Christie’s modern British and Irish art evening sale, taking place in London on October 21, will feature a mid-career sculpture by Barbara Hepworth with an estimate of £5 million–£8 million ($6.6 million–$10.5 million).
Hepworth, one of the most well-known British modernist sculptors, carved Sculpture with Colour (Eos) in 1946 from a single piece of Hopton Wood stone, a type of limestone. The approximately two-foot-tall egg-shaped sculpture sits on a short platform and has three hollowed-out areas that are painted pale gray, off-white, and deep blue, colors that reference “the depths of the ocean, the boundless sky and the infinite reaches of the cosmos,” according to a statement from Christie’s.
In addition to being an early work Hepworth’s to incorporate color, Sculpture with Colour (Eos) was also featured in a 1948 photograph taken by Lee Miller for the October 15, 1949, issue of American Vogue. Miller, who was a friend of Hepworth’s, visited the artist at her studio at Carbis Bay, on the coast of Cornwall, where she had moved with her family in 1939, before the start of World War II. (Soon after the photo was taken, Hepworth moved to St. Ives; her home and studio there is now the site of the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden.) The black-and-white photograph shows Hepworth seated with her arms and legs crossed, a tea set in the foreground and a cat curled up on a couch. Sculpture with Colour (Eos) is resting on a table to right.
The consignor of the sculpture purchased the piece at Christie’s in 2016 for $5.4 million (est. $1.2 million–$1.8 million) from the estate of American philanthropists David and Geraldine Pincus, who had themselves purchased it from Martha Jackson Gallery in 1962. (The Pincus estate also sold Orange, red, yellow, 1961, the second most expensive Mark Rothko painting to be sold at auction, for $86.9 million in 2012.)
Sculpture with Colour (Eos) has been at the heart of Hepworth’s story for 80 years, said Alice Murray, head of modern British and Irish art at Christie’s London, noting its inclusion in Hepworth’s first postwar solo gallery show in 1946 and “Hepworth in Colour,” which was on view at the Courtauld in London this summer.