Irina was a beautiful and intelligent woman whom Henry had met when she was an art student and Henry a teacher, who had given up her drawing to concentrate on gardening, who loved silence and solitude. Moore was gregarious by nature, but in their household she led the way: Solitude won out over company, which satisfied another powerful portion of Henry Moore, because he loved dearly to work. If he had married a woman who enjoyed society and conversation, Moore would have wasted his time at parties. He wanted most to get up in the morning, pick up a piece of clay, and work all day into the night. His work was various: modeling new ideas in a little old studio filled with oddly shaped pebbles, old maquettes, and bone; working over waxes that came from the foundry before they returned to become bronzes; carving in stone or wood; sketching; or overseeing assistants, young sculptors who translated models into larger versions—six inches to three feet, three feet to fourteen, fourteen to twenty-seven. Maybe I felt free to hire typists and researchers because Henry hired assistants.

Moore interrupted himself for lunch, tea, drinks, and supper; for mail, although mail was a burden; for the telephone; for the founder’s truck that came to haul away a great plaster for casting. All day he rode a bicycle over his acreage in the rolling farmland, patrolling his studios to work on different projects. At night after supper he and Irina might watch a BBC detective mystery, but as he watched he kept a pad open on his lap and made automatic or random marks in pencil—and sometimes ideas derived from his idle doodles. When I last saw him at eighty he had built a new graphic studio next to the house, where he retreated for an hour after television, working again between nine and ten at night.

Moore did not arrive among the rich and the famous until he was in his forties. Earlier, he had taught for a living, sculpting as much as he could the rest of the day in a Hampstead studio, or at a cottage in the country during holidays. He grew up in Castleford near Leeds, where his father was a coal miner who swore that none of his children would ever go down to the pits. They didn’t—except when Henry sketched coal mining during the Second World War; most of the children taught school, as Henry might have done if he had not served in the Great War and attended art school, first in Leeds and then at the Royal Academy, on something like the G.I. Bill. His whole life felt lucky to him, to have escaped the pits for the studio, to have traded work at the surface of a coal seam for work at the surface of marble and alabaster, of wood and clay.

Although he refused to attend some openings, others took him away from his work; so did lectures, which he mostly refused, and ceremonial occasions and honorary degrees or investitures. Celebrity dogged him and he fought it. Yet he gave up work one afternoon for a photo session, or a morning for a meeting of the directors of the Tate Gallery. During the years when I knew him he was celebrated all over the world, and he enjoyed his fame no end, but remained vigilant to combat its cost in work. I returned three years after the interview to do his New Yorker profile, and again when he was eighty for another magazine piece. He wrote me postcards and letters from time to time (I bought etchings; I lectured about him and required slides, which he provided; or he just said hello.) Always he asked me to drop by when I visited England, but we dropped by only twice, because I understood that although his invitations were genuine we would interrupt his day. Only once did I feel impatience from him—he wanted to be working—when Jane and I came calling in the autumn after his summer had been wasted by the huge show in Florence in the 1970s.