Wedding Photographer Yorkshire Sculpture Park — the West Bretton Parkland, Moore and Hepworth
Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield is England’s most distinguished and most visited outdoor sculpture park — an 18th-century designed landscape of 500 acres at West Bretton, where the Yorkshire Sculpture Park has since 1977 shown major international sculpture in the landscape, with permanent installations of Henry Moore’s large late bronzes, Barbara Hepworth’s abstract outdoor bronzes and rotating exhibitions of major contemporary sculpture accompanying them in the open parkland, the walled garden and the underground gallery. For Yorkshire Sculpture Park wedding photography, the combination of Henry Moore’s reclining figures above the Lower Lake’s reflection, Barbara Hepworth’s abstract forms in the enclosed walled garden and the eighteenth-century parkland’s rolling West Bretton estate landscape provide portrait settings of English landscape and major twentieth-century sculpture of a quite specific cultural and artistic quality.
Henry Moore, the Lower Lake and the Open Landscape
Henry Moore’s permanent collection at YSP — among the largest concentrations of Moore’s outdoor bronze sculpture anywhere in the world, including the King and Queen’s seated bronze pair (1952–3) on the hillside above the Lower Lake and the Reclining Figure series’ large bronzes placed across the parkland landscape — provides portrait settings of major twentieth-century British sculpture in the English landscape of remarkable scale and quality. The Lower Lake’s reflection of Moore’s bronzes in the still water surface provides portrait compositions combining the sculptural form and its mirror image of particular complexity. The parkland’s rolling West Bretton dale landscape provides portrait contexts of Yorkshire West Riding industrial and pastoral landscape.
The Hepworth Garden, the Walled Garden and the Long Wood
The Hepworth walled garden — the enclosed historic walled garden at YSP containing the permanent collection of Barbara Hepworth’s outdoor bronzes, the organic curved forms of the abstract sculptures placed among the garden’s planting with the walled enclosure’s structure providing a measured contrast to the parkland’s openness — provides a specific enclosed garden and abstract sculpture portrait setting of considerable intimacy and artistic quality. Long Wood’s beech woodland — the ancient beech hanger wood along the estate’s north ridge, with the beech canopy’s filtered light in late spring and the copper leaf carpet’s October woodland floor — provides seasonal woodland portrait settings adjacent to the sculpture in the park. The underground gallery’s contemporary exhibition provides interior portrait settings.