Barbara Neville Shaw (1930-2006)

£325. Buy here.
Cows (46cm x 56cm)
Barbara Neville Shaw lived in Duxford, Cambridgeshire, and was primarily a self-taught artist, whose career in art came later in life. She studied at Cambridge Arts School, was represented by Trumpington Gallery, Cambridge, and has works that feature in public and private collections, including the Arts Theatre, Cambridge, Robinson College, Cambridge and The Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, Cambridge.

Clowns (36cm x 46cm) £225 Buy here.
Gerald Scott (1916–1977)

£350. Buy here.
Sculptor, painter, draughtsman, potter, printmaker and teacher, born in Hersham, Surrey. After school worked for a firm of Lloyd’s brokers for seven years, then served in Army, 1941–6, partly in East Africa.
After a period as a potter he studied at Kingston School of Art under Reginald Brill, 1946–9, with some time in 1948 at Burslem College of Art, during which Arnold Machin advised him to take up sculpture. This he did at Slade School of Fine Art, 1949–52, under A H Gerrard.
Showed at RA, ICA, Festival of Britain, RWS, with RBS of which he was made a fellow in 1970, and at RWA of which he was a member. RWA, Bristol Corporation and London County Council held his work. His commissioned pieces included much church work, including a life-size figure for St Edmund the King, Pinner; a memorial panel for 501 Squadron, Royal Air Force, in Bristol Cathedral; and a dove in hemlock for a font cover at Lockleaze Church. Lived in Bristol.
This work of a nude as a landscape follows his sculptural theme. Oil on board. 46cm x 116cm
Angela Verren Taunt (1930-2023)

Siena – £450 Buy here.
Verren was born in Hampstead in north London and studied at King’s College, London. For many years Verren painted and sketched in Britain and abroad at Tuscany and Greece and had exhibitions in both London and Cambridge, with her works often showing forms abstracted from nature.
After marrying the Cambridge mathematician Derek Taunt and raising three children, Verren resumed her painting and exhibition career.
In 1970 she met the artist Ben Nicholson who became a good friend and a great influence on her art, and who wrote the introduction to her 1978 solo exhibition at the Crane Kalman Gallery in London. After Nicholson’s death, Verren became the copyright holder for his artworks.

Percy Hague Jowett

£175. Buy here.
Percy Jowett was born in Halifax, Yorkshire on 1st June 1882. He studied at Leeds College of Art from 1902-1904. In 1904 he entered the Royal College of Art in London on a Royal Exhibitioner scholarship and receiving his Diploma in 1907. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1907, and continued to exhibit there until the 1920s.
In 1910 he won the Prix de Rome, a Travelling Scholarship in Painting allowing him to travel to Italy and the British School in Rome. Jowett was appointed Head of Chelsea School of Art before going on to head the Royal College of Art in 1935 replacing William Rothenstein.
While at the RCA he gave the sculptor Henry Moore his first job and would have been at the centre of the current and future art world in the UK.
Jowett had a broad teaching experience and as a painter, he had exhibited widely. He had proven his ability to get on well with manufacturers, as well as with fellow heads of educational institutions. He also, though a fine artist, realised the importance of industrial art, a key factor when the Board was facing criticism over the College.
He was invited by the print-maker Claude Flight to join the ‘Seven & Five Group’. In 1921 Jowett acted as the Secretary of the Seven and Five Society and would be replaced by John Piper in 1934.
The Seven and Five Society was an art group consisting mainly of ex-servicemen who had been art students before the war. Their goal was to exhibit work rather than have a bold manifesto or be tied to a art style. It was easier to exhibit work in large numbers as the cost would be reduced on mass. The society was set up in 1920 but in 1924 Ben Nicholson was made a member. He more or less became a cuckoo in the nest for the group and elected his friends. In 1929 the group added the new members of Christopher Wood, Cedric Morris, Sidney Hunt, William Staite Murray, Frances Hodgkins, Jessica Dismorr, Evie Hone, Edward Wolfe and David Jones, as well as Alfred Wallis as a guest exhibitor. Nicholson voted to change the name to the ‘7 & 5 Society’ to look more modernist but failed to get the group changed to ‘7 & 5 Abstract Group’.
Jowett exhibited 11 times out of the society’s 14 shows from 1921-1933.

