Sculpture as Landscape: Archaeology and the Englishness of Henry Moore

The interplay in English thought between archaeology and landscape has been a long-standing one. Even before the notion of ‘landscape’ was well defined as an artistic genre, antiquaries like John Leland became topographers, and topographers such as William Camden became antiquaries. Stuart Piggott was one of the twentieth century archaeologists acutely aware of these links, well analysed in his Ruins in a Landscape (1976), and Barry Cunliffe has certainly been another. Like Piggott, he is a graphic artist of distinction himself, often preferring to draw his own plans and sections for his final excavation reports. As an able illustrator he has taken special pleasure in the work of another notable Wessex countryman, topographer and archaeologist, Heywood Sumner. Born in Hampshire, Sumner (1853–1940) became first an artist and then, on his retirement, a Weld archaeologist. The publication by Cunliffe (1985) of Heywood Sumner’s Wessex reflects again this enduring sympathy between the Weld archaeologist and the artist sensitive to the earthworks and the rolling contours of the English countryside. Sumner was not a great artist, nor did his work add significantly to the development of British archaeology, yet he captured a quality in his archaeological illustrations and in his vision of the earthworks of Wessex which looks back to those earlier antiquaries, Stukeley and Colt Hoare, and forward to such consummate artists of the English landscape as Paul Nash and Henry Moore. He was also a close friend of another significant Weld archaeologist, noted lover of the landscape and pioneer of landscape archaeology, O. G. S. Crawford. Barry Cunliffe, an internationally celebrated figure who has initiated several significant Weld projects overseas, has likewise undertaken some of his most distinguished work in Wessex, from Fishbourne to Hengistbury Head, and in the landscape of Wessex, most notably at Danebury. His treatment of Sumner’s work, for instance in his chapter ‘Landscape with people’, shows great sympathy with the human scale of the English landscape, a quality which is also an important feature in the work of Henry Moore. To regard a sculptor as a landscape artist as I have done in this paper, would, until recently, have seemed rather paradoxical. For it is true that the ostensible subject of most of Moore’s sculptures was the human figure.