Edith Lawrence

Edith Lawrence was a highly talented British modernist artist best known for her landscapes and portraits in a variety of mediums. She was born in 1890 studied at the Slade School in London and in 1922 exhibited work with the Seven and Five Society at the Walker Gallery alongside artists such as Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Christopher Wood. She was an important alumnus of the Grosvenor School of Modern Art where she honed her skills as a printmaker and textile designer. In 1927, alongside her lifelong partner, Claude Flight, they set up an interior decoration studio where they produced a wide range of textiles and household items, although very few examples of their work have survived to the present day. She travelled extensively throughout Britain and Europe and documented these travels by painting landscapes in watercolours, some of the works for which she has become best known. The present collection of watercolours includes numerous depictions of Scotland, Switzerland and Northern France where she travelled and painted frequently. Her unique, angular and modernist watercolour style was strongly influenced by her training as a printmaker and textile designer. Lawrence was a versatile watercolour painter who showed mastery of the medium across a variety of landscapes, including; pastoral English countryside scenes, rugged Scottish island seascapes, Swiss Alpine scenes as well as some more experimental vorticist style compositions influenced by her time studying at the Slade alongside C.R.W Nevinson and David Bomberg. Due to bomb damage to the London studio in 1943, Lawrence was forced to move out of London and opted for a more rural setting in Wiltshire where she lived and worked until her death in 1973.