Madonna and Child

Madonna and Child is cast from one of the maquettes Moore made for a commission for St Matthew’s Church in Northampton, which he said was ‘one of the most difficult and heart-searching sculptures that I ever tried to do’. [1] Moore’s difficulty stemmed from the fact that he created the Madonna and Child only for this commission. In fact it was his first religious topic. His series of maquettes for the stone commission represented Moore’s initial use of drapery in sculpture. Moreover, this particular maquette was the first of his work to be cast in bronze in an edition beyond two.

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the church, Reverend Walter Hussey commissioned Moore to create the sculpture after seeing his shelter drawings at the National Gallery during the war. Moore wavered over the religious subject, saying, ‘I hesitated for some time because – you can’t do experiments – I mean, I am a Christian and I couldn’t go and put something in a church that the average person might be offended by. So this was an attempt by me to do a sincere but an understandable piece – by the ordinary person.’ [2] He therefore asked for time to explore the subject before committing to the commission. He created twelve maquettes in clay and a sketchbook (now disbanded) with around twenty-six pages of drawings, largely in wax crayon and watercolour wash with pen and ink.

Moore first had to grapple with the fundamental question of how ‘religious art differs from secular art’, as he went on to explain, ‘the Madonna and Child should have an austerity and a nobility, and some touch of grandeur (even hieratic aloofness) which is missing in the everyday Mother and Child idea’. [3]

In this body of work, for the first time, drapery found its way into Moore’s sculpture, in the terracotta maquettes and then the carved stone. Of course, the drapery suits the ecclesiastical subject matter, but it was also a new formal interest for Moore, stemming from his wartime shelter drawings.

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