Henry Moore was born on July 30, 1898 in Castleford, Yorkshire. He was the seventh of eight children and came from a poor but supportive family. His mother, Mary Baker Moore was always helping him into schools and education programs so he could amount to something later on in his life. His father, Raymond Spencer Moore was a coal minor and didn't want Henry to be like him.
Henry Moore started his career as a teacher before he ever became a sculpture or a sketcher. Starting in 1919 through 1921 Henry Moore went to the Leeds School of Art where he first discovered his passion for sculpting. When he was 12 years of age his teacher, Alice Gostick, was working with clay and stone and he became very interested because to him the stone seemed to be alive. After his two years at Leeds Art School he then went to the Royal College of Art in London in 1921 through 1925 working on both drawings and on sculpting.
Henry Moore was influenced by Pablo Picasso because the way he drew was the way in which Henry Moore wanted to sculpt. He was also influenced by the war and the times that he was going through. For example, he began his work on abstraction and surrealism in the 1930's and later became an official war artist during World War II because of his patriotic engagement. Before the war he began postwar humanism but later after the war he began his large scale public sculptures for the last four decades of his life. Mainly of the human body because it interested him and mostly in reclining positions.
Henry Moore created The Reclining Figure first in drawings to show shadows and different positions that created the sculptures own meaning and somewhat told its own story. This sculpture was created in 1977 through 1978 and it was called his late work because he was turning eighty at the time. His use of color in his pictures were mostly browns to bronzes and some blacks and silvers but when it came time for him to actually sculpt his "Reclining Figure" he used large stones, bronze, and ultimately different types of metals.
