The Loves of the Winds and the Seasons

'The Loves of the Winds and the Seasons' of 1893, held at Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, is among Moore's most ambitious late compositions in terms of its allegorical reach. Winds and Seasons as subjects brought Moore into the territory of cosmic elemental forces, allowing him to deploy multiple figures in varied attitudes of movement — running, blown, turning — that gave his late style a new dynamism. By 1893 Moore was ill with the cancer that would kill him in 1893, making this a work from the very end of his life in which he still mustered considerable compositional ambition. The Blackburn holding places this major late work in a regional context that reflects the geographic breadth of Victorian collecting; Blackburn's museum has a distinguished collection of British Victorian painting acquired through civic patronage.

The multiple-figure composition requires Moore to coordinate contrasted dynamic poses within his harmonic colour system — a technical challenge he addresses by maintaining a unified cool palette even as figures are shown in varied states of movement. Drapery blown by wind is rendered with agitated linear rhythms contrasting with the more settled folds of calmer seasonal figures.