Dorothy Webster Hawksley (British painter) 1884 - 1970
Mother and Child, ca. 1920-30s
watercolour
128 x 97 cm. (50 x 38 in.)
private collection
Catalogue Note
Although Dorothy Hawksley worked in various media, her most successful works were painted in watercolour and tempera with large areas of flat colour and unshaded tone contained within refined outlines. These were influenced by Japanese prints and by the work of her friend Frederic Cayley Robinson. It is likely that the present large watercolour was painted in the 1920s or 1930s when she was at the height of her artistic powers. The woman in this picture bears a resemblance to Hawksley herself and she is known to have included self-portraits in her work; she appears in the side panel of the triptych The Nativity of 1924 (Birmingham City Art Gallery), standing in the stable and drawing the Holy Family. The same girl was certainly the model for the tempera painting Flora (private collection). John Christian has recently written of Hawksley's love of painting children; 'Dorothy loved drawing children, and there always seemed a poignancy in this since she had none of her own. Her infants are innocent without being cloyingly sentimental' (John Christian, Dorothy Hawksley, exhibition catalogue for The Maas Gallery, 2005, p. 4. A similar picture to the present one is entitled A Mother and Child (Bonhams, 7 June 2005, lot 115).
Dorothy Hawksley was born in London on 19 November 1884, the daughter of a maker of surgical instruments with an interest in the work of John Ruskin. Her maternal grandfather had been a painter of marine pictures and therefore she did not face any parental opposition when she showed signs of wanting to become a painter. Her formative schooling in drawing was at a small art school run by the watercolour painter Edward Clifford and Charles Orchardson (son of William Quiller Orchardson). She saw the Burne-Jones memorial exhibition in 1898 and as Clifford had been a friend of Burne-Jones it is likely that they had discussed his work. Her art certainly shows something of an influence from the pale maidens of Burne-Jones. She later attended Clifford and Orchardson's classes at the St. John's Wood Art School after they moved there, before she progressed to the Royal Academy Schools in 1906. She was awarded a silver medal for a drawing from life and the Landseer Scholarship in 1908. She began to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1909 and continued to show there almost every year until 1964.
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