Rye Art Gallery's Jacqueline Stanley Retrospective
Also featuring selected works by local artists, we visit Rye Art Gallery's latest exhibition on the landscapes of Jacqueline Stanley...
August 16, 2023
Dark damp shopfronts and twilight illuminated by a solitary streetlamp allude to the war-torn childhood of Jacqueline Stanley. Stanley knew from an early age she would be a painter, first sketching the view from the windows of her parents’ flat in Southeast London. She would go on to have over twenty landmark solo shows and be involved in over 270 group shows, describing drawing the world around her as ‘something I’ve always done’. She has over thirty pieces in collections in Ireland, one being in the National Gallery. However, back home she is less well known.
There is a deep romance to her early town and landscapes. An ominousness gives her illustrative depictions a visceral edge over better-known illustrative landscapes of the South Coast by artists such as Eric Ravilious, works such as ‘Merry Go Round, Funfair’ (circa 1940’s) or ‘Fishing off Brighton Pier’ (1956) make the Sussex landscapes of Paul Nash comparably twee.
Her thick murky townscapes speak to her upbringing during the Blitz. In the heartfelt documentary on show in the Studio Gallery, directed by her daughter Nicola Bruce, Stanley describes experiencing the Blitz as a child: ‘the siren drowning everything out… then the whistle and bang… everything shook like an earthquake’. Even after V-E day, even after the beach at Hastings was cleared of barbed wire and re-opened, the gloom of war remained in her work; her early paintings aren’t jovial seaside scenes, and there is an unsettling Sickertness, a dark horror and morbid beauty present.
In 'Goldie Escaping, London’ (1965) it’s difficult to tell if it’s day or night… is the solitary figure a zoo-guard or zoo-goer? Above what may be a full moon or setting winter sun, a Golden Eagle, ‘Goldie’, flies freely from the cages, tangled in gnarled black branches scratched into the canvas. This large painting reflects a shift in Stanley’s work and personal life. After both she and her husband were diagnosed with TB, Stanley moved her family to Kent on doctor's orders.
Though the gnarled winter trees remain, her dark wet townscapes open up to sun-kissed fields and pink fluffy clouds. There is still a dystopian palette to her weathered landscapes of the countryside around her new home, a home that would soon become something of an artist commune and party place for Stanley’s circle escaping London for the fresh air of the Garden of England. At Egerton House Stanley’s creativity moved away from the urban and became entwined with the natural world, from then on landscapes would occupy her oeuvre. The 1960s brought the opportunity to travel and the third room of the retrospective is occupied by large works of landscapes from the Grand Canyon to Spanish fincas and an interior scene looking out across the bay of Cape Town.
By the 1970s Stanley had become the third female member of the Chelsea Arts Club; she had left her post as Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and moved to Sandymount, Ireland, where she accepted a position at the National College of Art and Design. The Irish landscape would become a lasting influence, and Stanley travelled throughout the country sketching, representing Ireland at various Biennales including Maastricht, Florence, Cairo and Baden-Baden.
Stanley’s paintings offer an unaltered window into her world. It is always fulfilling to hear an artist talk about their work, and listening to her describe her paintings in her daughter’s documentary upstairs one sees her innate instinct to record the things that caught her eye. She describes one autumn at Egerton when the family found a neglected orchard which had lost its leaves, the apples were still on the trees unpicked and burning against the evening sky like lanterns in red and yellow. Her description instantly calls to mind Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose’ though in Stanley’s ‘Winter Orchard with Red Apples (1960s)’ all the beauty of Sargent’s painting is strung between twisted and broken branches like battered limbs reaching for the sky.
We spoke to the Director of Rye Art Gallery Dr. Julian Day about the curation of the exhibition, particularly the subtle focus on Stanley as a women artist.
Theis exhibition is a retrospective of Stanley but also features the work of two local artists Angela Braven & Liz Finch, who both deal with themes affecting women. What links Jacqueline’s work with these two artists?
There were connections to Jackie in the work as well as a friendship circle. Angela chose subject matter that makes her very angry, so we show a series of paintings reflecting on the horrific subject of Female Genital mutilation and brides for sale. We also wanted to feature women artists from our permanent collection, [Angela and Liz] selected works by Diana Low and Margaret Barnard who were both artists somewhat overshadowed by their male partners' careers.
Jacquelin’s daughter Nichola Bruce also collaborated with Liz Finch in the film ‘The Romance of Bricks' (2000) was there also a connection there?
