John Skeaping was born in Essex and studied at Goldsmith’s College of Art, the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal Academy Schools. He married the sculptor Barbara Hepworth (marriage dissolved 1933); during the Second World War he was commissioned as an official war artist. After 1945 he lived in Mexico and also France and taught for a time at the Royal College of Art; he exhibited widely. Skeaping’s work centred around animals, in particular race horses, which he drew with an economy of line that caught the power of taut muscle and flowing mane of a horse galloping