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Lot Essay
We are grateful to Dr Sophie Bowness for her assistance with the cataloguing apparatus for this work. Dr Sophie Bowness is preparing the revised catalogue raisonné of Hepworth’s sculpture.
In 1934 Hepworth carved several Mother and Child sculptures while she was pregnant, at the time unknowingly, with triplets. She carved sensuous, biomorphic forms with figurative allusions, working on the cusp of abstraction. Later, she described these works as ‘turbulent […] but I stand by them. They mattered a lot emotionally and sculpturally’ (B. Hepworth, quoted in E. Clayton, Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life, London, 2021, p. 68).
The present work follows the disc-like form of ironstone, so named for its colour, that Hepworth found littering the beaches of Happisburgh in Norfolk, where she holidayed in the early 1930s with her then husband John Skeaping, and a small group of other artists including Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore and her later husband, Ben Nicholson. Skeaping, Moore and Hepworth would comb the beaches for stones to ship back to London, and the form of the stone itself, polished and rounded by the sea, occasionally with holes going right through, was an important inspiration to the sculptor.
Hepworth had pierced her first sculpture in 1931, a development of great significance that represented a radical contribution to the canon of abstract art. Sculpture could create space rather than being merely a form existing in space; this discovery shaped the direction of her work from this point onwards. The piercing reappears in the present work with a poetical ambiguity, perhaps delineating a mother’s arm reaching towards her child, or an absence or opening within the figure.
It was at the time of her visits to Norfolk and the first pierced form that Hepworth began a relationship with Nicholson. By 1934 they were living and working together in Hampstead and she was pregnant with triplets, born in October that year. Mother and Child was originally conceived in a single piece of stone, the figures merged together and presented in their most essential form - Hepworth evokes remarkable tension and tenderness in the stone, and later in bronze. An incised circle and marks suggest the faces of the mother and child but it hinges on abstraction, echoing the eroded forms of pebbles and stones she found on the beach at Happisburgh. Cast in bronze and polished to a bright gold, it takes on a new material resonance.
Hepworth returned to a number of her earlier carvings after she began working with bronze in the 1950s, writing in 1964, ‘I have found some considerable pleasure in re-interpreting forms originally carved, and which in bronze, by greater attenuation, can give new aspect to certain themes’ (B. Hepworth, quoted in E. Clayton, Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life, London, 2021, p. 198).
In 1934 Hepworth carved several Mother and Child sculptures while she was pregnant, at the time unknowingly, with triplets. She carved sensuous, biomorphic forms with figurative allusions, working on the cusp of abstraction. Later, she described these works as ‘turbulent […] but I stand by them. They mattered a lot emotionally and sculpturally’ (B. Hepworth, quoted in E. Clayton, Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life, London, 2021, p. 68).
The present work follows the disc-like form of ironstone, so named for its colour, that Hepworth found littering the beaches of Happisburgh in Norfolk, where she holidayed in the early 1930s with her then husband John Skeaping, and a small group of other artists including Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore and her later husband, Ben Nicholson. Skeaping, Moore and Hepworth would comb the beaches for stones to ship back to London, and the form of the stone itself, polished and rounded by the sea, occasionally with holes going right through, was an important inspiration to the sculptor.
Hepworth had pierced her first sculpture in 1931, a development of great significance that represented a radical contribution to the canon of abstract art. Sculpture could create space rather than being merely a form existing in space; this discovery shaped the direction of her work from this point onwards. The piercing reappears in the present work with a poetical ambiguity, perhaps delineating a mother’s arm reaching towards her child, or an absence or opening within the figure.
It was at the time of her visits to Norfolk and the first pierced form that Hepworth began a relationship with Nicholson. By 1934 they were living and working together in Hampstead and she was pregnant with triplets, born in October that year. Mother and Child was originally conceived in a single piece of stone, the figures merged together and presented in their most essential form - Hepworth evokes remarkable tension and tenderness in the stone, and later in bronze. An incised circle and marks suggest the faces of the mother and child but it hinges on abstraction, echoing the eroded forms of pebbles and stones she found on the beach at Happisburgh. Cast in bronze and polished to a bright gold, it takes on a new material resonance.
Hepworth returned to a number of her earlier carvings after she began working with bronze in the 1950s, writing in 1964, ‘I have found some considerable pleasure in re-interpreting forms originally carved, and which in bronze, by greater attenuation, can give new aspect to certain themes’ (B. Hepworth, quoted in E. Clayton, Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life, London, 2021, p. 198).