Barbara Hepworth Sculpture Sells for £6.19 Million in London

A carved stone sculpture by Dame Barbara Hepworth, the British artist, sold for £6.19 million (US$8.3 million) at Christie's in London on 21 October. ArtNews reported that the price is a new auction record for a one-of-a-kind Hepworth work, meaning a piece with no copies. The auction house had estimated it would sell for between £5 million and £8 million.

The sculpture is Sculpture with Colour (Eos), made in 1946. Hepworth carved it from a single block of pale Hopton Wood stone. The title refers to Eos, the Greek goddess of dawn. Before the sale, Christie's called it Hepworth's "defining masterwork" in its announcement. The work had also appeared in the exhibition Hepworth in Colour at the Courtauld Gallery in London.

It was not the only Hepworth to sell well that night. Figure (Sunion), from 1960, sold for £4.12 million ($5.5 million). Sea Form (Porthmeor), from 1958, sold for £1.54 million ($2.1 million). Those three works were the top-selling lots of the evening sale. Together they made up more than half of the sale's total of £23.1 million ($30.8 million), according to ArtNews.

Christie's evening sale of modern British and Irish art was 30 percent higher than the equivalent sale a year earlier. A lot is the name for a single item put up for auction. After the Hepworth result, Christie's running total for its London auctions of 20th- and 21st-century art in October reached £278.6 million ($371.4 million).

Other British artists also set records at the same sale. Walter Sickert's The Horses of St Mark's, Venice (1901) sold for £550,400 ($734,000), the highest price paid for a Sickert at auction. Euan Uglow's Pyramid (1993-96) made £793,600 ($1.06 million). Gluck's Chromatic (1932) sold for £499,200 ($665,000). Eduardo Paolozzi's 9XSR (1958) made £204,800 ($273,000). Each of those prices is a new auction record for that artist.

Hepworth has held auction records before. In 2022, Christie's sold her Hollow Form with White Interior (1954) for £5,785,500, according to the auction house's artist page. The new result is higher than that figure.

Auction prices are the amounts paid in the sale room, and they decide who can afford a work and who can borrow it. For the people who pack and insure these objects, the sale also means one more high-value sculpture on the move.