SKU: 10363
Gertrude Hermes
(1901 - 1983)
Waterlilies, (the original block), 1930
£12,000
Gertrude Hermes (1901 - 1983)
£12,000
Size:
Height – 23cm
Width – 13.1cm
1 in stock
Printed and published by the artist in an edition of 30
In his book A History of Wood Engraving (1978), Albert Garrett, the President of the Society of Wood Engravers, described how in Water Lilies, Gertrude Hermes had solved in her own terms the language for engraving a large circular plane that has gentle undulations. For most people, a waterlily leaf is a solid plane ut in the engraving Hermes sees it as a space plane solution’. Hermes, who was one of the most imaginative and innovative wood engravers of her generation, drew much of her inspiration from nature. Trained by Leon Underwood at his art school in Hammersmith, she captured all manner of natural forms observed from the world around her‚ plants, animals, insects‚ with a rapidly flowing line. Transferring her preliminary sketches onto blocks of fine-grained wood, her distinctive style combined great technical skill with a bold sense of design. Described by the novelist Naomi Mitchison as a a magician, or if you like priestess’, Hermes’ unique achievement lay in the way she rendered nature as dynamic and living, the feeling of movement giving the engravings an almost three-dimensional quality. By the end of the second world war’, Garrett wrote, Hermes in engraving is what [Barbara] Hepworth is in sculpture’.
Gertrude Hermes attended the Beckenham School of Art (c.1921)
and the Brook Green School of Painting and Sculpture (1922),
where she met Blair Hughes-Stanton (1902’1981), whom she
married in 1926.
Although they divorced in 1933, they collaborated on several
projects, including wood engravings for The Pilgrim’s Progress,
published in 1928. She also collaborated with her friends Naomi
Mitchison and Prunella Clough (1919’1999) to explore depictions
of feminine desire.
The 1930s were a prosperous decade for Hermes, who exhibited
for the first time at the Redfern Gallery in 1932. She also showed
regularly at the RA from 1934, was elected a member of the LG in
1935, and in 1939 represented Britain at the Venice Biennale.
In the late 1940s to early 1950s, she taught at the Central School
of Art, and became the first woman engraver to be elected a full
member of the RA in 1971 ‘ eventually receiving an OBE in 1981.