Nichola Bruce the documentary filmmaker is Jackie’s elder daughter. Her film is a work in progress and shows clips from different periods of Jackie’s career as an artist; the working title is some things I know about my mother. This film is also about Egerton in Kent where the Bruce family spent time in an artists’ commune along with the Tichells and Fred Cuming RA, who was on the board of the Rye Art Gallery during the 80s.
Stanley has exhibited with the gallery before; how has Rye Art Gallery come to acquire such a large number of paintings?
It was really the connections with the Cuming family that started off our relationship with Jackie although she did exhibit work with us in 1971 as part of a show brought to the gallery by the Chelsea Arts Club.
Do you think Jacqueline’s work has previously been overlooked because she was a woman?
Jackie’s career as an artist stopped in the UK because she followed her husband, the artist Campbell Bruce, to Ireland where he became head of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She was not overlooked but exhibited and sold her work in Ireland for more than 20 years.
When I asked Fred Cuming about her he said that had she stayed in the UK she would definitely have been made a Royal Academician - and that her career and life would have been very different.
A Retrospective - Jacqueline Stanley is showing at Rye Art Gallery until the 30th of September.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Dark damp shopfronts and twilight illuminated by a solitary streetlamp allude to the war-torn childhood of Jacqueline Stanley. Stanley knew from an early age she would be a painter, first sketching the view from the windows of her parents’ flat in Southeast London. She would go on to have over twenty landmark solo shows and be involved in over 270 group shows, describing drawing the world around her as ‘something I’ve always done’. She has over thirty pieces in collections in Ireland, one being in the National Gallery. However, back home she is less well known.
There is a deep romance to her early town and landscapes. An ominousness gives her illustrative depictions a visceral edge over better-known illustrative landscapes of the South Coast by artists such as Eric Ravilious, works such as ‘Merry Go Round, Funfair’ (circa 1940’s) or ‘Fishing off Brighton Pier’ (1956) make the Sussex landscapes of Paul Nash comparably twee.
Her thick murky townscapes speak to her upbringing during the Blitz. In the heartfelt documentary on show in the Studio Gallery, directed by her daughter Nicola Bruce, Stanley describes experiencing the Blitz as a child: ‘the siren drowning everything out… then the whistle and bang… everything shook like an earthquake’. Even after V-E day, even after the beach at Hastings was cleared of barbed wire and re-opened, the gloom of war remained in her work; her early paintings aren’t jovial seaside scenes, and there is an unsettling Sickertness, a dark horror and morbid beauty present.
In 'Goldie Escaping, London’ (1965) it’s difficult to tell if it’s day or night… is the solitary figure a zoo-guard or zoo-goer? Above what may be a full moon or setting winter sun, a Golden Eagle, ‘Goldie’, flies freely from the cages, tangled in gnarled black branches scratched into the canvas. This large painting reflects a shift in Stanley’s work and personal life. After both she and her husband were diagnosed with TB, Stanley moved her family to Kent on doctor's orders.
Though the gnarled winter trees remain, her dark wet townscapes open up to sun-kissed fields and pink fluffy clouds. There is still a dystopian palette to her weathered landscapes of the countryside around her new home, a home that would soon become something of an artist commune and party place for Stanley’s circle escaping London for the fresh air of the Garden of England. At Egerton House Stanley’s creativity moved away from the urban and became entwined with the natural world, from then on landscapes would occupy her oeuvre. The 1960s brought the opportunity to travel and the third room of the retrospective is occupied by large works of landscapes from the Grand Canyon to Spanish fincas and an interior scene looking out across the bay of Cape Town.
By the 1970s Stanley had become the third female member of the Chelsea Arts Club; she had left her post as Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and moved to Sandymount, Ireland, where she accepted a position at the National College of Art and Design. The Irish landscape would become a lasting influence, and Stanley travelled throughout the country sketching, representing Ireland at various Biennales including Maastricht, Florence, Cairo and Baden-Baden.
Stanley’s paintings offer an unaltered window into her world. It is always fulfilling to hear an artist talk about their work, and listening to her describe her paintings in her daughter’s documentary upstairs one sees her innate instinct to record the things that caught her eye. She describes one autumn at Egerton when the family found a neglected orchard which had lost its leaves, the apples were still on the trees unpicked and burning against the evening sky like lanterns in red and yellow. Her description instantly calls to mind Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose’ though in Stanley’s ‘Winter Orchard with Red Apples (1960s)’ all the beauty of Sargent’s painting is strung between twisted and broken branches like battered limbs reaching for the sky.
