Annie French watercolor

ANNIE FRENCH                     Glasgow 1872   – 1965 Jersey

The Garden Flower (Young Woman in an Elegant Costume).

Watercolor, attached to a perhaps slightly later support sheet with a border decorated in pen and red ink, and on the reverse, the edge of sheet decorated with floral motifs surrounding two light-hearted poems, by the artist, the one above decorated with a sprig of flowers in colored ink and wash and the one below, set in a wreath floral forms all typical of her style.  Signed recto, lower left. Provenance: by descent from the artist to her great-niece.

She studied at the Glasgow School of Art and later was an instructor there in ceramic decoration.  At the end of the 19^th  century Glasgow was a center of Modernist artistic activity, having produced Charles Rennie Macintosh, the famous Scottish architect and designer, who had designed the School’s first building since its founding in 1853. From 1906 Annie French exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. She married the etcher and ceramic designer George Woollistcroft Rhead in 1914 and was active as a watercolorist and illustrator of children's books until circa 1925, shortly after the death of her husband in 1920.

French's style reflects the influence of Jessie M. King and more indirectly Aubrey Beardsley. The young woman, with forms curiously akin to those of Wassily

Kandinsky' s early woodcuts, embodies an abstraction and assurance typical of British art of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the last years of the 19^th  century and the beginning of the 20^th  century. Our watercolor can be dated relatively early, on the basis of costume and hairstyle, to the first years of the twentieth century, or at the latest 1914-15.

274 x 153 mm    10 ¾ x 6 inches