Mum and Dad [oder …?]

King and Queen (LH 350) is a bronze sculpture by Henry Moore, designed in 1952. It depicts two figures, one male and one female, seated beside each other on a bench, both facing slightly to the left. It is Moore's only sculpture depicting a single pair of adult figures. Moore's records suggest it was originally known as Two Seated Figures.

According to Moore, speaking years later, the work was inspired by double statues of male and female figures from Ancient Egypt, and by fairy tales read to his daughter Mary. Art critics have suggested links with the accession of Elizabeth II in 1952, and have identified a strikingly similar photograph of Moore and his wife Irina seated beside each other c.1952, in which Moore has one hand clenched in his lap and the other on the arm of the sofa, and Irina sits beside him with her fingers interlaced.

It was based on preliminary drawings of seated figures from the late 1940s. Inspiration came to Moore from playing with pieces of wax which became an initial maquette in 1952. He first created a bearded head with a crown which became the "king" figure, then the female "queen" and the bench. The king had a clenched fist, and the feet were little defined. The maquette had a narrow squared frame behind the figures, defining the space, recalling similar frames used by Alberto Giacometti for example in his The Nose and The Cage, and the frames used repeatedly in the paintings of Francis Bacon, such as his Three Studies of the Male Back. The 27 centimetres (11 in) high maquette was later cast in an edition of ten bronzes (LH 348). Examples were sold at Sotheby's in 2001 for £531,500, at Christie's in 2010 for over US$2.8m, and at Sotheby's in 2016 for £1.1m.Read more