Barbara Hepworth

Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born on 10 January 1903 in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the eldest child of Herbert and Gertrude Hepworth. Her father was a civil engineer for the West Riding County Council, who in 1921 became County Surveyor. She attended Wakefield Girls High School, and won a scholarship and studied at theLeeds School of Art from 1920 (where she met Moore). She then won a County scholarship to the Royal College of Art and studied there from 1921 until she was awarded the diploma of the Royal College of Art in 1924. She later studied for a period in Italy.

Hepworth's first marriage was to the sculptor John Skeaping, with whom she had a son, Paul, in 1929. Her second marriage was to the painter Ben Nicholson. They married on 17 November 1938 at Hampstead Register Office. The couple had triplets in 1934, Simon, Rachel and Sarah; Simon also became an artist. The couple divorced in 1951. Her eldest son, Paul, was killed on 13 February 1953 in a plane crash while serving with the Royal Air Force in Thailand. Hepworth created a memorial to him, entitled Madonna and Child,

 in the church in St Ives.

 in the church in St Ives.

One of her most prestigious works is Single Form, in memory of her friend and collector of her works Dag Hammarskjöld, at the United Nations building in New York City. It was commissioned in 1961 by the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation following Hammarskjöld's death in a plane crash.

Hepworth was featured in the 1964 documentary film 5 British Sculptors (Work and Talk) by American filmmaker Warren Forma. She was made a dame in 1965,^[7]


 ten years before her death during a fire in her St Ives studio in Cornwall, aged seventy-two.

On 20 December 2011 her 1969 sculpture Two Forms (Divided Circle) was stolen, from its plinth in Dulwich Park, South London, by suspected scrap metal thieves. The piece, which had been in the park since 1970, was insured for £500,000, a spokesman for Southwark Council said.Hepworth's former studio and home now form the Barbara Hepworth Museum. A new £35 million museum dedicated to Hepworth, the Hepworth Wakefield, opened in Britain in May 2011 at Wakefield in West Yorkshire

Her work may also be seen at St Catherine's College, Oxford ^school of Music at Cardiff University,the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton, West Yorkshire; Clare College Churchill College^[a nd Murray Edwards College (formerly New Hal Cambridge; Snape Maltings, Snape, Suffolk; and on view in or attached to the John Lewis department store,part of the John Lewis Partnership, in Oxford Street (see picture); and Kenwood House, both in London. Seaform (Atlantic) may be viewed in a newly created open space on St George's Street Norwich; it has been seen to be used by the Norwich parcour group to hang from horizontally and move through its apertures as part of their own physical urban art form (the sculpture was relocated from the Norwich Castle gardens for fear the precious bronze would be stolen and melted down for scrap). Her 1966 work,Construction (Crucifixion): Homage to Mondrian, can be seen in the grounds of Winchester Cathedral next to The Pilgrims' School; Hieroglyph can be seen at Leeds Art Gallery. The Tate Gallery owns many of her works. In the Netherlands, the Kröller-Müller Museum also owns several of her sculptures. Curved Form (Trevalgan) (1956), which stood in Margaret Gardiner's rear garden in Hampstead, is now at the Pier Art Gallery in Stromness together with 67 other works donated by Gardiner. Trevalgan was Hepworth's first entire bronze form.

Marble portrait heads dating from London, ca. 1927, of Barbara Hepworth by John Skeaping, and of Skeaping by Hepworth, are documented by photograph in the Skeaping Retrospective catalogue, but are both believed to be lost.