Clara Klinghoffer. Part 3.

Marriage and travels.

Lucien Pissarro by Clara Klinghoffer (1928)

Clara continued to paint and produce beautiful works of art.  She worked constantly at her easel from daybreak till sunset.  She was awarded a bursary by the Slade allowing her to attend classes three days a week for a year and receive tuition from the Slade Professors of Art, Frederick Brown, and Henry Tonks.  However, Clara only continued with this tuition for a few weeks, preferring to paint on her own at home.  In 1921, the excessive workload she had given herself and her innate perfectionism finally took a toll on her health and she suffered a breakdown and suddenly the desire to paint had left her.  She was suffering badly both mentally and physically, losing weight and becoming gaunt.  She talked to nobody about her struggle and her parents could not understand why she spent little time painting.  Clara recognised that she was ill and tried self-help but with little success.  It was almost a year later when something strange happened to arrest this decline.  At the rear of their large house, beyond their garden, there was a low border wall, on the other side of which was a set of newly constructed tennis courts.  Clara and her sisters were fascinated and loved to watch the tennis players in action.  The courts were owned by a good-looking young man in his early twenties, Julius Abrahams. A close friendship developed and Julius had strong feelings for Clara.  Clara painted a full sized portrait of him but as Julius was engaged to another woman, Clara decided that a friendship was all she could offer Julius. 

Upon Reflection by Clara Klinghoffer (1919)

Clara continued to build up a portfolio of her work and a number of her drawings were due to be exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in Central London in June 1923.  Her drawings caught the attention of a certain Mr Smith who had contacted her and asked to see more of her work.  Clara was requested to visit his house in Gordon Square in Central London’s Bloomsbury.  Despite disliking trudging across London in wintry weather to visit a possible patron, she needed to sell work to fund her artistic materials and so on January 10th 1924, a Sunday afternoon, she headed towards Gordon Square and to her meeting with Mr Smith – a meeting which would change the course of her life.

Rose with a Mortar and Pestle by Clara Klinghoffer (1919)

Unbeknown to Clara her meeting with Mr Smith was not a one-to-one meeting but she was heading to his house where he was hosting one of his artistic soiree.  One of the regulars to these “parties” was an Italian journalist who lived in Hampstead with his fellow lodger, a Dutch freelance journalist, Joseph (Joop) Stoppleman.  Joop was invited by his flatmate to come along to the party and reluctantly agreed, on the pretext that the experience might even make good copy for an article.  On entering the drawing room of the opulent house the two journalists were greeted by raucous singing led by their host, Mr Smith.  Midway through the party the doors to the Salon opened and Stoopleman in his biography, Clara Klinghoffer, The Life and Career of a Traditional Artist described what happened next:

“…the Study door was opened and a small girl with beautiful auburn hair, entered, carrying a portfolio much too large for her to hold with any comfort…”

The revellers were bemused by the sight of this small girl.  Mr Smith, who was halfway through giving his rousing speech to his guests, stopped and rushed towards Clara, taking her portfolio from her and raising it in the air, whilst acclaiming:

“…”Now my young friends you will have the privilege to see art that is on a par with the work of the great Masters. And who has created it?  This little girl–Clara Klinghoffer. Mark that name well, for one day it will be famous…”

The portfolio of Clara’s work was then placed on the large table at the centre of the Salon and Clara showed each of her paintings and drawings to the guests.  They were all amazed by what she had created.  When the party came to an end Joop Stoopleman offered to carry the heavy portfolio for Clara until she reached the trolleybus which would take her home.  He wanted to see her again and was both surprised and delighted when Clara asked if he wanted to visit her at home and see more of her work.  He avidly agreed and they exchanged telephone numbers and a date was set for the next meeting.  This was the start of a long friendship which resulted in a love affair and which would eventually result in marriage. Joop was well received by the family but as a freelance journalist he knew he could not boast a regular steady income.  As for Clara, she relied on the sale of her work so that their combined income was somewhat irregular.

Harriet Cohen by Clara Klinghoffer (1925)

The new year, 1925, was a very busy time for both Clara and Joop.  Clara worked steadily on her drawings and paintings. One of her sitters was Harriet Cohen, the celebrated British concert pianist. At the same time, she was organising her work for a large-scale exhibition in the Redfern Gallery, in Old Bond Street, which was to begin in March of 1926. Clara had collected together twenty new paintings and some thirty new drawings. By the time she had put together sufficient work for the exhibition she was both exhausted and deflated.  Her spirits were lifted when she was invited to accompany her friend Mabel Greenberg on a month-long holiday in the Pyrenees.  Clara, on her return home at the end of April, was refreshed and was filled with ideas that could be used as depictions for her future paintings.  In parallel to Clara’s busy schedule, Joop had to go on a trip to Holland visiting chief editors, to see if he could find new outlets for his writing.

Portrait of a Girl in a Fur Hat by Clara Klinghoffer

During the New year celebrations of 1926, Joop and Clara decided that they would marry once the Redfern Gallery exhibition had run its course.  The exhibition which opened on March 9th was a great success and her paintings received much praise from the art critics.  The art critic of The Times wrote:

“…It is perhaps being wise after the event to say that “work has feminine characteristics when an artist is known to be a woman. But this is certainly the case with Clara Klinghoffer’ s exhibition of paintings and dnawings at the Redfern Gallery. That is to say she has the power to imitate with great skill the manner of another painter and yet of toning it down and adapting it to her own less emphatic means of expression, as Berthe Morisot did with Manet. Her drawings and small pictures, rather than her larger oils, show that she has real talent. Her drawings are by far her best work and please at once, though, while they are reminiscent of Leonardo da Vinci, they leave out his emphasis and thus their correctness becomes apparent only after close examination. As is the modern custom, they are intended to be works of art in themselves, not studies of works of art, and they do not show the curiosity of an artist who draws to find something out, not to produce a finished effect. They are sensitive, but not profoundly sensitive.  Mims Klinghoffer’s paintings are more under the influence of Renoir than of Leonardo, and in her biggest pictures she has tried to be more forcible than is in keeping with the character shown in her drawings…”

Portrait of the Artist’s Husband, aged 25 by Clara Klinghoffer

Once the Redfern Gallery Exhibition had completed, Clara felt utterly drained and Joop persuaded her to take a rest from painting and visit his homeland, Holland.  She agreed to the change of scene despite Joop not being able to accompany her from the start as he was committed to leading a tour party to Europe.  Joop arranged for her to stay with a family in the village of Voorthuizen and when, after six weeks,  Joop finally arrived,  the pair travelled north to his home town, Groningen and there she met Joop’s family.  Clara and Joop finally returned to London in June 1926 and their marriage took place on July 29th at the Duke Street Great Synagogue of London.  At the time of the wedding Clara’s youngest sister, Hilda had been very unwell.  Joop and Clara decided that as they were going to the warm weather of Southern France for their honeymoon, Hilda should accompany them so as to help restore her health.  All was agreed with the family and the three of them took the ferry to Calais and then the train south to Avignon for a short stay before arriving at their ultimate destination, the Côte d’Azur seaside town of Menton.

The Old Troubador by Clara Klinghoffer (1926)

The Menton pension they stayed in was very comfortable but quite expensive.  In fact, it was too expensive for them as they planned to stay in Menton for six or seven weeks.  Clara approached the pension owner and because they intended to stay a long time in Menton, he agreed to lease them a large house, Villa Aggridito, situated on the Boulevard de Garavan, on the outskirts of the town, and only charged them just four hundred francs a month.  They took him up on his generous offer.  One day whilst out walking they came across a man carrying a guitar.  In Joops biography of his wife he recalls the moment:

“…we saw a little man with grey hair standing in the middle of the right-hand lane. He was neatly dressed in black linen trousers and jacket and carried a large guitar on a leather strap across his shoulders. He had a long egg-shaped face, burnt a red brown by the summer sun. His straight nose had wide, sensitive nostrils; his large eyes were of a melancholy brown.   His forehead, wide and furrowed, blended into his high bald dome; and above both ears were thick tufts of snow-white hair.  On his open shirt collar a neat dress tie had somehow found a foothold. All in all, he made the impression of a musician on the way to an appointment, transporting his instrument in a somewhat unorthodox way.  As we approached, he quickly placed the guitar in position, and began to play. First a gay melody, then the popular ‘Valencia’ tune, of which he sang the words in a small, tremulous voice. We stopped and listened. There was nothing about him of the street singer. Rather, he seemed to be amusing himself and, accidentally, allowing us to share his enjoyment…”

The musician was Torquato Simoncelli and he came to their villa the next day and sat for Clara. It took half a dozen sittings for Clara to complete the portrait. On February 16th 1958, Clara wrote about that visit:

“…My husband and I spent the summer and autumn of 1926 in Menton-Garavan, close to the Italian border. It was there, at the border, that we met old Torquato Simoncelli, singing and playing on his guitar. This gentle and lovable old man came to sit for me on the terrace of our Villa, after his day’s work as a Troubadour was over (generally in the late afternoon). He sang, reminisced and played while I painted…. I did paint a second picture of him in another pose (this picture I still have)…”

………to be continued.

The information I used for this blog came from a variety of sources but the two main ones which would be of interest to you if you want a more in-depth look at Clara’s life are:

Clara Klinghoffer- 20th century English artist

and

Clara Klinghoffer: the girl who drew like Raphael and Leonardo

Clara Klinghoffer. Part 2.

The artistic road ahead.

“…I consider Clara Klinghoffer an artist of great talent, a painter of the first order…
Her understanding of form places her in the very first rank of draughtsmen in the world…”

Sir Jacob Epstein, London, March 30, 1939

Self portrait by Clara Klinghoffer

Fourteen year old Clara was just about to leave St Mark’s School and it is thought that it could have been the head teacher of the school, Mrs Sinock, who suggested that Clara should enrol at Sir John Cass Institute in Aldgate. Once there she was set the task to make sketches of statues such as Michelangelo’s David concentrating on the various facial attributes. Soon the tutors realised she had a natural aptitude for sketching. A talent which she achieved with little effort, one that amazed her tutors. Clara was happy at the Institute but that all ended when one of the young tutors acted towards her in a sexually inappropriate manner which frightened her. The pleasure she once had attending the classes vanished and she left the Institute suddenly without giving a reason for her departure. For a fourteen year old girl this must have been a shocking moment in her life.

Salman Klinghoffer -Man In A Felt Hat (‘Daddy’) by Clara Klinghoffer (1929)

Clara’s father was disappointed that his daughter had given up her art studies and one day whilst travelling home on a tram he caught sight of an advert for the Central School of Arts and Crafts which was situated in Southampton Row in the West End of London He then managed to persuade his daughter to come with him to the art school and enrol. She agreed and took with her a portfolio of her sketches. The principal took a look at her work and immediately offered her a place, starting that next Monday. On the Monday, Clara, who was still very small, arrived at her classroom carrying her huge portfolio case much to the amusement of the two tutors who were overseeing the students. One was Douglas Grant a British painter who became part of the Bloomsbury Set and the other was Bernard Meninsky, the British figurative and landscape painter who had immigrated from Ukraine with his family when he was three weeks old. On looking at Clara’s portfolio, Meninsky was astounded by the quality of her work and set her the task of sketching a cast of a hand. He was astounded by the result and likened it to that of Da Vinci drawings. Both Meninsky and Grant had witnessed such talent in a person so young as Clara and often her sketches were hung on the walls of the classroom. Also on the wall was a print of Botticelli’s Primavera which Clara said that she loved above any other work she had seen. Another of her favourite works was a black and white reproduction of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne which she had seen a few years ago in the local library. More and more, she became influenced by Italian art.

East End Girl with Dark Hair by Clara Klinghoffer

Meninsky went on to tutor Clara in life drawing and became an important influence on her work.  He also introduced her to a number of luminaries of the art world such as Walter Sickert’s third wife, Thérèse Lessore, a British artist who worked in oil and watercolour and was a founder member of the London Group, the English writer and painter, Wyndham Lewis, and the New York born sculptor, Jacob Epstein and his publicist wife, Peggy, who became her close friends.

Harry, Old London Man by Clara Klinghoff (c.1920)

Clara remained at the Central School of Arts and Crafts for two years and during this period would often spend time at her easel, sketching at the Victoria and Albert Museum and her favourite venue, the British Museum, where she became a regular and was well known to the security guards, staff and regular visitors.

