Henry Moore’s Pink and Green Sleepers (1941). Image courtesy of the Henry Moore Foundation

Forty years after Henry Moore’s death, what is left of the country that made, celebrated, and then forgot him?

In March 1965, Time magazine reported that, “Great Britain has become a hotbed of new sculptors, with three museum shows in London currently devoted to their renaissance.” It opened the article with a quote from one of them: “Forty years ago, the idea of there being a great English sculptor was as remote as a Hottentot becoming prime minister of Scotland.”

Leave aside the self-consciously satirical, post-colonial tone so revealing of the Sixties; the great sculptor, “the oak towering above them all”, so described in the article, was Henry Moore, then 66. Six years previously he had been garlanded by Time with his own richly illustrated cover feature.

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Moore of England