signed and dated ‘Barbara Hepworth 1948’ (lower left);
signed, inscribed and dated on the reverse ‘Barbara Hepworth/’Fenestration (the microscope)’/1948
Further information »
Fenestration of the Ear (The Microscope), 1948
Provenance:
with Lefevre Gallery, 1948;
with Susannah Pollen, 2006
Exhibition History:
London, Lefevre Gallery, Paintings by Barbara Hepworth, April 1948;
London, Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, Barbara Hepworth, Drawings from the 1940s, October – November 2005;
Woking, The Lightbox, 2D:3D – Discover the Art of Sculpture: Sculpture & Sculptors’ Drawings from The Ingram Collection, 1 February – 1 March 2008 (illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, no. 33);
London, Sotheby’s, Sculpture and Sculptors’ Drawings from The Ingram Collection, 10 – 21 January 2011;
Hepworth Wakefield, Barbara Hepworth: The Hospital Drawings, October – February 2013. This exhibition travelled to Pallant House, Chichester, February – June 2013, and Mascalls Gallery Kent, June – August 2013;
Bristol, Royal West of England Academy, Drawing On, 21 March – 7 June 2015;
London, Royal College of General Practitioners, Health and the Body, 3 March – 29 May 2016;
Hastings, Jerwood Gallery, Century: 100 Modern British Artists, 23 October 2016 – 8 January 2017;
London, Business Design Centre, London Art Fair Museum Partner, Ten Years – A Century of Art, 18 – 22 January 2017;
Berwick Visual Arts (Granary Gallery), Spirited – Women Artists from The Ingram Collection, 26 May – 13 October 2018;
Woking, The Lightbox, The St Ives School, 6 April – 23 June 2019;
Victoria Art Gallery, Bath, War and Rumours of War: 1940s British works on paper from The Hepworth Wakefield, 6 July – 15 September 2019;
Wakefield, The Hepworth Wakefield, Barbara Hepworth: Art and Life, 21 May 2021 – 27 February 2022 then touring to Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, April – October 2022
Literature:
John B. Booth, ‘Window on the Ear: Barbara Hepworth and the Fenestration Series of Drawings’, The Journal of Laryngology & Otology, Vol. 114, Royal Society of Medicine Press, April 2000 (illustrated no. 26);
James Holland-Hibbert, Barbara Hepworth, London, 2005 (illustrated, p. 61);
Nathaniel Hepburn, Barbara Hepworth, The Hospital Drawings, London, 2012 (illustrated, p. 114, 125)
Hepworth was invited by the surgeon Norman Carpener to attend the operating theatre and make sketches and later paintings of orthopaedic procedures at the Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Centre in Exeter. These studies form the great majority of Hepworth’s sixty-plus hospital drawings and paintings but there is also a small group of six paintings involving the delicate fenestration of the ear.
, 1948)
