Hepworth honoured with show focusing on early art

More than 100 works, including major carvings as well as paintings, pictures and collages, will go on display at Tate Britain in central London.

The exhibition, called Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture For A Modern World, includes work such as Doves, which she completed when she was 24, and photo albums offering an insight into her home life with her husband and fellow artist Ben Nicholson.

Other exhibits include work long thought to be lost such as the alabaster sculpture Figure, which dates from 1933 and has been lost since the 1960s.

Hepworth, born in Wakefield, is associated with St Ives in Cornwall, where she lived and worked for almost 30 years until she died in a fire in her studios in 1975 aged 72.

Her Cornish studio and sculpture garden is run by Tate St Ives and is open to the public.

The show runs from Wednesday until October 25.

Hepworth was born in 1903. She attended Wakefield Girls’ High School, and won a scholarship to the Leeds School of Art from 1920. It was there that she met her fellow student, Henry Moore.

They became friends and established a friendly rivalry that lasted for many years.

Hepworth travelled to Florence, Italy in 1924 on a West Riding Travel Scholarship. She learned how to carve marble from master sculptor Giovanni Ardini, and later travelled to France and became involved with a Paris-based art movement.