WOW - a collaboration between Liss Llewellyn and the Laing Art Gallery - showcases 38 British women artists working on paper between 1905 and 1975, a transformative period for women in the arts. The featured artists approached the medium in vari ous ways, using traditional as well as innovative techniques to transform paper into beautiful and complex works of art. The exhibition celebrates the diversity of these approaches and highlights the ways in which paper provided artists with a rich arena for artistic innovation. Paper's adaptability allows for a multitude of techniques. Using paper in its traditional role as a support for drawings and prints, or creating collage and sculpture, the fea tured artists responded to the medium's inherent qualities - malleable, smooth and sensuous - to test ideas, express feelings or create a finished work. It is often in the more formative moments that the works in this exhibition most resonate; through these studies we bear witness to the seed of an idea in germination, as in Clare Leigh ton's iconic Southern Harvest, or Evelyn Dunbar's celebrated works for the War Artist's Advisory Committee. Selecting hand-made, mould-made or machine-made papers in various weights, tex tures and tints - depending on their intentions - artists worked with a variety of media from pencil, ink and pastel, to watercolour, tempera and oil, sometimes incorporating extraneous elements such as gold leaf and metallic forms. Working on monumental sheets, such as Winifred Knights' cartoon for St Martin's Altarpiece or tiny pages such as Edith Granger-Taylor's Small Grey Abstract, women's choices were nevertheless some times dictated by circumstance: the propensity of Frances Richards and Tirzah Gar wood - by no means isolated cases - to work on paper on a small scale was in part a result of not having access to a studio. From portraits, landscapes, botanical studies and genre scenes, many of the works in WOW highlight the artist's skill and dexterity in drawing on paper, which was at the core of artistic training and practice. Some artists have used the traditional techniques of etching, screen printing and woodblock to create a diverse range of images. Others highlight the ethereal properties of paper through precise cuts, resulting in elaborate collages combining shapes, patterns and designs, or compact and manipulate paper to create inventive and surprising sculptures. Featuring both famous and lesser-known talents, WOW celebrates the many ways in which women artists expressed themselves through works on, and with paper and highlights their unique contribution to the graphic arts in 20th century Britain.

LONG LISTED FOR THE WILLIAM MB BERGER PRIZE FOR BRITISH ART HISTORY 2022. A major survey of Dame Laura Knight, first female Royal Academician and popular British artist of the 20th century. Laura Knight (1877-1970) was one of the most famous and popular English artists of the twentieth century. She was the first woman to have a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, in 1965. In the following decades her realist style of painting fell out of fashion and her work become largely overlooked. A new generation has rediscovered her work, finding a contemporary resonance in her depictions of women at work, of people from marginalized communities and her contributions as a war artist. This beautifully illustrated book, which accompanies a major exhibition at MK Gallery, provides an overview of Knight's illustrious career: from her training at Nottingham Art School at the age of 13 and her time in North Yorkshire and Cornwall, to her visits to traveller communities and a segregated American hospital. It also features her circus, ballet and theatre scenes, paintings of women during the war and her late paintings of nature. The selection of over 160 works combines celebrated paintings with less known graphic and design works, including ceramics, jewellery and costumes that reflect the artist's enduring interest in the everyday activities of people from all walks of life.

Which artists in British 20th century art painted religious images? Broadly speaking there seem to have been two categories: The first concerns artists who created religious images when the religious content was in response to a set subject, for example The Deluge in the 1920 Rome Scholarship in Decorative Painting, or who responded to a specific commission, for example Thomas Monnington's works for The Ormond Chapel, Bradford, Kippen Church and Stations of the Cross for Brede Church in Hastings. The second category concerns a small minority off artists who were committed believers such as Frank Brangwyn, Eric Gill and Stanley Spencer. No account of 20th Century British art can overlook the numerous works of the period that were essentially "religious" in their content. Art, Faith& Modernity examines this question in Paul Liss' and Alan Powers' essays and demonstrates the wide range of expression in more than 200 colour reproductions.

Ever since Linda Nochlin asked in 1971, 'Why have there been no great women artists?', art history has been probing the female gaze. Through scholarship and exhibitions, readings have been put in place to counter prevailing assumptions that artistic creativity is primarily a masculine affair. Fifty Works by Fifty British Women functions as a corrective to the exclusion of women from the 'master' narratives of art. It introduces fifty artworks by known and lesser-known women - outstanding works that speak out. Fifty commentaries by fifty different writers bring out each artwork's unique story - sometimes from an objective art historical perspective and sometimes from an entirely personal point of view - thereby creating a rich and colourful diorama. This exhibition does not, however, attempt to present a survey or to address all the arguments around the history of women and art. Anthologies are of necessity incomplete, and many remarkable imaginations are not here represented. Women artists have been set apart from male artists not only to their own disadvantage but also to the detriment of British art. While there were some improvements for women to access an artistic career in the twentieth century in terms of patronage, economics and critical attention - all the things that confer professional status - women had the least of everything. By showcasing just a few of the remarkable works produced, this exhibition draws attention to the fact that a vision of British twentieth century art closer to a 50/50 balance would not only provide a truer account, but also a more vivid and meaningful narrative.