We spoke to the Director of Rye Art Gallery Dr. Julian Day about the curation of the exhibition, particularly the subtle focus on Stanley as a women artist.
Theis exhibition is a retrospective of Stanley but also features the work of two local artists Angela Braven & Liz Finch, who both deal with themes affecting women. What links Jacqueline’s work with these two artists?
There were connections to Jackie in the work as well as a friendship circle. Angela chose subject matter that makes her very angry, so we show a series of paintings reflecting on the horrific subject of Female Genital mutilation and brides for sale. We also wanted to feature women artists from our permanent collection, [Angela and Liz] selected works by Diana Low and Margaret Barnard who were both artists somewhat overshadowed by their male partners' careers.
Jacquelin’s daughter Nichola Bruce also collaborated with Liz Finch in the film ‘The Romance of Bricks' (2000) was there also a connection there?
Nichola Bruce the documentary filmmaker is Jackie’s elder daughter. Her film is a work in progress and shows clips from different periods of Jackie’s career as an artist; the working title is some things I know about my mother. This film is also about Egerton in Kent where the Bruce family spent time in an artists’ commune along with the Tichells and Fred Cuming RA, who was on the board of the Rye Art Gallery during the 80s.
Stanley has exhibited with the gallery before; how has Rye Art Gallery come to acquire such a large number of paintings?
It was really the connections with the Cuming family that started off our relationship with Jackie although she did exhibit work with us in 1971 as part of a show brought to the gallery by the Chelsea Arts Club.
Do you think Jacqueline’s work has previously been overlooked because she was a woman?
Jackie’s career as an artist stopped in the UK because she followed her husband, the artist Campbell Bruce, to Ireland where he became head of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She was not overlooked but exhibited and sold her work in Ireland for more than 20 years.
When I asked Fred Cuming about her he said that had she stayed in the UK she would definitely have been made a Royal Academician - and that her career and life would have been very different.
A Retrospective - Jacqueline Stanley is showing at Rye Art Gallery until the 30th of September.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Dark damp shopfronts and twilight illuminated by a solitary streetlamp allude to the war-torn childhood of Jacqueline Stanley. Stanley knew from an early age she would be a painter, first sketching the view from the windows of her parents’ flat in Southeast London. She would go on to have over twenty landmark solo shows and be involved in over 270 group shows, describing drawing the world around her as ‘something I’ve always done’. She has over thirty pieces in collections in Ireland, one being in the National Gallery. However, back home she is less well known.
There is a deep romance to her early town and landscapes. An ominousness gives her illustrative depictions a visceral edge over better-known illustrative landscapes of the South Coast by artists such as Eric Ravilious, works such as ‘Merry Go Round, Funfair’ (circa 1940’s) or ‘Fishing off Brighton Pier’ (1956) make the Sussex landscapes of Paul Nash comparably twee.
Her thick murky townscapes speak to her upbringing during the Blitz. In the heartfelt documentary on show in the Studio Gallery, directed by her daughter Nicola Bruce, Stanley describes experiencing the Blitz as a child: ‘the siren drowning everything out… then the whistle and bang… everything shook like an earthquake’. Even after V-E day, even after the beach at Hastings was cleared of barbed wire and re-opened, the gloom of war remained in her work; her early paintings aren’t jovial seaside scenes, and there is an unsettling Sickertness, a dark horror and morbid beauty present.
In 'Goldie Escaping, London’ (1965) it’s difficult to tell if it’s day or night… is the solitary figure a zoo-guard or zoo-goer? Above what may be a full moon or setting winter sun, a Golden Eagle, ‘Goldie’, flies freely from the cages, tangled in gnarled black branches scratched into the canvas. This large painting reflects a shift in Stanley’s work and personal life. After both she and her husband were diagnosed with TB, Stanley moved her family to Kent on doctor's orders.
Though the gnarled winter trees remain, her dark wet townscapes open up to sun-kissed fields and pink fluffy clouds. There is still a dystopian palette to her weathered landscapes of the countryside around her new home, a home that would soon become something of an artist commune and party place for Stanley’s circle escaping London for the fresh air of the Garden of England. At Egerton House Stanley’s creativity moved away from the urban and became entwined with the natural world, from then on landscapes would occupy her oeuvre. The 1960s brought the opportunity to travel and the third room of the retrospective is occupied by large works of landscapes from the Grand Canyon to Spanish fincas and an interior scene looking out across the bay of Cape Town.