Mother and Child by Clara Klinghoffer. Modelled by Clara’s eldest sister Fanny and her youngest sister Hilda (1918)

One of Clara’s fellow students at the Central School of Arts & Crafts was a young man called Seidenfeld, who was besotted with Clara but she alas did not return his amour.  He, like Meninsky, praised Clara’s work and would tell everybody who would listen, about Clara’s work and her extraordinary talent.  Word of this young artistic genius reached the ears of a journalist, Joseph Leftwich and he was so impressed by her artistic talent that he spoke of it to the post-Impressionist painter, Alfred Wolmark,   Wolmark had some of his work shown at the Hamstead Art Gallery in London and he persuaded Clara to put together a portfolio of her work which would be used in her “one-man” show at the gallery in May 1920.  That gave her twelve months to complete a collection which was good enough to be exhibited and this entailed a period of non-stop painting. The painting Mother and Child was one which was exhibited at Clara solo show at the Harpenden Gallery in May 1920. The show received rave reviews and of this work, The Sunday Times art critic wrote:

“…Clara Klinghoffer’s ‘ Mother and Child’ will appeal to ‘many as having more sheer beauty than any work in the exhibition. While exceedingly able in point of drawing, this moving painting of a mother just lifting her child “out of the bath delights one by the piquancy of its colour, the shimmer of light on the bare flesh being rendered with the tenderness of a Renoir and the dexterity of a Besnard. In its dazzling radiance it is a joy of pure colour…”

Portrait of a girl in a fur hat, with red background by Clara Klinghoffer

Portrait of Woman Plaiting her Hair by Clara Klinghoffer

In the end Clara submitted twenty-one paintings and thirty-two framed and glazed drawings. On May 3rd 1920 the solo exhibition opened. The London Evening Standard stressed the brilliant future this 19-year-old painter is destined to have. and it continued:

“…One of the most encouraging things about her work is that it gives frank and full expression to what may be supposed to be her racial instincts and interests. She likes exuberant forms and bright colours and says so when painting with commendable frankness. Her strongest point at present is the ease with which she can fill her canvas. Evidently, she has studied the Old Masters, particularly Leonardo da Vinci, to good purpose…”

In 1920, an edition of the The Jewish Chronicle sang the praises of Clara’s work at the exhibition writing:

“…Clara Klinghoffer, in her exhibition at the Hampstead Art Gallery, has clearly proved to be a truly great artist. Her drawings are very beautiful and quite remarkable for an artist scarcely out of her teens. One feels how very much she has been influenced by the Great Masters–by Raphael and by Leonardo for example. And yet, her outlook is entirely modern; she has absorbed the past and expresses herself freely, inspired but never enslaved thereby. Her paintings are always well composed and this is so whether a single portrait or a group is considered. She has a peculiar sense of colour and makes no attempt to get the correct tone, which fact accounts for the unreal appearance of all save one or two portraits. She apparently paints without much effort, and the spontaneity of her work is charming……. There is nothing shallow in Miss Klinghoffer’s genius. She is perfectly sincere and employs her extraordinary gifts for a definite artistic purpose, simply and beautifully, without the slightest trace of affectation…”

The painting Mother and Child was then put on display at the New English Art Club that summer and the press was full of praise for the work

Portrait of a Man (on Red) by Clara Klinghoffer

Meanwhile, her father’s “mill end” business was flourishing, so too was her mother’s clothes shop, so much so, the family moved to a large Victorian House in King Edward Road, Hackney.  Compared to their previous London homes, this was paradise.  It was large with a basement kitchen, large first floor living rooms and several bedrooms on the upper floors.  The increase in the size of their home was fortuitous as Clara’s mother gave birth to a three further children, all daughters, which meant the house was home to mother, father and seven daughters !  Business success for her father meant that he could afford to buy Clara all the materials she needed for her paintings.  He and his wife were convinced their daughter would one day become a famous painter.

Portrait of the Artist’s Sister Rachel (Rachel in a Red Dress) by Clara Klinghoffer

Clara would complete small paintings of the neighbourhood children but realised that for her own exhibition at the Hampstead Gallery she would need to complete larger works and so she turned to her sisters, (Fanny, Rose, Rachel, Bertha, Leah, and Hilda), whose ages ranged from four to twenty-one, to act as models, but most frequently Rose (who also sat as a model for the sculptor Jacob Epstein), and Rachel. This shimmering portrait of Rachel is made from delicate brushstrokes and this was a recognisable style of Clara’s portraits and establish her renowned warmth and understanding in the way she depicts her sitters.

Girl in the Green Sari by Clara Klinghoffer (1926)

This portrait, Girl in the Green Sari, by Klinghoffer was that of the Bengali artist Pratima Devi, the  daughter-in-law of the famous Bengali poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore.  Pratima often travelled abroad with him and they often visited Klinghoffer in her London studio. In all, she completed at least three portraits of Pratima: the first, in oils, around 1919-20; the second, a pencil head, which The Times, in 1924, considered it remarkable for the sensitive drawing and the suggestion of light. This later full-length painting was carried out in 1926, which was the year Clara married and her husband remembers Pratima’s visit and sitting for her portrait.  She wore the blue sari and was adorned with dazzling jewellery.  Clara had Pratima remove all the jewellery, maybe as she believed it would detract from the woman’s depiction.  We observe Pratima as a demure, maybe shy, woman with her eyes downcast, dressed in a translucent sari standing in front of a glistening backdrop.

Portrait of Orovida Pissarro by Clara Klinghoffer

Clara’s arresting portrait of her friend and fellow artist Orovida Pissarro was completed in 1962.  Orovida was born in Epping, Essex, in 1893, and was the only child of Lucien and Esther Pissarro. Her father, Lucien Pissarro was an acclaimed artist and graphic illustrator, while Lucien’s father, Orovida’s grandfather, was the renowned Danish-French painter Camille Pissarro who was a founder of the Impressionist movement.  Much to her father’s horror, Orovida turned her back on Impressionism – and even dropped her famous surname, wanting to be simply known as ‘Orovida’. Her reason for this was not because she wanted to cut herself off from her family ties but because she wanted to make her own way in life, on her own terms.  Clara has depicted the form of her sitter including her rounded belly and full face framed by her cropped hairstyle, which is copied in the curves of the chair.  Behind her we see a collection of inanimate objects which probably referred to items which often appeared in Orovida’s portraiture.

……to be continued.

Information for this blog was found in many sources but the most important ones were:

Clara Klinghoffer- 20th century English artist

Clara Klinghoffer: the girl who drew like Raphael and Leonardo

 

Clara Klinghoffer. Part 1.

Early childhood and teenage years

Self portrait by Clara Klinghoffer (1937)

“…Now universally recognized as one of the greatest English woman painters, she was a poor and utterly unknown young girl from the East End when her first exhibition took the artistic world by storm in 1919. Hailed everywhere as the girl who could draw like Raphael, her superb technique has always been compared with the Old Masters, but at the time of her first show she had never seen any of the great Old Masters pictures…”    

–Women of Today, 1932

My blog today looks at the rise of one of the great female artists. For Clara Klinghoffer’s life story, I want to go back to her paternal grandparents, Abel and Witie Stark who lived in in Szerzezec, a village some forty minutes by train away from the large town of Lemberg, known to us now as the Ukranian city of Lviv, but at the time of Clara’s birth in 1900 it was part of the contested region that was once Polish Galicia, but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Since Galicia had split from Poland and came under Austrian control, life had been good.  The majority of the population of the small town of Szerzezec were Jewish but they had a good working and social relationship with their fellow Christian citizens.  It was an easy-going and liberal place to live where both Jews and Christians realised they needed each other.  Abel Stark ran a grain business and had achieved lucrative contracts with the Austrian military.

 Portrait of Annie Salomans with her book by Clara Klinghoffer (1918)

In 1898 Abel and Witie had one major problem to solve.  Their eldest daughter, Chana Riza (Hannah), was twenty four years old and despite her father and mother’s attempts to find her a husband and that of the local shadchan (matchmaker), she remained unwed !  If it was a problem for them, it was also a problem for her two younger sisters, Sarah and Leah, as according to ancient custom, they were not allowed to marry until the eldest sister married first.  Eventually a “marriage candidate” arrived who was acceptable to both parents and Chana Riza.  He was Salman Klinghoffer.  To Chana’s father, Salman was ideal and would be able to work in the family business whilst to Chana herself he had all the physical attributes she found pleasing. 

Self portrait by Clara Klinghoffer (1955)

Chana Riza and Salman Klinghoffer were married on March 1st 1898 at a large ceremony attended by most of the townsfolk and the merriment lasted for many days.  The newly-weds moved into her parents home and Salaman began working for his father in law but Salman and his father-in-law did not get on well.  They were two totally different characters.  Abel Stark was shrewd, dynamic and very determined which was the reason for his success in business.  On the other hand, Salaman was a quiet and contemplative man and somebody who shied away from confrontations.  Chalk and cheese !  Abel soon became aware that Salman would not eventually be able to take over the family grain business in a partnership with Abel’s son Ephraim and Salman riled at being treated like a lackey by his father in law..

Untitled (Young Woman) by Clara Klinghoffer

Salman and Chana Rizi had their first child, Fegele, in early 1899 and later that year Chana became pregnant once more.  Her second child was born on May 18th 1900.  This second daughter was named Chaje Esther after her late maternal grandmother.  A third child, another daughter, Reisel, was born on April 4th 1902.  Although the grandparents were happy with the grandchildren, their happiness, at least in the eyes of Axel, was tempered by the fact that Chana Rizi had not given birth to any male offsprings.

Portrait of a Girl Reading by Clara Klinghoffer (1946)

Salman was fed up with life and working for Abel and soon on hearing many stories about the golden land of America decided that his future lay there and he would head there alone, get a job and then send for his wife and children.  Sadly Salman was a dreamer.    He broached the subject with Abel and Witie who did not oppose his dream and seemed to be pleased to be rid of him.  His wife viewed it differently but because she knew her husband was very unhappy, she believed he should grasp the chance to better his life and any way, soon she would join him.

Giuseppina by Clara Klinghoffer (1934)

Salman left Szerzezec but instead of going to America arrived in England in the city of Manchester and took a job as a presser in a tailor’s shop.  Nobody knows why he changed his plans of fulfilling his American Dream but maybe he had contacts in the northern English city.   At first he corresponded with his wife back home telling her what he was doing but there was never an invite for her and his three children to join him.  The arrival of letters from her husband soon became infrequent and eventually stopped altogether.  What had happened to him?  Had he taken up with another woman?  Had he become seriously ill?  Had he decided to journey on to America?  All were questions that Chana Rizi contemplated.  So in 1903, she took the momentous decision to go to Manchester with their two children Fegele and Chaje and look for her husband. Her youngest daughter, Reisel, was left with her grandparents.  Chana Rizi was just thirty years old and solo travel was hazardous and she would be arriving in a country whose language she could neither speak nor understand.  However, she did arrive in Manchester after a long boat trip during which time she was violently seasick and she eventually located her husband, much to his surprise.

Pastel portrait of Lucien Pissarro by Clara Klinghoffer (1928)

Salman was paid a pittance as a presser but Chana Rizi was determined to stay by his side so they could build a life together even if they all had to endure poverty.  It was also at this time that they changed the children’s first names.  Fegele became Fanny and Chaje Esther became Clara – Clara Klinghoffer.  The family could not make ends meet and so they moved to the Staffordshire town of Hanley.  Salman’s wages were better and Clara enjoyed the peace of the small rural town which compared favourably with the noisy and polluted city of Manchester but all was not well with the family dynamics and there was a rumour that Salman was having an affair with a local woman.  Chana Rizi, who was pregnant with her fourth child, packed their bags and demanded they returned to Manchester.

Harriet Cohen (pianist) by Clara Klinghoffer (1925)

The family arrived back in the city and rented a property at 18 Irwell Street in the Cheetham Hill district of the city and it was here in late June 1904 that Chana Rizi’s fourth child, another daughter, Rachel, was born.  Many years later, Chana went to visit a friend in London and when she returned to Manchester she announced to her family that they were going to move to the English capital and there would be a job waiting for her husband as manager of a drapery shop in Poplar in the East End of London, which would suit him better as the physical strain on him as a presser was proving too much for him and was affecting his health.  Salman went first to London to secure somewhere for the family to live.  He managed to rent a small East End flat in Puma Court, a tenement block off Whitechapel Road, close to Spitalfields fruit market.  Very little good could be said about their accommodation in their Puma Court flat or the neighbourhood and the smell of rotting fruit and veg coming from the market.

Clara’s early schooldays were ones she would rather forget.  Ferocious teachers who often meted out corporal punishment with a birch and unfriendly fellow pupils were things she had to put up with.  Added to that, her mother fell down the steps of their flat and broke her leg in a number of places which meant she had to rest up in bed with her leg in a heavy cast.

