Private
Collection
Collection
Phoebe Willetts-Dickinson
(1917 - 1978)
A Seated Model in the Studio, late 1930s
Private Collection
Phoebe Willetts-Dickinson (1917 - 1978)
Oil on canvas
Size:
Height – 76cm
Width – 56cm
Literature: Llewellyn, Sacha, and Paul Liss. Portrait of an Artist. Liss Llewellyn, 2021, p.107.
This study is likely to date to Willetts period as an art student in the late 1930’s early 1940s.
Although by the interwar period it had become common for women attending art school to paint in the life class, some observers were still unenthusiastic. The idea that there was as ‘something dangerously near to vulgarity’ ‚Äì as The Times critics had described Laura Knights’ iconic Self-portrait (1913) ‚Äì still lingered on.
Phoebe Peto Willetts studied at the Birmingham School
of Art and the Royal Academy Schools between 1934 and 1940.
She served in the land army during WWII and in 1942 married
conscientious objector Alfred Willetts.
She was a lifelong campaigner for peace, social justice and
the ordination of women ‘ issues which influenced many of
her paintings. After taking part in demonstrations to block the
entrance to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at
Foulness Island, she spent six months in prison for a nuclear
disarmament protest in April 1960.
In 1966 she was ordained as a Deaconess in the Church of
England, and as part of her campaign for the ordination of women
priests she defied Church authority in 1978 to become the first
female to concelebrate communion in an English parish church.
Although she died just seven weeks later, her writing on
women’s call to priesthood was published as a book, Sharing a
Vision, in 1979.
