The story behind Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece’s paintings ought to be better known than it is – something a new exhibition, ‘Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece: An Untold Story’ at Charleston in Lewes (the East Sussex property’s town-centre gallery) aims to put right.
After meeting at London’s Slade School of Art in 1918 the two women – both of them artists, one magnetic and flamboyant, the other shy but a prolific artist – would go on to forge a radical queer and creative partnership that would span a rich body of work over several decades: still lifes, drawings, and portraits. As far as the public was concerned these were Preece’s works; Hepworth, however, was secretly the artist.
