Studio RT Ltd

Description

We are pleased to offer this charming and beautifully painted oil on canvas by the artist Dorothy Fitchew. The painting was unsigned but was auctioned with some sketch books and some glass negatives of illustrations all by Dorothy Fitchew.The painting depicts a young girl of about seven years of age, reading a book, which is propped up against another book on a table. She has shoulder length fair hair, which is parted to one side and is wearing a pink and white dress, with a frilled collar and cuffs. The depiction of the face is masterful in its execution. It is possible that she was a choir girl, although we are unaware whether girls were in church choirs in the 1910s.

The only reference we could find to a Dorothy Fitchew was a birth date of 1894 and a census record for 1911, when she was 16, which stated that she was at college. As we found an auction record for a watercolour of hers that was sold by Christie's, which bore the stamp ESK, or Ecole South Kensington, the Royal Academy School, that would bear out the census record. She obviously had talent to have studied art there.

As all the auction records state that she was active between 1910 and 1922, and it is impossible to view census records after this date, but we have found that she was left half of £4,400 from her father's estate in 1932, when she was still a spinster. She married an Eddie Booth in 1938, but we are unsure of her death date, as there are many Dorothy Booths.

She is listed in the Dictionary of British Artists (Collectors' Club) with an address, presumably taken from an exhibition listing, of The Oriels, Widmore, Bromley, Kent. She exhibited 7 paintings at the Royal Academy, 2 at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 3 at the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours and 2 at the Society of Women Artists.

She specialised in illustrations and some of her botanical illustrations were made into Macmillan posters. She also produced watercolours of an art nouveau nature, some featuring fairies. We found one other oil painting of a similar size to this one, of an older girl, dressed in a sailor suit, in a similar pose.

The painting is newly framed in a 5" gilt bronze frame and will be supplied wired and ready to hang.

Image size: 12 3/4" x 11 3/8" - 32.35cm x 28.85cm

Frame size: 23" x 21 1/2" - 58.35cm x 54.5cm

Medium: Oils on canvas

Conditin: Very good. There are no repairs to the canvas which is clean and taut. There is no craquelure, stretcher marks or paint loss. The frame is new.