Henry Moore (British, 1898 to 1986)
Henry Moore, born in Yorkshire in 1898 to a coal-mining family, would eventually become one of the most celebrated artists of his time. After fighting in the First World War, he returned to study at the Leeds School of Art in his early twenties and later taught at the Royal College of Art in London. While his work was highly criticized for much of the next two decades, he received acclaim in the early 1940s for his sketches of reclining figures, which he drew of the many Londoners crowded into underground stations during air raids.
While the first part of his career was mainly devoted to drawing, he turned to sculpture in the 1940s and worked with a variety of materials including wood, stone, and bronze. His forms are extremely organic and fluid, demonstrated especially well in his broad variety of reclining figures, for which he is perhaps most famous.
Information courtesy of Skinner, Inc. and The Henry Moore Foundation, 2005.