Modern British Women by The Fine Art Society

modern british women

Modern British Women 6 to 28 February 2017

1 4 8 new bond st r eet Âˇ london w1 s 2 jt + 44 (0)20 7629 5116 Âˇ www.thefineartsociety.com For sale enquiries please contact Rowena Morgan-Cox rowena@thefineartsociety.com

Modern British Women

The Fine Art Society london Âˇ 2017

British women artists at The Fine Art Society

As an Art History graduate who studied at a time when Gender Studies were an essential component of any university History of Art course, I am delighted that the gallery is devoting its February exhibitions to considering the ‘Woman Artist’ question. It is of course debatable whether the label ‘Woman Artist’ is a helpful one at all. I am sure Gluck, who provided the genesis for this series of exhibitions, would have disapproved. She spent her life bucking convention and deliberately blurring gender boundaries. Nonetheless it remains undeniable that women, who are also artists, have not enjoyed the same success and longevity of recognition as their male counterparts, specifically in a historical context. In terms of the market for Modern British artists, relatively few women are represented in museums or sold by commercial galleries. Exceptions to this rule include the magnificent Barbara Hepworth, who was able to shake off some of the responsibility of family and home that debilitated many of her contemporaries. This exhibition of Modern British Women seeks to uncover and emblazon the work of already celebrated and lesser-known artists from the early twentieth century onward. The Fine Art Society seems an appropriate venue for examining the history of women artists in Britain. One of the gallery’s earliest successes, in which we invested heavily, was Elizabeth Thompson’s Crimean War subject The Roll Call of 1874, one of the most celebrated pictures shown at the Royal Academy of Art that year. The gallery paid the enormous sum of £13,500 for the copyright, engraved plate and subscription list which included the Prince of Wales, various Peers of Realm and Members of Parliament.

In the first half of the twentieth century, as well as Gluck, the gallery exhibited the work of Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes in an exhibition entitled Children and Child Lore, in 1900, and Dod Proctor alongside her husband, Ernest, in 1913 and 1915. The gallery also showed Ithell Colquhoun’s Exotic Plant Decorations in 1936, which included works that disguised her Surrealist affinities. ‘Clematis, anthuriums, arums, magnolia, hibiscus and pomegranate flowers all indicate her fascination for elaborated shapes,’ wrote Michael Remy, ‘and hint at fantastic worlds inaccessible to rational man.’ In the latter half of the twentieth century the gallery helped restore interest in artists such as Gwen John and Jessie M. King. The lives and careers of Dora Carrington, Vanessa Bell, Anne Redpath and later Elisabeth Frink are already firmly embedded in the narrative of Modern British art. Yet it is clear from this exhibition that there are many other artists that deserve more attention for their contribution to Modern British art. It also provides an opportunity to consider what it means to be both a woman and an artist. rowena morgan-cox

Image: Mary Adshead, with her husband Stephen Bone, at work in their studio, 1935 © The Artist’s Estate, courtesy of Liss Llewellyn Fine Art 5

Mary Adshead

Mary Adshead was a muralist, painter, and designer. She studied painting at the Slade School of Art where she won joint first prize with Rex Whistler in 1924. Both artists were subsequently commissioned to paint murals for the Highways Club in Shadwell and would go on to collaborate on many projects together. Adshead received several prestigious commissions for public murals over her lifetime, although unfortunately many are no longer extant. These include murals for London’s Bank and Piccadilly Circus stations in the 1920s, Vauxhall Motors, Westminster Hall, and Luton Hoo House in the 1940s, and decorations for Selfridge’s restaurant. Additionally, she produced British postage stamp designs, London Underground posters, and illustrated several books. She exhibited work at the Applied Art Exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1926, and the Art in Industry Exhibition at Burlington House, 1935. She also exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy of Arts, and with the Women’s International Art Club, serving on their Committee in 1951. Her first solo show was held at the Goupil Gallery in 1930, and that same year she was elected a member of the New English Art Club.

