Reclining Figure: Festival Reclining Figure: Festival Reclining Figure: Festival (LH 293) is a bronze sculpture by English artist Henry Moore, commissioned by the Arts Council in 1949 for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The sculpture can be viewed as an abstraction of a reclining female human figure, resting on two arms, with a small head. By 1949, Moore was already recognised as Britain's greatest living sculptor, having won the prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1948. The Arts Council suggested that a family group would be appropriate for its commission, based on the festival theme of "discovery", but Moore decided
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion to compose a landscape, and a small distant reclining figure. When the canvas is unframed, a number of measuring marks are visible on the outer margin of board, indicating that the composition was carefully conceived. Bacon said in a 1959 letter that the figures in "Three Studies" were "intended to [be] use[d] at the base of a large Crucifixion which I may still do." By this, Bacon implied that the figures were conceived as a predella to a larger altarpiece. The biographer Michael Peppiatt has suggested that the panels may have emerged as single works, and that the idea of