Dorothea Sharp

Haynes Fine Art, Broadway

Purchased from the above by the parents of the present owner in 2016

‘One of England’s greatest living woman painters’ wrote Harold Sawkins in The Artist in April 1935 before going on to explain the enduring appeal of her work; ‘No other woman artist gives us such joyful paintings as she. Full of sunshine and luscious colour, her work is always lively, harmonious and tremendously exhilarating… the chief attractions of Miss Sharp’s delightful pictures are the happy choice of subjects, and her beautiful colour schemes. Rollicking children bathed in strong sunlight, playing in delightful surroundings, her subjects appeal because they are based on the joy of life. And she presents them equally happily, with a powerful technique which enables her to make the most of her wonderful sense of colour’. (Harold Sawkins, ‘Dorothea Sharp, ROI, RBA’, in The Artist, April 1935)

Dorothea Sharp was born in Dartford in Kent and had little prospect of becoming a professional artist until, at the age of twenty-one, she inherited 100 pounds from her uncle which enabled her to enrol in an art school in Richmond, Surrey. She showed great promise and went to the Regent Street Polytechnic where Sir George Clausen and Sir David Murray both gave her much encouragement as regular visitors to the Polytechnic Sketching Club. However it was not until she went to Paris, to study in the atelier of Castaluchio, that her artistic style flourished. She fell in love with the art of Claude Monet and his work had a profound and lasting influence upon her energetic and spontaneous style of painting the brilliance of sunlight. She was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists and the Society of Women Artists of which she was President for four years. In 1933 she held her first solo show at the Connell Gallery which was a phenomenal hit with the public and collectors who crowded to see her paintings of still-life and children, which were always her favourite subjects.