commission by the John Lewis Partnership in 1963 saw Barbara Hepworth develop one of her emblematic stringed works Winged Figure I for the façade of the Oxford Street flagship store. As the original version of this work comes to auction, we look back at the conception of this work, from the studio tucked away in the back streets of St Ives, to its landmark home in the heart of London.

Walking to work along Oxford Street, one autumn morning in 1961, Sir Bernard Miller suddenly had a revelation. The Chairman of John Lewis, London’s famous department store, looked up at the shop’s pale Portland stone façade on its southwest corner and realised that was the perfect spot for an artwork.

He got to his office and promptly wrote a letter to Barbara Hepworth, who had agreed to work on a sculpture for the building. “I thought the chief impact of whatever we put on this site would be upon people walking from Oxford Circus,” he wrote. “It would be desirable, particularly having regard to the intervening lamp-post, to site the sculpture as high up on the building as its scale and nature would allow.”

And so that was precisely where Hepworth’s Winged Figure – a monumental sculpture of a pair of wings opening like a vast clam-shell – would come to perch two years later. This autumn, some six decades on, Hepworth’s original work, Winged Figure I, on which the John Lewis work was based, comes to auction as the star lot of the Modern British & Irish Art auction at Bonhams, just a few hundred metres away on New Bond Street.