Pen & Ink fashion sketch from Clara’s childhood sketchbook (1913)

Salman was not happy working as manager at his cousin’s drapery shop.  He wanted to be answerable just to himself and so he looked to become self-employed.  He wanted to be his own boss.  He travelled back to Manchester where he set himself up as a “mill end” trader and arranged for bags of “end of roll” materials to be sent to his London home where they were stored in one of their rooms.  He and Clara’s mother then sorted them and Salman took them around various tailors selling the cloth.  The tailors in those days partly made their livelihood from repairing clothes and so needed various pieces of material.  Salman’s business prospered and he was soon able to lease his own shop in Grove Street, off Mile End Road in London’s East End, from where he would run his business and there would be accommodation above for the family.  Throughout the day, tailors would call at the shop looking for material.  Thanks to the support and ambition of his wife Chana, Salman had become a merchant – a profit-making businessman.  Around the early part of 1910 the family moved to another East End property, a roomier three-storey house at 148 Cannon Street Road where Clara’s mother had a dress shop and in April 1914 Salman Klinghoffer applied for naturalisation, probably due to the prospect of war in his homeland .

Photograph of Clara (c.1913)

Clara enrolled at St Mark’s School, a parish school serving poor and largely immigrant children, in nearby Cable Street and despite her sense of foreboding, she found she enjoyed school life and her favourite subjects were history drawing.  After school, Clara would return home and spend time in her mother’s dress shop and began to sketch some of the clients.  She would also spend time in the large attic which ran the whole width of their house and was used as a room to store her father’s mill ends. However there was a table in the attic at which she sat and sketched. This was her first “studio”.

Girl in Green Sari by Clara Klinghoffer

One of her mother’s clients, a young man, who saw Clara’s sketches told Clara’s mother that her daughter was very talented and she should take art lessons.  Clara’s mother was intrigued by the suggestion and she and her husband decided to do something to help their daughter. Studying art at an art school was very expensive but her father and mother managed to raise enough for her to enrol at the John Cass Institute, in Jewry Street, Aldgate. 

………….to be continued

Information for this blog was found in many sources but the most important ones were:

Clara Klinghoffer – 20th century English Artist

Clara Klinghoffer: the girl who drew like Raphael and Leonardo

Evelyn Dunbar

Detail from Self portrait by Evelyn Dunbar (1930)

Evelyn Dunbar was born in Reading on December 18th, 1906.  She was the fifth and youngest child of William Dunbar and Florence Dunbar (née Murgatroyd). William Dunbar was a Scotsman who originally came from Cromdale, Morayshire.  In 1913, when Evelyn was seven-years-old the family moved to Rochester in Kent where her father established himself as a draper and bespoke tailor.  Evelyn’s mother Florence was a keen gardener and amateur still-life artist and a Christian Scientist and soon Evelyn became one and remained one throughout her life.

Portrait of the artists mother, Florence, on a bentwood rocking chair, by Evelyn Dunbar (c.1930)

Evelyn Dunbar won a scholarship to attend the Rochester Grammar School for Girls.  From there she enrolled on a two-year art course at the Rochester School of Art, in 1925 and in 1927 attended the Chelsea School of Art remaining there until 1929.  That year, she won a scholarship to attend  the Royal College of Art where she studied until 1933 at which time she graduated as an ARCA (Associate of the Royal College of Art). Students at the Royal College of Art were encouraged by Sir William Rothenstein, College Principal and Professor of Painting, to find commissions for their work and engage socially with influential art world figures. 

Compositional Study for The Pleasures of Life at Morley College by Charles Mahoney (1930)

Cyril Mahoney, known as Charles Mahoney, had been Visiting Painting Tutor at the RCA since 1928 and had carried out a commission to paint a thirty-foot long mural, entitled The Pleasures of Life, at the Morley College for Working Men which he and colleagues completed two years later.  In his memoir Since 50, Men & Memories 1922-1938, the first two names that appear on William Rothenstein list of top Royal College of Art students were Henry Moore and Charles Mahoney – the list continues with the names of other leading lights such as Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Barnett Freedman Edward Le Bas, and Evelyn Dunbar.

Mural by Evelyn Dunbar at Brockley County School for Boys

In 1932, Mahoney was offered a commission to decorate Brockley County School for Boys (which is now the Prendergast School for Girls) in South London, and following an appeal from Rothenstein for students to experiment further with mural painting, Mahoney chose three of his senior students to assist in the project, Evelyn Dunbar, Mildred Eldridge and Violet Martin. The subjects of these proposed five arched-top panel murals were to illustrate tales from Aesop’s Fables.  The painting of this set of murals was not completed until 1936. 

An English Calendar by Evelyn Dunbar (1938)

During Mahoney’s work with Evelyn on the mural their relationship intensified and he became her lover.   Mahoney and Evelyn shared a studio in South End Road, at the southern end of Hampstead Heath.  Besides painting and sketching,  they had another shared interest, that of plants and horticulture.  Mahoney’s love of horticulture resulted in an amusing warning from Evelyn who wrote to him:

“…Don’t ever have too big a garden, or with your avidity for making the names in the catalogue come true, you’ll never touch a brush or a pencil…”

Whilst working on the Brockley murals Evelyn accepted another commission.  Near neighbours to Evelyn Dunbar and Charles Mahoney were Catherine and Donald Carswell, authors and journalists.  Donald Carswell had put together a series of short travel stories, to be published by Routledge & Sons, under the title, The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade-Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer and needed an illustrator to produce accompanying illustrations. 

Evelyn Dunbar: Pen and ink vignettes from The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade-Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer (1936)

They approached Charles Mahoney who recommended Evelyn.  She agreed to the commission and produced twenty-five pen and ink vignettes, the frontispiece and dust jacket for the miscellany. 

Evelyn Dunbar: Pen and Ink frontispiece to The Scots Week-End and Caledonian Vade Mecum for Host, Guest and Wayfarer (1936)

For Evelyn, it was not a labour of love and she wrote to Mahoney about her struggle to complete the commission asking for some moral support:

“…can you tell me why it is that whenever I get going on these blooming Scotch illustrations with vigour and spontaneity all my spontaneous and lively feelings completely desert me, and I am left clutching an unwilling, unwieldy pen, scratching at laborious and second-rate expressions of stereotyped and 5th rate (so it seems to me) ideas? I’m trying my best and I mean to get over it, but jobs of that kind seem to mesmerise me into a kind of stupidity and inability. Write me a few comforting and inspiring lines…”

With the success of the travel book more commissions came from the Routledge publishing house.  One of them was for the book, Gardeners’ Choice which comprised of the history, characteristics and cultivation advice for forty garden plants.  The book was illustrated in pen and ink, and was jointly written and illustrated by Dunbar and Mahoney.

Design for June for the Country Life 1938 Gardeners Diary by Evelyn Dunbar

More work came their way when the magazine, Country Life, commissioned Dunbar to compose their Gardener’s Diary 1938, a monthly journal and appointments book which contained literary texts chosen by Evelyn and illustrated with her pen and ink drawings.

In 1941 Dunbar collaborated with author, Michael Greenhill by providing pen-and-ink illustrations for his book, A Book of Farmcraft.  It was a basic primer of husbandry for those who had little or no knowledge of farming. Michael Greenhill was an instructor of recruits to the Women’s Land Army at Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester, Hampshire. Many of Evelyn’s illustrations, differentiated between the right way of undertaking some agricultural task and the wrong way.  For the illustrations, Evelyn used Sparsholt recruits as her models.

Putting on Anti-gas Protective Clothing by Evelyn Dunbar (1940) Composite image of a woman being assisted into an anti-gas suit by another woman

Having looked at Evelyn Dunbar’s mural work and her interest in horticulture, floral paintings and illustrations, one has to remember that she is best known for her depictions of the activities of the Women’s Voluntary Service and the Women’s Land Army during the Second World War.  In April 1940 Evelyn was appointed by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, (WAAC), as an official war artist and later was the only woman artist to receive successive and continuous salaried commissions throughout the war.  The WAAC tasked her with pictorially documenting civilian contributions to the war effort on the home front.

Milking Practice with Artificial Udders by Evelyn Dunbar 

Land Army Girls going to Bed by Evelyn Dunbar

One of the most important tasks for women besides working in munitions factory was tending the land as so many male farm workers had gone to fight in the war.  The first harvest which the Women’s Land Army was largely responsible for bringing in during the summer/autumn of 1940 led to Evelyn’s painting entitled Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook.

Men Stooking and Girls Learning to Stook by Evelyn Dunbar (1940)

One of Evelyn’s paintings, A Canning Demonstration,  depicted some members of the Women’s Voluntary Service learning how to can and preserve the fruit which had been harvested that summer.

A Canning Demonstration by Evelyn Dunbar

A Knitting Party by Evelyn Dunbar (1940)

Another important task for the women, who volunteered their services, was to organise knitting “gatherings” at which the women would make blankets and comforters which could be sent to the troops.  In her 1940 work entitled, A Knitting Party we see one such gathering.  The setting is the drawing room of the Dunbar family home in Rochester, Kent, and it depicts some fifteen women, one of whom is Evelyn’s mother,  Florence.

Portrait of Flying Officer Roger Folley in Flying Kit by Evelyn Dunbar

Whilst working for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee she encountered Roger Folley, who came from Lancashire and who had graduated from Leeds University.  Roger was an “outdoor person” and spent his holidays and time after university working on farms and enjoying life outdoors hiking around the countryside.  Having gained some experience working on farms combined with his two university degrees (B.Sc and B.Comm.) it qualified him to work as an agricultural economist and his first job was as Costing Officer at Sparsholt Farm Institute, near Winchester, where he first met Evelyn who had been posted there in 1940 to paint Women’s Land Army recruits at work.

Winter Garden by Evelyn Dunbar (1929-37)

Roger was a Royal Auxiliary Air Force volunteer and at the outbreak of war, was called up to serve in the RAF.  He received his Flying Officer commission in 1941 and transferred from the Voluntary Reserve and became Flight Lieutenant Roger Folley RAF, serving as a navigator with 488 (NZ) Squadron.  Friendship between Evelyn and Roger blossomed into love and the couple were engaged in February 1942 and married the following August  

Pastoral, Land Girls Pruning at East Malling by Evelyn Dunbar (1944)

One of Evelyn’s and Roger’s great mutual loves was their commitment to the land and the careful management of its productivity.  For Evelyn this premise was in line with her Christian Science beliefs which she continued to follow.  She believed in the texts of the Old Testament that talked about a covenant between God and encompassed a covenant, frequently mentioned in the Old Testament, between God the Creator and mankind whereby the creator guaranteed the means of subsistence to mankind in return for mankind’s undertaking to cherish the land with love, intelligence and industry.

Potato Sorting, Berwick by Evelyn Dunbar

Evelyn often followed her husband when he was transferred to another military base and once he was stationed at RAF Charter Hall in Berwick. Whilst staying at the Scottish Borders, Evelyn made a sketch of women from the Women’s Land Army sorting newly dug-up potatoes.

Sprout Picking by Evelyn Dunbar

Much of the Land Girls’ work on the farm was back-breaking as can be seen by Evelyn’s painting entitled Sprout Picking.

Singling Turnips by Evelyn Dunbar

Turnip seeds are minute and they are scattered in ridges by seed-drill.  However a few weeks after the seeds have been “mechanically” sowed, the seedlings will shoot up in their masses along with a profusion of weeds.   To avoid the turnip shoots being choked by the weeds they have to be thinned out by hand and re-planted, known as “singling” – hence the title of the painting.

A Land Girl and the Bail Bull by Evelyn Dunbar (1945)

One of the last paintings Evelyn completed for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, depicting the Land Girls was entitled A Land Girl and the Bail Bull.  It is a depiction of a Land Girl’s work with an outdoor dairy herd on the Hampshire Downs.  The name “bail” in the painting’s title refers to the moveable shed, which can be seen in the centre of the middle-ground and is where the milking is done.  The girl has to catch and tether the bull and we see her enticing the animal with a bucket of fodder whilst she hides the chain behind her, ready to snap on to the ring in its nose as soon as it is within her reach. The girl in the painting is modelled by Evelyn’s sister, Jessie .

