From the mid-1950s until the early 1960s the solitary, seated female figure became a central theme in Moore’s work. The subject was not new to him; in the 1920s and 1930s he developed his characteristic treatment of monumental women in a number of drawings and carvings, in which figures sit solidly on simple geometric blocks. Moore’s renewed interest in the theme can be specifically related to the commission for a large-scale work to be sited at the new headquarters of UNESCO in Paris. Initially, Moore thought a seated figure might be suitable and he made a number of maquettes testing out various poses. While the final work for UNESCO was a large reclining figure (LH 416), his maquettes formed the basis for later works such as Draped Seated Woman 1957-58 (LH 428).[1] Moore conceived Seated Woman in the years immediately following the Paris commission although it was not enlarged and cast in bronze until 1975.[2] 

In 1960, the art historian Will Grohmann analysed Moore’s seated figures and identified two distinct types. One type he described as a figure of calm contemplation, the other as one of imminent activity, caught in the ‘moment before rising, jumping up, going into action.’ Grohmann determined that the first type of figure was more classical while the second was more ‘demonic’. The demonic type, he suggested, contained some of the same ‘destroying themes’ evident in Moore’s work of the late 1930s and early 1950s.[3] For Grohmann, one sign of the destroying theme was the distorted body, so works like Moore’s Woman 1957–58 (LH 439) fell into the ‘demonic’ category. Seated Woman and Woman both portray a recognisable, but disfigured body with truncated limbs.

In contrast to themes of destruction, Seated Woman also embodies elements inspired by nature which lend the work an organic vitality. The diminutive head of the figure, which enhances the monumentality of the body, appears alert, as if scanning the horizon. Physically, however, she does not seem poised to spring into action. The figure is footless, her legs rooted to the supporting plinth. The bulbous form of the skirt can be related to seed pods or shells. It has a telling, straight incision down its centre which is not at odds with its natural inspiration but is a definitive mark of the artist. Indeed, the upper half of Seated Woman clearly evokes the impression of the artist’s hands forcibly moving the wet plaster through his fist. Moore linked such processes to an early memory of massaging his mother’s back:  

...that kind of idea can’t begin from a drawing; in that particular case there is a sort of sense of touch of the back of that figure which is what my mother had when I had to massage her when she suffered from rheumatism. This must have come from actuality, from the handling of the material. [4]

This recollection of his mother supported the theory of Erich Neumann, who wrote a psychoanalytic appraisal of Moore’s work, that the maternal aspects of his large women related to those of the archetypal ‘Great Mother’, a symbol of ‘nourishment, shelter and security’ and ‘the mistress of life and fertility’.[5]