How the sculptor Henry Moore's garden became a living laboratory for his work

The monumental sculptures of Henry Moore are among the most recognisable works of British art in the 20th century, their organic, sinuous forms always staggering when displayed in the cavernous space of a gallery or a city’s public square. Yet one of the biggest collections of Moore’s work can be found in a rural garden in Hertfordshire behind a charming, yet relatively unassuming house called Hoglands. This was home to Moore, his wife Irina, and their daughter Mary, until the couple died in the 1980s, and is now the headquarters of the Henry Moore Foundation.

The Moores first moved to Hoglands, in the sprawling hamlet of Much Hadham, in 1940, when their Hampstead house was damaged in the Blitz. It was at this period that Moore was completing his famous drawings of Londoners sheltering from the bombs in the Underground. Having rented half of Hoglands for about a year, they bought the entire house in 1941, and over the course of their lives extended its land, developed its outbuildings into studios, and made the grounds into a series of outdoor galleries for Moore’s work. Although the house was unoccupied for some time after the couple’s deaths, the Foundation, which acquired it in 2004, has restored the ground floor of the house to its 1970s appearance, maintained the studios as Moore left them, and ensured that the 70 acres of grounds continue to function as galleries where visitors can enjoy his work.

It was Irina who was mainly responsible for turning the land into what it became, emphasising the natural boundaries of the land - ditches, hedges and so on - with clever planting, and creating beautiful settings where her husband could install his work. He firmly believed in the importance of seeing his sculptures outside, from a distance, and in the changing light and weather conditions that England offers. Since holes are often significant in the sculptures, they offer a new way of seeing the landscape as well, as it is glimpsed through the empty spaces in the massive bronze structures.

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The gardens at Hoglands contain many of Moore’s most iconic motifs, the reclining figures, mothers with children, upright motives, and abstract organic forms that are so characteristic of his work. Moore had been strongly influenced by non-European art quite early on in his career, at first through studying the ethnographic collections at the British Museum. His fascination with the reclining figure, for example, was prompted by the chacmool, a type of Mesoamerican sculpture that shows such a figure, its head turned 90 degrees to face the viewer. Moore’s involvement with the Surrealist group in the 1930s also had a huge impact on his work, and he began experimenting with more abstract, organic shapes.

The gardens also showcase one of the materials that was essential to his work: bronze. When Moore began to have editions of his work cast (instead of sculpting them directly himself), he was able to create bigger works and fulfil public commissions, a step that would take his career in an entirely new direction. A cast of his largest bronze work, Large Reclining Figure (1984), occupies a small hill at Hoglands, which Moore created especially to site it. Over 9 metres in length, it’s an awe-inspiring figure at any distance, but when seen against the sky it stands out in particular relief. As the artist himself explained, “the sky is the perfect background for sculpture, because you are contrasting solid, three-dimensional form – the sculpture – with its opposite, the sky, which is space, with no distractions.”