Letter: Moore could draw very well

'THE fact is that Moore couldn't draw at all.' So ends Tim Hilton's review of the National Portrait Gallery's show of Master Drawings ('Every picture tells a life story', Sunday Review, 28 August).

I do not always understand everything that your art critic says but I usually assume that, if I was clever enough, I would. However to assert, without further explanation, that Henry Moore couldn't draw at all is plain silly.

Why then were we all so deeply moved by the drawings which he made in the London Underground during the war? And why were we again so moved by his drawings of sheep, which must surely seem to most people (and even apparently at first to Moore himself) to be such unpromising subjects for such close scrutiny?

While it may be true that Moore had little interest in individual human portraiture, either in his sculpture or in his drawings, it is just nonsense to say that he couldn't draw at all.

Peter Coate

Nr Axbridge, Somerset