The British sculptor Henry Moore first saw Stonehenge on a clear and silvery night in the autumn of 1921. Bathed in lunar light, the majesty of the standing stones appeared magnified to the Royal College of Art student, still fresh from the terrors of the first world war trenches. “Moonlight, as you know, enlarges everything,” he said. “And the mysterious depths and distances made it feel enormous.”
“From that moment on, Stonehenge was always in his psyche, just as it is forever embedded in the English psyche,” says the artist’s daughter, Mary Moore. More than a century later – and a mere 30 minutes down the A303 – she has collaborated with Hannah Higham of the Henry Moore Foundation on an exhibition presented by Hauser & Wirth Somerset that throws the influence of Stonehenge on the sculptor into sharp relief. For Mary, there’s a direct line to be drawn between the ancient megaliths of the Wiltshire Chalkland and the modern abstractions hewn by her father – part of his life-long assimilation of more than 30,000 years of visual art.
