Gertrude Leese

(British 1870 – 1963)

The Fountain at Saint Paul de Vence, c.1924-1925

watercolour and pencil on paper

signed in pencil lower right ‘Gertrude Leese’

42.2 x 29.7 cm.

(framed 47 x 36 cm.)

in a period frame

Gertrude Leese was a good friend of the artist Jessica Dismorr, and cousin to Dismorr’s partner, fellow artist Catherine Dawson Giles, with whose delicately coloured, pared-down watercolours there is much resonance. The three women all studied with the American artist, Max Bohm, at his studio in the Etaples art colony at the turn of the century. During the First World War they created their own art retreat, buying a pair of 15th century cottages at Amberley in west Sussex, with new friends from the War Office - two of them formerly at the Royal Academy Schools - Rachel Levy and Margaret Hodgson. “In the Orchard overlooking the Wild Brooks, between the fall of apples or the cries of snipe or bittern, we could sometimes hear the guns of France”, wrote Rachel Levy.

This drawing dates to the 1920s when the friends’ visits to the south of France were almost annual, their object being to paint landscapes in a primitive style. In 1924, Leese, already over fifty, had enrolled as a student again at the Académie de la Palette in Paris, and her ‘maître’ there was Henri le Fauconnier. It’s probable that she was joined by her cousin Dawson Giles at this time, and the pair continued their travels to the south of France, including Saint Paul de Vence, itself a hub of artistic activity, with the likes of Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger among others.