Disbanded notebook originally containing 80 pages of white medium-weight wove paper 210 x 251mm, of which the first page has a dedication For/Mary from Dad/7th March 1972 and the following forty-nine are drawn on. The white paper cover HMF 3317 bears a drawing of sheep and a drawn title. The pages were numbered upper right on the verso, where many of them were also signed in ballpoint pen at some time in the mid-1980s.

Moore began this sketchbook in February 1972 when the preparations for his retrospective exhibition at Forte di Belvedere, Florence, confined him to a small studio which happened to overlook a field of grazing sheep. The last five studies of shorn sheep HMF 3362-3366 were made on his return from Italy in May that year.

Also in 1972 Moore used some of these sketches as the basis for etchings; returning to the subject two years later he drew further etching plates to complete a life-cycle of the sheep which was published as Sheep Album in 1975.

The sketchbook, excluding p.3, was published in facsimile as Henry Moore's Sheep Sketchbook, with comments by Moore and Kenneth Clark (Thames and Hudson, London 1980, reprinted 1998).