At intervals between 1947 and 1953 Hepworth produced a series of figure studies on gessoed board. Alan Bowness (Barbara Hepworth Drawings from a Sculptor's Landscape, London, 1966, p.20) comments on this series: 'We have two views of the same model, one subsidiary to the other. There is no suggestion of a fixed pose - which the artist dislikes intensely. She asks the model to move about naturally, pausing or resting at certain movements, but never taking up an artificial position. By preference she has used trained dancers on holiday, rather than professional artists' models.

[In the later group of figure drawings from 1952-53] the style is chunkier, and although the forms are flatter and sometimes even silhouetted one feels that the sculptor is more aware of the suclptural relevance of these drawings than she was with the 1947-48 group'