1 mary adshead 1904-1995

An English Holiday - The Puncture - Lady Louise Mountbatten, c. 1928 Oil on canvas 851/2 x 47 in (217.2 x 119.4 cm) Literature: M.H. Clough & A Compton (ed.), Earthly Delights: Mary Adshead 1904-1995, 2005, p. 43 (listed as destroyed)

The British-Canadian businessman and politician Lord Beaverbrook commissioned a series of eleven panels for the dining room at Calvin Lodge, Newmarket in 1928. The Puncture is one of the surviving panels, known collectively as An English Holiday. The murals were described at the time as being in ‘the manner of English eighteenth-century sporting prints and acquatints’. Rex Whistler’s influence on Mary Adshead’s style is apparent in these canvases. The model for the female subject in The Puncture was Lady Louise Mountbatten, the eccentric Crown Princess (and later Queen) of Sweden, who was also a notoriously bad driver. Lord Beaverbrook withdrew the commission in August 1928, after the intervention of his friend Lady Diana Cooper on the grounds that Beaverbrook would quarrel with most of the people (his friends and acquaintances) who served as the models.

Gillian Ayres

Gillian Ayres studied at the Camberwell College of Art. She worked first in London and then in Wales before finally settling in Cornwall, where she still lives. One of the most prominent abstract painters of her generation, Ayres uses a tachist style of painting influenced by the American Abstract Expressionists to fill her canvases with vibrant colour and gestural movement. Ayres is also an accomplished printmaker. Ayres had her first solo exhibition at Gallery One in 1956, with other notable shows held at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, The Serpentine Gallery, The Tate Gallery, and the Royal Academy of Arts. She was elected a Royal Academician in 1991. Her work is held in many important public collections, including the Victoria & Albert Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Tate Gallery, London, The British Museum, and the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven. She has also held teaching positions at the Bath Academy of Art, Central Saint Martins, and Winchester School of Art, where she was head of painting.

2 GILLIAN AYRES b.1930 Abstract Ship, 1953

Oil on canvas, signed and dated ‘53 19¾ x 29½ in (50 x 75cm)

Gillian Ayres’s work has always been abstract, bold, and expressive. In this painting, the predominantly grey, white, and black colour palette is driven through with yellows and reds – bright colours that show the influence of Matisse, Van Gogh, Pop Art, and the Abstract Expressionists on her work. In her early paintings, Ayres ‘wanted the colour to speak, to resonate, to dictate the shapes, the mood, the tone... everything.’ The physical act of painting is clearly visible in this canvas; the artist has built up the surface in thick impasto so that it bears the marks of her brushes and hands. Although there are many possible visual associations one could make with this painting (perhaps smoke stacks, metal machinery, and even an anchor), Ayres insists her work is purely abstract and that her titles are arbitrary.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham

Born in St. Andrew’s in Scotland, Wilhelmina BarnsGraham studied at the Edinburgh College of Art from 1931-1937. She moved to St. Ives in 1940, where she met Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, and Naum Gabo and joined their influential Penwith Society of Arts where she began honing her geometric abstraction. She travelled abroad to Switzerland and Italy in the 1940s and 1950s, and later split her time between St. Andrews and St. Ives. When Barns-Graham first moved to St. Ives, she focussed on abstraction based firmly on perception, later moving on to more hard-edged geometric abstraction, before finally experimenting with more organic forms with a colourful, painterly dynamism in her later years. Barns-Graham exhibited widely throughout her life. Her work was included in the major exhibition St. Ives 1939-64 held at the Tate Gallery in 1985, and a retrospective of her work was held at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh and in Penzance. Her paintings are in many public collections in the UK including the Tate Gallery, the Arts Council and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

3 WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM 1912-2004 Black, White and Orange, 1954 Oil on canvas 233/4 x 41¾ in (60 x 106 cm)

Barns-Graham’s work from the 1950s focused primarily on abstract compositions and carefully arranged geometric forms inspired by the natural world around her. One source she particularly drew on was the rocky coastline, sandy coves, and beaches of Cornwall. These monumental prehistoric forms lent themselves perfectly to reinterpretation in her painted compositions.

5 WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM 1912-2004 Untitled, 1982

Collage 4 x 5¼ in (10 x 13.5 cm)

Untitled is part of a series of small-scale collage works Barns-Graham made between 1982 and 1986. Made during a period of ill health, these intimate works not only answered a need for the artist to adapt her practice, but also inspired a new form of expression. The building up of the surface with layers of paper achieves remarkable depth, pattern, and texture in her collages, which both correspond to and diverge from her painted work from around the same time.

