Focus on King and Queen (sculpture) and discuss the Maquettes.
According to Moore, speaking years later, the work was inspired by double statues of male and female figures from Ancient Egypt, and by fairy tales read to his daughter Mary.  Art critics have suggested links with the accession of Elizabeth II in 1952, and have identified a strikingly similar photograph of Moore and his wife Irina seated beside each other c.1952, in which Moore has one hand clenched in his lap and the other on the arm of the sofa, and Irina sits beside him with her fingers interlaced.
It was based on preliminary drawings of seated figures from the late 1940s.  Inspiration came to Moore from playing with pieces of wax which became an initial maquette in 1952.  He first created a bearded head with a crown which became the "king" figure, then the female "queen" and the bench.  The king had a clenched fist, and the feet were little defined.  The maquette had a narrow squared frame behind the figures, defining the space, recalling similar frames used by Alberto Giacometti for example in his The Nose and The Cage, and the frames used repeatedly in the paintings of Francis Bacon, such as his Three Studies of the Male Back.  The 27 centimetres (11 in) high maquette was later cast in an edition of ten bronzes (LH 348).  Examples were sold at Sotheby's in 2001 for £531,500, at Christie's in 2010 for over US$2.8m, and at Sotheby's in 2016 for £1.1m.
A copy of the maquette was made in plaster, but only fragments survive.  It was used to scale up the sculpture to a full-size plaster working model, Maquette for King and Queen 1952–3. Anthony Caro made a three quarter size terracotta model of the queen figure, which was cast in bronze in an edition of five, as Seated Figure 1952–3 (LH 345). In this work, the hands are ill defined, and head does not have the crown-like looping feature.
Elizabeth II Francis Bacon Three Studies of the Male Back Maquette Anthony Caro Christie's Ancient Egypt Sotheby's Alberto Giacometti maquette