For Henry Moore, sculpture was “an art of the open air”—a form of expression in constant dialogue with natural and built environments alike. More than just a setting for his work, the outdoors inspired Moore. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his monumental public sculptures.

Even if you haven’t heard of Henry Moore before now, you may already be familiar with his work: three of his large bronzes are just a stone’s throw from the MFA, in Cambridge on the campuses of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University.

If you’re looking to extend your MFA visit and engage with the art and artists even more after seeing the exhibition “Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore,” head across the river to visit these sculptures. Walk around them and observe them up close and from afar. Take note of their richly varied surfaces, and the ways in which they interact with surrounding people, buildings, and nature. Amid the changing seasons and New England’s unruly weather patterns, you may find the sculptures transformed upon each subsequent encounter.

Three-Piece Reclining Figure, Draped, 1976

Located in front of MIT’s iconic Great Dome, Moore’s Three-Piece Reclining Figure, Draped draws upon the artist’s ongoing fascination with the expressive possibilities of the figure in repose. For Moore, this fixed subject was a foundation upon which he could continuously iterate and experiment to develop a vast vocabulary of abstract gestures.

Moore drew inspiration from a vast range of art historical sources, including Chacmool figures from pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican art. Their enigmatic reclining postures—with knees bent and head turned 90 degrees to confront the viewer—captivated Moore as a young art student in London.

The figure here is fragmented into three masses, with swollen forms seemingly growing out of and sinking into the base. Rounded bends and scooped cavities hint at the contours of human anatomy while echoing the organic flows of a landscape, blurring the line between body and land.

Moore visited MIT’s campus in May 1974 and was impressed by its greenery. Its proximity to the Charles River complemented Moore’s interests in historical precedent: river gods in Roman mythology were also often depicted in languid, reclining poses.

Working Model for Reclining Figure (Lincoln Center), 1963–65

This two-part composition is a smaller version of a sculpture that was commissioned by Lincoln Center in New York City. In contrast to the other piece at MIT, its surfaces are much more hewn and textured, and its two forms appear more angular and dynamic.

The sculpture at Lincoln Center sits in a reflecting pool the size of a tennis court; Moore was particularly attentive to how its stretched appendages would reflect on the surface of the water and produce the illusion of rising and falling. The arched and hollowed forms, along with the weathered surfaces, recall seaside cliffs and caves.

Seeing Moore’s sculptures at an expanded scale enables us to see the traces of the artist’s hand and tools at work. Working first in plaster, Moore created marks and indentations across the form’s surface. He later reproduced these marks and scaled them up in his bronze casts.

Large Four Piece Reclining Figure, 1972–73

Moore’s experimentations with fragmenting the reclining form reach an apex in this work, which stands in front of Harvard’s Lamont Library. Here the figure is split into four distinct geometric components, each balancing on another, creating pockets of negative space that seem to morph in shape and substance depending on the viewer’s vantage point. Moore collected seashells and other natural objects, whose forms are echoed in the curves and indentations found across this composition. He often reused motifs from this vocabulary of natural forms—the same shell-shaped impression reappears in Mother and Child, one of the works featured in “Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore.”

Depending on the time of day, weather, and surrounding activity, all three of these sculptures can appear to look different despite remaining physically unchanged. “I believe that natural light (rather than studio lighting) makes the sculptor produce forms which are complete and real like the nature around him,” Moore once wrote.

Coda: Reclining Figure, 1945

If you make your way further outside of Boston to Lincoln, Massachusetts, you’ll encounter one of Moore’s sculptures at an entirely different scale. On a bookshelf in the living room of the Gropius House—the self-designed modernist home of architect Walter Gropius and his family—sits a bronze reclining figure by Moore that’s small enough to fit in your hand. After leaving their native Germany, the Gropiuses lived in London for a brief period in the 1930s. During this time they were neighbors with Moore in the artistic enclave of Hampstead in North London.

Though the Gropiuses moved to the United States in 1937, when Walter was appointed chair of the Architecture Department at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design at, their friendship with Moore continued. When the artist visited the Gropius family in Lincoln in 1946, he gave them Reclining Figure, an edition of seven cast the previous year.

Intentionality is embedded into every corner of the Gropius House—each object and furnishing held personal significance or served a practical function. Whereas Moore’s public sculptures invite us to walk around them and marvel at their relationship to their natural surroundings, this piece sheds intimate light on the personal relationships and creative collaborations that weave throughout the sculptor’s career.

Learn more about Henry Moore and explore his sculptures across the world using the Henry Moore Foundation’s “Works in Public” feature.