Lot Essay
Alan Bowness says of the drawings of the 1960s (intro., Barbara Hepworth, Drawings from a Sculptor's Landscape, London, 1966, pp.23, 25) 'What has most notably happened is that the drawings have become much larger and grander in scale, and altogether more painterly, with colour playing an increasingly important role. They might more properly be called paintings. The boards are prepared as before with scumbled oil paint, making rich and variegated textures on which accents of stronger colour and thicker paint are placed ... at once suggestive of sculptural form, and yet also mysterious in a celestial way'.