Hepworth was born at Wakefield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire on 10 January 1903. She was educated at Wakefield Girls High School. She trained in sculpture at Leeds School of Art (1920-21) and, on a county scholarship, at the Royal College of Art (1921-24), where she met the painters Raymond Coxon and Edna Ginesi and the sculptor Henry Moore. Hepworth was runner-up to John Skeaping for the 1924 Prix de Rome, but travelled to Florence on a West Riding Travel Scholarship. After visiting Rome and Siena with Skeaping, they were wed in Florence on 13 May 1925 and moved to Rome, where both began carving stone. In November 1926, they returned to London. Links forged through the British School at Rome with the sculptor Richard Bedford (a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum), ensured that the collector George Eumorfopoulos (1863-1939), visited their studio show in 1927 and bought two Hepworths. The couple moved to 7 The Mall Studios in Hampstead in 1928 (where Hepworth remained until 1939). With Bedford and Moore, they became leading figures in the ‘new movement’ associated with direct carving. Successful joint exhibitions in 1928 (Beaux Arts Gallery, London and Alex Reid and Lefevre, Glasgow) and 1930 (Tooth’s) consisted of animal and figure sculptures in stone and wood. They joined the London Group and the 7 & 5 Society in 1930-1. Their son Paul was born in August 1929, but the marriage was deteriorating and in 1931 Hepworth met Ben Nicholson (then married to Winifred Nicholson), who joined her on holiday at Happisburgh, Norfolk. She and Skeaping were divorced in 1933. In 1934 Hepworth gave birth to triplets; she married Nicholson four years later. Hepworth and Nicholson’s move in the direction of abstraction became apparent with their joint exhibitions of 1932 (Tooth’s) and 1933 (Lefevre). Establishing links with the continental avant garde, the couple visited the Parisian studios of Arp, Brancusi, Mondrian, Braque and Picasso. They joined Abstraction-Création, and were leading figures in Paul Nash’s Unit One group and the associated publication edited by Herbert Read (1934). In 1935 they were instrumental in restricting the Seven and Five to abstract work, thus paving the way for a fertile period of constructivism enhanced by a horde of artistic refugees from totalitarian Europe such as Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Breuer and Gabo. That work culminated in the publication of Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art (1937), edited by Nicholson, Gabo and the architect Leslie Martin, and designed by Hepworth and Sadie Martin. During the Second World War, Hepworth and Nicholson evacuated to St Ives, Cornwall. For the first three years, she ran a nursery school and had no time for sculpture. However, upon moving to Carbis Bay in 1942, she finally secured a studio. Her first major solo exhibition was held at Temple Newsam at Leeds in 1943 and it was followed by a monograph by William Gibson (Barbara Hepworth: Sculptress, 1946). She was prominent amongst St Ives artists, becoming a focus in 1949 for the establishment of the Penwith Society of Artists with Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and others, and helping to attract international attention to the group’s exhibitions. Although Hepworth’s contribution to the 1950 Venice Biennale was dogged by comparisons with Moore, two retrospectives – held at Wakefield (1951) and London (Whitechapel, 1954) – and Read’s monograph of 1952 confirmed her post-war reputation. She bought Trewyn Studio at St Ives in 1949, where she lived, after her divorce from Nicholson two years later. In 1953 her son Paul Skeaping was killed in an air crash over Siam. She visited Greece in 1954 in an attempt to get over his death. Hepworth was appointed CBE in 1958 and DBE in 1965. In 1964 Hepworth’s sculpture Single Form was erected outside the United Nations Building in New York as a memorial to the UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld (1905-61). Hepworth served as a Tate Trustee (1965-72), donating six works in 1964 and a further nine in 1967, prior to her 1968 retrospective at the Gallery. With her long-standing friend, the potter Bernard Leach, she was awarded the Freedom of St Ives in 1968 as an acknowledgement of her importance to the town. After a long battle with cancer, she died there at the age of 72 on 20 May 1975 in a horrific fire at her home, probably caused by a cigarette. Her studio was designated the Barbara Hepworth Museum the following year. Hepworth’s Family of Man (1970) may be seen above.