In 1982, when Ronald Clive Moody was seventy-two and in the last years of his life, he received a letter from a young student working on a personal study project for her A-levels. Her chosen subject was black artists in Britain, and she wrote to ask Moody for information about his life and work. In his response he immediately stated, “First I would like to be the artist first and then, what colour you prefer, if I am any use to you in your A level.” Too few critics of Moody's work have heeded his request.

This chapter examines Moody's art and career from his own perspective, as reflected in his art, radio scripts, lectures, drawings, literature, interviews, and personal correspondence. This perspective, like that of all artists, was “informed by education, class, regional custom and the pressure of friends” as well as “unstated physical, economic, political and moral constraints.” It therefore changed over time.

One must also consider the perspectives of those who have assessed and presented Moody's work to the public: galleries and curators, art critics and the media, as well as academic scholars. No less than Moody, these institutions and individuals were (and continue to be) informed by custom, economy, politics, and are therefore changeable too.

The story below, then, runs along two tracks that run parallel, intersect, and diverge as they chart Moody's career and legacy. Such intersections and divergences are historically vital to any assessment of the sculptor's significance to British culture as both a colonial and a British artist. I argue here that while art critics, institutions, and historians have, on account of his race and colonial status, positioned Moody variously as a representative of “primitive,” Caribbean, and Negro (later Black or Black British) art, these labels do not reflect the totality of Moody's history and artistic evolution. In fact, a closer evaluation of his experiences in Jamaica, England, and France, his grappling with the politics of race and colonialism, even his aesthetic inspirations, highlights the extent to which he was a product of, and contributor to, British and European artistic traditions since the 1930s.