Barbara Hepworth's Parent I (1970) sold for £3.7m ($4.7m) on the first day of Sotheby's British and Irish art auction on November 22.

The lot is numbered two of four individual casts.

Barbara Hepworth produced a series of works based around the theme of family in the 1970s

It's from a series of works Hepworth produced in the 1970s around the theme of family, and is inspired by the totemic symbols of prehistoric societies.

Hepworth said of Parent I in a 1972 interview: "She is very female obviously, she is voluptuous, if she isn't carrying a child she has had about twenty".

Her record at auction remains £4.1m ($5m), set in 2014 for Figure in a Landscape.

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