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HELEN THORNYCROFT (England, 1848-1937): Still Life with a Chinese Tuquioise Bottle Vase and a Chinese Shekwan mudfigurine of a girl holding a ceramic pillow, signed "TH" in monogram, oil on canvas, 79 x 55 cm.


The room in which the artist was painting the still life is mirrored in the dragon Tuquioise decorated bottle vase in the Kangxi style.

Helen Thornycroft was a member of the well-known Thornycroft family of sculptors. The family had strong multiple connections with the English art world of the nineteenth century, Her two sisters Theresa Thornycroft and Ellen Thornycroft Gosse studied painting under Ford Madox Brown.

Helen Thornycroft trained in the Royal Academy schools starting in the 1860s, when the institution was only beginning to take female students. The date and circumstances of Helen´s entry are disputed, by one account, she applied in 1862, but was rejected by Sir Edwin Landseer because of her youth (she was 14 at the time). Helen started out as a sculptor like previous generations of her family, she exhibited a statue of Ophelia in the Royal Academy summer show of 1864. Within a year or two, however, she abandoned sculpture to concentrate on painting.

Helen was a more prolific and committed artist than her sister - by the late 1880s she had her own studio and her own apartment, which was again unusual for the time. She became known primarily as a flower painter, a genre long associated with women, yet she also worked in other genres, including landscape and portraiture. Thornycroft exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World´s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. She spent a decade (1899-1909) as Vice President of the Society of Women Artists. She never married. Many sources mistakenly give the year of her death as 1912.

Thornycroft dressed daringly for the time, as a modern young woman in the early aesthetic style, against the prevailing fashion, her hair ´à la Grecque´ (she always wore her hair set, because of an accident as a girl when she caught it in the machinery of a steam engine her teenage brother Isaac was building and was "nearly scalped").

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Auktionsnummer:

576615

Datum:

2018-10-23