English sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975) has been called one of the outstanding women artists of the twentieth century. Throughout her working life and until her death, she never received the recognition of male contemporaries such as another--and more famous--British sculptor, Henry Moore. Comparing the two, art critic Leslie Judd Portner, in Washington Post and Times Herald, noted that "Where Moore concerns himself with natural forms, Hepworth's work is almost entirely abstract."

Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England, on Jan. 10, 1903, Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was the eldest of four children. As a young girl, she often traveled about the Yorkshire countryside with her father for his work as county surveyor. She spoke of Yorkshire as a "curiously rhythmic patterning of cobbled streets...most ungracious houses dominated by...slagheaps, noise, dirt, and smell." These early impressions of the contradiction between industrial town and quiet countryside later became an integral part of her...