A Garden

In the late 1860s Moore, like many of his contemporaries, was influenced by Japanese art. He began to produce pictures which were almost entirely without subject, yet decorative and subtly coloured. Invariably they show women in classical robes, allowing him to concentrate on the colour, texture and movement of draped fabric.The Victorian poet Swinburne said such paintings are the 'worship of things formally beautiful ... their reason for being is simply to be'. The flower-like device at the bottom of the picture is the symbol Moore used as a signature.