"Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight is necessary to it, and for me its best setting and complement is nature.", Henry Moore, 1951
Henry Moore, OM, CH (July 30, 1898 – August 31, 1986) was a British sculptor and one of the central figures of twentieth-century European sculpture. Born in Castleford, a small Yorkshire coal-mining town, the seventh child of a coal miner who was a self-taught socialist and trade unionist, he served in the First World War before using an ex-serviceman's grant to enrol at the Leeds School of Art in 1919. There he met the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, with whom he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London in 1921. A formative encounter at the Trocadéro Museum in Paris with a plaster cast of a Mayan Chac Mool, the reclining male rain spirit, set him on the path of the reclining-figure motif that would become the defining form of his career.
He taught at the Royal College of Art for seven years after his graduation, then at the Chelsea School of Art. Among his many honours: he won the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1948, declined a knighthood in 1951, was appointed a Companion of Honour in 1955 and a Member of the Order of Merit in 1963, and received the Erasmus Prize in 1968. In 1977 he established the Henry Moore Foundation at his home and studios at Perry Green in Hertfordshire, which now administers his work, runs the seventy-acre sculpture grounds at Perry Green, and operates the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto holds the world's largest public collection of his work; his sculptures, drawings, and prints are also held by the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Hirshhorn, the Stedelijk, and essentially every other major collection of twentieth-century art, alongside major public commissions installed in cities around the world.