4 WILHELMINA BARNS-GRAHAM 1912-2004 Dancing Squares, 1962 Mixed media on paper 10 x 9½ in (25.5 x 24 cm)

Barns-Graham began experimenting with the motif of small squares in the early 1960s. These simple geometric shapes allowed her to play with colour, movement, and form as she moved them around the canvas in picture after picture, creating different compositions. Introducing irregular visual rhythms into the ordered layout of the squares gives her works from the 1960s a great sense of dynamism. While the compositions appear random, they were in fact carefully planned: ‘things of a kind in order and chaos’, as Barns-Graham referred to them.

Vanessa Bell

Vanessa Bell was one of the central and founding members of the Bloomsbury Group, along with her sister Virginia Woolf, her husband Clive Bell, and many others including Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Roger Fry. Vanessa Bell’s early work showed a naturalist tendency, but following her introduction to Post-Impressionism in 1910 via Roger Fry’s first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, her painting became more radically experimental, simplified, and focused on form. Bell was one of the very first British artists to try a non-representational style of painting. Bell was closely involved in the Omega Workshops and Hogarth Press and continued her interest in the decorative arts throughout her life. Her figurative paintings tended towards domestic subjects, including interiors, landscapes of her immediate surroundings, and striking portraits of friends and family. Her colour palette showed the influence of post-impressionists such as Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh throughout her career. Bell lived with fellow Bloomsbury artist Duncan Grant for many years at Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, where the two worked alongside one another, critiquing each other’s work and welcoming the criticism of artistic friends and visitors.

6 VANESSA BELL 1879-1961

Portrait of Faith Henderson, c.1917 Oil on canvas 22 x 17¾ in (56 x 45 cm) Exhibited: Sussex, Charleston Gallery, Just Friends and Lovers? A Bloomsbury Portrait Exhibition, 2003; Bedford, Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, The Bloomsbury Effect, 2006; Sherborne, Sherborne House, Face to Face: Portraits from Joshua Reynolds to Julian Opie, 2006; International Krakow, Cultural Centre, British Bohemia: The Bloomsbury Circle of Virginia Woolf, 2010-11 Provenance: The Artist’s Astate; Private Collection, UK

This painting is typical of Bloomsbury Group portraiture: both Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell frequently used their friends, family, guests, and each other as models. Communal working was a common endeavour in Bloomsbury households, with each person present undertaking their own artistic or scholarly pursuit. Here Faith Henderson, wife of Hubert Henderson, the editor of The Nation and Athenaeum, and mother of Sir Nicholas Henderson, British Ambassador to Warsaw, Paris, and Washington, works industriously on her needlework while being painted. A less finished painting by Duncan Grant, undoubtedly painted at the same time as the present picture, shows the scene from a different angle (National Trust, Fenton House). Bell uses a distinctive style of brushwork in this painting which shows the influence of postimpressionist artists like Paul Cézanne on her work: short parallel brushstrokes in unmodulated colours create the modelling of the hair, face and clothing. An experimental use of colour (in this case contrasting bright red with muted green and using non-white highlights) was particularly prevalent in her paintings from the 1910s.

Sandra Blow

Born in London in 1925, Sandra Blow attended first St. Martin’s and later the Royal Academy Schools. In 1947 she travelled to Italy where she met and had a relationship with the proto Arte Povera artist Alberto Burri. His primitive style of painting had a great influence on Blow’s own painting style and inspired her to experiment with adding industrial materials such as sackcloth and tar into her compositions. Her gestural painting style, her knowledge of and willingness to experiment with materials, and her grand use of scale set her apart from her contemporaries. Upon returning to London in the 1950s, Blow found herself at the centre of the abstract art movement in Britain. She held her first solo exhibition at Gimpel Fils in 1951, and her work was featured in the 1958 Venice Biennale. She was awarded the International Guggenheim Award in 1960, and the second prize for painting at the John Moores exhibition the following year. Blow taught at the Royal College of Art for fourteen years and was elected a Royal Academician in 1978.

