Artist      Dod Procter
Title       Ancilla with an Orange
Date      1950's
object    Painting
Media    oil
Size       61 x 51cm
Ref        127

Purchased in the 104th RWA Annual Exhibition in 1956

Other websites featuring this artist's work/
www.newlyn.info/
www.tate.org.uk/

Ancilla with an Orange
Dod Procter was born Doris Shaw in Hampstead, North London in 1890. Her father, a ship's doctor died when she was a child and her mother, devoted to the arts and recognising the latent talent within her daughter, took her to Cornwall to attend the art school at Newlyn run by Stanhope Forbes and his fellow painter and wife, Elizabeth when Dod was 17 years old. It was at Newlyn that she met Ernest Proctor, another painter whom she married and took the name of in 1912. She later studied in Paris and was greatly influenced by pointillism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Despite these influences, her work would always retain an 'English' feel in its choice but more notably treatment of subject matter, the techniques developed at Newlyn staying with her all her days..

Proctor was a prodigous talent, taking portraits and adolescent girls as her favoured themes. In 1927, she entered a painting called 'Morning' in the RA summer show, a not untypical example of her style, a sleeping girl draped among her bedsheets. The picture became a cause celébraire, voted the most Popular painting of the year and was bought for the Tate by the owners of the Daily Mail. Proctor was catap[ulted to artistic fame, a mantle she never wore easily or lightly. She was shortly thereafter elected a to the RA, being only the second woman to be made an RA at that time.

Her husband and mentor Ernest Procter died unexpectedly in 1935, greatly affecting Dod on both a personal and artistic level. Restless, among other places she visited France, the Canaries, the Bahamas and both North and Southern Africa, painting the same choice of subjects she had always loved, but under different light and with different eyes.

She kept up her home in Cornwall and in later life painted many still lives and flower paintings. She died in Cornwall aged 82 in 1972.

A major touring retrospective of her work began at the Penlee House Gallery in September 2007.
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/index.php?storyID=8765&p=2

Further Reading:
A Singular Vision: Dod Procter 1890-1972; Alison James, Redcliffe Press Ltd London, 2007. ISBN-10: 1904537782
Newlyn Flowers: The Floral Art of Dod Procter ; Avril King, Philip Wilson Publishers Ltd, London, 2005; ISBN-10: 0856676047 

back