Henry Moore: a monument to British art

1898: Henry Moore's story begins in Castleford, West Yorkshire, where he was born; the son of a mining engineer
Photograph: Jane Bown

1917: At the age of 18, while serving in the army during the first world war, Moore was injured in a gas attack at Cambrai – an experience which has been seen to have influenced his work. This late piece, Hill Arches, dates from 1972-73
Photograph: Penny Tweedie/Corbis

1919: After the war, Moore received an ex-serviceman's grant to continue his education, and in 1919 he became the first student of sculpture at the Leeds School of Art. Here, one of his reclining figure sculptures stands outside the entrance of Leeds City Art Gallery
Photograph: PR

1924: After further study in London, Moore won a six-month travelling scholarship which he spent in Italy and Paris. It was there, in the Louvre, that he came across a plaster cast of a Toltec-Mayan sculptural form, an example of the Chac Mool. The motif (echoed in this 1939 Reclining Figure) was to have a profound effect upon his work
Photograph: Detroit Institute of Arts/Henry Moore Foundation

1928: His first public commission, West Wind (1928–29), which shows the influence of his contemporary Eric Gill, was placed high on the wall of St James's Park underground station in London
Photograph: Reproduced by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation

1929: This was the year Moore married Irina Radetsky, a Russian-Polish painting student at the Royal College. Irina would pose for him, and is presumably the model for this reclining figure sculpture
Photograph: Leeds Museums and Galleries/Henry Moore Foundation

1933: Moore, who was now living in Hampstead and working as head of sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art, joined painter Paul Nash's modern art movement, the Unit One Group. Surrealist influences crept into Moore's work around this time, as in this sculpture, Figure (1933-34)
Photograph: Courtesy Osborne Samuel Fine Art. Photograph Sotheby's /Courtesy Osborne Samuel Fine Art/Sotheby's

1939: At the outbreak of the second world war, Moore was commissioned as an official war artist, going on to produce evocative, troubling drawings of Londoners sleeping in the London underground during the blitz. This piece is entitled Tube Shelter Perspective: the Liverpool Street Extension (1941)
Photograph: Tate/Henry Moore Foundation

1940: After their Hampstead home was hit by bomb shrapnel, Moore and his wife moved out of London to live in a farmhouse called Hoglands in the hamlet of Perry Green, Hertfordshire. This was to become Moore's final home and workshop. Here he is pictured walking in its grounds
Photograph: Arnold Slater/Rex Features

1946: The arrival of Moore and Irina's baby daughter, Mary, focused the sculptor's mind on themes of the family, which he expressed by producing several mother-and-child compositions
Photograph: Sheffield Galleries & Museums Trust

1957: A reclining figure for the Unesco building in Paris (a version of which is pictured here) was among Moore's increasingly significant commissions. As the decade progressed, the scale of his sculptures grew, and he started to employ a number of assistants to work with him at Perry Green, including Anthony Caro and Richard Wentworth
Photograph: Dan Chung

From the 1950s onwards, Moore's public art became ever more visible on the streets of Britain, especially in cities. This figure of a woman was photographed in Stepney, east London, on 11 April 1963
Photograph: Jane Bown

1964: Twenty-five years to the minute after a team of physicists had achieved the first controlled nuclear chain reaction on the campus of the University of Chicago, Moore's Atom Piece (1964-5) was unveiled on the same site
Photograph: Tate/Henry Moore Foundation

1972: In order to protect his estate from death duties, Moore set up the Henry Moore Trust with the help of his daughter, Mary. The foundation was also established to preserve his sculptures and promote the public's appreciation of art; and since Moore's death in 1988, it has run his home as a gallery and museum
Photograph: Jane Bown

2005: Almost 20 years after his death, thieves broke into the grounds of the Henry Moore Foundation and stole one of Moore's bronze statues. The work, known as Reclining Figure (1969-70), weighed more than two tonnes. In 2009, British officials announced that the sculpture, once valued at £3m, had probably been sold for scrap metal, for which it would have fetched no greater price than £1,500
Photograph: Hertfordshire Constabulary/PA

2010: Tate Britain's new show will open on 24 February and runs until 8 August 2010
Photograph: Jane Bown