Private
Collection
Collection
Phoebe Willetts-Dickinson
(1917 - 1978)
A Seated Model in the Studio, late 1930s
Private Collection
Phoebe Willetts-Dickinson (1917 - 1978)
Size:
Height – 61.5cm
Width – 51.5cm
“There are no artists in Fascist countries”, declared Cyril Connolly in 1938.
It is an outrageous comment, but shows how polarised the world was at
the time Phoebe Willetts-Dickinson painted a Jewish refugee. Willetts-
Dickinson was radically anti-war. Shortly after studying at the Royal
Academy Schools she joined the Land Army, where she met and married
the conscientious objector Alfred Willetts, 1942. Yet she wanted to draw
attention to the plight of the German Jews. Her depiction is remarkably
straight ‚Äì compare it to John Craxton’s romanticised pen and ink drawing
in the Tate, Dreamer in the Landscape (1942).
Antisemitism was not limited to Nazi Germany. It was rife in the
whole Christian world. Willetts-Dickinson was religious; indeed, in 1966
she became the first Deaconess in the Church of England. As a feminist
she campaigned for the ordination of women, but over and above this she
was concerned with social justice, and she spent six months in jail for civil
disobedience. Painting was ultimately not enough.
When Craxton drew his urbane Jewish friend Felix Braun as a
shepherd in a landscape, he was sharing a house with Lucian Freud and
Braun. Yet Craxton’s picture is only an oblique social criticism. Willetts-
Dickinson’s picture shows an abandoned man. He is on the stage, but on the
very edge of it. The plight of the Jews should have been on the world stage,
but who was paying attention? This particular lonely man has unpacked
his case; its contents, a violin and bow on his lap, and he waits patiently.
He is in a desolate corner. The stage curtain that would be pulled back for
any serious performance is still down except for a mouse-door of entrance.
There is just about room for him to have crawled in, but what next?
Commentary by Alistair Hicks. Hicks is the author of Global Art Compass (2014) and is currently curating The Time Needs Changing at Pera Museum, Istanbul and The Crime of Mr Adolf Loos at Axel Vervoordt Gallery, Antwerp.
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.
