Dorothea Sharp, RBA, ROI

(British, 1874-1955)

The Round Pond near Kensington Palace 25.4 x 35.5 cm. (10 x 14 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Richard Hagen, Worcestershire
Private Collection, U.K.

Dorothea Sharp was born into a Quaker family in Dartford, Kent. Despite her parents' disapproval, she wanted to be an artist from an early age, enrolling at the Richmond School of Landscape Painting in 1894 under the tutelage of Charles Edward Johnson (1832-1913). Preferring to work in oil, she spent much of her time painting outside making rapid notes in her sketchbook, which she worked up later in the studio. This was to be a method which she refined throughout her career and was ideally suited to her style and choice of subject.

Sharp visited Paris in 1900, seeing first-hand the work of the Impressionists, which was to have a profound and lasting effect on her work. As she noted in The Student's Book of Oil Painting, published in 1947, 'I think the young painters of this decade little realise what we owe to those great masters of The French Impressionist School'. She also came to know and love the work of some of the American painters who were in Paris at the same time, notably Frank Benson (1862-1951) and Carl Frieseke (1874-1939). Upon her return to England, her reputation grew and the bright and bold depictions of children playing at the seaside, picking flowers or feeding ducks became more and more popular. Her colourful compositions were ideal for use as posters, which by the 1930s had become an effective and popular form of advertising.

By the 1940s Sharp was famous. She had exhibited widely at many leading galleries (and over a period of 47 years at the Royal Academy alone) and her work had been purchased by an admiring public. She had travelled extensively from the south of France to Algiers and from St. Ives (where she spent the war years with her companion Marcella Smith) to Sussex and her circle of friends included many of the leading artists of the day. Her paintings were in many ways unique, but also reflected the changing style of the times. Her rapid confident brushstrokes were almost sculptural in the way the paint was applied to canvas, but always bound together by an innate understanding and love of colour.

Like her contemporary Dame Laura Knight (see Lots 16 and 17), Sharp was a pioneer of British Impressionism, her bright palette and loose brushstrokes ideally suited to her depictions of the happy innocence of childhood.