The Top Lots to Watch in the March London Sales

Conceived by Moore between 1952-1953 and inspired by Egyptian art, this majestic bronze sculpture presents two stylized figures seated on a bench, their “Pan-like” heads lending them an uncanny, almost extraterrestrial presence, as if they had arrived from another time and space, at once deeply archaic and strikingly futuristic. Their bony, fossil-like forms recall Etruscan sculpture, and their ancestral, regal bearing carries something fierce and supernatural, like the spirit of ancient warriors or shamans. The unsettling yet compelling existential mystery they seem to embody, like ominous prophetic guardians or heralds bearing a fatal message, contributes to the sculpture’s enduring enigma, transforming this modern work into a monument to a historical moment marked by uncertainty, created in the shadow of postwar anxieties when humanity was once again confronting its fragility and fallibility. That psychological weight, as much as its formal authority, helps justify its £6-9 million estimate. King and Queen is the last cast in private hands from an edition of four, plus one artist’s copy, cast at the Galizia Foundry, London, in 1952-1953. Two subsequent bronzes were cast specifically for the collections of the Tate Gallery, London (1957), and the Henry Moore Foundation, Much Hadham (1985).