Barbara Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, and as a child travelled the county's roads in her father's car; she said the shape of the hills got into her hands. She won a scholarship to Leeds School of Art at sixteen, where Henry Moore was a fellow student, and went on to the Royal College of Art in London. At a time when sculptors modelled in clay and handed the work to stone masons, she insisted on carving directly, learning from an Italian craftsman in Rome.

In 1931 she made a small piece with a hole through it, one of the first pierced forms in modern British sculpture. Three years later she gave birth to triplets with the painter Ben Nicholson. Money was so short that the babies were cared for in a nursery while she and Nicholson worked in a shared studio.

When war came in 1939 the family moved to St Ives in Cornwall, where for years she had no proper workshop and carved in a small yard at night after the children were in bed. She bought Trewyn Studio in 1949 and worked there for the rest of her life.

In 1953 her eldest son Paul, from her first marriage, was killed in an RAF plane crash in Thailand. Her monumental Single Form stands outside the United Nations in New York as a memorial to Dag Hammarskjold. She was made a Dame in 1965 and died in a fire at her studio in 1975.