Lay's Auctioneers Puts Barbara Hepworth Miniature Winged Figure Up For £80,000 Cornish Sale

A 13-inch aluminium-and-string working model sculpted by Barbara Hepworth will cross the auction block in Cornwall on November 26 and 27, 2026, carrying a presale estimate of up to £80,000.

Lay's Auctioneers catalogued the piece for its flagship Cornish Art sale. Signed, dated 1967, and marked 5/9, the sculpture is an exact miniature iteration of Winged Figure, the monumental public installation mounted across the facade of the John Lewis department store on London's Oxford Street. Yet its commercial value hinges on an intimate personal debt. Hepworth handed the casting to Dr. Roger Slack, her longtime physician, as a private token of gratitude.

He was no ordinary village doctor.

The Physician Who Anchored St Ives Modernism

Slack moved to the rugged coastal town of St Ives in 1947 to establish his general practice. Within months, his examination room became the unofficial medical sanctum for Britain's postwar avant-garde. Slack tended to Hepworth, Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron, and Terry Frost. He saved the life of Irish painter Tony O'Malley on several occasions, forging a lifelong bond with the painter. But Slack did not merely write prescriptions.

Between home visits, the physician took up photography, documenting the changing light of St Ives throughout the 1950s. He recorded the oral histories of elderly townsfolk who had known Alfred Wallis, the self-taught marine painter whose naive seascapes reoriented British modernism. Hepworth took notice. She pressed Slack to author a book on Wallis, handed him blocks of her own carving marble to encourage his sculpting ambitions, and welcomed him into her working circle at Trewyn Studio. The 1967 gift of Winged Figure formalized that cross-disciplinary bond.

From Oxford Street Facade to a Private Token

Hepworth secured the John Lewis Partnership commission in 1961, beating six rival sculptors for the right to dress the retailer's flagship Oxford Street facade. She chose to dramatically expand an earlier 1957 motif titled Winged Figure. Completed and unveiled in 1963, the finished public work rose nearly six metres above the pavement, casting sweeping shadows along the capital's busiest retail thoroughfare.

British heritage authorities granted the Oxford Street landmark Grade II listed status in 2016.

The 33-centimetre model heading to Lay's Auctioneers captures that precise kinetic ambition on a tabletop scale. Its twin curved aluminium wings cradle crisscrossed tension lines, creating an evolving dialogue of shadows as ambient lighting shifts.

Bidding opens during the morning session of the Cornish Art sale at Lay's Auctioneers on November 26, 2026, with the lot scheduled to clear the block before the close of the two-day auction.