Beads (study)

'Beads (study)' of 1875, now at the Yale Center for British Art, exemplifies Moore's practice of producing autonomous studies that distil the essence of his aesthetic investigations. Beads as a subject — small spheres of colour, light-catching, rhythmically arranged — are almost a parody of the purely visual subject matter Moore sought: they have no meaning beyond their optical properties. The Yale Center's collection emphasis on British art makes this a well-contextualised holding; the work sits among its British Romantic and Victorian peers but represents a distinctly anti-narrative strand within Victorian painting. By 1875 Moore was at the height of his mature powers, and this study would have contributed to the development of a larger finished canvas in the series of draped-figure compositions he exhibited through the decade. The beads themselves, worn or handled by the figure, give the artist an excuse for close attention to the optical relationships between coloured spheres, skin tone, and textile.

The study format allowed Moore to work out colour and compositional relationships before committing them to a large canvas. The handling is more sketchy than his exhibition pieces, with looser brushwork in peripheral areas while the critical colour relationships — bead tones against skin and drapery — are resolved with his usual precision.