"I've always liked sheep"
After the destruction of his London studio in the early 1940s, Henry Moore and his wife Irina left the city and moved to rural Perry Green, near Much Hadham in Hertfordshire, where he would live and work until the end of his life (today seat of the Henry Moore Foundation). The studio was right next to a large meadow where a farmer had dozens of sheep graze. In 1969, Moore made a first draft for a monumental sculptural work, which he titled "Sheep Piece" and which was placed on this very meadow in 1972. "I have always liked sheep, and there is a large sculpture of mine that I called 'Sheep Piece', because I had placed it in a field of sheep and I noticed that the sheep liked it and that the lambs were playing around it. Sheep are just the right size for the kind of landscape scenery I prefer for my sculptures [..]. Perhaps the sheep are also part of the landscape of my youth in Yorkshire. If the local farmer didn't keep sheep, I would get some myself, purely for the sake of the pleasure I get from them." (Henry Moore, in: Henry Moore and Kenneth MacKenzie Clark, Sheep Sketchbook, London 1980, quoted from: David Mitchinson (ed.), Henry Moore. Plastiken, Stuttgart 1981, p. 242) After "Sheep Piece" was set up in 1972, Moore began to capture the sheep grazing and seeking shade under the sculpture in front of his studio window in numerous drawings and several prints: The result is an extensive body of graphic works.

The present work is the "working model" for the monumental, roughly 5.7 meter wide later version of the same motif. Moore always started out with smaller models (the so-called "maquettes"), which he then had enlarged as "working models" and in some cases even cast with monumental dimensions. The total of four copies of the huge "Sheep Piece" from 1971/72 are in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, the city of Zurich, as well as in the Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens at the PepsiCo World Headquarters in Purchase, New York (artist's copy in the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green, Hertfordshire).
From the edition of nine copies of our "Working Model for Sheep Piece", three casts are in museum collections: the Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, the Hakone Open-Air Museum (Japan) and the Flint Institute of Arts in Flint (Michigan).

"Sheep Piece" and the Mother-With-Child Motif
The human figure is at the heart of Henry Moore's oeuvre. Only very few works draw on animal motifs, including "Bird" (1959, LH 445), "Rearing Horse" (1959/72, LH 447), "Fledgling" (1960, LH 446) and "Owl" (1966, LH 546). However, unlike it is the case with those few sculptural explorations of the animal world, "Sheep Piece" is just slightly reminiscent of actual sheep. The artist abstracts the two touching forms to such an extent that no direct association would come up if it were not for the title. Instead, Moore once more explored the relationship between large and small forms, an idea that roots in his lifelong occupation with mother-and-child figures and which is also reflected in his aforementioned drawings of sheep.: "I went on drawing, because the lambing season had begun, and there in front of me was the mother-and-child theme." (Henry Moore, in: ibid., quoted from: https://catalogue.henry-moore.org/objects/18352/sheep-piece)
"Sheep Piece" merges stability with lightness. The larger of the two rounded, yet indistinct shapes protrudes above the smaller one, appearing more active and powerful, while the other shape touches the ground twice and therefore appears much more passive and stable: "One is solid and passive, resting firmly on the ground and strongly resistant – the other form, slightly larger and more active and powerful, but yet it leans on the lower form, needing it for support." (Henry Moore, quoted from: Henry Moore Foundation, https://catalogue.henry-moore.org/objects/18352/sheep-piece)
Turned towards each other to interact, the close forms of the "Sheep Piece" evoke the same sense of intimacy and closeness as Henry Moore's "Mother and Child" depictions, as well as his "Family Groups", of which the work "Mother and Child" from 1959/67 (LH 453, e.g. Henry Moore Foundation) is a prime example. The artist uses the abstract forms as metaphor to illustrate an intimate relationship without actually depicting the human figure:"We express one thing in the image of another", explains the artist. "It seems to me that I can say more about the world as a whole by means of such poetic interpenetrations than I could with the human figure alone." (Henry Moore, quoted from: ex. cat. Henry Moore, Royal Academy, London 1988, p. 259).

"Sheep Piece" and "Two Pieces"
The form of "Sheep Piece" is also akin to Henry Moore's works from the 1960s, in which he explores the motif of divided yet interconnected forms. The artist made his first small sculptures consisting of several individual parts as early as in the 1930s. However, with the creation of "Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 1" (1959, LH 457), this division became more frequent in his oeuvre and would later evolve into three- and four-part works. The combination of two different, essentially single forms leads to a greater complexity of the three-dimensional composition and thus to a view that varies with the perspective. "By adding two pieces together the differences are not simply doubled. As in mathematics, they are geometrically multiplied, producing an infinite variety of viewpoints." (Henry Moore, quoted from: John Hedgecoe, Henry Moore, New York 1968, p. 504)
Contrary to the "Two Piece" works, the forms of the "Sheep Piece" are closely connected. Hence the work may formally refer to Henry Moore's multi-part works to some extent, however, owing to the proximity and contact of the forms, "Sheep Piece" is reminiscent of the intimacy that the "Mother and Child" figures embody and thus one of the most all-encompassing themes in the artist's oeuvre. [CH]