Dame Barbara (Jocelyn) Hepworth (1903–1975)

Sculptor. Born at Wakefield, Yorkshire, the daughter of a civil engineer. She entered Leeds School of Art in 1919, transferring to the Royal College of Art in 1920. In 1924 she won a scholarship for one year’s study abroad and went to Italy with sculptor John Skeaping, whom she married in 1925 (marriage dissolved 1933). They stayed in Rome until 1926. In Italy Hepworth learned to carve stone, a skill not taught at the Royal College, as it was at this time considered stonemason’s work. She had her first major exhibition in 1928 at the Beaux Arts Gallery, Hampstead (with Skeaping), her work there consisting of stone carvings of figures and animals. During the early 1930s she simplified her forms to the point of complete abstraction, a process encouraged by her association with Ben Nicholson, who was to become her second husband in 1938 (marriage dissolved 1951). The couple visited Paris and were in touch with the international avant-garde, notably Picasso, Brancusi, Braque and Mondrian, both becoming members of the Paris-based Abstraction-Création group. They were also members of the English Seven and Five Society and Unit One. In 1939 they moved to St Ives, where Hepworth stayed for the rest of her life, allowing the Cornish landscape to influence her abstract forms. She had numerous retrospective exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale in 1950, the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1954 and 1962, the São Paulo Biennale in 1959, where she was awarded the Grand Prix, and the Tate Gallery in 1968. Her most prestigious commission was Single Form (unveiled 1964) for the UN building in New York; a smaller version was erected in Battersea Park, London, in 1964. Other publicly-sited sculptures by Hepworth in the UK include Contrapuntal Forms, Glebelands, Harlow, Essex (1951); Turning Forms, Marlborough Science Academy, St Albans, Hertfordshire (1951); Figure for Landscape, University of Exeter (1960); Winged Figure, John Lewis department store, Oxford Street (Holles Street frontage), London (1963); Construction (Crucifixion), Salisbury Cathedral (1966); Rock Form (Porthcurno), New County Hall, Truro, Cornwall (1966); Three Obliques (Walk In), Cardiff University (1968); Ancestor I, University of Birmingham (1971); Family of Man, Snape Maltings, Suffolk (1970; installed 1976); and Theme and Variations, Cheltenham House, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire (1969–72). She was appointed CBE in 1958 and DBE in 1965. She received honorary degrees from several British universities and, in 1973, honorary membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died in a fire in her studio at St Ives 20 May 1975. Trewyn studio, as it is called, was presented to the nation by her executors in 1980 together with a representative collection of her work.

Bibliography (updated 2024): A. Bowness, ‘Hepworth, Dame (Jocelyn) Barbara (1903–1975)’, ODNB (online edn), (2004), 2017; S. Bowness (ed.), Barbara Hepworth. Writings and Conversations, London, (2015), 2017; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, pp. 477–78; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Leicestershire and Rutland, Liverpool, 2000, pp. xvii, 38–39; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Liverpool, Liverpool, 1997, pp. 226–27; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. xvii, xviii, xx, 81, 235–37, 292–93, 361–62, 364, 365; E. Clayton, ‘Contrapuntal and Turning Forms: Barbara Hepworth and the Festival of Britain’, in M. Trusted and J. Barnes, Discovering Women Sculptors, Watford, 2023, pp. 172–84; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. xix, 17, 54–55, 244–45; D.A. Cross, Public Sculpture of Lancashire and Cumbria, Liverpool, 2017, pp. 64–65, 76, 77–78, 169; P. Curtis, Barbara Hepworth (Tate Gallery), London, 1998; M. Gale and C. Stevens, Barbara Hepworth. Works in the Tate Gallery Collection and the Barbara Hepworth Museum, St Ives, London, (1999) 2015; G.T. Noszlopy, Public Sculpture of Birmingham (ed. J. Beach), Liverpool, 1998, pp. 58, 135; G.T. Noszlopy and F. Waterhouse, Public Sculpture of Staffordshire and the Black Country, Liverpool, 2005, pp. 201–02; P. Ward-Jackson, Public Sculpture of Historic Westminster. Volume 1, Liverpool, 2011, pp. xli, 64–65, 120, 450–51; T. Wyke, Public Sculpture of Greater Manchester, Liverpool, 2004, p. 209.

Philip Ward-Jackson, 2011