From the Sept/Oct, 2025 issue of *Touchstone*

Henry Moore’s Madonna and Child

by Mary Elizabeth Podles

Henry Moore’s 1943 Madonna and Child depicts his subject on a monumental scale, a solid, block-like Madonna with oversized hands and feet and rather abstracted features, holding the child Jesus between her knees. The sculpture stands 59 inches high, so that if Mary were to stand, she would be nearly seven feet tall. Monumental and hieratic, yes, but by no means stiff; of her, the sculptor remarked, “I have tried to give a sense of complete ease and repose as though the Madonna could stay in that position for ever (as, being in stone, she will have to.)” She is an unusual departure for Moore, one of only a handful of religious works from a sculptor better known for his abstract nudes. The story of how it came about is illuminating.

During World War II, the school where Moore taught disbanded and sculptural materials became generally unavailable. So he turned to drawing instead, as he did at intervals to hone his observational skills, escape routine, and expand his horizons. During the Blitz, he executed a series of intimate sketches of families huddled in the bomb shelters. They caught the eye of Kenneth Clark, who appointed Moore an official war artist and exhibited his sketches as Shelter Drawings, evidence of the toughness and resilience of the British people. Walter Hussey, the vicar of St. Matthew’s Church in Northampton, saw the drawings and recalls saying to Clark, “That’s the kind of man who ought to be working for the Church—his work has the dignity and force that is desperately needed today.”

Hussey approached Moore to commission a Madonna and Child for St. Matthew’s fiftieth anniversary. The sculptor was at first reluctant and a bit ambivalent: he found the contemporary religious idiom inadequate, but feared his own abstract style would be offensive to an Anglican audience. He was not a churchgoing Christian, either. Hussey asked whether he felt able to believe in the commission. Moore replied, “Yes, I would. Though whether or not I should agree with your theology, I just do not know. I think it is only through our art that we artists can come to understand your theology.” He did eventually accept.

Working Out the Iconography

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Mary Elizabeth Podles is the retired curator of Renaissance and Baroque art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the author of A Thousand Words: Reflections on Art and Christianity (St. James Press, 2023). She and her husband Leon, a Touchstone senior editor, have six children and live in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a contributing editor for Touchstone.

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