The Cerebrant by Evelyn Dunbar

Once the Second World War had ended Evelyn and her husband went to live in Long Compton, Warwickshire, and they remained there for fifteen months.  In 1946 The Oxford School of Art welcomed Evelyn as a part-time tutor and she combined this with her role as a visiting teacher at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. Having these two teaching posts in Oxford and with her husband, Roger Folley, obtaining a position in the nearby University Agricultural Economics Research Institute, the couple decided to move home from Long Compton and re-locate to Enstone, Oxfordshire, in the spring of 1947. They made the  Manor House at Enstone their home for next three years. In 1948, whilst living at Enstone, Evelyn completed a portrait of her thirty-five year-old husband Roger, entitled The Cerebrant.  The setting for the work was his study on the top floor of The Manor House.  It is a peaceful and relaxed portrait of her husband. He is depicted sitting  down at a small table, which has various coloured books on it. One of the books is open and he is holding one of the pages in his right hand. He is looking towards his right, which is the direction the light is coming from. Folley is dressed casually in a green, short-sleeved, collared shirt. The painting was given that title by Roger Folley some fifty-seven years later when he presented it to Manchester Art Gallery in 2005.  He had told one of his wife’s biographers that It was a celebration of Thinking.

Bailing Hay by Evelyn Dunbar (1943)

Roger Folley changed jobs in 1950 when he was appointed to the Department of Economics at Wye College, Kent. The new position meant Folley and Eveleyn had to move home and they  leased an isolated house, The Elms, four miles from the Kent village of Wye, nestled in the hills of the Kent Downs.  Dunbar would run informal art classes but still managed to travel once a year to Oxford to give an annual lecture at the Ruskin School. In 1953 a solo exhibition of her paintings was held at Withersdane Hall on the Wye campus.

Women’s Land Army Hostel by Evelyn Dunbar

Roger Folley was away in the Caribbean working for the government whilst Evelyn remained at The Elms.   However their lease on the property was coming to an end and she had to organise a new home for her and her husband.   Evelyn chose a more modern property in the village of Wye, which had once been a vicarage. She named it Tan House.  It did not prove a good move and the couple were never happy there.  It was smaller than they were used to and did not have a studio space for Evelyn. In 1958 Roger and Evelyn, could no longer endure the limitations of Tan House and moved to a farmhouse called Staple Farm, close to the village of Etchinghill, on the North Downs and in this home Evelyn had her own studio.

August and the Poet by Evelyn Dunbar (1960)

On the evening of May 12th 1960, whilst out walking in the woods around Staple Farm, Dunbar suddenly collapsed and died. One of Evelyn’s last paintings was Autumn and the Poet which she had started to paint ten years earlier and was still on one of her easels when she died.  The figure of the poet, half-seated on the ground, was modelled by her husband.  Unfortunately the painting was slightly smoke-damaged in a house fire in 2004, but was restored in time for the 2006 exhibition marking the centenary of Dunbar’s birth.

Roadworks by Evelyn Dunbar (Thought to have been produced while studying at Rochester School of Art in c.1926) sold in 2018 for £19,000.

Her main works were her oil paintings but she also left behind many portfolios of watercolours, drawings, pastels, sketches and other secondary work, most of which were not seen for many years after disappearing shortly after her death.   The Times newspaper in its obituary of Evelyn Dunbar wrote:

“…Living a retired life in Kent, absorbed in country pursuits, Miss Dunbar did not often come before the public in mixed exhibitions, but her mural paintings and illustrations, with their peculiar authenticity of work inspired by the ruling passion, appealed strongly to those who knew it…”

Roger Folley remarried in 1961, and Evelyn’s works of art were distributed among family and friends.

I have only scratched the surface of Evelyn Dunbar’s life and the majority of the information was gleaned from a beautifully written series of blogs regarding this wonderful artist written by her nephew, Christopher Campbell-Howes, who has also published a book on her life an art work.

Southport’s Atkinson Gallery

The Atkinson Gallery, Southport

Art galleries or Museums of Art come in various shapes and sizes from the gigantic multi-room edifices such as London’s National Gallery, Paris’ Louvre and Madrid’s Prado, to small one-room private galleries.  The former is awash with works which would take you days to properly study them all, whilst the latter often contain less than fifty paintings and you are sometimes hard-pressed to see a work you like. 

A couple of days ago I visited Southport on the Merseyside coast, a seaside resort which is close to where I was born and lived for most of my life and yet I had never visited the town’s art gallery.  There was something about the site’s publicity I found off-putting.  You see, it was a multi-faceted building; part museum, part library, part café, part children’s playroom, part theatre, part bar, part locals selling their art and crafts etc etc., and yet there was only a small shop/theatre ticket office which had no literature on the permanent collection and as I feared, the room set aside for works of fine art was small.  However the works of art in the permanent collection, numbering about fifty, were excellent and for that reason I can recommend you visit their permanent collection.  Today’s blog is about some of these fine works. There were a number of paintings, presumably on loan, which belonged to the Harris Museum and Art Gallery in the nearby town, Preston, which had been closed whilst undergoing renovations.

A Golden Dream by Thomas Cooper Gotch (1895)

Thomas Cooper Gotch was an English painter and book illustrator.  He studied art in London and Antwerp before he married and studied in Paris with his wife, Caroline, a fellow artist, and when they returned to England, initially his works depicted the lives of Newlyn fisherfolk but after a visit to Italy his style changed and he began painting Symbolist images conjuring up dreamlike idylls of Arcadian innocence, in a Pre-Raphaelite romantic style.  Gotch exhibited A Golden Dream for the 1895 opening of the Newlyn Art Gallery.

Cordelia Disinherited - John Rogers Herbert als Kunstdruck oder Gemälde.

Cordelia Disinherited by John Rogers Herbert (1850)

The subject of John Rogers Herbert’s painting is Cordelia, a fictional character in William Shakespeare’s tragic play King Lear. Cordelia, along with her sisters, Goneril and Regen are the three daughters of King Lear. After her elderly father offers her the opportunity to profess her love for him in return for one-third of the land in his kingdom, she, unlike her two sisters, refuses.  Lear banishes Cordelia from the kingdom and disinherits her.  Cordelia is depicted as a saintly figure.  She looks impassive and wears blue and white clothes which remind us of depictions of the Virgin Mary.  Herbert painting is a detail from a large fresco commissioned for the Houses of Parliament.

The Orphan of the Temple by Edward Matthew Ward (1875)

On the face of it, we are simply looking at an elegant young lady painting en plein air.  The title of the painting does not offer us a clue as to what is going on in the depiction !  However, if I tell you that the young lady painting is Marie Thérèse Charlotte, the eldest daughter of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette you will realise that this painting depicts a little piece of French history.  In a brief synopsis of Marie Thérèse Charlotte  life : she was the daughter of Louis XVI, king of France and Marie Antoinette.  She was educated at French was imprisoned with her family in the Temple, originally a fortified monastery of the Templars and later a royal prison, in 1792.  Her mother and father were guillotined in 1793 although she was unaware of their fate at the time.  She was released from prison in 1795 and four years later married the Duke of Angoulême.  Later she lived in exile with her uncle Louis XVIII in various European countries.  The painting clearly contrasts the innocence of the young woman, dressed in white, with her gaoler who stands in the background.

On the Bridge by Stanhope Forbes (1925)

Stanhope Alexander Forbes was a British artist and a founding member of the influential Newlyn School of painters. He was often referred to as the father of the Newlyn School. This is the second time Stanhope Forbes painted this scene. The first was in 1888. The old bridge we see in the painting is in the Cornish village of Street-an-Nowan, in the lower part of the fishing town of Newlyn.

The Fish Fag by William Banks Fortescue (1888)

Fortescue was also one of the Newlyn School’s many Birmingham-born artists.  He began his career as an engineering designer but later trained as an artist. He studied art in Paris, and later travelled around Europe, reaching Venice in 1884.  On his return he exhibited many of his works depicting Venetian scenes at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. Fortescue went to live in the Cornish fishing town of Newlyn around 1885 and took lodgings in a house which also included Stanhope Forbes as another lodger.  This work by Fortescue was painted in the style of Stanhope Forbes and as is the case with this work, he used local people to model for his paintings.  The painting’s title Fish Fag is the term used for “Fishwife” and she would be in charge of cleaning the fish prior to them being sold.  Prior to the men setting sail in their boats the Fish Fags would also be tasked with baiting the hooks.  The little boy holding the toy boat and walking alongside the woman has probably been added by the artist implying that one day he will experience life as a fisherman.

Welcome, Bonny Boat! The Fisherman’s Return (Scene at Clovelly, North Devon) by James Clark Hook (1856)

The life of a fisherman is a precarious one, even in the present day but more so in the nineteenth century. Catching fish to feed the family was a necessity and sometimes the fisherfolk heading out to sea to bring home food and to eke out a living sometimes meant taking risks which often resulted in dire consequences. James Clarke Hook RA., an English painter and etcher of marine, genre, historical scenes, and landscapes, was born in London in November 1819.   Initially his favoured painting genre was history painting but then he turned his attention to genre depictions in rural landscapes.   He made several trips to Devon and the fishing village of Clovelly which in Devon stimulated him to adopt coastal scenes as his main motif but it was more than just depictions of the sea and boats as he incorporated figures into his paintings in order to highlight the hardship and rewards of life by the sea. He completed so many of this type of depiction that his coastal paintings were soon dubbed “Hookscapes”.  In this painting we see a returning fisherman being greeted by his family, all of who are relieved to see him back safely.

Katy’s Letter by Haynes King (1875)

Haynes King was an English genre painter, who was born in Barbados in December 1831. He came to London when he was twenty-three and became a student at Leigh’s later known as Heatherley’s Academy in Newman Street, London. In 1857 he exhibited some of his paintings for the first time at the Society of British Artists, of which he was elected a member in 1864 ; many of his works appeared at its exhibitions, and forty-eight were shown at the Royal Academy between 1860 and 1904.  He painted interiors, landscapes, and coastal scenes with figures. The motif in this painting centres around the letter which the young woman is reading.  The action of reading a letter was depicted in many paintings and became very popular.  The popularity of such a motif is probably because we are subconsciously being asked to imagine what was in the letter.  Good news or bad news?  We then put together in our minds a cover story both past and future for this young woman due to what she is reading !

The Argument by Tristram Hillier (1943)

Tristram Paul Hillier was an English surrealist painter and a member of the Unit One group led by Paul Nash . He was born on April 11th 1905 in Beijing, China, and was the youngest of the four children of Edward Guy Hillier, a banker and diplomat, and Ada Everett.  He attended Downside, an independent boarding school.  He later went to Christ’s College, Cambridge and later in 1926, the Slade, where his tutors included Henry Tonks.  From the Slade he travelled to Paris and studied for two years under André Lhote, and also at the Atelier Colarossi.  Whilst in Paris he mixed with many members of the Surrealist movement and was particularly influenced by Giorgio de Chirico and Max Ernst. He lived in France until 1940, but travelled extensively; he remained a surrealist painter throughout his life. His painting style is unique to him and if you look at some of his other paintings you will recognise similar characteristics.

The Children’s Prayer by Arthur Hacker (1888)

There were a number of paintings on show with religious connotations.  One such work was Children’s Prayer by the English painter Arthur Hacker.  Hacker was born in St. Pancras, Middlesex in September 1858.  In 1876, aged eighteen, he enrolled on a four-year course at the Royal Academy.  From there he went to Paris where he studied at the atelier of Léon Bonnat.  He became a member of the Royal Society of Portrait painters in 1894.  His paintings were shown at the Royal Academy on two occasions, in 1878 and 1910.  It was also in 1910 that he was elected as a Royal Academician.  He travelled to France, Italy, Spain and Morocco., and of the RA in 1910.  Hacker was most known for painting religious scenes and portraits.

La Prière du Matin (Morning Prayer) by André-Henri Dargelas (c.1860)

André Henri Dargelas, a French painter of the realist movement, was born in Bordeaux on October 11th 1828.  In his twenties, his paintings became very popular in England due to the positive assessment of his work made by the English art critic, John Ruskin, who liked Dargelas’ sentimental vision as seen in many of his paintings.  In 1857 he began to exhibit his work at the Paris Salon and the motifs of his paintings were influenced by the very popular eighteenth century French artist, Jean Siméon Chardin.

The Word by Keith Henderson (1931)

The above painting is more modern in comparison to those I have showcased earlier and some would say a more realistic view on religious trends and differing views of the old and young on the subject of religious worship. The Word was completed by Keith Henderson in 1931. Keith Henderson was a Scottish painter born in Aberdeenshire in April 1883.  He was one of three children born to George MacDonald Henderson, a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn, and Constance Helen, née Keith.  He attended Orme Square School in London before being admitted to Marlborough College, a prestigious Wiltshire public school. He then studied at the Slade School of Art before moving to Paris and studying art at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière.  During the First World War he served as a Captain with the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry where he spent time in the trenches acting as a war artist.  He recorded his time on the Western Front in a book, Letters to Helen: Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front, which included several of his illustrations.  During the 1930s Henderson returned to Scotland to live on the Isle of Barra in the Outer Hebrides where his paintings at the time depicted village life.  He was forty-eight when he completed The Word which depicts an old lady seen distributing free bibles coming across a group of young revellers who have just come out of the local pub.  They seem to be little interested in her offer. The depiction harks back to Victorian moralistic paintings.

