Oval Sculpture

In 1963 Moore took a holiday home in Forte dei Marmi in Tuscany, where he would spend his summers close to the famous quarries of Carrara. During these years carving, and in particular carving in marble, held a renewed importance for the artist. The qualities of white marble allowed Moore to most fully express the sense of energy and tension that he so clearly sought. As he wrote in 1964, the year the present work was executed, “One of the things I would like to think my sculpture has is a force, is a strength, is a life, a vitality from inside it, so that you have a sense that the form is pressing from inside, trying to burst or give off strength from inside itself, rather than having something which is just shaped from outside and is stopped. It is as though you have something trying to make itself come to a shape from inside itself” (quoted in A. Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Berkeley, 2002, pp. 198-199).
“On one of my banking trips to London in 1967," David Rockefeller reminisced, "I had an opportunity to visit Henry Moore at his studio in Much Hadham…Moore is not only a very great sculptor but a very charming human being. I visited his studio with him and also went outdoors to see some of his larger pieces on the property. At the end of our visit, I saw a white marble sculpture which I liked, and I asked him if I could buy it from him as a memento of the visit…I enjoy having it beside my chair in my study at Ringing Point.” –David Rockefeller