Dame Barbara Hepworth

Robin Ellett, by 1952
Sir Martyn Beckett, Bt
Crane Kalman Gallery, London, where acquired by the present owners, December 1982

London, Lefevre Gallery, Paintings by Barbara Hepworth, Paintings by L.S.Lowry, April 1948;
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective Exhibition of Carvings and Drawings from 1927-1954, April - June 1954, cat. no.89.

Herbert Read, Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, Lund Humphries, London 1952, illustrated pl.94a (as Reclining Form with Dark Red and Yellow). 

There are a few small depressions along the edges of the canvas board. There is a tiny area of fraying the top right corner. The surface has been heavily worked and is in good overall condition. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. Held under glass and presented within a metal slip in a gilded rectilinear frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Just prior to the outbreak of WWII, Hepworth and Nicholson moved down to Cornwall at the invitation of Adrian Stokes and Margaret Mellis, initially staying with them at their house, Little Parc Owles. The stay was not intended to be permanent but the movement of events led them to remain in Cornwall and they decamped to Dunluce, another house in Carbis Bay, just after Christmas 1939.

With triplets to look after, materials becoming scarce and space limited, Hepworth found that her opportunities for carving were becoming fewer and thus in the earliest part of her time in Cornwall, she 'could only draw at night and make a few plaster maquettes'. However, the possibilities of drawing soon became apparent to her and she found that they could be produced relatively quickly and provided a useful source of income during the war years, and virtually all her friends and collectors acquired examples, including Margaret Gardiner, Cyril Reddihough, Leslie Martin and Alastair Morton.

Once the privations of the war began to lift, Hepworth found that drawing was now solidly established as a key element of her work, and several themes began to emerge from this corpus. Although always described by the artist as drawings, the careful building up and working of the base surface, often gesso, the coloured washes and painted details make them more than simply drawings.

The rigorously linear structures of many of her abstract works in the 1940s have their genesis in a group of studies dating to 1940, such as Drawing (crystal) 1940 (formerly collection of the late Helen Sutherland) and use fine pencil lines to create a web of intricate three-dimensional forms, these lines often appearing to reflect her use of stringing in her own sculpture and also the use of translucent materials in the work of her friends Naum Gabo and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. 

The present example, executed in 1947, belongs to a group of works whose rigid geometry seems at first to be at odds with the figure studies and medical subjects which she was producing concurrently but in many ways they were all different explorations of the same concerns. Her spare line and use of base tone and simple blocks of colour to delineate the spatial relationships of the forms is not in fact that far removed from her figure studies of the same period and the title of the present work does indeed back up such a reading. It is also possible to compare Recumbent Form with Dark Red and Yellow with the studies and maquettes for a large carving for Waterloo Bridge on which Hepworth was also working in 1947, and although the Waterloo pieces are more sinuous in form, one can identify similarities in the overall shaping of the piece. The choice of the term 'recumbent' for the title, an unusual choice for Hepworth at this time, would have been immediately redolent of the pre-war sculpture of Henry Moore for contemporary observers, and emphasises the deliberate anthropomorphism of this work.

We are grateful to Dr Sophie Bowness for her kind assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.