By the Waters of Babylon we sat down and wept by William Etty (1832)

“…By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. 

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. 

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?…”

My final painting in this blog also has religious associations as it illustrates a passage from the tragic 137th psalm of the Book of Psalms in the Tanakh, the Jewish bible. The painting by William Etty, By the Waters of Babylon depicts the biblical story of the Israelites’ captivity in Babylon.  The psalm is a communal lament about remembering Zion, and yearning for Jerusalem while dwelling in exile during the Babylonian captivity.  The psalm reflects the yearning of the exiles for Jerusalem as well as hatred for the Holy City’s enemies.  In Etty’s painting the lyre can be seen hanging from the tree.   William Etty was an English artist best known for his history paintings containing nude figures. He was the first significant British painter of nudes and still lifes and in this “religious” painting the three women depicted are in a state of undress.

Isabel Codrington Pyke Nott

Portrait study of Isabel, by Philip Alexius de László, (c.1909)

In 1856, John Nott , the Lord of the Bydown Manor estate within the parish of Swimbridge, close to the town of Barnstable in Devon, died childless and his two sisters Elizabeth and Marianne became his co-heirs.  In 1838 Elizabeth Nott married Reverend John Pyke, and their son John Nott Pyke, became the heir to Bydown.  John Nott Pyke was educated at Eton College and Exeter College, Oxford and was an amateur playwright.    In 1863 John Nott Pyke received royal licence to assume the additional surname of Nott, in compliance with the will of his uncle and thus became known as John Nott Pyke-Nott. In 1867 he married Caroline Isabella Ward, a writer and artist.  The couple had five children, three sons and two daughters.   John Moels Pyke-Nott, the eldest and heir to the estate was born in 1868.  Caroline Evelyn Eunice Pyke-Nott was born in 1870 and Isobel Codrington Pyke-Nott was born in 1874 and it is this lady, a painter that is the subject of this blog.

Phoebe by Isabel Codrington

Isabel Codrington Pyke Nott, more commonly referred to as Isabel Codrington, was born on the Bydown estate within the parish of Swimbridge in Devon in 1874.  When she was nine years old she and her family moved to London.  In 1885 Isobel and her sister Evelyn Caroline Eunice were enrolled at the Hastings and St Leonards School of Art.  From there Isobel and her sister attended the St John’s Wood Art School which was a precursor for entry into the Royal Academy Schools which Isobel entered in 1889, aged fifteen. It was also here that her sister Eunice met her husband-to-be, the artist Byam Shaw.  Isobel soon displayed her artistic talent and won two medals for her work and she soon began to have her work shown at various exhibitions.

Paul George Konody by William Roberts (1920)

Around the end of the nineteenth century Isobel Codrington met a young and highly motivated Hungarian-born art critic, Paul George Konody who at the time was the editor of The Artist, and later became a regular art reviewer for The Observer and The Daily Mail. The couple fell in love and were married on October 27th 1901 in the romantic village of Porlock, an English coastal village in Somerset.  Isabel was twenty-seven at the time of her marriage and her husband, twenty-nine. She was now Mrs Isabel Konody. The couple went on, during the next five years, to have two daughters, Pauline and Margaret.

At this time, Isabel’s work featured miniatures and inventive watercolours, one of which won her a medal at the Exposition Internationale d’arte in Barcelona in 1907.  Isobel and her husband lived in London and hosted many parties for their artistic and literary friends.  Isobel’s husband was a keen motorist and the couple and two male companions, Gustavus ‘Dan’ Mayer, the art dealer, and ‘Pomponius’, the architect, Edwin Alfred Rickards, embarked on an exciting road trip in 1911 driving through France and then down the length of Italy from north to south through the Alps and Apennines, in what Konody described as a ‘noiseless’ thirty-horse-power steam driven landau.  Out of this momentous trip Konody published the account of their exploratory journey in a 1912 book entitled Through the Alps and the Apennines.

Mrs Konody sketching an ox-cart at Assisi. Photograph by Gustavus Mayer from P.G. Konody’s book , Through the Alps to the Apennines, (1911)

Cantine Franco-Britannique, Vitry-le-François by Isabel Codrington (1919)

Sadly Isobel’s marriage to Paul Konody came to an end around 1912 and they divorced in 1913.  That same year, Isabel married Gustavus Mayer, known as Dan, who had been with Isabel and her husband on their Italian road trip.  He was a director in the London art dealership, P & D Colnaghi.

The Beggars are coming to Town by Isabel Codrington

Having two young daughters and a new husband to look after curtailed her painting for a few years.  She remembered the time she returned to her beloved art in an interview with a reporter in 1918, saying:

“…I felt I would like to begin again…… I had forgotten almost everything…”

The phrase “getting back on the horse” came to fruition in 1919 when she received a painting commission from the Imperial War Museum for a painting, Cantine Franco-Britannique, Vitry-le-François, which depicted life at a French canteen during the Great War.  It is an interior scene of a canteen for French troops and we see soldiers sitting and standing around the tables talking amongst their comrades. In the right foreground we observe one soldier greeting another who has just come into the room. On the extreme left of the foreground, we see one soldier slouched over with his head resting on his arms on a table.

The Shrimp Girl by William Hogarth (c.1745)

The depiction of Costers, Hawkers and Gypsies became popular around the mid eighteenth century with the likes of William Hogarth’s painting, The Shrimp Girl. The painting was one of Hogarth’s later works and depicts a woman selling shellfish on the streets of London, which was typically a job assigned to the wives and daughters of fishmongers who owned stalls in markets such as Billingsgate. By the 1920s this type of depiction was favoured by the likes of George Clausen, who was one of Isabel Codrington’s most notable teachers.

The Old Tramp by Isabel Codrington (1926)

Her painting entitled The Old Tramp was well received by the critics and the art critic of the Colour magazine wrote:

“…At the present time Miss Codrington is among its ablest exponents as can be seen in this outdoor character study which is remarkably naturalistic and full of descriptive detail…”

The article also made reference to the plein air tradition of George Clausen and Bastien-Lepage.

Zillah Lee, Hawker by Isabel Codrington (c.1928)

Two years later in 1928 when her painting entitled Zillah Lee, Hawker was shown at the Paris Salon des Artistes Français, similar remarks were made about her depiction of the gypsy woman.  One French critic remarked that the depiction of the old woman was ‘sobres, très observés, traduites avec une grande simplicité de moyens, (simple, highly observed and translated with great simplicity of means). The exhibiting of her work that year was the fifth time her paintings had graced the walls of the Salon.  From Paris the painting went to London where it was exhibited at the Royal Academy.

The Onion Rover by Isabel Codrington

In the 1920s Isabel had her work exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and after 1923, her paintings could be seen hanging at the prestigious walls of the Paris Salon.  On one occasion she received a Mention Honorable from the Salon Jury. One of her favourite subjects for her paintings was that of peasant life.  She had exhibited works alongside the great George Clausen,  one of the foremost modern painters of landscape and of peasant life and maybe it was his influence that influenced Isabel. It could also be, despite her impressive circle of artist friends and the connections she made through her husband’s firm of P &D Colnaghi, that Isabel preferred scenes of peasant life which she would have come across during her travels through France, Spain and Italy. One of her “peasant” depictions was entitled Onion Rover.

The Old Violinist by Isabel Codrington (c.1933)

Fine Prints of the Year was an annual series of books that reported and discussed the etchings, engravings, woodcuts and lithographs published each year between 1923 and 1938 by major artists of the period.  Malcolm Salaman,  an art critic and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, who studied at Slade School of Art and Ruskin School of Art, Oxford,  explained in the preface to the 1933 volume of Fine Prints of the Year, why he had chosen to illustrate the distinctive figure of The Old Violinist in preference to Isabel Codrington’s consummate landscapes. He wrote about the subject of the print:

“…He is playing his way slowly along the poor street, his worn fingers touching the strings in no uncertain fashion, though his bowing is not perhaps what it was in his younger and more showy days. But there is something in the tone or the tune that attracts a small boy ambling along with his marketing mother. This etching is suggestive, the face, figure and clothes of the man show wear, but the fiddle is being strummed with a reminiscence that the child seems to recognise…”

Isabel often added distant figures to her etched street scenes, so to enrich the narrative element of the work.

Drowsy Summer Days by Isabel Codrington (c.1935)

In complete contrast to Isabel’s paintings depicting gypsies, beggars and the like, she produced one of her most sensuous works entitled Drowsy Summer Days. Isabel Codrington may well have seen paintings depicting provocative reclining nudes which were popular in the 1920s and 1930s but she has depicted the sleeping female in the most sensitive way. 

Grande Odalisque by Ingres (1814)

Her model’s sleek torso, pale skin, and the cool, silken cloths and cushions on which she rests, remind us of Ingres’ 1814 Grande Odalisque or the Venus of Urbino by Titian.. 

Venus of Urbino by Titian (1534)

In Isabel’s painting the woman’s body is bathed in the light from the fire in her boudoir on what appears to be a drowsy summer day. The young woman’s book has been set aside and her arms have fallen by her side, whilst her head has sunk into a silken pillow.  The painting was the last one she submitted to the Royal Academy.  Alfred Lys Baldry, the English art critic and painter commented on the work saying:

“…. it was an idealized rendering of the female nude as seen by a male painter and the frank fidelity of the female nude of the woman artist who has no illusions about the beauty of her sex…”

Morning by Isabel Codrington (1934)

Similar in some ways and yet in total contrast in other ways is Codrington’s 1934 work simply entitled Morning.  It was a masterclass on the use of light and shade.  Gone are the silk furnishings seen in her Drowsy Summer Days painting.  In this work we see a woman lying asleep in a simple metal bed. Her left arm lies outstretched towards the floor while her right hand clutches the sheets. The room is seedy and an untidy mess. In the room we see a plain wooden chair by her bed, enveloped with her discarded clothing and a melted candlestick.   In the foreground, the light from the morning sun streams through a window into the room. A breakfast table can be seen, cluttered with bread, cucumber, a bowl of tomatoes, a half-read newspaper, and a glass of water.  The lifestyle of the depicted woman could not be further away from the luxurious lifestyle of the female in the Drowsy Summer Days painting.

Wild Thyme Farm by Isabel Codrington (1927)

Isabel and her husband, Gustavus Mayer, moved to the village of Woldingham in Surrey, and bought a mock-Tudor mansion named Wistler’s Wood.

Isabel Codrington dominated the British art scene during the 1920s. Her landscape work was outstanding and her painting, Wild Thyme Farm was a prime example of her excellence.  The depiction with its foreground field of hay-stooks typifies a series of downland landscapes painted by Isabel on the estate surrounding her home at Whistler’s Wood, a forest in Surrey. The sun shines from the left on to the rolling hills and casts long shadows.

Frank Rutter, a British art critic, curator and activist who was the art critic for The Sunday Times, wrote about Isabel Codrington’s landscape works, saying:

“…since her art is based on simple domestic commodities and the homely landscapes and barns of the southern counties, Isabel Codrington has little need of an interpreter. Her pictures speak for themselves and speak simply but eloquently…”

The Lily Garden by Isabel Codrington (c.1935)

Isabel’s landscape paintings depicting rural scenes around her home, the Mayer estate, at Whistler’s Wood, Woldingham in Surrey, were shown at a 1929 exhibition.  During the 1930s, Isabel began to concentrate on etching and an exhibition of her etchings was presented at Colnaghi’s London gallery in 1933. 

Chrysanthemums by Isabel Codrington

In 1935 she submitted work for the Royal Academy exhibition for the final time.  Her final solo exhibition of ‘Flower Paintings’ was held at the Rembrandt Gallery in Vigo Street in November 1935.  During the final years of her life, she moved to Devon where she died in 1943, aged 68.

Below are some websites I used when compiling this blog and they will offer you further reading about the life and works of Isabel Codrington.

