Winged Figure in 1961. John Lewis originally approached Jacob Epstein to create a sculpture to decorate the plain Portland stone side wall of the new store, but he declined as he was engaged on other commissions. Instead, in May 1961, John Lewis asked six other artists to propose designs. In addition to Hepworth – whose breakthrough public sculpture, "Meridian", had recently been installed outside State House on Holborn – the others were Ralph Brown, Geoffrey Clarke, Tony Hollaway, Stefan Knapp, William Mitchell and Hans Tisdall. None of their initial designs was accepted. Hepworth had been asked to express "the idea of common
Philip Hepworth by a hipped roof clad in pantiles." Another early design was that of an arts-and-crafts thatched house named 'Bolton Muir' (1930) in Gifford, East Lothian. In 1931, Hepworth was featured in a book by architectural critic Trystan Edwards. Published in Zug, Switzerland, this 91-page hardback book, part of a series on the leading architects of the day, was titled "Some recent work of Philip Hepworth". It was illustrated mostly with black-and-white photographs of the buildings designed by Hepworth. The embossed clothbound cover shows the Roof Garden House in Bickley, with the cover artwork described in 2015 by RIBA's British Architectural