7 SANDRA BLOW 1925–2006 Tea and Ash, 1966

Acrylic and sand on canvas 27 x 231/2 in (68.5 x 59 cm) Provenance: The Artist’s Estate. Exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, ‘Sandra Blow’ 1994 (8)

Blow often incorporated non-traditional materials into her artworks, both as a formal experiment and as a tribute to Alberto Burri. In the present picture, sand has been used to create a rough texture and matt finish on the surface of the canvas while leaving the composition open and neutrally coloured. Blow’s improvisation links her to the style of abstract painting known as ‘art informel’, a term coined by the French art critic Michel Tapié in 1952.

8 SANDRA BLOW 1925–2006 Little River (Summer), c.1956

Oil on board, inscribed Sandra Blow/37 Montague Sq/ London W.1./Title: Little River (Summer)/(No.1)/Price £50 351/2 x 441/2 in (90 x 113 cm) Provenance: The Artist’s Estate Exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, ‘Sandra Blow’ 1994 (8)

By the mid-1950s, Blow’s reputation was already on the rise in the UK. After returning from Italy in 1950, her work had quickly achieved critical recognition through exhibitions in New York in 1956, and the purchase of her paintings by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate, and the Arts Council in London. Abstract Expressionism was also becoming well known in England around this time. The spontaneity of Little River Summer suggests that Blow had already studied works by these artists first hand. 16

9 SANDRA BLOW 1925–2006 Expanse, 2006

Mixed media on canvas 24 x 24 in (61 x 61 cm) Provenance: The Artist’s Estate

Blow moved from London back to St. Ives in the mid 1990s and continued working in her studio there until her death in 2006, the year this piece was created. Of her late St. Ives work, Blow said ‘Now I have more enjoyment, and knowledge of what happens when I do what I do. The pressures have gone, the striving to find something. I do work I know is good, and I know how to do it.’ The rough hessian cloth used in the present picture, which recalls her earliest mixed media works made in Italy in the 1940s, provides surface texture and compositional structure, as well as adding a natural element to the work.

Dora Carrington

Dora Carrington was a painter and decorative artist closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group. After training at the Slade School of Art, Carrington worked at the Omega Workshops, producing paintings and woodcuts, and also contributed illustrations to the Hogarth Press, run by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. A tumultuous personal life means that her oeuvre is inconsistent, but shows influences ranging from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Post-Impressionists, and shares many affinities with art by her Slade colleagues such as Mark Gertler and John Nash. Her style ranges from primitive or naïve to technically skilled. In addition to portraits and landscape paintings, Carrington also produced decorative art and design work. This included inn signs, tiles, paintings on glass, and decorated furniture. Her career was tragically cut short by suicide in 1932, just a few weeks after the death of her friend and her main love Lytton Strachey.

10 DORA CARRINGTON 1893-1932 Annie, c.1924

Oil on canvas 19 x 14½ in (48 x 37 cm) Exhibited: The Barbican Art Gallery, London, Carrington, 1984; International Cultural Centre, Krakow, British Bohemia: The Bloomsbury Circle of Virginia Woolf, 2010-11 Provenance: Noel Carrington; Joanna Carrington; Private Collection, UK

The eponymous ‘Annie’ in this painting was the goodnatured house servant who worked at Tidmarsh Mill, the home near Pangbourne in Berkshire to which Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey moved together in 1917. Here Carrington depicts her as an innocent, naïve figure, contrasting her simple clothing, plain features, and blonde hair against an elaborate floral background reminiscent of the primitivist paintings of Henri Rousseau.

Prunella Clough

Prunella Clough, born in London in 1919, attended the Chelsea School of Art and the Camberwell School of Art before contributing her skills as a draughtswoman to the war effort by drawing maps and charts. She became a leading figure of the post-war British art scene as both an artist and teacher. Her early works focused on subject matter including labourers and urban landscapes in London and East Anglia painted in a narrow tonal range, while works from later in her career tended towards abstraction. Clough’s artistic practice included painting, collage, drawings, and reliefs, all of which demonstrate her preoccupation with the formal qualities of colour, shape, and texture across media. Clough had her first solo exhibition at the Leger Gallery in 1947, with subsequent shows at the New Art Centre, Annely Juda Fine Art, the Whitechapel Gallery and the Serpentine Gallery among others. She was awarded the Jerwood Prize for painting three months before her death in 1999. In 2007, Tate Modern held a major retrospective exhibition of her work.

