The Henry Moore bronze taken from Perry Green

At about ten o’clock on the night of Thursday 15 December 2005, a flatbed lorry with a mounted crane drove into the courtyard of the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green, Hertfordshire. The BBC and The Guardian report that three men were in it. They loaded a bronze sculpture and drove away. CCTV recorded the theft, but police called the pictures poor.

The Foundation looks after the former home and studios of Henry Moore, the British sculptor, who settled at Perry Green in 1940. The stolen work was Reclining Figure, made in 1969-70. Tate says Moore cast it in an edition of six, plus an artist’s copy that he kept. The stolen bronze was that artist’s copy. It was shown in his 1972 retrospective in Florence and later joined the Foundation’s collection. Tate gives its length as about 3.6 metres. It weighed about 2.1 tonnes.

The sculpture usually stood on a concrete plinth in a field. The Guardian reports that staff had moved it to a yard a few days earlier, so that it could be placed in another part of the park. A Foundation spokesman said this at the time. The press put its value at 3 million pounds. That figure is an estimate. It is not a sale price.

The thieves left a trail. The Guardian reports that the lorry had been stolen from a building site in Roydon, Essex, about an hour before. A member of the public saw it with the sculpture on board in Harlow, Essex, at about 10.45 pm. Police found it abandoned on a housing estate at Coopersale, near Epping, on Sunday 18 December. The Independent reported on 24 December that no forensic trace had been found. It also said that police had names from anonymous tip-offs, but had made no arrest. Hertfordshire Police named their inquiry Operation Soufflé.

In May 2009 Detective Chief Inspector Jon Humphries of Hertfordshire Police gave a new account to The Guardian and The Observer. He said police believed the sculpture was cut up on the night of the theft and taken to a place where it was badly damaged. It was then, he said, shipped abroad. Inquiries indicated a scrap dealer in Dagenham, then another scrapyard in Essex, and possibly Rotterdam. Police estimated that the metal was worth no more than 1,500 pounds. This is the police’s belief in 2009. It is not proven, and no part of the sculpture has been found.

Tate, in its Gallery of Lost Art, repeats the police view that the bronze was probably sold for scrap and destroyed soon after. Tate adds that three questions remain open. Who the thieves were, what they did with the work, and whether they knew its value are all unanswered.

No source names a suspect. The Comet, a Hertfordshire newspaper, wrote in September 2025 that the thieves have never been caught. The sources consulted give no record of an arrest or a trial. The sculpture has not been recovered.