The English sculptor Henry Moore was born in Yorkshire in 1898. When he died at the age of eighty-eight,

1919, Henry Moore (front row, right) at Alice Gostick's pottery class.

he was acknowledged as one of the twentieth century's greatest artists, with his large works featuring prominently in many of the world's major cities.

His childhood environment included the coalmining, glass, and chemical industries, and he took an early interest in Gothic sculpture and in drawing. This combination of the elemental, the industrial, and the sculptural would direct Moore's life as an artist.

After his military service in World War I, Moore received a grant to study at the Leeds School of Art. Symbols of protection, such as helmets or a mother's arms encircling a child, would become major motifs in his work. He attended the Royal College of Art in London, first as a student and later as a teacher, between 1921 and 1932. During this time, he studied non-western and archaic sculpture in the British Museum and regularly visited Paris, where he became familiar with key modernist movements and artists.

Henry and Irina Moore in Moore's studio in Hamstead, 1930's.

In 1940, during the bombing of London, he moved to Perry Green in Hertfordshire, where he worked for the rest of his life and where the Henry Moore Foundation is now located.

During World War II, Moore made his celebrated 'shelter' drawings, recording the huddled forms of Londoners seeking protection in the stations of the London Underground. These images, together with his ideas about shelter and threat, and the subject of the family and of mothers with small children, generated many of the forms that Moore would continue to explore throughout the rest of his life.

From the mid-1950s, he rarely made preparatory drawings for sculptures, using instead found objects such as bones and stones to generate models. He took to combining this modelling approach with bronze casting to create the forms of large sculptures - the method and medium he favoured until his death in 1986.