Barbara Dorf

(London 1933-2016)

Gateway in Walton Street, 1982

watercolour on cartridge paper

signed and dated lower right 'Barbara Dorf '82' and with extensive inscriptions verso: 'The gift of the artist to Francis and Larissa Haskell, in loving memory of our dearest friends, Anne Pennington and David Carritt./ Subject - Gateway in Walton Street, Knightsbridge, SW3.... Francis, Larissa & Lydia, for Christmas '83, and gratefully for all your kindness and support in the last 15 months after losing our Anne & David, Love Barbara.... There are several Waltons. One was an angler, another invented linoleum, another founded Sunday Schools and one wrote a polyglot bible, and one was one of Chas I's generals in the Civil War.'

15 x 12 cm.

Provenance

From the estate of Francis & Larissa Haskell.

Barbara Dorf studied at the Central School of Art and Crafts, and at the Slade, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. She went on to teach at the Ruskin School of Drawing in Oxford, and was a regular exhibitor with the New English Art Club and at the Royal Academy, specialising in particular in architecutral drawings in watercolour and charcoal. She was great friends with the author Iris Murdoch and Kingston University holds an archive of their correspondence.

Francis Haskell (1928-2000) was an art historian, author and professor of art history at Oxford University. His wife Larissa (1931-2024) was a noted Russian art historian, and curator of Venetian Drawings at the Hermitage.