A to Z of artists Skeaping RA, John 1901 - 1980

The son of the painter Kenneth Mathieson Skeaping, John Skeaping was born in South Woodford, Essex on 9 June 1901. He studied at Goldsmith’s College School of Art, the Central School of Arts and Crafts, 1917 to 1919, and the Royal Academy Schools, 1919 to 1920. He married the sculptor Barbara Hepworth in 1925 and they worked together until separating in 1931. Their marriage was dissolved in 1933. Winning the Prix de Rome in 1924, Skeaping had first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1922; he was elected an Associate in 1950 and Academician in 1960. His first one-man show, with Hepworth, was held in Glasgow and London in 1928, shortly before he visited France and Spain. During the Second World War he served in the Intelligence Corps before transferring to the SAS in North Africa. He visited Mexico in 1949-50, while teaching sculpture at the Royal College of Art, and was the College’s Professor of Sculpture between 1953 and 1959 before settling in the Carmargue in the south of France, partly for health reasons. Between 1960 and 1969, seven one-man shows of his work were held at Ackermann’s Gallery, and there were retrospective exhibitions at the same venue in 1979, 1981 and 1984. Among the four books which he wrote and illustrated, his autobiography Drawn from Life was published in 1977. He died in London on 5 March 1980.