By the 1970s Stanley had become the third female member of the Chelsea Arts Club; she had left her post as Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and moved to Sandymount, Ireland, where she accepted a position at the National College of Art and Design. The Irish landscape would become a lasting influence, and Stanley travelled throughout the country sketching, representing Ireland at various Biennales including Maastricht, Florence, Cairo and Baden-Baden.
Stanley’s paintings offer an unaltered window into her world. It is always fulfilling to hear an artist talk about their work, and listening to her describe her paintings in her daughter’s documentary upstairs one sees her innate instinct to record the things that caught her eye. She describes one autumn at Egerton when the family found a neglected orchard which had lost its leaves, the apples were still on the trees unpicked and burning against the evening sky like lanterns in red and yellow. Her description instantly calls to mind Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose’ though in Stanley’s ‘Winter Orchard with Red Apples (1960s)’ all the beauty of Sargent’s painting is strung between twisted and broken branches like battered limbs reaching for the sky.
We spoke to the Director of Rye Art Gallery Dr. Julian Day about the curation of the exhibition, particularly the subtle focus on Stanley as a women artist.
Theis exhibition is a retrospective of Stanley but also features the work of two local artists Angela Braven & Liz Finch, who both deal with themes affecting women. What links Jacqueline’s work with these two artists?
There were connections to Jackie in the work as well as a friendship circle. Angela chose subject matter that makes her very angry, so we show a series of paintings reflecting on the horrific subject of Female Genital mutilation and brides for sale. We also wanted to feature women artists from our permanent collection, [Angela and Liz] selected works by Diana Low and Margaret Barnard who were both artists somewhat overshadowed by their male partners' careers.
Jacquelin’s daughter Nichola Bruce also collaborated with Liz Finch in the film ‘The Romance of Bricks' (2000) was there also a connection there?
Nichola Bruce the documentary filmmaker is Jackie’s elder daughter. Her film is a work in progress and shows clips from different periods of Jackie’s career as an artist; the working title is some things I know about my mother. This film is also about Egerton in Kent where the Bruce family spent time in an artists’ commune along with the Tichells and Fred Cuming RA, who was on the board of the Rye Art Gallery during the 80s.
Stanley has exhibited with the gallery before; how has Rye Art Gallery come to acquire such a large number of paintings?
It was really the connections with the Cuming family that started off our relationship with Jackie although she did exhibit work with us in 1971 as part of a show brought to the gallery by the Chelsea Arts Club.
Do you think Jacqueline’s work has previously been overlooked because she was a woman?
Jackie’s career as an artist stopped in the UK because she followed her husband, the artist Campbell Bruce, to Ireland where he became head of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She was not overlooked but exhibited and sold her work in Ireland for more than 20 years.
When I asked Fred Cuming about her he said that had she stayed in the UK she would definitely have been made a Royal Academician - and that her career and life would have been very different.
A Retrospective - Jacqueline Stanley is showing at Rye Art Gallery until the 30th of September.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Dark damp shopfronts and twilight illuminated by a solitary streetlamp allude to the war-torn childhood of Jacqueline Stanley. Stanley knew from an early age she would be a painter, first sketching the view from the windows of her parents’ flat in Southeast London. She would go on to have over twenty landmark solo shows and be involved in over 270 group shows, describing drawing the world around her as ‘something I’ve always done’. She has over thirty pieces in collections in Ireland, one being in the National Gallery. However, back home she is less well known.
There is a deep romance to her early town and landscapes. An ominousness gives her illustrative depictions a visceral edge over better-known illustrative landscapes of the South Coast by artists such as Eric Ravilious, works such as ‘Merry Go Round, Funfair’ (circa 1940’s) or ‘Fishing off Brighton Pier’ (1956) make the Sussex landscapes of Paul Nash comparably twee.
Her thick murky townscapes speak to her upbringing during the Blitz. In the heartfelt documentary on show in the Studio Gallery, directed by her daughter Nicola Bruce, Stanley describes experiencing the Blitz as a child: ‘the siren drowning everything out… then the whistle and bang… everything shook like an earthquake’. Even after V-E day, even after the beach at Hastings was cleared of barbed wire and re-opened, the gloom of war remained in her work; her early paintings aren’t jovial seaside scenes, and there is an unsettling Sickertness, a dark horror and morbid beauty present.
In 'Goldie Escaping, London’ (1965) it’s difficult to tell if it’s day or night… is the solitary figure a zoo-guard or zoo-goer? Above what may be a full moon or setting winter sun, a Golden Eagle, ‘Goldie’, flies freely from the cages, tangled in gnarled black branches scratched into the canvas. This large painting reflects a shift in Stanley’s work and personal life. After both she and her husband were diagnosed with TB, Stanley moved her family to Kent on doctor's orders.