Lyon & Turnbull

Artvee

Christies

Elizabeth Harvey Lee:  Original Prints 15th – 21st centuries

Broncia Koller-Pinell

I was reading an article entitled A Forgotten Fame in the German Arts magazine, Schirn Mag.  It was about the life and works of the Austrian artist Bronislawa (Broncia) Pinell, later, Broncia Koller-Pinell and the headline read:

“…Broncia Koller-Pinell is listed as one of Austria’s most important female artists of the turn of the 20th century – but today her name has been almost entirely forgotten…”

She was an Austrian Expressionist painter who specialized in portraits and still-lifes. I was fascinated by what I read and so I decided to feature the young Austrian painter in one of my blogs. It is a strange story as she was listed as one of the most impor­tant Austrian artists of the turn of the 20th century – even though her name has by now largely slipped into obscu­rity.

Had you heard of her ?

Self Portrait by Broncia Koller-Pinell

Bronislawa (Broncia) Pineles was born on February 23rd 1863 in the town of Sanok, which is situated in the extreme south-east of Poland close to both the Polish and Ukrainian borders.  She was one of five children brought up by Orthodox Jewish parents, Klara Chaja and Saul Pineles, an architect of military fortifications.  She was the fourth-born of five children and had two older brothers, Markus and Stanislaus and an older sister Erika, and younger brother Friedrich. Later in life, Dr. Stanislaus Pineles, became a lawyer and lecturer at the University of Vienna, and Friedrich Pineles, a physician at the Wiener Allgemeine Krankenhaus and later head of the Franz-Josefs Ambulatorium.

Egon Scheile and his wife Edith by Broncia Koller-Pinell (1918)

At the age of seven, Broncia moved with her family to Vienna.  Her father had set up a manufacturing business just outside the city.  It was also the time when the family name was changed to “Pinell”.  Broncia developed a love of art and her father Saul did everything he could to nurture his daughter’s love of painting and sketching.  When she was eighteen, he had her receive private lessons from the sculptor Josef Raab and after Raab’s death in 1883, she was tutored by Alois Delug, the Austrian painter and later a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

Seated Woman (Marietta) by Broncia Koller-Pinell (1907)

In 1885, Broncia went to Munich and enrolled at the so-called “Ladies Academy” at the Munich Kunstverein and this presented the young painter with the oppor­tu­nity to further profes­sion­alize her skills in a single-sex art class.  The Munich Women Artists’ Association was founded in 1882 and according to the statutes, the primary goal was:

“…to give the ladies of the arts and crafts the opportunity for mutual stimulation in their work and mutual support in their endeavours, to raise a sense and taste for beauty and to develop artistic understanding in women’s circles more and more…”

Silvia Koller with Bird Cage by Broncia Koller-Pinell (c.1905)

It was during her five-year stay at the Lady’s Academy that she was able to study in the ateliers of the German artist and educator, Ludwig Heterich and Ludwig Kühn, the German Impressionist and Modernist artist.

The Artist’s Mother by Broncia Koller-Pinell (1907)

Broncia Pinell began exhibiting her work in 1888.  However, it was not until 1892 when she achieved her first success with her paintings when they were exhibited at the Künstlerhaus in Vienna.  The following year her paintings were well received at the Glaspalast in Munich and in 1894 at the Kunstverein in Leipzig.   In 1896 she exhibited her works for the first time at the International Art Exhibition in Vienna.

Sleeping Child (The Artist’s Daughter, Sylvia) by Broncia Koller-Pinell (1903)

The year 1896 was also an important one for Broncia for this was the year she married Dr. Hugo Koller, a German Catholic physician and physicist, who studied medicine as well as mathematics and physics at the University of Vienna.  This decision did not please her family because she was Jewish and her husband was Catholic and the children were raised as Christians, albeit Broncia did not convert to Catholicism.  After marrying, the couple lived in Salzburg and later Nuremburg where Hugo held a leading position at Schuckert & Co., a German electricity company based in the city.  Whilst living in Nurenburg, they had two children, Rupert in 1896 and Silvia in 1898.  More about them later.   In 1903 the family resettled in Vienna.

Nude standing in Front of a Mirror by Broncia Koller-Pinell (1904)

Once settled in Vienna, Broncia actively participated in the circles around the Vienna Secession, which was also known as the Union of Austrian Artists, or Vereinigung Bildender Künstler Österreichs.   It was formed in 1897 by a group of Austrian painters, graphic artists, sculptors and architects, including Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser, Otto Wagner and Gustav Klimt. The latter becoming a friend of Broncia and her husband.  The Vienna Secession was an art movement, closely associated with Art Nouveau.   The artists who formed this organisation were opposing the domination of the official Vienna Academy of the Arts, the Vienna Künstlerhaus, and official art salons, with their traditional orientation toward Historicism.  Broncia was also involved with the Wiener Werkstätte, which was an association formed and brought together architects, artists, designers and artisans working in ceramics, fashion, silver, furniture and the graphic arts. 

Die Ernte (The Harvest) by Broncia Koller-Pinell (1908)

Broncia’s husband Hugo Koller was an art collector and patron of the arts and he endorsed his wife’s artistic work and, through his good relations with the Secessionists and artists of the Wiener Werkstätte, he facilitated her access to exhibitions.  In 1898 the family moved to Nuremberg. In 1903 the family moved back to Vienna and lived right next door to the Theater an der Wien.  

Hugo Koller by Egon Schiele (1918)

Hugo built the first power plant in Lower Austria to power the factory in Oberwaltersdorf which was owned by his father-in-law, Saul Pineles. After the death of his father-in-law in September 1903, Hugo and Broncia inherited Saul’s Oberwaltersdorf estate and had the main residence extensively rebuilt. 

House Koller in Oberwaltersdorf (Vienna), Austria.

The couple would often entertain guests from the art world here such as Josef Hoffmann, Kolo Moser, Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt, as well as philosophers, musicians, and scholars. Broncia Koller had a special relationship with Klimt and his group of friends and she would exhibit her work alongside this group of artists and in 1913 she became a member of the Bund Österreichischer Künstler founded by Klimt, Moser, Hoffman, and others.

Erster Schnee” (Der Wiener Naschmarkt im Winter) by Broncia Koller-Pinell (1911)

Life’s pathway to being a respected artist was very bumpy for Broncia.  There were two main reasons for this.  Firstly she was a female and as such was looked down upon by some male art critics who, according to Albert Paris von Gütersloh, an Austrian painter and writer, despite her artistic accomplishments, her critics and even some of her “friends” labelled her with the stigma of being simply “the talented wife of a prominent husband” or “a painting housewife”.  Sadly, like many Jewish women artists of her time, Broncia Koller-Pinell was supposed to fit into the male-ordained female role of just looking after the family and the home.  The second reason as to why she had to fight all the way along her career path and parry male “put-downs” was that she was a prosperous Jew.  That duel factor, coupled with the growing anti­semitism in Austria after the First World War, was experienced ever more acutely by Broncia and other Jewish artists and their families.

Werden und Vergehen by Broncia Koller-Pinell (1920)

Bronica Koller-Pinell died in Oberwaltersdorf on April 26th 1934, aged 71. Her husband died in October 1949.

Junge Frau by Sylvia Koller (1924)

After completing her studies, her daughter Sylvia Koller worked as an artist in Vienna. She became a member of the Kunstschau and the Wiener Frauenkunst, at whose exhibitions she began entering her work in 1927.  Being Jewish, it is probable that she was no longer allowed to work as an artist after the annexation of Austria. In 1937, three years after the death of her mother, she returned to Oberwaltersdorf and became a carer for her sick widowed father. In 1961, she organized the first posthumous exhibition of the work of her mother, Broncia Koller-Pinell.  Silvia Koller not only posed for her mother several times but also for a number of artists including Egon Schiele. Sylvia died in 1988, two weeks before her eighty-fourth birthday.

Anna Mahler by Broncia Koller-Pinell (1921)

Anna Justine Mahler was the second child of the composer Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma Schindler.  At the age of 16, Anna fell in love with a rising young conductor, Rupert Koller, the eldest child of Broncia Koller-Pinell and Hugo Koller. They were married on November 2nd 1920 but their marriage ended within months.  She actually married and divorced five times during her life.  Robert Koller was conductor at the Municipal Opera House in Elberfeld.  He died in 1976.

I acquired a great deal of information for this blog from the following websites:

The Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women

Schirn Mag: Forgotten Fame

artvise.me:  Viennese Modernism, 6 important female artists from 1900-1938

Doris McCarthy-beautiful simplicity.

Doris McCarthy aged 96.

When I first saw the artwork of today’s featured artist, the phrase that first came to mind was “beautiful simplicity”.  I hope you will feel the same when you peruse this blog.  The artist I am showcasing today is Doris McCarthy, a Canadian painter, writer and educator and who is best known for her abstract landscapes.

Doris McCarthy was born on July 7th 1910 in Calgary, Alberta.  She was the youngest child of George Arnold McCarthy, an engineer, and Jennie McCarthy (née Moffatt).  Doris had two older brothers, Kenneth and Douglas. Because of her father’s job the family had to make many house moves.  In the Summer of 1912 the family moved to Vancouver, then Boise, Idaho that December.  The following Spring they lived in Berkeley, California and in the Summer of that year they had re-located to Moncton in New Brunswick, where Doris’ paternal grandparents lived. Finally in the Autumn of 1913, at the age of three, Doris and her family moved to Toronto where she spent her youth living in the east end of the city, in a neighbourhood known as The Beaches, on the shores of Lake Ontario.

Doris’ schooling started when she was five-years-old at which time she was a pupil at Williamson Road Public School in Toronto.  She remained there until she was eleven years of age.  She then transferred to the middle-school of the Malvern Collegiate Institute in 1921.  She remained at the Institute until she graduated in 1926.  As she began to enjoy sketching and painting, whilst attending the Institute, she also enrolled in Saturday Junior courses at the Ontario College of Art (OCA).  She showed such artistic aptitude during her time on these Saturday sessions that she was awarded a full scholarship to the college and started a three-year course in the Autumn of 1926. This was the start of her formal artistic training.

Hills at Dagmar, Ontario by Doris McCarthy (1948)

During her three-year stint at the college, she was mentored by some of the great Canadian artists such as Arthur Lismer, James McDonald and Lauren Harris who were founder members of the Group of Seven, also known as the Algonquin School of landscape painters, a group which was formed in 1920. These Impressionist painters loved to explore the uncharted areas of Canada continually recording through plein air sketches and paintings the beauty of their own country.  It was from their works that other artists realised what was on offer to those who would make the effort to discover the history, culture and geography of their fine nation and question the reasoning behind going to Europe in search of inspirational beautiful scenery.  Doris graduated from the college in 1930 and the following year she began to exhibit her work at the Ontario Society of Artists (OSA).  She was accepted as a member of the OSA in 1945 and later went on to become OSA Vice President from 1961 to 1964 and later, President from 1964 to 1967. 

Village Under Big Hills by Doris McCarthy

Was she influenced by these artistic luminaries?  In an interview in 2004 she cast doubt on that assertion, saying:

“…I don’t think I was ever influenced by the Group of Seven’s actual paintings.  I was influenced very strongly by the tradition of going out into nature and painting what was there. I bought it. And I still buy it…”

Sutton Village, Quebec Province by Doris McCarthy

Whilst at the OCA, Doris met and became great friends with a fellow student, Ethel Curry and the two would often go off together on painting trips together they spent many holidays painting in Haliburton Ontario.  Haliburton, to the north-east of Toronto, was very popular with tourists with its beautiful lakes and old cottages. It was also referred to as the Haliburton Highlands, due to its geographical similarity to the Scottish Highlands.  It was an ideal location for landscape painters such as Doris and Ethel.

Houses on the Neck, Salvage, Newfoundland by Doris McCarthy (1999)

Doris graduated from OCA in 1930 and worked for very low wages at Grip, an advertising agency where many of the Group of Seven had previously been employed. However, her future pathway outside academia was given to her by one of her tutors, Arthur Lismer, who offered her an opportunity to teach children’s art classes at the Art Gallery of Toronto, which she accepted and thus began her career as an educator. Doris also worked part-time as a teacher with Moulton College from 1931 to 1932, and that year enrolled on a twelve-month teacher training course at the Ontario Training College for Technical Teachers in Hamilton during the years 1932 to 1933.

 Asters in the Field at Fool’s Paradise by Doris McCarthy (1953)

In 1932 Doris, aged twenty-two, began teaching art at the Central Technical School in Toronto, and this began her forty-year period of teaching at this institute.  In her forties, Doris McCarthy’s reputation as a landscape painter had blossomed.   She had faithfully kept faith with the Group of Seven’s premise of “going out into nature and painting what was there” and it was on her many painting trips into the Canadian wilderness that she built up her work.  Some of the places she visited looking for inspiration were Haliburton, Muskoka, Georgian Bay, the Badlands of Alberta, and the Arctic. 

