Hannah's secret sculpture garden

Metals and minerals underpin much of our material life, but art critic John Russell Taylor finds that they can offer more ethereal values, too. He reports from deep in the English countryside.

Not so long ago, it was pretty difficult to sell the British on sculpture, let alone sell it to them. Fellow Europeans always found this mystifying: the natural assumption, given the primacy of British sculpture in world regard, was that Brits should be the most eager of all nations in the cause of sculpture.

Henry Moore, after all, was the world's ultimate master, with massive bronzes inescapable, it seemed, on every public space and university campus in the universe. Germans especially came in droves to Lynn Chadwick's grand country studios to buy his sculptures for their houses and gardens – to such an extent that some unkind commentator once remarked that a Chadwick bronze was the cultivated German's equivalent of a garden gnome.

So how could it be that the source of all this artistic bounty should be so unmoved by it? A lot of the problem seemed to be that sculpture was expensive compared with painting – if one was not paying for the man hours required to chip a sculpture out of the stone, it was to repay the major investment required of the sculptor in getting his clay or plaster models cast in bronze. And then, the general image of sculpture was that it was large and heavy – too much of a hassle to install anywhere short of a palace – and that outdoors it was a conservator's nightmare, liable to all kinds of degradation from atmospheric pollution and passing birds. When, a few years back, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park organized a show of large Moores specifically designed by their creator for the outdoors, they had endless problems securing loans because of this very worry.