John Rattenbury Skeaping

Skeaping was born on 9 June 1901 in South Woodford, Essex, and was educated at home with his siblings until his teens. He enrolled at the Blackheath School of Art at about age thirteen, then moved to Goldsmiths' College School of Art, and studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts from 1917 to 1919. He then entered the Royal Academy Schools for sculpture, where in 1920 he won the Royal Academy Gold Medal and Travelling Scholarship, funding a period of travel and study in Italy. In 1924 he won the British Prix de Rome, a scholarship that placed him in residence at the British School at Rome until 1926.

While in Rome and Florence he met the sculptor Barbara Hepworth; the two married in Italy in the mid-1920s, with sources giving 1924 or 1925, and the marriage was dissolved in the early 1930s, with sources giving 1932 or 1933. Their first joint exhibition, with Skeaping showing sculpture alongside Hepworth's work, was held at Alex Reid and Lefevre in Glasgow in 1928. Through the late 1920s and early 1930s Skeaping exhibited with the London Group (1928 to 1934) and, from 1932, the Seven and Five Society, showing alongside Henry Moore among others. He had first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1922 and continued to show there for decades.

During the Second World War, Skeaping served as an official war artist. After the war he lived for periods in Mexico and in France, before settling later in Devon and then in the Camargue region of France. He later taught sculpture at the Royal College of Art, serving as Professor of Sculpture from 1953 to 1959, and in 1960 he was elected a full Royal Academician. Alongside his own sculpture, he designed a series of animal figures for Wedgwood and produced public equestrian commissions, including a life size statue of the American racehorse Secretariat, now at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga Springs, New York; his work has also been the subject of a dedicated display at the National Horseracing Museum, Palace House, Newmarket. He died on 5 March 1980 in Lambeth, London.

No verbatim critical assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed in current research, so none is reproduced here. Reference and dealer sources consistently describe Skeaping as one of the most admired British sculptors of his generation and, more specifically, as a leading twentieth century sculptor of horses, credentials reflected in his Royal Academy membership, his Rome scholarship, and his long list of museum and public collection placements. His early identification with Hepworth and Moore in the London Group and Seven and Five Society situates him within the formative circle of English modernist sculpture, even as the bulk of his later reputation rests on equestrian and animal subjects rather than abstraction.

Skeaping's auction footprint is modest relative to his museum standing. The highest figure identified in current research is approximately GBP 289,250 for Figure of a Horse, reported sold at Sotheby's London in June 2011; this figure comes from a single dealer listing rather than a primary auction house record, and the exact sale date could not be independently confirmed, so it should be treated as a reported rather than fully verified record. Other identified results are far lower: a lot in a "Sporting Art, Wildlife and Dogs" sale at Sworders realized GBP 2,600, though the exact title and sale date are not shown in the auction house's public listing; Aspire Art Auctions in South Africa recorded a sale of R7,387 for a single lot; and Strauss & Co's entire recorded turnover for the artist across auctions is ZAR 12,898. A Bonhams press release once carried a pre-sale estimate of GBP 10,000 to 15,000 for a bronze group of racehorses, but no confirmed hammer price for that lot has been located. Taken together, the evidence points to an artist with real but thin secondary market activity, traded mainly through UK regional saleroom sales and a small number of specialist galleries rather than through major international evening sales.

Skeaping's market is not well documented at the top end: no catalogue raisonne exists, no single gallery or estate holds exclusive representation, and the highest reported auction price, for a work called Figure of a Horse reportedly sold at Sotheby's London in 2011, comes from a single dealer listing rather than a primary auction record and lacks an independently confirmed sale date. Works appear periodically through UK regional auction houses and through dealers such as Jenna Burlingham Fine Art and Rountree Tryon Galleries, both of which have handled his sculpture and works on paper. Because his practice spanned bronze, wood, stone, and drawing, and because so much of his best known output sits inside museum and public collections rather than in private hands, collectors should expect limited supply and should treat provenance research, rather than any published price benchmark, as the primary basis for evaluating a given work.