Though best known as a sculptor, Henry Moore was also a skilled and highly original draftsman. In Study of Female Figure, the artist sketched—with confident brushstrokes, frenzied lines, and swaths of translucent gray wash—the imposing physical presence of an undressed woman. Moore visited Florence in 1924, where he was deeply affected by the monumentality and simplicity of the city’s early Renaissance frescoes. He appreciated similar qualities in Mexican carvings and examples of Cycladic, pre-Columbian, ancient Egyptian, and African art on view at the British Museum in London. These encounters prompted the artist to consider capturing dimensionality on a flat surface and conveying emotion in the artistic rendering of a body.