British realist art of the 1920s and 1930s is visually stunning - strong, seductive and demonstrating extraordinary technical skill. Despite this, it is often overshadowed by abstract art. This book presents the very first overview of British realist painting of the period, showcasing outstanding works from private and public collections across the UK. Of the forty artists featured in the show, many were major figures in the 1920s and 1930s but later passed out of fashion as abstraction and Pop Art became the dominant trends in the post-war years. In the last decade their work has re-emerged and interest in them has grown. Interwar realist art embraces a number of different styles, but is characterised by fine drawing, meticulous craftsmanship, a tendency towards classicism and an aversion to impressionism and visible brushwork. Artists such as Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, Meredith Frampton, James Cowie and Winifred Knights combine fastidious Old Master detail with 1920s modernity. Stanley Spencer spans various camps while Lucian Freud's early work can be seen as a realist coda which continued into the 1940s and beyond.Featuring many Scottish and women artists, this book promises a fascinating insight into this captivating period of British art. Exhibition to be held at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh from 1 July to 29 October 2017.

GashWhile Gash's oeuvre is full of the period charm that might be expected from the decades that bridge either side of the Edwardian era, his pictures consistently offer something more substantial. His genre paintings bring to mind those of Charles Spencelayh but they display a less predictable and less laboured narrative. As a landscape painter he painted en plein air with relish; he excelled in themedium of pastel. According to his daughter, portraiture was the genre he enjoyed most. His portraits are consistently striking, moving impressively from conversation pieces, such as his elegant and engaging family group of c.1919, to the tradition of Swagger portraits which recall those of Gainsborough, Lawrence and Sargent. For an artist who died before he was 60 it is striking that his most memorable images are amongst his last. The Inseparables, for instance, demonstrates the kind of facility and originality that puts him comfortably on a stage with many of the better known international artists of his period. Indeed, his best work can be viewed as a potent last flowering of the landscape, portrait and genre tradition exemplified by artists such as Sir George Clausen, Stanhope Forbes and Mark Fisher. It is hoped that Walter Bonner Gash: Unsung Edwardian Hero will firmly re-establish Gash's reputation and demonstrate that his talent stands comparison with those of the better known Kettering artists Thomas Cooper Gotch and Sir Alfred East.

Winifred Knights (1899-1947) is one of the outstanding, but until recently neglected, British women painters of the first half of the 20th century. Copiously illustrated in colour throughout, this book provides the first full account of her life and work, examining Knights' art in the context of interwar Modernism and assessing her contribution to the revival in this period of both Decorative Painting and religious imagery.Author Sacha Llewellyn traces the artist's career from her years at the Slade School of Art and her First World War evacuation to rural Worcestershire through to the time she spent at the British School at Rome in the early 1920s and the many commissions she completed between 1926 and 1939. Presenting the artist as the central protagonist, and with models selected from her inner circle, Knights' paintings were deeply autobiographical. She consistently re-wrote fairy-tale and legend, Biblical narrative and Pagan mythology to explore women's relationship to war, the natural world, working communities, marriage, motherhood and death. Drawing on previously unpublished documentary material, including letters, diaries, sketchbooks and photographs, Sacha Llewellyn makes a strong case for recognising Knights as one of the most talented artists of her generation. The book reproduces all of Knights' major works, including her masterpiece, The Deluge, which is among the most remarked upon works at Tate Britain, having been on almost permanent display there since 1995.

The murals that were produced in this country in the twentieth century remain as one of the great inventive achievements in modern British art. Highly original in their approach to design, balancing varying degrees of modernity or tradition, they demonstrate the creative drive of their makers and contain singular expressions of the aesthetic, personal and social concerns that typify the ages from which they come. Some are celebrations of simple human pleasures, perhaps to decorate a refreshment room, an ocean liner or a dining room. Others are intended to be the highest expressions of their art, ambitious allegorical or decorative compositions that like the frescoes of the Renaissance would speak through the ages to later generations. The individuals and committees who commissioned them similarly believed they would both represent the best that Britain had to offer and mark the high accomplishment of contemporary society, elevating the public and private spaces they occupied and inspiring moral purpose.This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition 'British Murals & Decorative Painting 1910-1970' which took place at the Fine Art Society - London (13 February - 9 March 2013) in association with Liss Llewellyn Fine Art. It coincided with the Sansom & Co publication British Murals & Decorative Painting 1920-1960.

