
Penny Day
Head of UK and Ireland
Sold for £206,500 inc. premium
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Provenance
C.S. Reddihough (purchased at the 1950 exhibition)
Exhibited
London, Lefevre Gallery, Sculpture and drawings by Barbara Hepworth, February 1950, cat.no.15
Bradford, Cartwright Memorial Hall, Golden Jubilee Exhibition; Fifty Years of British Art, 19 March-8 June 1954, cat.no.391
Literature
Herbert Read, Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, Lund Humphries, London, 1952, pl.118 b (ill.b&w)
It is quite likely the model for Seated Girl was Daphne Selfe, a dancer and model. In Alan Wilkinson's new book, The Drawings of Barbara Hepworth (2015) he comments, 'The recent recollections of the dancer and model Daphne Selfe, who posed for Hepworth in the early 1950s, offer an unexpected and invaluable record of their sessions together. In email correspondence to me, 28 August 2014, Selfe wrote:
"As a model for her in the 1950s [?] when I was 20, it was a nice holiday job...I didn't know Barbara very well – she was engrossed in drawing me and we did not chat much! She asked me how long I could stand for and I did the customary 45 minutes. She was very nice to work for especially as I was a dancer and she liked that."
And in a letter of the same date: "Yes, I did the standing poses for B.H. – but I probably did others as well – so long ago to remember!" (Alan Wilkinson, The Drawings of Barbara Hepworth, Lund Humphries, Farnham, 2015, p.90).
Whilst commonly referred to as 'drawings', the body of work Hepworth produced from 1947-1951 of female nudes are as much paintings, with their inclusion of oil on a gesso prepared surface. The present lot is refreshing and slightly unusual in that we view the sitter from the front with the elegant lines of her face in profile, whereas many of the paintings from this series concentrate on the model's back.