Shelter Drawing (Mother and child with reclining figures)

The divergent figures in this drawing demonstrate how Moore’s shelter drawings both stem from, and translate into, his sculptures. The drawing represents each of Moore’s primary subjects: the mother and child, the reclining figure, seated figures and family groups.

Despite the similarities in subject matter and form between his sculpture and his drawings, Moore’s drawings during the war were the first real break between the two media. They were no longer studies, or training, for his sculpture. As Herbert Read wrote, ‘the drawing can exist in its own rights, more cursive, more colourful, and more dramatic’. [1] Moore experimented with the wax resist technique and colour in his shelter drawings, which were inspired by the scenes of people sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz. In this drawing the sense of foreboding is heightened by the dark-grey wash emanating from the centre of the page. The contrasting washes – rose-pink at the bottom half of the page and grey at the top – give the suggestion of a horizon line and perspective in an otherwise indecipherable setting.

Alan Wilkinson describes the drapery in another of Moore’s shelter drawings as creating ‘an external shell protecting the internal forms within’. [2] This is true of this mother and child, for whom the blanket creates a protective cocoon. In this way they are linked to Moore’s later sculptural series of Internal/External forms, which he saw as a development from the mother and child being composed of two complementary forms: one large, one small; one protective, one protected.

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