11 PRUNELLA CLOUGH 1919-1999 Bonfire, 1967

Oil on canvas 32 x 31.75 in (81.5 x 81 cm) Provenance: Sir Frederick Gibberd CBE, RA

Bonfire from 1967 is an example of her later abstract style. Although Clough’s works of the 60s and 70s became increasingly abstract, they were always inspired by the physical world around her. In the present work, she directly references the visual source in the title, creating a piece that is at once representational and abstract; an experimental exploration of the visual subject.

12 PRUNELLA CLOUGH 1919-1999 Cranes, 1952

Lithograph, signed in pencil Clough, lower right, printed in colours on wove paper 17 x 141/2 in (43 x 37 cm) Sheet 24 x 19 in (60.8 x 47.9 cm)

Cranes was commissioned by Rex Nan-Kevill of the Redfern Gallery in collaboration with the publishing house The Millers as part of a series of artists’ lithographs. Keith Vaughan, Robert MacBryde, and Robert Colquhoun, among others, were also commissioned to design works for the series. Clough drew the design directly onto transfer paper which was then sent to the printers, either Ravel in Paris or the Chiswick Press in London. Stylistically, Cranes relates closely to the paintings of industrial landscapes (or ‘urbscapes’ as she called them) that Clough was producing in the 1940s and 1950s. Even here, however, Clough is beginning to experiment with abstracting these familiar industrial shapes, employing them for formal rather than representational purposes.

Alice Fanner

Alice Fanner studied at the Slade School of Art and with Julius Olsson at St. Ives. She worked in both watercolours and oils, producing primarily landscapes and seascapes. Fanner had a particular interest in boats and yachting, which is apparent in her carefully studied marine paintings. Equal care and attention to detail was taken in her studies of trees and landscapes. She travelled to Paris at the beginning of her career before returning to London where she taught at the Richmond School of Art. Fanner exhibited widely during her lifetime, including the Royal Academy, the New English Art Club, the Royal Scottish Academy, the Royal Glasgow Institute, and the Women’s International Art Club. She was a member of the Society of Women Artists and of the New English Art Club.

13 ALICE FANNER 1865-1930 Spring in Hyde Park, c.1910

Oil on canvas, signed Alice Fanner lower right 25¼ x 30 in (64 x 76.3 cm)

People at leisure was a favourite subject of Fanner’s and one that she explored in various locations including Hyde Park, Runnymede, Hampton Court gardens, and the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. The relaxed picnickers, walkers, and families made ideal models and added interest and colour to the landscape, as exemplified by the woman’s pink dress and umbrella in the foreground of this painting.

Elisabeth Frink

Elisabeth Frink, born in Suffolk in 1930, studied at the Guildford and then the Chelsea School of Art. She was associated with the post-war school of British sculptors, which also included Reg Butler and Eduardo Paolozzi, though her work was more figurative than that of her contemporaries and tended to focus on naturalistic themes such as dogs, horses, birds, and male figures. Her unique sculptural practice is characterised by a rough, highly textured surface treatment. She was also an accomplished draughtsman. Frink’s first solo exhibition was held at St. George’s Gallery in 1955 and her first major public commission was the Harlow New Town Boar, and the Bethnal Green Blind Beggar and Dog soon followed in 1957. Other monumental commissions include the Risen Christ at Liverpool Cathedral, Eagle at the JFK Memorial in Dallas, and Paternoster in Paternoster Square, London. Frink was elected a Royal Academician in 1977 and was awarded both a CBE (1969) and created a Dame of the British Empire in 1982.

