Recumbent Figure (1938) is one of the earliest works in which Henry Moore shows the female figure undulating like the landscape and at the time it was his largest stone sculpture. It was commissioned by the architect Serge Chermayeff (1900-1996) to stand on the terrace of his home, Bentley Wood, also known as the House at Halland on the South Downs in Sussex.
Visually, the larger-than-life reclining figure would have acted as a bridge between the rolling hills and the ultra-modern house. Moore, like others, used many native British stones at this time. This Hornton stone, a Jurassic limestone quarried in Oxfordshire, came from near Banbury. It was carved by hand, using a range of chisels, hammers and files, over a period of five weeks outdoors in the garden of the sculptor's cottage, Burcroft, in Kingston, Kent.
In 1939 Chermayeff went bankrupt; the deposit was refunded and the sculpture was returned to Moore. Sir Kenneth Clark, who was the official buyer at the Contemporary Art Society that year, purchased it from the artist for £300. It was presented to the Tate, whose new director John Rothenstein, unlike his predecessor, was willing to accept a work by Moore. As previously arranged with the British Council before Tate's acquisition, it was loaned to New York World’s Fair for the British Pavilion in the summer of 1939. Because of the Second World War it remained in America and went on display in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) where it was damaged by the cold winters and hot summers and ultimately by vandals in 1944.
Recumbent Figure finally returned to the Tate in 1946 and since then it has gained notoriety and fame. It is now regarded as one of the sculptor's masterpieces. It was displayed, again outside, in the first open-air exhibition at Battersea Park, which opened in May 1948 and in 1972 was included in the ground-breaking exhibition 'Sculpture for the Blind', in which sculptures from Tate’s permanent collection were exhibited for the blind and partially sighted, who were encouraged to experience the works through touch.
