Barbara Hepworth: Madonna and Child
Title: Madonna and Child
Artist: Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975, British)
Location: St Ives Parish Church (C of E)
Date: 1954
Carved in memory of her son Paul who died in an RAF plane crash over Thailand in 1953.
‘I do not want to make a stone horse that is trying to and cannot smell the air. How lovely is the horse’s sensitive nose, the dogs moving ears and deep eyes; but to me these are not stone forms and the love of them and the emotion can only be expressed in more abstract terms. I do not want to make a machine that cannot fulfill its essential purpose; but to make exactly the right relation of masses, a living thing in stone, to express my awareness and thought of these things.’ (Barbara Hepworth, introduction to Unit 1, 1934).
The British sculptor Barbara Hepworth achieved international prominence with her abstract sculptures. Hepworth studied first at the Leeds School of Art, and then at the Royal College of Art. Along with her friend Henry Moore, Hepworth became a leading member of the new art movement associated with direct carving. Her work was, however, commercially unpopular.
During the war Hepworth moved with her family from London to St Ives, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Hepworth was invited to create several important public pieces of art for the Festival of Britain in 1951, marking a turn in her career. Several large retrospectives of her work, at the São Paulo bienal, Brazil, in 1959 and the Tate Gallery in 1968, cemented her international reputation. On her death in 1975 her Trewyn Studio was given to the nation together with a large collection of her work. This now forms part of Tate St Ives.
Further Information
Permanent display
See Barbara Hepworth’s Madonna and Child on the Ecclesiart map here.
Other artworks in churches by Barbara Hepworth: Homage to Mondrian at Salisbury Cathedral