Published to coincide with a major exhibition at Sir John Soane's Museum, London from October 25th 2013 - January 25th 2014, touring to The Beecroft Art Gallery, Westcliff-on-Sea, England and the British School at Rome. Alan Sorrell attended the Royal College of Art in the mid-1920s in a period that saw the emergence of Edward Bawden, Eric Ravilious, John Piper, Henry Moore and Barnett Freedman. From 1928 to 1932 he was a student at The British School at Rome, Italy; from the 1930s Sorrell painted a large cycle of murals including his celebrated Working Boats from Around the British Coast for the Festival of Britain in 1951. As an airman during the Second World War, Sorrell produced a remarkable series of paintings characterized by a new perspective, broad horizons and tilted aerial views which were to become a hallmark of his post-war reconstruction drawings. He is perhaps best remembered for his archeological illustrations for magazines and books and his reconstruction drawings for the Ministry of Works (later English Heritage, UK). Alan Sorrell's vision was born out of the Romantic British tradition exemplified by Blake, Palmer and their 20th-century disciples. This book makes it possible at last to assess the full scope of Sorrell's work and the underlying poetic vision that runs through it. Comprising a series of essays the book sets out to chart Sorrell's life and achievements, as well as illustrating the range and diversity of his talents, most works having never previously been reproduced.

Raymond Sheppard showed an early interest in both art and nature and aged 15 enrolled in the Elementary Course of John Hassall's Correspondence Art School where he was complimented on "his remarkable understanding of the correctness of drawing". Sheppard's talent for drawing wildlife gained recognition with the success of the first of his three books for The Studio Publications How to Draw Series. How to Draw Birds, published in 1940, not only ran to four reprints during WW2 but a further two reprints afterwards in 1948 and 1955 - a remarkable feat for a 27 year old artist. This not only provided Sheppard with a secure, if modest, financial income but put him on a stage alongside the highly regarded draughtsman of this genre John Skeaping (How to Draw Horses) and C.F. Tunnicliffe (How to Draw Farm Animals) both of whom were 12 years his senior. In parallel to his work as an illustrator of wildlife, Sheppard, along with Jack Merriott as President, became a founding member of the Wapping Group. Limited to 25 members, The Wappers, as they were known, comprised artists from the Langham Sketching Club, (which did not meet in the summer months,) who convened along the river between Westminster and Gravesend, in the East End of London, to paint scenes along the Thames. If Raymond Sheppard's drawings are to been seen as something more than illustrations the key is here: "An outlook at once poetic and intimate, whose technique was developed from a habit of contemplation".

It is rare for a creative artist to work in the privacy of his garden shed, in a challenging medium, and almost entirely for his own pleasure, but such a one was the slate-carver, John McKenzie. His day job was working as a steward in the Petty Officers' Mess aboard H.M.S. Condor, the Fleet Air Arm Training School at Arbroath, Angus, on the east coast of Scotland. McKenzie's work is totally unpretentious, but it reveals a cultivated familiarity with the carvings of ancient Babylon and Mesopotamia, as well as classical mythology, suggesting that as a boy he had haunted Kelvingrove Art Gallery - and may have continued to do so - as well the public libraries of Glasgow and Arbroath. A list of the hundred and twelve carvings that were still in his possession at the time of his death exists, but forty years on we will never know what books he had on his shelves, what postcards, photographs and cuttings from the local paper, what references he used. John McKenzie may have worked in solitude but it is clear that he did not work in isolation.

Victor Hume Moody created timeless images of an Arcadian idyll at a time when most artists had turned their backs on the classical tradition. The centuries old heritage of Western art was too inspiring and too valuable for him to simply abandon. Over a working life of nearly 70 years he tirelessly researched and worked to revive traditional painting techniques. At the same time he created a unique fusion of classical figure composition and the pastoral English landscape. Since Victor Moody died his work has been widely seen and his reputation has steadily risen. The Harris Museum in Preston held a retrospective exhibition, 'The Last Classicist', in 1992 and more recently his work featured in the 2010 exhibition 'Counterpoint - Modern Realism 1910-1950' held at the Fine Art Society. The dispersal of works from the Estate of the artist's daughter, which has made this present catalogue possible, represents a further important moment in the rehabiliation of Victor Moody's reputation. It is hoped that his work will, as a result, continue to become more widely seen and better understood.

Ziegler was born in London in 1903 and studied at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He subsequently (from 1927 to 1930) studied at the Royal College of Art under William Rothenstein, whom he recalled as 'a lively and inspiring Principal'. The late 1920s was a rich period to attend the RCA : the likes of Bawden, Ravilious, Mahoney, Sorrell, Bliss and Freedman had already completed their formative studies and, in what was to prove the golden age of the Royal College of Art, their influence can be seen in Ziegler's early work. Later on the influence of his fellow Jewish artists - Joseph Herman, Bernard Meninksy, David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Emmanuel Levy and Fred Ulhman, all of whom he empathised with and wrote about with enthusiasm, came increasingly to the fore. After leaving the RCA Ziegler taught drawing and painting at St. Martin's School of Art (where he was a visiting instructor for Figure Drawing and Painting) and Art History at Morley College in London and for the Worker's Educational Association. His work was widely reproduced in publications including Illustrated London News, Country Life, Architectural Review, Mater Builder, Architecture Illustrated, Studio Artist, Courier, London Mercury, Leader, Bookman and The Artist. His Royal Academy exhibits (which between 1931 and 1970 numbered 12) were mostly of his locality: Chelsea in the 1930s, Hendon and Hertfordshire in the 1940s and Hampstead from the 1950s onwards.