Barbara Hepworth

In 1925, after travelling together through Siena and Rome, she married John Skeaping, also a sculptor, in Florence. In 1929, they were blessed with a son, Paul, but the couple divorced in 1933.

In 1933, she entered into a wedlock with the painter, Ben Nicholson, with whom she had triplets; Rachel, Sarah, and Simon, in 1934. The couple divorced in 1951.

Barbara Hepworth died in an accidental fire on May 20, 1975, at the age of 72, at her Trewyn Studios, St. Ives, Cornwall.

Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born on January 10, 1903, in Wakefield, West Riding of Yorkshire, to Herbert Hepworth, a civil engineer who later became County Surveyor, and his wife, Gertrude.

She was the eldest of four children in her family. She received her early education from the Wakefield Girls' High School, and later earned a scholarship to the Leeds School of Art.

At the art school, she met her fellow student, Henry Moore, with whom she struck a lifelong friendship and who had an important influence on her work.

She won a county scholarship to the Royal College of Art (RCA) and studied there from 1921 and earned a diploma in 1924.

In 1924, after completing her studies at the RCA, Hepworth travelled to Florence, Italy on a West Riding Travel Scholarship. In Italy, she learned how to carve marble from the master sculptor, Giovanni Ardini.

In 1926, she returned to London with her husband, where both of them exhibited their works together from their flat.

In 1933, she became one of the founders of the Unit One art movement; the other founders of the movement were artists, Paul Nash and Ben Nicholson. The movement sought to unite surrealism and abstraction in British art.

In 1935, she produced ‘Three Forms’, an abstract sculpture consisting of a sphere and two nearly oval shapes, which according to critics symbolized the birth of her triplets.

In 1937, she designed the layout for ‘Circle: An International Survey of Constructivist Art’, a 300-page book that surveyed Constructivist artists.

One of her most famous sculpture works is the ‘Single Form’, which is made in the memory of her friend and collector of her works, the former UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. The sculpture currently stands in the plaza of the United Nations building in New York City.