Cathy's Art Diary

Fascinating exhibition at Charleston in Lewes looking at the collaborative art of Dorothy Hepworth and Patricia Preece. I have known this story for a while plus I own some drawings by them. Hepworth and Preece were a couple and artists in the early 20th century. Hepworth was the better artist but Preece was the more outgoing character so the former produced work under the latter’s name and Preece promoted it. They fooled a number of art establishment figures including the Bloomsbury Group who helped to promote the work. Preece is also known for being a muse and later wife of the artist Stanley Spencer although she continued to live with Hepworth. The show was beautifully narrated and wove together paintings and archive material well. Most intriguing was that Preece photographed Hepworth with all her finished works obviously intending the story to be known at some point. I loved the still-lives in the show often documenting their house in Cookham but was less impressed by the p...

Fabulous online talk organised by the Samuel Courtauld Society looking at Stanley Spencer’s two wives Hilda Carline and Patricia Preece. If you follow this blog you’ll know that Spencer is one my favourite artists and I have always been fascinated by his story as well as his art. He married Hilda in 1925 and was devoted to her continuing to write to her after their divorce and even after she had died. However in 1929 he met Patricia Preece in a tea shop in Cookham and became infatuated with her and they married in 1937. This was all despite the fact she was living with her girlfriend, Dorothy Hepworth and continued to do so. The speakers, Amanda Bradley, who has curated the exhibition at the Stanley Spencer Gallery that this talk Is based on, and the author Carolyn Leder, told this story well and it was particularly interesting to hear anecdotes from Leder of people she had interviewed who were part of the tale such as Elsie, Stanley and Hilda’s maid and Daphne Charlton, Spencer’s...