‘Two Seated Women and a Child’, 1945 is a variation on the theme of the family group and forms part of a series of 18 works Henry Moore made on this subject between 1944 and 1947. This motif was first considered by Moore in 1934, when he was approached about undertaking a large, public sculpture to install in front of the Village College at Impington, near Cambridge. Envisioning a sculpture that would express the connection between family and school, Moore proposed a family group, although the project was subsequently abandoned twice due to lack of funding.

The present sculpture is distinct from other family group sculptures in that it features two women and a child. As such, it relates to another major theme in Moore’s work, the Mother and Child, and in particular to the sequence of maquettes he made in 1943 for his commission for the Church of St. Matthew, Northampton.

The composition of this sculpture is also closely related to several of Moore’s important wartime shelter drawings. From 1940 Moore meticulously recorded the German aerial Blitz on London through drawing and this enabled him explore the relationship between his profoundly humanist approach to art and his interest in both classical Mediterranean and Italianate sculpture and archaic and primitive art. Both influences are evident in the present sculpture. The female figures with their draped clothing, flowing hair and rounded forms possess a classical grandeur; and the relative scale and relationship between the figures has a certain monumentality in keeping with classical sculpture. Yet other aspects point towards the influence of a more primitive art. A faithful rendering of anatomical features is displaced here by a more expressive and intuitive approach, which foregrounds the presence of the figures and the relationships they express.

The symbolic and compositional centre of this sculpture is the child and the protective embrace in which it is held. After the widespread psychic and material damage inflicted by the Second World War, Moore’s image of the nurturing, protective family became all the more poignant, the child a symbol of a new generation and hope for the future.