During his time as a student at the Royal College of Art in London, Henry Moore frequently visited the collection of art at the British Museum. He was drawn to the power of the Egyptian, Assyrian and African sculpture that would become a crucial point of inspiration in the early and formative stages of his career as a sculptor. Specifically, this work (LH 23) may have been inspired by the great arm of Amenhotep III which was on display in the museum’s Egyptian galleries at the time. Moore rejected their labelling as primitive rather praising their tradition of rejecting naturalistic representation of the human form. He greatly admired the vitality of life these works conveyed and obsessively tried to charge his works with the same energy and intensity as shown in the expression of outright anguish in this work.