Arthur Jackson Hepworth

Painter/architect cousin of Barbara

Arthur Jackson Hepworth, painter and architect: born Rotherham, Yorkshire 1 August 1911; married 1951 Anne Scott Stokes (died 1996; two sons, one daughter); died Taunton, Somerset 28 January 2003.

For long overlooked by the art world, Arthur Jackson Hepworth made a unique contribution to the modern movement in painting and architecture in the 1930s. Because of his early association with such luminaries as Dame Barbara Hepworth, J.L. (later Sir Leslie) Martin, Henry Moore, Ben and Winifred Nicholson and John and Myfanwy Piper, he became in old age a valuable source of information for researchers.

Although his overall output, mainly in oils, was modest, from the mid-1960s his pictures began to be featured in key survey exhibitions at major venues. This growing recognition prompted the Tate Gallery to create a one-work display centred on his Painting 1937, celebrating his 80th birthday in 1991.

Arthur Jackson Hepworth was born in Rotherham, Yorkshire, in 1911. He was one of three children – there were two younger sisters – of Frank Hepworth (himself known as Arthur), a surgeon turned general practitioner, and his wife Hilda, known as Gub, a former hospital nurse. The Hepworths owned woollen mills. One of Frank's brothers was father of the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, eight years older than her first cousin Arthur.

Hepworth had an idyllic childhood. He learned to shoot and explored the woods with the local gamekeeper and joined his much-admired father visiting patients. The contrast between rich and poor, the 1926 General Strike and the Depression contributed to his becoming a Communist and then, after disillusionment with Stalin, a lifelong socialist.

Frank Hepworth would have been satisfied if his son had stuck with medicine, which he did study for a time. Hepworth decided to switch to art, from 1929 to 1931 attending St Martin's School of Art, in London. Around this time his cousin Barbara, and her first husband, the sculptor John Skeaping, took Arthur under their wing. "It was not long before they split up and when Ben Nicholson took Barbara over he took me over as well."

The opportunity to work alongside the much older Ben and Barbara, both at the forefront of the modern movement, was eagerly taken up. He accepted that he was a "mere student on sufferance" who never actually met Ben's family or their close friends: "However, I did know Henry Moore (who did not altogether approve of me) and sometimes worked for him roughing out, as I did for Barbara."

Winifred Nicholson, the painter and Ben's first wife, invited Hepworth to her Cumberland house. There he made two large paintings and did some photography. His knowledge of contemporary art widened as he made several trips to France and Switzerland "and met Hélion and Erni and paid one visit to Mondrian's studio". In England, he encountered other well-known artists, such as John Piper, Ceri Richards and Ivon Hitchens, along with the fine, now-neglected sculptor Elizabeth Spurr, and the constructions maker Eileen Holding, Piper's first wife.

From the outset of his exhibiting career, at Barbara Hepworth's suggestion, he adopted the painting surname Jackson, his mother's maiden name, and his middle name, "to avoid inevitable confusion and comparison". There could not be two Hepworths seeking public attention, although in his later career as an architect Arthur retained the surname Hepworth. Later, he told me, "The difficulty is to remember which hat one is wearing."

In 1934-35, Arthur Jackson showed nine works in two shows at the important Leicester and Zwemmer Galleries with the 7 & 5 Society, a modernising group which began fairly cautiously after the First World War, but which had, under Ben Nicholson's influence from the mid-1920s, moved towards abstraction. Between 1934 and 1937, he exhibited a series of pictures in London and provincial shows.

He experimented with various materials to achieve his desired effects. That his work soon made an impact became evident when the publication Circle: international survey of constructive art appeared in 1937. Edited by J.L. Martin, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Circle was the third of an important series of modern movement-inspired publications, following Unit One and Axis, and aimed to set Britain's contribution to the abstract movement within a wider European context. This it did through a collection of articles and photographs of work not only by leading artists but also by architects, and reflected the stimulus provided by the arrival of influential continental refugees, such as Walter Gropius, Berthold Lubetkin and László Moholy-Nagy.

One of Circle's editors was the architect Leslie Martin, with photography layout by Barbara Hepworth and Martin's wife Sadie Speight. Arthur had met the Martins through his painting:

This contact, and perhaps the publication of Circle, may have germinated the idea of getting an architectural qualification. This offered a better chance of ever being able to earn my own living and seemed a logical progression from my painting. Leslie Martin was head of the School of Architecture at Hull and he offered me a place in the school.

In 1937, the year that he started studying at Hull, Hepworth ceased exhibiting, although "I produced some of my most successful paintings between then and 1940-41." In 1939, he obtained his Royal Institute of British Architects Intermediate and began working as an assistant to Martin and Speight, who encouraged him to keep painting.

This became became more difficult when the Second World War came:

Although my various landladies were willing to accept a drawing board on their parlour tables, they would probably have drawn the line at oil paints. In any case, I was at work during the day and frequently on patrol at night, wearing an LDV arm band and a tin hat, armed with a 12-bore shotgun.

From 1940, Hepworth worked for the town planner Sir William Holford, then with the city architect in Coventry. He served in the Royal Engineers in Britain and the Middle East. On demobilisation, he took his final RIBA examination in 1947, being elected Associate in 1948.

His career until retirement was solely as architect. After, in 1947, joining the London Midland & Scottish (Railway) architect's office, planning new stations, from 1949 he was employed by the London County Council architect's office, engaged on the Royal Festival Hall, from 1951 in the LCC's schools department working on a comprehensive high school in Holloway. After two years' service from 1955 with the architect to the North West Metropolitan Hospital Board, planning the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, in Hatfield, Hertfordshire, Hepworth moved to Somerset, and settled in Glastonbury, building mainly factories as well as seven private houses.

From the mid-1960s, his pre-war pictures began to appear in survey exhibitions, specialist biographies and catalogues. Scholars were helped, when they contacted him, because of his methodical numbering system. Part of his important photographic record found its way into the Tate archive.

After retirement in 1977 Hepworth recommenced painting for his own pleasure, carrying on stylistically from where he had stopped many years before, a development rather than a rehash of old ideas. He kept quiet about the resumption until about 1985, when he became more satisfied with what he was producing. Self-effacing by nature, he resisted any temptation to exhibit, although sometimes urged to do so.

"He did feel that, if there were to be a retrospective of his work, it should be of both his architecture and his pictures," says his son Ben. "He saw his architecture as not very different from painting, rather an aspect of the same thing."

David Buckman