World War Two
In what year was Moore given a commission from the Church of St. Matthew, Northampton to carve a Madonna and Child?
Henry Moore
At the outbreak of the Second World War the Chelsea School of Art was evacuated to Northampton and Moore resigned his teaching post. During the war, Moore produced powerful drawings of Londoners sleeping in the London Underground while sheltering from the Blitz. Kenneth Clark, the chairman of the War Artists' Advisory Committee,WAAC, had previously tried to recruit Moore as a full-time salaried war artist and now agreed to purchase some of the shelter drewings and issued contracts for further examples. The shelter drawings WAAC acquired were completed between the autumn of 1940 and the spring of 1941 and are regarded as among the finest products of the WAAC scheme. In August 1941 WAAC commissioned Moore to drew miners working underground at the Wheldale Colliery in Yorkshire, where his father had worked at the start of the century. Whereas Moore drew the people in the shelters as passively waiting the all-clear he shows the miners aggressively working the coal-faces. These drawings helped to boost Moore's international reputation, particularly in America where examples were included in the WAAC "Britain at War" exhibition which toured North America throughout the war. After their Hampstead home was hit by bomb shrapnel in September 1940, Moore and Irina moved out of London to live in a farmhouse called Hoglands in the hamlet of Perry Green near Much Hadham, Hertfordshire. This was to become Moore's home and workshop for the rest of his life. Despite acquiring significant wealth later in life, Moore never felt the need to move to larger premises and, apart from the addition of a number of outbuildings and studios, the house changed little over the years. In 1943 he received a commission from the Church of St. Matthew, Northampton, to carve a Madonna and Child; this sculpture was the first in an important series of family-group sculptures.