Fool’s Paradise

In 1939, whilst on a painting trip along Scarborough Bluffs she came across an abandoned property set high on top of a sheer section of the bluffs and along Gates Gully, a deep ravine at the end of Bellamy Rd.  The property was derelict and covered in poison ivy. However, it was the position looking out over Lake Ontario and other views over the tree-less farmland which appealed to her, and she decided to buy the plot of land.  It cost her $1,250 which was a “fortune” considering her teacher’s salary.  Her mother was horrified with her daughter’s purchase and referred to it as a “fool’s paradise”.  Doris was not deterred by her mother’s negative comments and designed a small single-storey cabin for the developed site.  During the following years she expanded the building and protected it against the harsh winter weather.   The State’s conservation authorities, wary of possible erosion of the land around her cabin, had trees planted around it but left the view of the lake unaffected.  The adjacent land was later subdivided into lots and a residential neighbourhood now surrounds McCarthy’s Fool’s Paradise.

Home – a painting of her home – Fool’s Paradise on the Scarborough Bluffs, Toronto, Canada by Doris McCarthy

Doris ventured further afield when she went on a year-long sabbatical to Europe in 1951 and ten years later another twelve-month sabbatical had her travelling through the Middle East and Asia, visiting far-off places such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Cambodia, just to mention a few.  McCarthy worked in both oils and watercolour and she cultivated a recognisable style of hard-edged angles, form and colour depictions.

Holman Island, Western Artic by Doris McCarthy (1977)

Using primarily thick oils and watercolours, McCarthy developed a style, often verging on abstraction, that was consistently praised for its vitality, boldness and skillful explorations of hard-edged angles, form and colour. In 1972, at the age of sixty-two, she retired from the Central Technical School.  She was interviewed by a journalist from the Huffington Post as to her life in retirement and she said:

“…When I retired from teaching, I thought that the next major event of my life would be dying.  There was no imagining that the best years were still ahead of me…”

For Doris McCarthy, retirement did not mean slowing down, for the following year after she retired, she enrolled at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus as a part-time student. Sixteen years later, at the age of seventy-nine she was awarded an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Literature on June 6th, 1989.

Iceberg Fantasy by Doris McCarthy

Dennis Reid is the author of The Concise History of Canadian Painting, which is considered the definitive volume on Canadian art.  He was also a curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario for over 30 years.  In his book of Canadian art he wrote about Doris McCarthy:

“…Following her retirement in 1972 from [teaching at] Central Technical School, Toronto, she began exhibiting commercially on a more regular basis, not just in Toronto but in Ottawa, Calgary and later Winnipeg, showing work that some saw as a fresh take on the Canadian landscape tradition. She made the first of a number of trips to the Arctic in 1972, and that encouraged greater boldness with light, colour and pattern, and in 1977 she began painting larger canvases that emphasized this confident command of formal issues even more.  She began showing with Aggregation Gallery in Toronto in 1979 (which became Wynick/Tuck Galley in 1982), and her subsequent regular showings there assured close critical attention to both the work of the half century already accomplished and the new, always fresh work that continued through the nineties and beyond…”

McCarthy painting at Grise Fjord, Nunavut 1976

Nunavut is the vast territory of northern Canada that stretches across most of the Canadian Arctic. It was created in 1999 out of the eastern portion of the Northwest Territories, Nunavut encompasses the traditional lands of the Inuit, the indigenous peoples of Arctic Canada.  Its name means “Our Land” in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit. The capital is Iqaluit, at the head of Frobisher Bay on southern Baffin Island.

Doris McCarthy, besides painting numerous works, also wrote three autobiographies during various times in her life.  In 1990 she wrote A Fool in Paradise a fascinating memoir of her early years. It describes the fortunes of an artist who was striving to establish herself in the art world of the thirties and forties and the journey made by a spirited girl searching for her own path to fulfilment. Against the backdrop of those early years, Doris writes of studying art in pre-war London, winning a teaching position in the depths of the Depression and roughing it on painting expeditions to northern Ontario, the Maritimes and the Rockies. She reveals stories of her personal life: of breaking loose from a disapproving mother, building her own home on the bluffs above Lake Ontario, and of finding love in unexpected places.

Her second autobiography entitled The Good Wine: An Artist Comes of Age describes her life from 1950 to 1991. It tells of the time at the age of forty, she broke free of her teaching responsibilities to take a year’s sabbatical in Europe as a full-time painter. It was to be the first of many adventures around the world which included a solitary round-the- world odyssey from Japan to Australia, India to the Middle East. She also discovered the Arctic and in 1991, Antarctica, drawing inspiration for her art and her life in the far-flung corners she visited and in the beloved landscape of her own country.  It recounts her meetings with Dorothy Sayers and Arnold Toynbee, and all the controversies associated with the fledgling Canadian art community.

In 2004, at the age of 94, Doris McCarthy published her third and final autobiography.  In this final autobiography, Ninety Years Wise, she focuses on her 92nd summer and she tells of the summer ritual of heading to her summer home, her cottage on Georgian Bay, painting and entertaining friends.

During her long life, Doris McCarthy received many awards.  She was the recipient of the Order of Ontario, the Order of Canada, honorary degrees from the University of Calgary, the University of Toronto, Trent University, the University of Alberta, and Nipissing University, an honorary fellowship from the Ontario College of Art and Design and also had a gallery named in her honour on the Scarborough campus at the University of Toronto. 

Doris McCarthy died at her Fool’s Paradise home on November 25, 2010, aged 100. She is buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Her Fool’s Paradise property now functions as an artist’s residence, the Doris McCarthy Artist-in-Residence Centre, and is in part funded by the Ontario Heritage Trust.

Some of the information for this blog came from the following websites:

The Life of Doris McCarthy. University of Toronto

https://doris.digital.utsc.utoronto.ca/content/life-doris-mccarthy

American Women Artists

https://americanwomenartists.org/rediscovered-women-artists-doris-mccarthy/

Fool’s Paradise Guided Tour

Doris McCarthy Gallery – Fool’s Paradise Guided Tour (utoronto.ca)

The Knip Dynasty of Artists

(Left click on family tree for larger view)

Nicolaas Frederik Knip (1741-1808)

A Stone Urn with Flowers and Fruit by Nicolaas Frederik Knip

In this blog I am looking at the Knip family, a Dutch artistic dynasty, a multi-generation of talented painters. To begin this journey I go back to February 12th, 1741 and the birth of Nicolaas Frederik Knip in the Dutch town of Nijmegen, which lies close to the German border. During the first thirty years of his life, he earned money for his family as a travelling painter picking up commissions on his journeys.  His favoured genre was painting wallpapers for large residences, painting advertising signs for inns and various businesses.  In 1774, a year after moving to Tilburg, he married Anna Elisabeth Drexler the daughter of Matthijs Drexler, the keeper of Tilburg Castle. The couple went on to have five children, four of who, like their father, became well-known artists. They were Josephus Augustus Knip, Mattheus Derk Knip, Henriëtta Geertrui Knip and Frederik Willem Knip. After his marriage, Nicolaas Knip started painting floral still lifes and landscapes.

Saint Nicholas as Patron of the Butchers’ Guild (1789)

In 1787 Nicolaas Knip moved to Den Bosch and two years later, he collaborated with the Dutch painter Quirinus van Amelsfoort on the large painting (220 x 530 cms) commemorating the fourth century saint, St Nicholas of Myra as the Patron of the Butchers’ Guild.  We see the bishop in the centre of the work holding out his hands to three children. At the top right are some angels who have alerted the saint to the incident.   The depiction refers to the legend that through his fervent prayer the saint brings to life the children and is a reminder of the gruesome tale which tells of three children who, at the time of a famine, were cut into pieces by a butcher and pickled in a barrel.  It now hangs in the Den Bosch town hall. For the last 12 years of his life, Knip was completely blind. He died in Den Bosch in 1808.

Josephus Augustus Knip (1787-1847)

The Shelling of ‘s-Hertogenbosch during the French Revolutionary Wars  by Josephus Augustus Knip (1800)

Josephus Augustus Knip was the eldest child of Nicolaas and Anna Knip (née Drexler).  He was baptized on August 3rd 1777.  In 1788, when he was eleven years old, he moved with his family to ‘s-Hertogenbosch. His father was his first art tutor.   Unfortunately when his father’s eyesight deteriorated and eventually became blind in 1796, Josephus had to take on the role as breadwinner.  In 1801 at the age of twenty-four, he built up a reputation as a landscape artist in Paris, where he accepted commissions for topographical landscape works. He spent nine years in Paris during which time he became drawing master to Napoleon III of France. Josephus left Paris at the end of 1809 and travelled to Italy and based himself in Rome for three years. 

The Gulf of Naples with the Island of Ischia and the Epomeo Volcano in the Background by Josephus Augustus Knip (1818)

During those three years he made many painting depicting Naples, the Sabine Hills, the Alban Hills, and the Campagna.  He was greatly influenced by the panoramic landscapes he saw during his travels. He made numerous detailed sketches which he would later convert into beautiful watercolour and oil paintings. One such work from his days in Italy is his 1818 work entitled The Gulf of Naples, with the Island of Ischia and the Epomeo volcano in the background. Also depicted are the Roman monuments. You can see the ruins of the Colosseum on the left, the aqueduct of Nero and the monastery church Quattro Coronati. In 1813, Josephus went back to his Dutch homeland with his wife, the painter Pauline Rifer de Courcelles, whom he had married in 1808. He settled in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, where he set up his studio. Later he lived in Amsterdam. His career was cut short in the late 1820s when he lost the sight of one eye. By 1832 he was completely blind. He died at the end of September 1847, aged 70.

Illustration by Pauline Rifer De Courcelles femme Knip for the book, Les Pigeons.

There is some doubt as to Henriëtte’s mother, as at the time of her birth in 1821, Josephus and Pauline were living apart, their marriage had been a disaster as they were such different characters and incompatible.  Josephus was then living with his mistress, Cornelia van Leeuwen, who is credited with being Henriëtte’s mother. In 1824, when Henriëtte was three years old, Pauline and Josephus divorced and thereafter she signed her pictures ‘Pauline De Courcelles femme Knip’. 

De Courcelles’s earliest paintings featured American birds and later she provided illustrations of pigeons for the book Histoire Naturelle des Pigeons, written by the Dutch ornithologist Coenraad Temminck. The backstory to this publication is filled with intrigue as in 1811 when she had finished one volume of pigeons, she published it straight away, much to the annoyance of Temminck who did not publish his own three-volume work until 1813-15. He stated with much anger that she had rushed in and ‘stolen’ his text on pigeons of the world and published it with her illustrations before he had completed his 3-volume set.

Henrietta Geertrui Knip (1783-1842)

Henriëtta Geertrui Knip was born in Tilburg on July 19th 1783.  She was the second-born child of Nicolaas and Anna Knip.  Initially she was tutored in painting by her father, Nicolaas but when he began to go blind she turned to her older brother Josephus for artistic advice.  In April 1801 when Josephus went to Paris she accompanied him.  She had always been interested in floral paintings and so, on arriving in Paris, she took lessons from the Dutch flower painter Gerard van Spaendonck, who had been living and working in Paris since 1769.

Flowers in a Vase by Henriëtta Geertrui Knip (1830)

Once she had completed her studies she returned to The Netherlands where she spent the summers in Haarlem and was employed by various flower companies to illustrate their adverts and brochures.  During the harsh winters and out of the flower growing season she returned to Amsterdam where she taught ladies how to paint.

Floral Bouquet by Henriëtta Geertrui Knip (1834)

She eventually returned to the French capital in 1824 and studied under Jan Frans van Dael, a Flemish painter and lithographer who specialised in floral painting and still lifes featuring various fruits.  She remained close to her older brother and when he suffered from blindness and had to give up painting, Henriette was able to step in and support him and his family.  Henriëtta Geertrui Knip died in Haarlem on May 29th 1842, aged 58.

Mattheus Derk Knip (1785-1845)

Dr. P.J. de Willebois with His Family at the Rhine in Germany by Mattheus Knip (c.1823)

Mattheus Derk Knip, the second son of Nicolaas Frederik Knip and his wife Anna, was born on December 30th 1785 in Tilburg.  Little is known about his early years but, like his sister Henrietta, it is believed that he received his first art tuition from his father and later from his elder brother Josephus.  It is thought that he also studied under the Brabant brothers, Gerard van Spaendonck and his brother Cornelis van Spaendonck who were renowned floral painters. At the time, there were no leading flower painters in Paris and so the brothers were able to make a name for themselves with their favoured genre.  King Louis XVI appointed Gerard to the role of royal miniature flower painter.

