Gertrude Brodie's 'Portrait of a tree in Giggleswick'

     

I wanted readers to know that another poster-size work by Gertrude Brodie has turned up. Unless the previous two, this one has a direct link with the artist herself because the reader's grandmother became friends with Brodie after she taught her at Settle High School. The drawing was then given to the former pupil following her marriage at the church in the picture and has remained in the family ever since. As ever, I am very grateful to the reader for sending the image to me. As other readers will know, Brodie has staying power and is the kind of artist you do not push in a cupboard but hang on your wall.  Portrait of a tree at Giggleswick (above) would certainly join my own The hill over Settle which is hanging on the wall only a few feet behind me as I write. I should also say it wasn't always there. My mother loved it so much, it hung in her home for many years.

Brodie was onto something with her poster-size drawings. Wherever she went, she used the same format which allowed her to make the best of the narrow Yorkshire streets, stately trees and church towers. So for as I can make out she employed gouache and conte crayon for all the four pieces by her we know of and it is the consistent use of the same size of picture and the same medium that suggests someone who was serious about her work.

To go over the little we know about her biography, she was born at Redbridge, Essex, in 1882 and taught at Settle High School and Giggleswick School. Both schools are in small towns in the old North Riding of Yorkshire. She then returned to Essex where I assume she went on working in the same way and made View from my Essex window (above). I am including this to allow readers to make comparisons. So far as I am concerned, what impresses me is the combination of a decorative style and a successful overall tone. As you see, this differed from picture to picture. Also compare the very different moods. The calm sense of withdrawl in the Essex picture is very different from the vigorous sense of movement at Giggleswick, with the wild growth of its beech trees, sloping uneven streets and uncertain sky. Here is an artist who could do both public and private and who had a strong enough sense of form and firm enough handling of technique to get across how very different the two counties she worked and lived in were.

Brodie died in 1967 and deserves to be better known. But then I could say that about so many.