Christie's to Auction Hepworth's Vogue-Featured Sculpture for £5M–£8M

Christie's will offer a Barbara Hepworth sculpture with an estimate of £5 million–£8 million ($6.6 million–$10.5 million) at its modern British and Irish art evening sale in London on October 21. The work, Sculpture with Colour (Eos), isn't just a market lot — it's one of the artist's signature objects, photographed for American Vogue in 1948 by Lee Miller.

Hepworth, one of Britain's best-known modernist sculptors, carved the piece in 1946 from a single block of Hopton Wood stone, a type of limestone. The roughly two-foot-tall egg-shaped form sits on a short platform and carries three hollowed-out areas painted pale gray, off-white and deep blue. Those colors, according to a Christie's statement, reference "the depths of the ocean, the boundless sky and the infinite reaches of the cosmos."

The color matters. Sculpture with Colour (Eos) counts among Hepworth's early works to bring painted surfaces into her carved forms — a shift in her practice that collectors now prize.

How did the sculpture end up in Vogue?

Lee Miller, the photographer and Hepworth's friend, shot the work at Hepworth's studio in Carbis Bay, on the Cornwall coast, in 1948. The image ran in the October 15, 1949, issue of American Vogue.

The black-and-white photograph shows Hepworth seated with her arms and legs crossed, a tea set in the foreground and a cat curled on a couch. Sculpture with Colour (Eos) rests on a table to her right.

Hepworth had moved to Cornwall with her family in 1939, before the start of World War II. Soon after Miller took the picture, she relocated to St. Ives, where her home and studio now form the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden.

What does the provenance tell us about the price?

The current consignor bought the sculpture at Christie's in 2016 for $5.4 million — well above its $1.2 million–$1.8 million estimate. The seller then was the estate of American philanthropists David and Geraldine Pincus, who had acquired the work from Martha Jackson Gallery in 1962.

The Pincus name carries weight beyond Hepworth. Their estate also sold Mark Rothko's Orange, red, yellow (1961) for $86.9 million in 2012, still the second most expensive Rothko sold at auction.

So the new £5 million–£8 million estimate implies a relatively modest step up from the 2016 hammer price of $5.4 million — a realistic target rather than an aggressive one, given how rarely major carved Hepworths come to market.

Why this work, and why now?

Alice Murray, head of modern British and Irish art at Christie's London, framed the sale around the sculpture's long public life. Sculpture with Colour (Eos), she said, "has been at the heart of Hepworth's story for 80 years."

Murray pointed to its inclusion in Hepworth's first postwar solo gallery show in 1946 and in "Hepworth in Colour," an exhibition on view at the Courtauld in London this summer. That museum exposure immediately preceding an auction often works in a consignor's favor: it reminds bidders of the work's institutional standing.

For buyers of modern British art, the October 21 sale offers a rare combination — a mid-career Hepworth with color, a Vogue pedigree and a documented Pincus provenance. If it lands within estimate, it will likely rank among the artist's top results at auction.