14 ELISABETH FRINK 1930-1993 Reclining Horse, 1975

Hand knotted tapestry, signed and numbered on attached label on reverse Edition of 25 70 x 99 in (178 x 251 cm)

15 ELISABETH FRINK 1930-1993 Reclining Horse, 1974

Pencil and watercolour, signed and dated lower right ‘Frink. 74’ 23 x 32¾ in (58.5 x 83 cm) Provenance: Commissioned from the Artist; Private Collection, then by descent

Reclining Horse was one of the first in a series of artists’ tapestries commissioned by the late collector and art dealer Barry Cronan from the 1970s to 2016. He commissioned around a dozen different designs from artists he knew personally, including John Piper, Peter Blake, Howard Hodgkin, and most recently Craigie Aitchison. Each tapestry was produced in an edition of between 20 and 30 by artisans in India using traditional dyeing and hand-knotting techniques and each is accompanied by a signed and numbered label from the artist who designed it. Due to the handmade nature of the tapestry making process, each one is unique. This is evident in the slight difference in colour between the tapestry of Reclining Horse and the watercolour design for it, also on display.

Gertrude Hermes

Born in Bromley, Kent in 1901, Gertrude Hermes studied painting and sculpture at the Beckenham School of Art and then Leon Underwood’s Brook Green School of Art in London, where she was a contemporary of Henry Moore and Blair HughesStanton, her future husband. Perhaps better known as a wood engraver than a sculptor, Hermes was a member of the English Wood Engraving Society, the Society of Wood-Engravers, the London Group and R.E. She was also employed by several private presses to produce illustrations for their publications and taught wood engraving and animal drawing at the Camberwell School of Art, Central School of Art, Saint Martins, and the Royal Academy Schools. She was elected a Royal Academician in 1971 and was awarded an OBE in 1981. While she received much acclaim for her engravings, her sculpture was not as frequently exhibited and less well known during her lifetime. Her sculptural work can be divided into two main strands: representational portraits of her friends, family, and commissions, and more abstract carvings of organic forms. Additionally, she produced designs for architectural and decorative features, which show the influence of her sculptor’s eye.

16 GERTRUDE HERMES 1901-1983 Rudolph Dunbar, 1946

Bronze 133/8 x 71/8 x 83/4 in (34 x 18 x 22 cm) exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1946 (1293); London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Gertrude Hermes: 1924-1967, 1967; Colchester, Minories, Gertrude Hermes ARA: Sculpture and Drawings, 1968; Brighton, Forum Gallery, 1972; Richmond, Southwell Brown Gallery, Works by Gertrude Hermes RA 1974; London, Royal Academy of Arts, Gertrude Hermes RA, 1981; Salisbury Festival Library Galleries, Gertrude Hermes Retrospective 1984; Redfern Gallery, London 1996 provenance: The Artist’s Estate literature: Jane Hill, The Sculpture of Gertrude Hermes, 2011 (cat. no. 91)

Early portraits of friends and family led on to a long career of commissioned bronze portraits, some of which are now in the collections of the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery. This bronze is of the Guyanese musician and composer Rudolph Dunbar. He was a pioneering figure in the world of classical and jazz music: having attended Juilliard in New York, he went on the have a successful career as a clarinettist in Paris and London, and was the first black conductor at the Royal Albert Hall and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra..

17 GERTruDE hERMES 1901-1983 Adam & Eve, 1954-5

Elm 48 x 161/8 x 15¾ in (122 x 41 x 40 cm) exhibited: London Group, 1955; Folkestone, New Metropole Art Centre, Gertrude Hermes ARA, 1964; London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Gertrude Hermes: 1924-1967, 1967; Colchester, Minories, Gertrude Hermes ARA: Sculpture and Drawings, 1968; Brighton, Forum Gallery, 1972; London, Royal Academy, Gertrude Hermes RA, 1981; London, Redfern Gallery, 1996 literature: Commemorative Art, February 1996; Harpers & Queen, 1981; Jane Hill, The Sculpture of Gertrude Hermes, 2011 (cat. no. 116). provenance: The Artist’s Estate

This work is representative of Hermes’s more organic, carved sculptures. Here the entwined figures of Adam and Eve have been hewn from elm with a finesse and delicacy drawn from her skills as a wood engraver, yet it still has the strong form and presence of a stone sculpture.

