Sleeping Shelterers: Two Women and a Child

Sleeping Shelterers: Two Women and a Child combines two of Moore’s favoured sculptural subjects: the reclining figure and the family group. The family group related to Moore’s fascination with the mother and child, which allowed for the visual opportunity to present complementary forms: large and small, protective and protected. Here the encompassing blanket adds an additional visual layer and sense of a cocoon-like enclosure for the figures. The drapery represents a new interest for Moore, as it had not yet found a sculptural outlet in his work.

After witnessing people sheltering during the Blitz on a journey via Belsize Park station, Moore began a series of drawings of the scenes. He began to visit the London Underground especially for inspiration. He showed his sketchbook of the drawings to his friend Kenneth Clark, who had set up the War Artists Advisory Committee, who subsequently encouraged Moore to become an Official War Artist. Moore therefore began to create the drawings in an official capacity.

Moore made just a handful of shelter drawings like this, in which the viewer looks along the body up to the looming sleeping faces. Wilkinson writes that these are ‘Among the most powerful and disturbing’ of Moore’s shelter drawings. [1] Moore’s Pink and Green Sleepers (1941) is very similar compositionally. It was selected for acquisition by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee and is now in the collection of the British Museum. The Committee selected seventeen out of around sixty-five of Moore’s full-size shelter drawings to buy, which they distributed to museum collections. Pink and Green Sleepers is a subject in Jill Craigie’s 1944 documentary Out of Chaos. The viewer watches Moore sketching in the Underground before witnessing him coat the page with watercolour, which is resisted by the wax, and the formerly invisible image is revealed.

Although this drawing is signed and dated 1940 by Henry Moore, Wilkinson believes the drawing would have been executed in late 1941, as a study for it appears towards the end of the Second Shelter Sketchbook. [2]

Tania Moore, September 2020

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