Maquette, Theme and Variations relates to a large-scale mural commission which Barbara Hepworth received in November 1969 from Thomas Overbury, an architect and a director of Cheltenham & Gloucester Building Society. His practice Healing and Overbury were designing Cheltenham House, the Building Society’s new chief office. The mural sculpture was completed in 1972 and, though the company moved to different offices in 1989, it still adorns the building to this day (fig. 1). In October 2019, the building and Hepworth’s work were given grade II listed status by Heritage England. The reasons for designation attest to the importance of Theme and Variations : [A]s Barbara Hepworth’s final public commission this is a sculpture of superior artistic and aesthetic quality, resonating with her artistic vision that gained depth and complexity in her maturing years. It is an expressive, dynamic piece that elevates the quality of the elegant neoclassical façade of which it forms a part to achieve a bold and distinctive example of post-war commercial architecture. Hepworth subsequently used the mural’s maquette – itself made of painted hardboard – as the basis for Maquette, Theme & Variations, which was produced in two editions of six. The first edition was made using individually cast pieces of silver attached to a walnut wood base, while a second edition was cast in bronze. In addition to the plaster maquette, Hepworth made two further models as the basis for the silver/walnut wood and bronze editions of Maquette, Theme and Variations. Both of these models were donated to the Hepworth Wakefield in 2011. The Hepworth specialist and the artist’s granddaughter Sophie Bowness has described the process by which Hepworth moved from these designs to the finished, editioned works. These templates were made at Trewyn Studio by Hepworth and her assistants. The semi-circular elements […] were made of hardboard (as with the painted version) of various sizes and can be moved on their nails. This allowed Breon O’Casey and Bryan Illsley, who created both editions for Hepworth, to make each segment of the finished sculptures individually in silver or bronze. O’Casey (who had worked as an assistant to Hepworth ten years earlier) and Illsley made the polished bronze edition at Trewyn Studio and the silver in their own studio in St Ives. She added, ‘Dicon Nance made the walnut panels for the silver edition. Hepworth had found Morris Singer’s estimate for the silver edition too expensive.’ In a letter to Thomas Overbury, the artist described the semi-circular discs of the sculpture as ‘leaf-like segments’. While the formula of overlapping basic shapes is a routine compositional technique in constructivist modernism, as practiced by Hepworth and her contemporaries Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo and Moholy-Nagy, her use of these elementary forms was intended to evoke resonant analogies with the natural world. Several important works of Hepworth’s from the late 1960s make allusions to the sun and moon, including the pendant pieces Disc with Strings (Sun) and Disc with Strings (Moon) (1969) and Small Sun (1969). Maquette, Theme and Variations develops these works, breaking the circle form in two and arranging it to suggest the movement of the planets, falling leaves, a lapping tide, and any number of other such phenomena. Hepworth’s title also invokes a musical association. The central panel appears to be the ‘theme’, with these segments organised with the highest degree of order; this is the only panel where the segments do not break across the boundaries created by the wooden support. The two outer panels proceed to re-arrange and displace the segments, creating complementary distortions of the central panel. While the left-hand-side and central panels are both composed with seven leaf-life segments, the right-hand-side panel uses nine; this is also the most adventurous of the three, being the only one to reverse the straight side of the segment so that it seems to face the others. Sophie Bowness has noted that each segment was individually made, and it was this that permitted each piece to be cast individually in silver and subsequently in bronze. Maquette, Theme and Variations is catalogued in Barbara Hepworth's own records as BH512A. In 2011, the plaster maquette for the work was donated to The Hepworth Wakefield by two of the artist’s daughters, Rachel Kidd and Sarah Bowness. The second edition of this sculpture was cast in solid bronze and has been catalogued by Sophie Bowness as BH512B.