Edition summary
Bronze edition of 5+1 artist's copy, cast 1953-54, +1, cast c.1972
Foundries: John Galizia, London (casts 0-5); Bildgiesserei Hermann Noack, Berlin (cast 00)

Current or last known owner - click on the 'related' tab below to find out more about specific works
cast 0 (artist's copy): private collection
cast 00 (cast c.1972): The British Institute, Florence: on loan to the Comune di Firenze
cast 1: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, gift of the John Cowles Foundation
cast 2: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto: gift from the Junior Women's Committee Fund 1955
cast 3: Städtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim
cast 4: Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Birmingham
cast 5: City of Arnhem

plaster, 1953-54: The Henry Moore Foundation: gift of the artist 1977

Remarks
"The idea for The Warrior came to me at the end of 1952 or very early in 1953. It was evolved from a pebble I found on the seashore in the summer of 1952, and which reminded me of the stump of a leg, amputated at the hip. Just as Leonardo says somewhere in his notebooks that a painter can find a battle scene in the lichen marks on a wall, so this gave me the start of The Warrior idea. First I added the body, leg and one arm and it became a wounded warrior, but at first the figure was reclining. A day or two later I added a shield and altered its position and arrangement into a seated figure and so it changed from an inactive pose into a figure which, though wounded, is still defiant.

The head has a blunted and bull-like power but also a sort of dumb animal acceptance and forbearance of pain.
The figure may be emotionally connected (as one critic has suggested) with one’s feelings and thoughts about England during the crucial and early part of the last war. The position of the shield and its angle gives protection from above. The distance of the shield from the body and the rectangular shape of the space enclosed between the inside surface of the shield and the concave front of the body is important.
Except for a short period when I did coal-mining drawings as a war artist, nearly all my figure sculpture and drawings, since being a student, has been of the female, except for the Family Groups, but there the man was part of the group.

This sculpture is the first single and separate male figure that I have done in sculpture and carrying it out in its final large scale was almost like the discovery of a new subject matter; the bony, edgy, tense forms were a great excitement to make.

Like the bronze Draped Reclining Figure of 1952–3 (LH 336) I think The Warrior has some Greek influence, not consciously wished for but perhaps the result of my visit to Athens and other parts of Greece in 1951."
(Henry Moore, from a letter of 15 January 1955, quoted in Philip James (ed.) Henry Moore on Sculpture, 1966, p.250)