View of Oirschot and St Petrus Church by Mattheus Knip

When his siblings, Josephus, Mattheus and Henriette moved to Paris in 1801 he went with them and remained in the French capital until 1806.  On returning to the Netherlands he set up home in Vught and then Den Bosch in the North Brabant, a province in the south of the Netherlands.  Mattheus would go on to paint many Brabant landscapes. Mattheus rarely signed his work which made the attribution of his work difficult. Mattheus Knip married twice. His first marriage in 1810 was to Elisabeth Ubens and they had a son, Henri Knip, who also became a painter. Mattheus married a second time in 1822.  His second wife was Cornelia Adriana van Hoften.  He died in Vught on April 24th 1845, aged 59.

Hendrikus Johannes “Henri” Knip (1819-1897)

Self portrait by Henri Knip

Henri Knip, the son of Mattheus and Elisabeth Knip, was the youngest member of the family of artists.  He was born in den Bosch on April 20th 1819.  It is thought that during his career , around 1833, he travelled to Italy and Switzerland accompanied by his father, Mattheus Derk Knip. The long painting trip through the mountainous regions of those countries were captured on canvas and resulted in half of his work such beautiful scenes.   As well as using his sketches from his painting trip to aid his finished oil paintings he also made use of topographical lithographs which were circulating at that time.  Other of Henri’s works depicted village scenes and buildings, including churches, castles and country estates.

A Mountainous Landscape by Henri Knip

In 1854, Henri was living in Amsterdam but two years later he took up residency in Brussels and in the latter years of his life he lived Schaerbeek where he died in 1897, aged 78.   Henri had been married to Louisa Henriëtte Victoire Verassel.

Henrietta Ronner-Knip (1783-1842)

Henriette Ronner-Knip

Henriëtte Ronner-Knip, named after her aunt, was born in Amsterdam on May 31st 1821, the younger of two children of Josephus Augustus Knip and Cornelia van Leeuwen.  She had one brother, August, who was almost two years older than her.   Henriette’s parents were not married at the time of Henriette’s birth as her father was still officially married to his French animal painter wife, Antoinette Pauline Jacqueline Rifer de Courcelles. 

Katjesspel (The Kitten Game) by Henriette Ronner-Knip

Her father, despite his failing eyesight, tutored both her and her brother in the techniques of painting. In 1833, after a short stay in The Hague, the Knip family moved to Beek before returning to ‘s-Hertogenbosch.  When she was twenty years old, she and the family took up residence in the nearby village of Berlicum in North Brabant, close to the River Aa.  Once her father had to give up painting because he was going blind, Henriette took on the task of looking after the household and providing for the family.

A Kitten Playing by Henriette Ronner-Knip

On the death of her parents, her father Josephus in 1847, and her mother Cornelia in 1848, she left Berlicum and went to Amsterdam where she joined, and was the first female member, of the Arti et Amicitae Society (For Art and Friendship).   The Society played a key role in the Netherlands art scene and in particular in the Amsterdam art schools. It is still a focal point for artists and art lovers in the city of Amsterdam.

Cart Dog at Rest by Henriette Ronner-Knip

Henriette began painting local landscapes of North Brabant.  Often she would sketch scenes using pencil and watercolours but soon began to paint using oils.  The breakthrough for her was when she and her brother August were commissioned in 1835 to produce a painting featuring the Tilburg farm owned by the Dutch ruler, Prince of Orange.  A year later many of her paintings depicting North Brabant scenes were exhibited at various salons.

Mother and Kittens playing by Henriette Ronner-Knip

In 1850 she married Feico Ronner and moved with him to Belgium, living first at Rue de la Régence 7, in the north-east suburb of the Belgium capital, Saint-Josse-ten-Noode,  much later, in 1878, they settled in the Brussels suburb of Elsene.   Feico acted as Henriette’s business manager looking after money matters and the correspondence.  It was when she moved to Brussels that her painting genre changed from landscapes and village scenes and focused on depictions of dogs and then latterly, around 1870,  her paintings incorporating cats which was probably what she was best remembered for.

The Musicians by Henriette Ronner-Knip

She exhibited her work at many exhibitions and received many awards. In 1887, she was awarded the Order of Leopold and, in 1901, became a member of the Order of Orange-Nassau.  Feico and Henriette had three children, a son Alfred and two daughters, Allice and Emma who all became artists and Henriette would often show her work along that of her children.   Henriette Ronner-Knip died at Ixelles, Belgium on February 28th 1909, aged 87.

Augustus Knip (1819-1859)

Brother of Henriette Ronner-Knip.

Spring in the Sheep-pen by Augustus Knipp

Henriëtte’s elder brother Augustus who was born in 1819 and, like his sister, was also tutored by his father and later became a successful artist, who, at the age of sixteen, was commissioned with his sister, to paint farmyard scenes at King Willem II’s farm. His speciality was the depiction of farm animals often portrayed in indoor settings.

Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès.

This blog is the second one requested by Barbara Matthias, a reader of my blogs, who had actually met the artist, and, like the previous one about Rudolf Bonnet, it is about the life and artwork of a painter who spent the latter half  of his life on the Indonesian island of Bali.  Let me introduce you to Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès, a self-declared impressionist.

City view with boats in the canal by Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès

Le Mayeur was born on February 9th 1880 in Ixelles, a municipality of Brussels which lies to the south-east of the Belgium capital.  He was the youngest of two brothers born to Andrien Le Mayeur De Merpres, a marine artist, and his wife Louise Di Bosch. During his early years Jean studied painting with the French artist, Ernest Blanc-Garin as well as being tutored by his father.  His father wanted his son to receive an all-round education and had him enrol at the Polytechnic College of The Université Libre de Bruxeles, where he studied Architecture and Civil Engineering.  However much to the horror of his family, Jean decided to forego all that he had learnt at the polytechnic and pursue his love of painting and his favoured genre of landscape painting in the Impressionistic style, depicting Belgian landscapes in hazy hues.

Tahitian Women on the Beach Gaugin’s Tahitian painting (1891)

In 1914, now in his thirties, with the outbreak in Europe of the Great War, Jean was enlisted as a war-time painter and photographer.  During the conflict he was affectedly badly by the carnage of the war and this could have been one of the reasons why he decided to leave Western “civilisation” and find solace in the exotic worlds which he had seen in the works of the French post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin.

 Two Women on the Beach, Tahiti, by Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès

Jean had also acquired an insatiable appetite for travel.   In the early 1920s he visited Italy, North Africa, India, Cambodia, Burma, Madagascar and Turkey, all the time transferring his thoughts and what he saw onto canvas.  In a way these extensive travels were Jean’s way of searching for paradise and like Paul Gaugin, who had visited the Pacific island of Tahiti in June 1891, he too arrived on the Pacific island in 1929.  Jean Le Mayeur was disappointed with Tahiti as it was now far more commercialised than it was in Gaugin’s day and so Jean discounted Tahiti as being the promised land and instead decide to travel to south-east Asia and in 1932 he embarked on his first voyage to the “island of the Gods”, Bali.

An Arab Market by Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès

After a long sea passage,   Le Majeur arrived at Singaraja, a port town in northern Bali.  From there he travelled south and rented a house in Banjar Kelandis, close to the northern part of Denpasar, the island’s main town. He was captivated by the Balinese people’s traditional way of life, the temple ceremonies and the local dances such as Legong, which is a form of Balinese dance that is characterized by intricate finger movements, complicated footwork, and expressive gestures and facial expressions.  For Le Mayeur, Bali was an ideal place to paint because of its light, colour and the exquisiteness of the surroundings in what was still a quite an unspoilt island.

Harbour of St Tropez by Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès

From his love of watching the Legong dancers Le Majeur met a beautiful fifteen-year-old Legong performer, Ni Nyoman Pollok and he persuaded her to model for his paintings. In 1933 he had put together a collection of work featuring Ni Pollok, which he took to Singapore for an exhibition.  The exhibition was a great success and it resulted in him being more widely known.  On returning from Singapore, Le Mayeur purchased a plot of land at Sanur beach, a coastal stretch east of Denpasar in southeast Bali.  There, he built a house, which was also his studio and a beautiful garden. It was here that Ni Pollok along with her two friends worked every day as his models.

Three Dancers in the Garden by Le Mayeur by Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès

In his painting entitled Three Dancers in the Garden we see three graceful dancers.  The setting of the depiction is in the garden in front of the house Le Mayeur and his wife Ni Pollok built on the beach of Sanur. Almost the whole of the background is taken up by the white house with its thatched roof and blue and white window shutters. 

Their house at Sanur was depicted on a number of occasions by Le Mayeur.  In one of his letters to a friend he recounts his love for the property:

“…I’ve evidently made all things serviceable to my art. All my actions have but one purpose: facilitating my work…”

 In another, he talks about how he is inspired by the house:

“…you will understand my paintings wherever you may see them, for everything in this little paradise which I created for myself was made to be painted”…”

Again, in yet another letter he writes about his love for the garden:

“…I organized my home exactly as I liked it. I intended to surround myself with nothing but beauty.  I planted a mass of bougainvillea, frangipani, hibiscus and all around the cottage I put groups of intertwining plants. I built little temples, completely made of white coral, dug little ponds in which the reflections of all the Gods of Hindu mythology can be seen among the sacred lotus flowers. The two temples are surrounded by approximately two hundred of these little sculptures, which have integrated with the flowers whose silhouettes are drawn on the purple and pink tropic skies…”

Le Mayeur and Ni Pollok

It is fair to say that Le Mayeur was smitten by the beauty of the island and the beauty of Ni Pollok. His original intention had been that he would just stay on the island for eight months but as that time came to an end he took the decision to remain in Bali for the rest of his life. After three years working together, in 1935, Le Mayeur and Ni Pollok got married. Le Mayeur kept on painting with his wife and her friends as his models during their married life. During the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies in 1942, Le Mayeur was put under house arrest by the Japanese authorities.

Around the Lotus Pond by Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès

Many of Le Mayeur’s paintings depicted scenes in and around their house.  The subjects were varied such as women at leisure on a daybed in the interior of the house; women weavers at the loom; women on the veranda or women dancing on a terrace; women in front of the house or in the garden picking flowers or making offerings but one of his favourite depictions was of women dancing around the lotus pond in his garden.  In this painting, Around the Lotus Pond, which Le Mayeur completed in the 1950s, we see the pond around which are six young women picking flowers.  It is thought that Ni Pollock posed for all the women.  Le Mayeur strived to make his paintings colourful and in this work the hues of red, purple, orange and pink dominate the painting and are in contrast with the darker colour of the pond and its water which we see in the lower left of the picture.

Ni Pollok with a friend enjoying the Afternoon Sun

by Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès

During the war, tourism had totally disappeared but at the cessation of hostilities tourism to the island slowly returned.  The island’s tourists would often visit and look around Le Mayeur’s home and studio in Sanur and took the opportunity to buy his artwork.   Returning home with their purchasers enabled Le Mayeur’s works of art to become part of many collections. Although Bali was undoubtedly a scenic paradise, one of the downsides of living on the island was the possibility of contracting malaria and le Mayeur often suffered from bouts of the disease which weakened him.  A riding accident in 1948, resulted in the then sixty-eight years old artist to suffer a broken leg from a fall from his horse, Gypsy, and after that incident, probably because of his age, he never ever really recovered and had always, from then on, to use a cane when walking.  In 1951 the aging artist was attacked by a group of robbers and thanks to the effort of his wife Ni Pollok, they managed to fight off the intruders.  However Le Majeur received a large stab wound in the shoulder during the attack. Five years later he suffered with a hernia. Despite all these negative happenings, Le Mayeur managed to keep focused on his work and maybe the highly colourful works he produced radiated the sunny side of his and Ni Pollok’s life.

Five women on the Beach by Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès

In 1958, seventy-year-old Le Mayeur had to travel to Brussels with his wife for treatment for cancer of his ear. Sadly, the illness was diagnosed as being terminal and the painter died on May 31st, 1958, aged 78. and was buried in Ixelles, Brussels. Ni Pollok later married an Italian physician who was living on the island but like many foreigners, during the troubles in Indonesia, he had his residence permit revoked and was obliged to leave the country. Ni Pollok stayed behind on Bali.

A room in Le Mayeur’s house, now a museum, in Sanur

The will of Le Mayeur had stated that Ni Pollok was allowed to live in the house in Sanur and she resided there up to her death in 1985. Subsequently, the house and its contents, including a hundred paintings by Le Mayeur, were then donated to the Indonesian government and the house was converted into a museum.