pickLives of British artists, their art choices and experiences. At points the archive record is so fragile (or non-existant) this is the focus of the book. It would be even better with colour reproductions of the art but Google was my friend here.
...the objects [in the paintings] communicate Nina [Hamnett]'s admiration of her sitters, and create new measures of value - such as imagination, intelligence and grit - entirely distinct from portraiture's traditional criterion: wealth. Borrowing from Cubist portraiture, Nina painted her sitters with a monumental stillness, as though they were carved from wood or rock; they look capable of enduring any weather, any encounter...
The experience she wanted to preserve was that of sitting with a pile of newspapers in a corner alone, her sketchbook open, sipping her cocktail of choice, a crème de menthe frappé.
#NinaHamnett
All of the autonomy Vanessa would subsequently enjoy would be facilitated by the availability and cheapness of female domestic servants...
Sophia Farrell, Maud Chart, Trissie Selwood, Mabel Selwood, Flossie Selwood, Nellie Boxall and Lottie Hope, temporary cooks (unnamed)..... The invisible co-producers in the most celebrated decade of Vanessa's practice."
Image - Detail from "The Cook" via https://artscouncilcollection.org.uk/artwork/cook
Then she was those four strands of herself combined, she was Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd, a figure with a question forever hanging over her, a flash of talent and humour running through the correspondence of others. She became her few known paintings: an exquisite nude in fluffy dirtied pastels, a couple of still lifes set in cramped interiors...
The Mill at Tidmarsh is beautiful, and only strange when studied up close, like Tidmarsh itself: an ordinary country house that once entered revealed a radical reinterpretation of domesticity.
/Detail from "The Mill at Tidmarsh", Dora Carrington
A very sunny day to read such a gloomy-sounding book.
(It's not gloomy, it's about women's art)
Section in the TLS on two new books about women artists (1/2)
Check out the ads from Brepolis. Any women artists featured?
This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century | 
