Barbara Hepworth, sketchbook in hand, stood alongside medical professionals gathered around a body in an operating theatre, her piercing eyes focused on the operation. The surgeon in the centre furrows his brow as he operates. His clenched left hand mirrors Hepworth's – both hold their tools tightly, as Hepworth presses pen to paper and the surgeon knife to flesh.

The resulting painting, Concourse (2), which now hangs in the Hunterian Museum, is one of a series of works which Hepworth completed in the late 1940s of surgeons in London and Exeter. Painted the year the National Health Service (NHS) was founded, this painting and body of drawings are an archive of its early years by an artist who keenly appreciated its necessity, both as a socialist and an individual with direct experience of it.

The surgeon Norman Capener presented Concourse (2) to the Royal College of Surgeons in 1964. Capener was a close friend of Hepworth's – they met in 1944 when he treated her daughter Sarah at the Orthopaedic Hospital in Exeter.

It was Capener who suggested that Hepworth observe an operation, and so in 1947, the operating theatre became her studio. The inspiration went both ways – Capener also produced sculptures, frequently under Hepworth's tuition. On one occasion in 1949, their work was exhibited together at Penwith Society of Arts.

That year Hepworth had undergone operations on her hands due to strain from carving. She began to draw during her recovery, as drawing was comparatively painless. Sketching the surgeons at work became somewhat of an obsession for Hepworth. She produced around 80 drawings over three years. Two Figures most closely resembles the technique Hepworth used for her drawings in the operating theatre.

For other works such as Concourse (2), the artist built up layers of gesso and chalk, painted on coloured oil glaze and rubbed the surface with razors to reveal a white ground and brushstrokes. She then drew her composition in pencil and completed it with daubs of oil paint.

The prominence of the surgeon's hands in Concourse (2) is echoed elsewhere in the body of work and remained a preoccupation in the artist's, evident in sculptures she produced of her own hands years later. In one of his lectures, Capener compared the sleight of hand of sculptors to that of surgeons, and showed photographs of Hepworth's hands, alongside that of the potter Bernard Leach, in his slides.

In 1950 Hepworth delivered a lecture to an audience of surgeons, including Capener, in which she described how the human hand was not only the most 'revealing and expressive part of the human body' but was also 'the visible extension of the brain.' This is clear in Hepworth's attention to detail when drawing hands and eyes.

Eleanor Clayton notes in her biography of the artist that this 'highlights the affinity that Hepworth saw between the work and approach of artists and surgeons, both seeking to restore beauty and grace through the cooperation of hand and eye.'

Hepworth was in awe of the surgeon's control over their hands. She was particularly impressed by the dexterity required for fenestration, an ear operation to treat otosclerosis, a problem with bones inside the ear, which involved making a new aperture in the inner ear to resolve any hearing loss. 'You can imagine how impressed a sculptor would be by the precision and delicacy of this particular operation!' she remarked.

Her drawings of the procedure depict surgeon Edward Rodney Garnett Passe, who pioneered fenestration in England and worked at the London Clinic on Harley Street.

Fenestration of the Ear (The Microscope)

Hepworth carefully detailed the stages of fenestration in her drawings. One shows the surgeon illuminating the ear with a lamp, another looking through a microscope, and a further using a hammer.

The composition of the figures surrounding the central patient would go on to inspire Hepworth's abstract sculptures. The grouping of figures was what Hepworth had been looking for compositionally but struggling to find. As she explained, it was 'a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture very close to what I had been seeking in my work.'

This resonates in her group sculptures that same year, most notably Group III (Evocation) which she told Capener derived from her hospital sketches. By diverging from abstraction in her hospital drawings, she seemed to find it again, going on to produce many more abstract works later in her career after this hiatus.

Where most of the drawings depict groups of figures, some focus on individuals. For instance, Hepworth became acquainted with another surgeon at that clinic, Reginald Watson-Jones, who is depicted in Tibia Graft.

Solo figures like this are interesting to consider in relation to her abstract sculpture practice. Nathaniel Hepburn, who curated the 2012–2013 exhibition 'Barbara Hepworth: The Hospital Drawings' (which toured at Hepworth Wakefield, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester and Mascalls Gallery in Kent), suggests that drawings of individual surgeons can be compared with her tall standing sculptures – and he quotes Hepworth: 'draw a surgeon with clasped hands – he is a monolith!'

In its cropped composition and strongly delineated line, Surgeon Waiting has a totemic quality not unlike Hepworth's monolithic sculptures.

The composition of the figures was connected to an emotional poignancy. Describing her drawing The Hands, Hepworth remarked that this 'row of hands'; was a 'very moving moment for me when a group of surgeons stood together, after discussion, before commencing the operation.'

Notably, it was the emotion that caught the contemporary art critic Herbert Read's attention who, in a 1949 review of an exhibition of Hepworth's figurative work, noted that 'What is surprising about the work, however, is not its realistic character, but its depth of feeling.' The emotional intensity of the drawings is enhanced by Hepworth's use of colour, which she stressed was not meant to be realistic but to convey the 'meaning and form of light as I see it.'

In Prelude I, Hepworth's use of the deep ultramarine contributes to the atmosphere of solemnity and gravity which so captivated the artist as she sketched.

The nurses and surgeon in Prelude I gaze down as if in meditation as they prepare themselves mentally for the operating theatre. Read reminds us that in the 'sensitive hands' and 'patient faces' of the surgeons, we get a sense of the 'creative purpose' which Hepworth so admired. Hepburn argues that this purpose was compelling to the artist because it was shared: 'she became absorbed by the hospital team, who anticipated and responded to each other's actions with near instinctive reactions.'

Medical professionals work together in pursuit of healing. In the years following the Second World War, and at a time of personal difficulty, Hepworth's hospital drawings are a reminder of art's potential to heal. Creating art was perhaps Hepworth's own personal medicine; as she wrote in a letter to Read, drawing 'replenishes one's love for life, humanity and the earth.' The hospital drawings are, then, above all works about love, whether between surgeon and patient, mother and daughter, or even sculptor and stone.

Jessica Raja-Brown, writer

This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation

Further reading

John B. Booth, FRCS, 'Window on the Ear: Barbara Hepworth and the Fenestration Series of Drawings', The Journal of Laryngology and Otology, April 2000, Vol. 114, Supplement No. 26, 1–29

Eleanor Clayton, Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life, Thames and Hudson, 2021

Nathaniel Hepburn, Barbara Hepworth: The Hospital Drawings, Tate Publishing in association with Mascalls Gallery and The Hepworth Wakefield, 2012

Sarah Pearson, Treasures from the Collections, 2017, The Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, Volume 99, Number 1