Winifred Nicholson

Born in Oxford in 1893, Nicholson attended Byam Shaw School of Art in London in 1912. She met and married fellow artist Ben Nicholson in 1920 and they exhibited together and separately over the next several years including at the Beaux Arts Gallery and Leicester Galleries. Winifred Nicholson became a member of the 7 & 5 Society in 1925. Following her separation from Ben Nicholson in 1931, Winifred moved to Paris where she met many artists including Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. She eventually moved back to Britain and settled in Cumberland, where she continued to paint domestic still lifes and landscapes inspired by her surroundings. She was always a colourist who worked in a personal, and sometimes impressionistic style. Major retrospectives of her work were held at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal in 1969, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge in 1972, and a major touring exhibition was organised by the Scottish Arts Council in 1979. Most recently the exhibition Winifred Nicholson: Liberation of Colour is touring England, in Middlesborough at the Institute of Modern Art until 12 February 2017, then in Nottingham and Falmouth.

18 WINIFRED NICHOLSON 1893-1981 Abstract Sequence, Untitled, 1935-6 Gouache on paper 16¾ x 13½ in (42.5 x 34.5 cm) Exhibited: Colchester, The Minories, 7 & 5 Society, 1979; London, Tate Gallery and toured nationally, Winifred Nicholson, June-August 1987 (66); The Fine Art Society London, Britain Between the Wars, 2004 (46) Provenance: Albemarle Gallery, 1987

Winifred Nicholson spent her winters in Paris from 1932-1938, following her separation from Ben Nicholson. She said she moved to Paris in order to ‘get to know about abstract art’ and this move did indeed mark a new style in her work. Prior to this, in the 1920s and 30s, Nicholson’s paintings had mostly focused on landscapes and still lifes, whereas here we see the influence of pioneering abstract artists such as Piet Mondrian, Hans Arp, and George Braque on her purely abstract work. Her engagement with abstraction was short-lived, however, as when she returned to the UK in 1938 under the imminent threat of war, she also returned to figurative and landscape painting, claiming that the emotional detachment required to produce abstract work was no longer possible in the aftermath of World War II.

Mary Potter

Mary Potter was born in Beckenham, Kent in 1900. She studied at the Slade School of Art from 1918-1921, winning a Slade Scholarship in 1919 and their first prize for portraiture. Potter was a skilled painter in both oils and watercolours, and her subject matter included landscapes, seascapes, interiors, still-lifes, and portraiture. Her style was influenced by Paul Klee and by Chinese and Japanese painting. Potter’s unusual use of colour illustrated her fascination with light and atmosphere, and allowed her to create ethereal, diffused light effects in her paintings. Potter was a member of and exhibited her work with several early 20th century artistic groups, including the New English Art Club, the London Group, and the 7 & 5 Society. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Bloomsbury Gallery in 1931. In addition to many shows held by London dealers, her work was also exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1964, at the Tate in 1980, and at the Serpentine Gallery in 1981.

19 MARY POTTER 1900-1981 Brighton Belles, 1946-49

Oil on canvas 24 x 30 in (61 x 76 cm) Inscribed verso on stretcher ‘Mary Potter, 135 Harley St, W1, Brighton Parade’ Provenance: J Walter Thompson Company Ltd Exhibited: London, Serpentine Gallery, and toured nationally by the Arts Council, Mary Potter: Paintings 1922-80, May - October 1981 (14); Newtown, Oriel 31 at the Davies Memorial Gallery, and toured nationally, Mary Potter 1900-1981: A Selective Retrospective, September 1989 - May 1990 (63)

While Mary Potter was living in Harley Street, London, she often retreated to a friend’s flat in Brighton where she was especially fond of painting the sea and people on the promenade during the winter months. The winter sunlight cast the seafront in the cool neutral tones Potter favoured, and encouraged her experimentations with the effects of light and atmosphere.

20â&#x20AC;&#x201A; MARY POTTER 1900-1981

Evening Light on Pine Branches, 1972 Oil on canvas 30 x 36 in (76 x 91 cm) Provenance: The New Art Centre

This late work is meant to be neither representational nor entirely abstract. Rather, Potter is drawing on a real visual source, hazy golden light seen through tree branches, to create a painted impression of the effect produced by nature with carefully balanced colours and shapes. In many of her paintings, Potter mixed the paint with wax and turpentine and did not use a shiny varnish in order to achieve a luminous but matt finish.

