A life-sized cement head-cast of Henry Moore’s baby nephew Peter will be among rare early works by the artist in an exhibition opening in May.
The show, at London art dealer Osborne Samuel, will be unusually personal, with many early pieces never previously exhibited, including his sister Betty’s personal collection of sculpture and drawings that Moore gave her in the 1920s and 30s – including the cement head-cast of her infant son.
Moore was born in 1898, the son of a Yorkshire miner, and in his long working life, which lasted to within weeks of his death in 1986, he became one of the most internationally renowned – and expensive – British artists of his generation.
Although some of the works on show will be for sale, many are rare loans, including early carvings and academic drawings from his student days.
The exhibition will also feature some of Moore’s first lithographs, as well as wartime drawings of sleepers packed into the London underground when its stations served as air raid shelters. Some of the shelter drawings were exhibited in Russia in 2011, in an exhibition marking the joint 70th anniversary of the end of the London blitz and the start of the siege of Leningrad.
Moore’s works will be shown alongside photographs by Gemma Levine, who documented the last 12 years of Moore’s life at work in his studio, Perry Green in Hertfordshire.
• Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings is at Osborne Samuel, London W2, 22 May to 27 June.
