Edition summary
Bronze edition of 9, cast c.1930
Foundry: not recorded

Current or last known owner - click on the 'related' tab below to find out more about specific works
cast a: Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, purchased 1956
cast b: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam
cast c: private collection
cast d: unknown
cast e: unknown
cast f: unknown
cast g: unknown
cast h: unknown
cast i: unknown

terracotta, autumn 1923: The Henry Moore Foundation: gift of the artist 1977


Remarks
"This is an un-Moore-like Moore. The piece reminds one of an amalgam of influences, ancient and modern. The dominant ones appear to be contemporary German and ancient Egyptian. The delicacy of the modelling resembles New Empire Egyptian portraits, with particularly similar treatment of the lips. (An example, from the Berlin Museum, may be found in Elie Faure's Ancient Art, a book which Moore might well have seen.) But the veiled, grieving nature of the inclined head brings to mind Wilhelm Lehmbruck, of Georg Kolbe, or even Ernst Barlach's carvings in wood. It is clear from his Notebook No.2 that Moore was not only culling his sources - he actually named Underwood, Gauguin and apparently Schiele - but was attracted to a more muscular way of working. This sculpture suggests to me that Moore was still entertaining the possibility of making his way forward by modelling, and that he made his head after a number of much rougher carvings. To find a way of modelling that was not utterly retardataire, Moore has here rather successfully mixed a sensitive naturalism with stylisation. The unseeing - even blind - aspect of the head is unusual for Moore, and brings additionally to mind carved african masks."

Penelope Curtis, Celebrating Moore, Lund Humphries, London, 2006, p.81.