Barbara Hepworth Museum

Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden

Visiting the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden offers a remarkable insight into the work and outlook of one of Britain’s most important twentieth-century artists. Sculptures in bronze, stone and wood are on display in the museum and garden, along with paintings, drawings and archive material. The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in St Ives, Cornwall preserves the 20th-century sculptor Barbara Hepworth’s studio and garden much as they were when she lived and worked there. She purchased the site in 1949 and lived and worked there for 26 years until her death in a fire on the premises in 1975.

Barbara Hepworth first came to live in Cornwall with her husband Ben Nicholson and their young family at the outbreak of war in 1939. She lived and worked in Trewyn studios – now the Barbara Hepworth Museum – from 1949 until her death in 1975. Following her wish to establish her home and studio as a museum of her work, Trewyn Studio and much of the artist’s work remaining there was given to the nation and placed in the care of the Tate Gallery in 1980. ‘Finding Trewyn Studio was a sort of magic’, wrote Hepworth. ‘Here was a studio, a yard and garden where I could work in open air and space’. Most of the bronzes are in the positions in which the artist herself placed them. The garden itself was laid out by Barbara Hepworth with help from a friend, the composer Priaulx Rainier.

Cornwall Multi-Entry Multi-Directional Visitors Guide © Simon Newbound