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Sketchbook 1928: West Wind Relief
Black paper-covered boards quarter-bound in black cloth 228 x 180mm; the book originally contained 52 pages of off-white lightweight laid paper 228 x 180mm in two signatures of eight and three signatures of twelve. The inside front cover is inscribed upper right in pen and ink
Henry Moore/13 Fitzroy Street/W.C.
with the
C
crossed through and
1
added in pencil. The drawings were never signed or dated. The pages are unnumbered but were ascribed numbers by Alan Wilkinson in the early 1970s. Blank pages or pages with only an inscription have not been included in the printed catalogue raisonné, though each carries an HMF archive number.
West Wind
was Moore's first major commission. At the invitation of Charles Holden, the architect of the new headquarters of London Transport, St James's Underground Building, 55 Broadway, London W1, Moore was asked to carve one of eight reliefs representing the four winds. The other sculptors involved in the project were Eric Aumonier, Jacob Epstein, A.H. Gerrard, Eric Gill, F. Rabinovitch and Allan Wyon. The sculpture and the notebook were known as North Wind until the error was corrected by Denis Farr in1978; Wilkinson, writing a few years earlier, used the older title. In 1982 the sketchbook was reproduced in facsimile and for this Wilkinson wrote a catalogue in which he used the proper title and corrected some errors of pagination which had occurred in his thesis. Unfortunately as the thesis remained unpublished until 1984 confusion has remained until now. In the thesis pp.59/60 is mistakenly called pp.51/52, resulting in Wilkinson's page numbers being two ahead of the sketchbook pages that he is describing: p.53 is p.[51] and the numbering remains incorrect until sketchbook p.[61].