Compare and contrast Rodin and Moore

One generation is usually so busy reacting against its predecessors that it can take years for a balanced appreciation of real and relative merits to emerge. Henry Moore was born in 1898, and Rodin didn’t die until 1917, but they never met. All his life Moore was aware of Rodin’s work, and although early on he made apprentice works influenced by Rodin, it was only when he had established his own territory as an artist that he could afford to look long and admiringly at the senior artist. Indeed, Moore came to value his work so highly that he included four sculptures and three drawings by Rodin in his own collection and was happy to be consulted over the installation of the great Rodin exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1970. The current exhibition — the first time the work of another has been shown beside his own in Moore’s old home at Perry Green — tellingly juxtaposes sculptures and drawings by both artists in landscape and gallery settings.

Any visit to the Moore Foundation is incomplete without a tour of Hoglands, the old farmhouse in which the sculptor lived with his wife Irina and daughter Mary. In later life, Moore added a large entertaining room to the original house where he could show off his own work to prospective buyers (he was his own agent), and display his increasingly distinguished collection. The ground-floor interiors are largely unchanged. Here, for instance, are three paintings by Courbet including a seascape, a large Vuillard and a tiny Renoir of roses, together with an Ivon Hitchens still-life. In the small sitting room at the front of the house are drawings by Daumier and a painting by Sickert entitled ‘Yellow Skirt’. In the office is a large and beautiful Degas drawing of a nude and a fine ink portrait of Rodin by William Rothenstein.