![\"Henry](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/9b5492eb-ed97-4cd5-adb7-210646c6e0f4.jpg\")
Mary Moore with her parents, Henry and Irina, in 1948National Portrait Gallery London<\/p>\nWhen I meet Mary Moore in the porch of Hoglands, her parents\u2019 house at Perry Green in Hertfordshire, she is raging against the light.\u00a0Nothing\u00a0could be worse for seeing sculpture than fog. I try to make the case that seeing the sculptures of her father, Henry Moore, wrapped in mist is, in its own way, striking. She\u2019s having none of it.<\/p>\n
If a thick mist could be lifted with sheer force of personality, Mary would be the woman to do it. Whenever you read about Henry Moore, the greatest British sculptor of the 20th century, you hear about his energy, his striking combination of focus and restlessness, of always wanting to be up and at it, out in all weathers, drawing, carving, etching, creating. Never enough time for all he wanted to achieve in a day or a lifetime.<\/p>\n
A morning with Mary, a few weeks away from her 80th birthday, gives you a sense of the Moore lifeforce. I\u2019m the one running to keep up as she strides across the grounds, heedless of mud, giving me a first-class sculpture lecture and a running commentary on why this sculpture is in\u00a0completely\u00a0the wrong place and those bushes have\u00a0utterly\u00a0ruined the sightline. She is tremendous (a very Mary word) company and certainly puts you on your mettle.<\/p>\n
Mary Moore with her parents, Henry and Irina, in 1948National Portrait Gallery London<\/p>\n
To the public the Henry Moore Studios & Gardens is the perfect place for an art day out (I came here for my hen do.) For Mary it\u2019s her childhood home. Ensconced with her on mustard-coloured sofas in the Hoglands sitting room for a rare interview, I ask if it\u2019s strange to be back. I half expect the ghosts of Henry and his wife, Irina, to appear out of the mist and come striding through the sun-doors. \u201cIt isn\u2019t,\u201d she says. \u201cNo. It feels like home. This is why I go around and open windows and curtains and treat it as though it\u2019s ours.\u201d In defiance of curatorial precautions, she has indeed just raised all the blinds. Mary now divides her time between London and the West Country, but still takes a keen interest in the goings-on at Perry Green.<\/p>\n
Between us is a coffee table of curiosities: a nautilus shell, an ostrich egg, a piece of malachite, a butterfly encased in Perspex, stones, pebbles, urchins, cowries, a bone. There\u2019s a narwhal tusk in a corner and a stalking stone lynx by the doors to the garden.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf any visitor came, be they people from museums or even a student on a bicycle from Cambridge \u2014 I think Antony Gormley<\/a> did that \u2014 and knocked on the door, my father would have them in. He was a very good teacher. He was able to use the forms in this room to teach people how to look, because actually a lot of people don\u2019t know how to look at sculpture or objects. They know how to look at a painting or a flat screen, but they don\u2019t know how to look at three-dimensional things.\u201d<\/p>\n It is 40 years since Henry Moore\u2019s death in 1986 at the age of 88. Next month,\u00a0Henry Moore: Monumental Nature\u00a0will open at Kew Gardens<\/a> in southwest London. It will be the largest outdoor exhibition of Moore\u2019s work to date with 30 sculptures in the gardens and 90 works on display in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art. At Perry Green, the Henry Moore Studio & Gardens will re-open for the spring and summer season on April 1 with an addition to its family of barns and studios and an exhibition of Moore\u2019s \u201cshelter drawings\u201d made in the tunnels of the London Underground during the Blitz.<\/p>\n Before meeting Mary, I am taken down to the Sheep Field Barn, an old farm building, newly reimagined as an education and exhibition space by the architecture studio DSDHA. Godfrey Worsdale, the director of the Henry Moore Foundation, tells me \u2014 a little sheepishly \u2014 that if the foundation has had a failing it is that it hasn\u2019t done justice to Moore\u2019s great belief in artistic education. Banish all sheepishness. Two superb new art rooms look out onto the Sheep Field and Moore\u2019s\u00a0Large Reclining Figure\u00a0(1984). Schools will visit during the week and at weekends there will be drop-in workshops for families. The exhibition spaces will be a refuge on wet days.<\/p>\n Henry and Irina could hardly have come from more different worlds. Henry was born in 1898 in the small industrial town of Castleford in West Yorkshire. His father was a miner and Henry was the seventh of eight children. He enlisted in 1917, was gassed at Cambrai and was invalided back to England. After the war, he enrolled at Leeds School of Art.<\/p>\n \u201cMy mother,\u201d Mary says, \u201chad an extraordinary life. It was an ungoverned and extreme life.