He was elected a member of the New English Art Club.
During World War II he worked on the War Artists’ Advisory Committee alongside Kenneth Clark, then Director of the National Gallery.
He was an outstanding teacher, remembered with affection by his students, and this has probably obscured his reputation as an artist.
Katharine “Kitty” Church (1910–1999) – The chestnut tree by Moonlight, 1955
£Sold
Kitty was associated with the Neo-Romantic movement but is another female artist who curators in the past ignored for her male counterparts.

Born in Highgate, London, Church studied at the Brighton School of Art, Royal Academy Schools (1930-33), and the Slade School of Fine Art (1933-34).
Church had a close friendship with Ivon Hitchens, and for a time was his model. While staying with him in June 1934, at his Suffolk cottage, Hitchens invited John Piper for the weekend. Kitty invited her friend Myfanwy Evans, an Oxford English graduate whom Hitchens also wished to sketch. Piper agreed to meet Myfanwy at Leiston station and was immediately infatuated with Evans, sparking a romance that became a lifelong marriage.
From Kitty, Ivon cribbed her style of painting trees with sweeps of paint and over time he would extend this into his pictures of paintbrush motions of the landscapes. Kittys work had the feel of calligraphy in this way, with confident lines of black making up pictures of the landscape.
During the early phase of her career, Kitty exhibited regularly with the Royal Academy. In 1933, she had her first solo exhibition at the Wertheim Gallery run by Lucy Carrington Wertheim, patron of Christopher Wood and Frances Hodgkins.

Church exhibited with the New English Art Club and showed regularly with The London Group. From 1937 to 1947, she exhibited her work at the Lefevre Gallery. In 1954, she was invited to take part in the exhibition Figures in their Setting at the Tate Gallery. She was invited to exhibit at the National Museum of Wales in 1982. In 1988, a retrospective of her work was held at the Duncalfe Galleries.

Church married Anthony West (son of writer Rebecca West & H. G. Wells) in 1937; the couple had one son (Edmund West) and one daughter (Caroline Frances West).
Hodgkins painted a portrait of Kitty, Portrait of Kitty West, in 1939, which is now held by the Tate.

Kitty Church – RAF Airmen (oil on board)
£800 Buy here.

Kitty Church – Landscape
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Kathleen McFarlane (1922 – 2018) – Colour Abstract, Oil on board with plasterwork.
£300. Buy here
Kathleen McFarlane was best known for her sculptures and off-loom weavings in sisal and rope. She was an innovator in many media, from paint and fibres to Perspex and ceramic. She constantly experimented, balancing the powers of shape, colour and material substance with a deep understanding of how to transform experience into forms.
After WWII she spent her time in Newcastle under the influence of Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton, who were lecturers at the university. Born Kathleen Crouch and brought up in Sunderland, she married Mac, her childhood sweetheart, at the age of 22. While he forged his distinguished academic career, Kathleen, sharing his enthusiasms, translated a number of Norwegian texts into English, including Lapp Life and Customs (1962). Folk traditions fascinated her and she came to weaving through observing its survival as a craft tradition in Norwegian peasant households. When in 1964 they moved to Norwich, Kathleen decided to give up translating Norwegian texts and, instead, to combine weaving with looking after their family and household.

From Magdalena Abakanowicz, the Polish sculptor-weaver whose work in sisal was regularly shown in Europe from the early 1960s, she learned that tapestry could be an exciting three-dimensional form in which “anything was possible”, and from her friend Tadek Beutlich, the leading figure in British avant-garde tapestry, she learned new skills to enable her to transform her art.
Throughout the 1970s her career blossomed. She was a leader of the British Fibre Art movement and her work was in demand for exhibitions in venues from the Weavers’ Workshop in Edinburgh to the Victoria and Albert Museum and British Craft Centre in London.

Kathleen balanced a growing inter-national reputation with a commitment to being a local artist. She loved nothing more than to engage in debate, rigorously defending high-quality crafts as being equal in ambition and status to any other art form. Her initiatives were many, from curating the nationally toured 1981 exhibition, Contemporary British Tapestry, for the Sainsbury centre for visual arts at UEA, to helping establish an annual exhibition for local artists at Salthouse church on the north Norfolk coast.

Following her Fabrications exhibition that year at the Sainsbury Centre, her intrepid spirit led her to be awarded, at the age of 81, a three-month residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre at ‘s-Hertogenbosch in Holland, and thereafter began a whole new development of her work in ceramics and mixed media.

Her final paintings represented her beloved north Norfolk, and were, like the rest of her creative output, intensely individual, fearlessly brilliant in colour, and like no other landscapes ever seen. – Text by Veronica Sekules
Frame size: 41 x 26cm – Image size: 20 x 35.5cm