Henry Moore with King and Queen

Henry Moore is pictured alongside the shadow of King and Queen (1952–3). Hedgecoe explained, ‘posing Henry Moore alongside the shadow cast by one of his works gave a new slant to the subject.’ [1] Rendering the sculpture in silhouette has the strange effect of animating the figures. They are no longer weighed down by the material properties of the bronze. Moore wanted the forms of this sculpture to be thin, so it would be ‘as spatial as any group sculpture could be’. [2] This lends itself to silhouette, unlike some of Moore’s more blocky forms. The holes that represent the figures’ eyes are a bright white piercing the black shadow.

The sculpture is well suited to this uncanny imagery. The sinuous bodies are topped with chimerical heads. Moore described the head of the king, which emerged as he was playing with modeling wax, as ‘Pan-like’, from which came the idea for the sculpture. [3] The hands and feet are the most realistic aspects of the sculpture, but they are not portrayed in the silhouette. The only concession to reality is Moore standing aside the shadow, characteristically wearing his apron, and the grid provided by the brickwork against which the shadow falls. This grid suggests the process used to scale up Moore’s sculptures, where plaster models would be marked with lines to provide the framework from which to enlarge.

Moore and Hedgecoe remained friends from their first meeting in 1956 until Moore’s death in 1986 and during this time, Hedgecoe took around 6,000 photographs of Moore. [4] In some of his photography manuals Hedgecoe used his images of the sculptor as an example of how to take a prolonged portrait of a single subject. [5] As Hedgecoe explained, with photography ‘you capture forever a frozen instant of time. But how much more meaningful those images can be is made plain when you see a progression of pictures of the same person taken over a long period of time.’ [6]

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