\u201d Born Irina Radetsky in Kyiv in March 1907 to wealthy parents, she spent her early childhood in Moscow and St Petersburg. In the 1917 Russian revolution, her father disappeared, almost certainly killed. Her mother left Irina with her grandmother in Crimea. When the grandmother died of cancer, Irina, aged 11, suffered terrible deprivation and hunger.<\/p>\n Irina\u2019s mother, beautiful and flighty, reappeared in 1919 in the company of a British officer and took her daughter, who was pitifully thin, to Paris. At the age of 15, Irina was deposited with the officer\u2019s parents in a pleasant Georgian house in Buckinghamshire from where, in due course, she would commute to the Royal College of Art. Henry was the sculpture tutor. Mary says they didn\u2019t meet so much as \u201ccollide\u201d.<\/p>\n Mary was born in March 1946 after Irina had several miscarriages. She was a longed-for only child. \u201cI was brought up with a tremendous amount of adult company and very high-end adult thought, adult conversation, adult things around me. I was just expected to kind of absorb it and keep up.\u201d She never felt her parents were trying to \u201cimpose\u201d on her, only to include her. She had enormous freedom. \u201cI ran wild. I was covering every single acre, not in this garden, but all the way across the fields. I would be wandering the whole ten-mile area.\u201d<\/p>\n As a young child, she would pop into the studios and make things with her father. \u201cI remember the danger all over the place,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are files, there are knives, there are saws, there are sharp things, there are bits of wood.\u201d Mary would sit beside her father cutting shapes out of clay and from time to time she would say, \u201cCan you make me a lion?\u201d and he would oblige.<\/p>\n Her mother had a \u201cfantastically good eye\u201d and was \u201cprepared to lift great big bits of stone with him\u201d and act as his model, but didn\u2019t pursue her own career as an artist. Did Irina feel thwarted or secondary? \u201cI\u2019ve met many artists, husbands and wives, and that is a role that they chose to take. They know what they are not.\u201d Irina knew that Henry was the star. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a big deal.\u201d Henry valued her opinion absolutely. \u201cThey would sit and tear up drawings together.\u201d<\/p>\n Irina did produce stylish sketches in the manner of the\u00a0Ballets Russes\u00a0designer Leon Bakst, some of which she turned into tapestries. She also used to stitch little costumes for Mary\u2019s teddies. Irina was the creator of the gardens and landscape at Hoglands. Visitors can still peer into her cactus houses.<\/p>\n Mary went to the progressive boarding school Cranborne Chase (she says that if a bomb had fallen on Waterloo station as parents were sending their children off \u201cit would have got rid of the whole of the English intelligentsia\u201d), then to Oxford. She married Ray Danowski, an American art dealer, and they had three children. She has lived in South Africa and Zurich. She is writing her memoirs, which, she says, accounts for her \u201cBird Woman from Mary Poppins\u201d get-up. \u201cI find that it means that you don\u2019t change your clothes.\u201d Mary, I\u2019ve been there.<\/p>\n There was a period when Mary and the foundation were on bad terms. She took them to court in 1993, objecting to expansion plans and claiming that works by Moore made between the creation of the foundation in 1977 and Moore\u2019s death were part of the family estate and rightfully hers. She lost \u2014 and was left responsible for legal fees. She later sold 44 works left to her by her father at Sotheby\u2019s. Relations are now friendly, although Mary can be\u00a0trenchant\u00a0when a sculpture hasn\u2019t been presented to its best advantage.<\/p>\n Henry could be \u201cquite judgmental\u201d about people\u2019s likes and dislikes in sculpture and art. \u201cMy father had a top ten and he would always ask people who their top ten were and use it to tell their character and their taste. My father was certainly judging himself against Cimabue and Giotto and Masaccio.\u201d Rembrandt was another favourite. \u201cPeople who had a sense of monumentality and humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n Henry, whom Mary describes as \u201ca kind of human, three-dimensional photocopier\u201d, had a knack for measuring weights and distances by eye and instinct, an invaluable skill in a sculptor who might start with a tiny hand maquette that has to be scaled up to stand 40ft tall in a plaza. \u201cAt one of my birthday parties,\u201d Mary remembers, \u201cI could have been five or six or seven, he got the bathroom scales out and he guessed the weight within pounds of every single little girl in a party dress who had come to my party.