Anne Redpath

Anne Redpath OBE, born in 1895, was a pivotal member of the Edinburgh School. She studied at the Edinburgh College of Art, where she received her diploma in 1917, and then she and her architect husband lived in the South of France until 1934. Upon returning to Scotland, she took up painting again as a full time career. Her early work comprised intimate domestic scenes, interiors, Border landscapes, and still lifes, while later she captured scenes from her travels in an adventurous painting style that borders on the abstract. Redpath’s work was regularly exhibited at the Royal Glasgow Institute, the Society of Scottich Artists, the Royal Scottish Academy, and the Royal Academy of Arts. She was the first woman to be elected as a full member of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1952. She was awarded the OBE in 1955, and was made an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1960.

21 ANNE REDPATH 1895–1965 The White Azalea, 1951

Oil on canvas 20 x 30 in (50.8 x 76.3 cm) Exhibited: Edinburgh, Royal Scottish Academy, 1952 (344)

When Redpath moved from Hawick to Edinburgh in 1949, much of her work depicted flowers in vases and jugs or potted plants on tables. These simple but carefully constructed still life compositions allowed her to experiment with colour. Throughout the 40s and 50s, she employed a cool background tone against which she set more vibrant colours, such as the orange candlestick, orange armchair, and striped yellow jug in the present picture.

22 ANNE REDPATH 1895–1965 A Town in Spain, c.1963

Watercolour 101/4 x 121/4 in (26 x 31.1 cm) Exhibited: London, Royal Academy of Arts, 1963, (888); Kingston Upon Hull, Ferens Art Gallery, Collector’s Choice, 1970, (157)

‘I think I have always been interested in the structural quality of paint and painting, and I think what I have got out of different countries such as the Canary Islands, Corsica, Brittany and Portugal is something structural’, Redpath wrote. This interest in the structure paint can provide to a composition is illustrated perfectly by the present painting, in which she has built the Spanish town up layer by layer, using the paint to divide the canvas into small squares of colour.

23 ANNE REDPATH 1895–1965 The Old Harbour, Bastia, c. 1955 Oil on board 233/4 x 291/2 in (60 x 75 cm) Exhibited: London, Alexander Reid and Lefevre

Redpath visited Corsica in 1954. As in her pictures of Spain, she embraced Corsica’s bare and unpopulated landscape. In Spain, Redpath had found ‘dark grey skies and white villages’, but in Corsica she found ‘violet and scarlets on the hillsides’. The present picture is painted in a primitive and natural style, with a scumbled and heavily worked surface.

Muriel Wheeler

Born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire in 1888, Wheeler studied art at the Wolverhampton Municipal School of Art and Crafts, where she met her future husband, the sculptor Charles Thomas Wheeler. She began her career as a painter, exhibiting as such at the Royal Academy in 1919, before shifting her focus primarily to sculpture from 1925, though she continued to paint occasionally throughout her career. Wheeler was a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors, and served as a member of their council from 1946-1948. During her lifetime, her work was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Society of British Sculptors, Leeds City Art Gallery, and the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. Her sculpture is in the National Portrait Gallery collection.

24 MURIEL WHEELER 1888-1979 Self and Family, 1933

Oil on panel, signed and dated Muriel Wheeler 1933, lower right 22 x 28 in (55.3 x 70.8 cm) Exhibited: The Royal Academy of Arts, 1933, as Portrait Group (392), Royal Society of Portrait Painters (date unknown) Provenance: Private collection

While Lady Wheeler’s focus had shifted to sculpture in 1925, this painting, a self portrait featuring her family seated around the dining table, is undoubtedly one of her most accomplished. The surface of the canvas records the names of her sitters: her husband Charles Wheeler, and their children Robin and Carol. While Muriel depicts Charles, a sculptor and Royal Academician, wearing an artist’s smock, she has chosen to paint herself in a vivid red dress that is presumably not her normal work attire.

Published by The Fine Art Society for the exhibition Modern British Women, held at 148 New Bond Street, London, from 6 to 28 February 2017. isbn 978 1 907052 76 7 Catalogue © The Fine Art Society Text © The authors 2017 · All rights reserved Designed and edited by Rowena Morgan-Cox Catalogued by Helena Anderson Printed in Belgium by Albe De Coker

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