JESSICA DISMORR (1885-1939) Siena
oil on panel
17 x 14 in. (43.2 x 35.5 cm.)
Painted circa 1911.
JESSICA DISMORR (1885-1939) Siena
oil on panel
17 x 14 in. (43.2 x 35.5 cm.)
Painted circa 1911.
The artist's nephew. with Sandra Lummis Fine Art, London, where purchased by the present owner.
Jessica Dismorr attended the Slade School of Art from 1902 to 1903, before training with Max Bohm at Etaples, and later at the Académie de La Palette in Paris from 1910 until 1913. Among the teachers at La Palette were Jean Metzinger, André Dunoyer de Segonzac and the Scottish Colourist John Duncan Fergusson. In 1911, Dismorr contributed several illustrations to the avant-garde magazine, Rhythm, edited by John Middleton Murry, and she later became a member of Wyndham Lewis’s Rebel Art Centre, signing the Vorticist manifesto published in the first issue of Blast in 1914. Dismorr was one of only two female members of the Vorticist Group, the other being her friend Helen Saunders.
The present work was painted circa 1911. In July 1912, Dismorr showed three landscapes with the Allied Artists’ Association, two of them Italian, to favourable reviews. In the winter of that year, Dismorr exhibited at Rhythm’s only known show, alongside artists including S.J. Peploe and Anne Estelle Rice, held at the Stafford Galleries. In these paintings, as in Siena - and particularly in their bold, energetic palette - the Fauvist influence on Dismorr’s work is clear.
.jpg?maxwidth=3840)