Moore’s comment on his tendency to ‘Humanise everything, to relate mountains to people, tree trunks to the human body’, is powerfully evoked in this work. The natural, twisted formation of a tree trunk here takes on the appearance of a human torso. Moore was fascinated with the trees that grew around his house and studios in Perry Green. Shortly after this work was made, he made a series of tree drawings.

The work also recalls the more clearly human Draped Torso Moore made in 1953. The earlier work is influenced by Moore’s engagement with antique sculpture. In this work, the evocation of an ancient past is provided by the natural world, the slow-growing and deeply rooted tree. Moreover, the heavy solid forms of this particular Torso, which rely upon this organic strength and authority, emphasise the importance of the torso as the centre of the human body.

Moore described the properties in nature which helped evolve his work:
But a sculptor is a person obsessed with the form and the shape of things, and it’s not just the shape of any one thing, but the shape of anything and everything: the growth in a flower; the hard, tense strength, although delicate form of a bone; the strong, solid fleshiness of a beech tree trunk. […] They’re all part of the experience of form and therefore, in my opinion, everything, every shape, every bit of natural form: animals, people, pebbles, shells, anything you like are all things that can help you to make sculpture.
Henry Moore in Forma, 1964, see Wilkinson, p. 198