\u201d<\/p>\n To achieve what Moore achieved he had to be \u201ctremendously disciplined and had to have an absolutely organised day\u201d. No downtime? \u201cHe hated weekends,\u201d Mary says. \u201cHe couldn\u2019t take holidays.\u201d Mary remembers staying with friends in Siena to see the Palio, the great horse race in the piazza. \u201cThey were having a long siesta and my father became tremendously agitated because he was unable to control the way he was spending his time.\u201d If they were on the beach at Broadstairs, they were picking up pebbles as inspiration for future reclining figures. If they were in France, they were off to Cap Blanc in the Dordogne to see the prehistoric carvings of animals. Henry would, however, put a line through the diary during Wimbledon, and he and Irina would sit in the little back sitting room at Hoglands with the curtains drawn and watch every match on a \u201ctiny television\u201d.<\/p>\n I bring up something Kenneth Clark said about Moore: that if charged with sending an ambassador of the human race to Mars, Moore would be his first choice. By all accounts he sounds like a nice man? Gormley remembers \u201ca lovely, old-fashioned gentleman\u201d.<\/p>\n Mary nips niceness in the bud. \u201cHe wasn\u2019t nice.\u201d What was striking was that \u201che genuinely liked people. He was genuinely interested in people.\u201d He was always welcoming: students on bicycles, curators, collectors. Although even Henry had his limits. \u201cI do remember on a Sunday, people coming and looking through and we used to have to hide below the level of the window.\u201d But for the most part \u201che wanted people to understand and get something out of sculpture\u2026 to actually get an extra enjoyment out of their life, in looking at sculpture that perhaps hadn\u2019t naturally come to them before\u201d.<\/p>\n A few hours after saying goodbye beside the Sheep Field Barn, the grounds still stubbornly fog-bound, a cast of Henry Moore\u2019s\u00a0King and Queen\u00a0(1952-3) sells at Christie\u2019s for \u00a326 million, setting a new auction record for the artist. The Christie\u2019s lot essay places Moore\u2019s\u00a0King and Queen\u00a0beside the British Museum\u2019s limestone statue of the pharaoh Horemheb and one of his wives. Mary remembers her father making the sculpture at about the time he was reading her stories that all started: \u201cOnce upon a time there was a king and queen\u2026\u201d To her, though, the resonance is far more personal than a storybook echo.<\/p>\n She takes me down to a cast of King and Queen\u00a0in the Hoglands garden. There\u2019s blossom on the water that pools in the plinth. \u201cIt\u2019s tremendously moving,\u201d Mary says. \u201cThe queen, she\u2019s quite vulnerable, but very contained. That\u2019s very much a portrait of my mother. Those hands and that very tentative posture.\u201d Henry and Irina are here still. Not as wraiths in the mist, but eternal presences in landscape and bronze.<\/p>\n Henry Moore: Monumental Nature is at Kew Gardens May 9 to Jan 31 (kew.org<\/a>). The Henry Moore Studios & Gardens re-open on Apr 1 until Oct 25 (henry-moore.org\/studios-and-gardens<\/a>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I meet Mary Moore in the porch of Hoglands, her parents\u2019 house at Perry Green in Hertfordshire,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":565937,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-565936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=565936"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/565936\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/565937"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=565936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=565936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=565936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Mary](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/f655d773-fb99-4e66-8e8f-c9f336fd3665.jpg\")
Mary looking at the Reclining Figure at Perry Gardens in 1951Alamy<\/p>\n![\"Mary](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/5f6eb564-facb-479f-911a-1f3c056b3e44.jpg\")
Mary at five years old with her father, Henry, in the early FiftiesThe Henry Moore Foundation Archive<\/p>\n![\"Bronze](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/a66b74f9-16bd-4ded-bdeb-bbc5a91600d9.jpg\")
Henry Moore\u2019s Oval with Points, 1968-70 will be on show at the Henry Moore: Monumental Nature exhibition at Kew Gardens Joe Kitchen\/The Henry Moore Foundation<\/p>\n![\"Mary](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/f3aebd54-98e2-4a75-bb8b-e369c5577cb2.jpg\")
\u201cI\u2019d ask my father \u2018Can you make me a lion?\u2019 and he would oblige\u201dKatie Wilson for The Times<\/p>\n![\""Large](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/7a9e6fda-5f6f-4103-9d19-6f8179eecb64.jpg\")
Large Interior Form, 1953-54, will be on show at the Henry Moore: Monumental Nature exhibition at Kew Gardens JONTY WILDE<\/p>\n