Family Group (Moore)

Family Group (LH 269) is a sculpture by Henry Moore. It was his first large-scale bronze sculpture, and his first large bronze with multiple castings. Made for Barclay School in Stevenage, it evolved from drawings in the 1930s, through a series of models to bronze castings in 1950–51. It also one of the last important sculptures that Moore developed from preliminary drawings: in future, he worked mainly from found objects, maquettes and models.

The sculpture depicts a group of three human figures, a stereotypical nuclear family comprising a man, a woman and a small child. The two adults are sitting on a bench, holding the child between them. The figures are slightly smaller than life size. Three of the five castings from the 1950s are still owned by the original owners, Barclay School, the Tate Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The others are held by the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Japan, and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, with a later version copy at the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green, Hertfordshire.

The work began with drawings and maquettes made by Moore in the mid-1930s after Walter Gropius suggested a Moore sculpture for Impington Village College. The college opened in 1939, but the war stopped Cambridgeshire County Council giving a commission to Moore. The council's education officer Henry Morris approached Moore again in 1944, and Moore made a small clay model in 1945, now held by the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green, Hertfordshire. In this model, the father's head had a distinctive notch, also seen in other early works such as Four-Piece Composition: Reclining Figure of 1934, and Reclining Figure 1938. Moore also made several other clay models, some cast in bronze, with three held by the Tate. Eventually, his ideas were rejected because funding was not available, and the project in Cambridgeshire went unrealised. An example of a cast from this early work, LH 239, is held by the Tate.

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