A child looking at Barbara Hepworth s sculpture Family of Man in Wakefield
Credit: The Hepworth Wakefield
“I don’t know if you remember me,” an art student wrote to Helen Kapp, director of Wakefield Art Gallery, in 1960. “You once purchased a pot cat off me.” Kapp was the doyenne of the Yorkshire art scene at the time, known for acquiring young artists’ work for the Wakefield collection.
This student enclosed a catalogue for his solo exhibition at Skipton Castle. Kapp sent her excuses – the bus trip to Skipton would take a day – but hoped that, when he was home in Bradford, David Hackney (as she misspelled his name) would show her his pictures. Sadly, no trace of Britain’s greatest living painter’s “pot cat” survives.