OTD in early British television: 17 March 1939
John Wyver writes: After a concert from Jack Hylton and his band on the evening of Friday 17 March 1939, Alexandra Palace broadcast Animals, Anatomy, Artists, a talk by John Skeaping on ‘the three main types of animal art – documentary, creative and caricature’. He illustrated this with his own drawings (above) and with animals brought from the zoo which were described by naturalist and later noted author James Fisher.
Fisher was an assistant curator at the zoo in the 1930s, and was about to publish his first book, Animals as Friends and How to Keep Them. He brought to the studio two penguins, a mongoose, a goat and a kid, while Skeaping himself contributed two French poodles as additional models.
The programme was one of many pre-war talks dealing with the visual arts, to several of which Skeaping contributed. He was especially feted for his drawings and sculptures of animals, particularly horses, and in 1936 he had published the illustrated manual Animal Drawing: How to Do It.
Something of a forgotten figure now, if Skeaping is remembered at all it is as likely to be as the first husband of Barbara Hepworth as for his equine sculptures. The couple met when they were both studying in Rome in the early 1920s and they married in Florence in 1925. Their divorce was finalised in 1933, after Hepworth had fallen for Ben Nicholson, with whom she had triplets in 1934.
After the war John Skeaping taught sculpture at the Royal College of Art and was professor of sculpture there from 1953 to 1959. He moved to the Camargue in the south of France, published his autobiography, Drawn from Life, in 1977, and died three years later.
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