Hoglands which becomes their home for the rest of their lives.

Henry Moore stands in the doorway at the rear of Hoglands, c.1940. Photo: Henry Moore Archive.

In 1943 the first retrospective exhibition of Barbara Hepworth’s work is held at Temple Newsam House, Leeds, as part of a joint exhibition with the painter Paul Nash.

Hepworth has another solo exhibition at Wakefield City Art Gallery the following year, which tours to Bankfield Museum, Halifax.

Moore lays the foundation stone for the new Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture at Leeds City Art Gallery.

Henry Moore laying the foundation stone of the Henry Moore Sculpture Gallery at the Leeds City Art Gallery, 10th April 1980. Photo: The Yorkshire Post Newspapers.

The Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture extension at Leeds City Art Gallery is opened by Queen Elizabeth II.

The Centre fosters the development of the study of sculpture with a library, archive, sculpture acquisitions and exhibitions with funding provided by the Henry Moore Foundation.

The first exhibition is of early carvings by Henry Moore. Moore selects his sculpture Reclining Woman: Elbow 1981 to be sited outside the new entrance to the gallery, where it remains today, on long-term loan from the Henry Moore Foundation.

Leeds City Art Gallery with its completed extension, 1982.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and Henry Moore at the opening of The Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture on 26 November 1982. Photo: Henry Moore Archive.

Angels of Anarchy and Machines for Making Clouds: Surrealism in Britain in the Thirties at Leeds City Art Gallery is one of a number of nationwide exhibitions celebrating the 50th anniversary of the First International Surrealist Exhibition in London.

‘Surrealism in Britain in the Thirties’ exhibition catalogue.

The New Art in Yorkshire open submission exhibition takes place across Leeds’ gallery spaces.

Among the 260 artworks exhibited is a piece by the then-unknown young artist Damien Hirst.

Revelation for the Hands: Sculpture to Touch is organised by the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture and boldly encourages visitors to handle artworks by Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gormley, Hepworth, Moore, Paolozzi and many more.

Private View card for ‘Revelation for the Hands: Sculpture to Touch’.

The National Life Stories charitable trust and oral history project, based at the British Library, is set up. The Henry Moore Institute is a key partner in its Artists’ Lives initiative.

Leeds City Art Gallery celebrates its centenary with a special exhibition 100 Years of Art in Britain.

The exhibition featured one artwork for each year the gallery had been open, including the centenary year new acquisition, Susan Hiller’s Monument (1980-81).

Holbeck Sculpture Exhibition shows Antony Gormley’s maquette for the infamously unrealised The Brick Man – a 12 storey high public sculpture intended for an empty plot near the train station which is sadly denied planning permission.

The exhibition Images of Women at Leeds City Art Gallery puts in motion an increased number of acquisitions of works by women artists including pieces by Gillian Ayres and Paula Rego.

The Henry Moore Studio in Dean Clough, Halifax is opened by the Prince of Wales.

At Dean Clough the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust work with contemporary artists. The first exhibition is Richard Long: High Tide to High Tide.

The Henry Moore Studio in Dean Clough, Halifax.

Alison Wilding: Contract is the final exhibition held at the Henry Moore Studio in Dean Clough.

Installation view of ‘Alison Wilding: Contract’ at the Henry Moore Studio in Dean Clough. Photo: Roderick Coyne.

The Institute celebrates its tenth anniversary with the exhibition Other Criteria, an ambitious examination of 100 years of British sculpture.

Installation view of ‘Other Criteria: Sculpture in 20th Century Britain’. Photo: Jerry Hardman-Jones.

Sculpture in 20th-century Britain: Volume 1 and Volume 2 are published to coincide with the anniversary.

Leeds City Art Gallery takes part in Situation Leeds, the city’s first festival of contemporary artists in the public realm.

The Northern Art Prize is launched awarding an annual prize of £16,500 and exhibitions to shortlisted artists. There is no age limit, entrants just have to be based in the north of the UK.

The prize runs until 2013 and winners include Leo Fitzmaurice, Karen Guthrie, Margaret Harrison, Haroon Mirza and Nina Pope.

Glasgow University, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Henry Moore Institute launch the Mapping Sculpture three year research project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

The outcome in 2010 is the extensive searchable online database: Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951.

A Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660-1851 is published for the Paul Mellon Centre and the Henry Moore Foundation by Yale University Press.

This is accompanied by an extensive online database launched in 2010.

The Covid–19 pandemic closes the galleries. Paloma Warga Weisz’s Bumpman on a Tree Trunk 2018 sits outside the Institute and Henry Moore’s Reclining Woman: Elbow 1981 remains outside Leeds Art Gallery.

Paloma Varga Weisz, ‘Bumpman on a Tree Trunk’ 2018, bronze. Photo: Stefan Hostettler.

The Henry Moore Institute celebrates its 30th anniversary.

View of the Henry Moore Institute from Cookridge Street in 2023/1938. Vintage photo by kind permission of Leeds Libraries, leodis.net. Photo: Min Young Lim.

The Henry Moore Institute is awarded the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s inaugural Exhibition Fund to support a three year research project in collaboration with University of the Arts, London and Shape Arts.

Beyond the Visual: Blindness and Expanded Sculpture explores engagements with contemporary sculpture using senses other than sight, challenging the dominance of vision in the making and appreciation of art.

Aaron McPeake, ‘Once I Saw it All’ 2022, bell bronze (casting of Snellen Chart).

The Henry Moore Institute reopens following internal refurbishment with refreshed spaces and new education facilities.

The Henry Moore Institute shop. Photo: Richard Chivers.