End of a Sofa

'End of a Sofa,' undated and painted on cardboard, now at York Art Gallery, is an intimate fragment or study in which Moore focuses on the extremity of a piece of furniture — perhaps a foot or cushion end — as a setting for a small figure study. York Art Gallery's collection emphasises the relationship between fine art and design traditions that Moore's work embodied. The cardboard support suggests this is a study or a work produced in a different register from his major canvases, and the unusual framing — the 'end' rather than the whole — reflects Moore's ability to find compositional interest in partial, unconventional viewpoints. The title's specificity is itself characteristic: Moore named works after the elements that gave them their visual character, not after any subject or narrative.

The cardboard support gives the surface a different quality from stretched canvas — slightly absorbent, allowing the paint to sit in a matte register that suits the intimate scale. Moore works within the constraints of the limited surface area, using precise economical brushwork that distils his larger compositional methods into a smaller format.