While she is often presented as Henry Moore’s female alter ego, Barbara Hepworth did not enjoy the same renown. Their parallel careers began at the Leeds School of Arts, where the young girl from a humble background began studying sculpture, which she later continued from 1921 to 1924 at the Royal College of Art in London, which still taught according to 19th-century canons. From 1924 to 1927, she lived in Florence, where she became interested in Etruscan and Romanesque sculpture rather than Renaissance art, before joining her first husband, the sculptor John Skeaping, at the British School in Rome. It was in the Italian capital that she learned direct carving, a technique...