Though the gnarled winter trees remain, her dark wet townscapes open up to sun-kissed fields and pink fluffy clouds. There is still a dystopian palette to her weathered landscapes of the countryside around her new home, a home that would soon become something of an artist commune and party place for Stanley’s circle escaping London for the fresh air of the Garden of England. At Egerton House Stanley’s creativity moved away from the urban and became entwined with the natural world, from then on landscapes would occupy her oeuvre. The 1960s brought the opportunity to travel and the third room of the retrospective is occupied by large works of landscapes from the Grand Canyon to Spanish fincas and an interior scene looking out across the bay of Cape Town.
By the 1970s Stanley had become the third female member of the Chelsea Arts Club; she had left her post as Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and moved to Sandymount, Ireland, where she accepted a position at the National College of Art and Design. The Irish landscape would become a lasting influence, and Stanley travelled throughout the country sketching, representing Ireland at various Biennales including Maastricht, Florence, Cairo and Baden-Baden.
Stanley’s paintings offer an unaltered window into her world. It is always fulfilling to hear an artist talk about their work, and listening to her describe her paintings in her daughter’s documentary upstairs one sees her innate instinct to record the things that caught her eye. She describes one autumn at Egerton when the family found a neglected orchard which had lost its leaves, the apples were still on the trees unpicked and burning against the evening sky like lanterns in red and yellow. Her description instantly calls to mind Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose’ though in Stanley’s ‘Winter Orchard with Red Apples (1960s)’ all the beauty of Sargent’s painting is strung between twisted and broken branches like battered limbs reaching for the sky.
We spoke to the Director of Rye Art Gallery Dr. Julian Day about the curation of the exhibition, particularly the subtle focus on Stanley as a women artist.
Theis exhibition is a retrospective of Stanley but also features the work of two local artists Angela Braven & Liz Finch, who both deal with themes affecting women. What links Jacqueline’s work with these two artists?
There were connections to Jackie in the work as well as a friendship circle. Angela chose subject matter that makes her very angry, so we show a series of paintings reflecting on the horrific subject of Female Genital mutilation and brides for sale. We also wanted to feature women artists from our permanent collection, [Angela and Liz] selected works by Diana Low and Margaret Barnard who were both artists somewhat overshadowed by their male partners' careers.
Jacquelin’s daughter Nichola Bruce also collaborated with Liz Finch in the film ‘The Romance of Bricks' (2000) was there also a connection there?
Nichola Bruce the documentary filmmaker is Jackie’s elder daughter. Her film is a work in progress and shows clips from different periods of Jackie’s career as an artist; the working title is some things I know about my mother. This film is also about Egerton in Kent where the Bruce family spent time in an artists’ commune along with the Tichells and Fred Cuming RA, who was on the board of the Rye Art Gallery during the 80s.
Stanley has exhibited with the gallery before; how has Rye Art Gallery come to acquire such a large number of paintings?
It was really the connections with the Cuming family that started off our relationship with Jackie although she did exhibit work with us in 1971 as part of a show brought to the gallery by the Chelsea Arts Club.
Do you think Jacqueline’s work has previously been overlooked because she was a woman?
Jackie’s career as an artist stopped in the UK because she followed her husband, the artist Campbell Bruce, to Ireland where he became head of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She was not overlooked but exhibited and sold her work in Ireland for more than 20 years.
When I asked Fred Cuming about her he said that had she stayed in the UK she would definitely have been made a Royal Academician - and that her career and life would have been very different.
A Retrospective - Jacqueline Stanley is showing at Rye Art Gallery until the 30th of September.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Dark damp shopfronts and twilight illuminated by a solitary streetlamp allude to the war-torn childhood of Jacqueline Stanley. Stanley knew from an early age she would be a painter, first sketching the view from the windows of her parents’ flat in Southeast London. She would go on to have over twenty landmark solo shows and be involved in over 270 group shows, describing drawing the world around her as ‘something I’ve always done’. She has over thirty pieces in collections in Ireland, one being in the National Gallery. However, back home she is less well known.
There is a deep romance to her early town and landscapes. An ominousness gives her illustrative depictions a visceral edge over better-known illustrative landscapes of the South Coast by artists such as Eric Ravilious, works such as ‘Merry Go Round, Funfair’ (circa 1940’s) or ‘Fishing off Brighton Pier’ (1956) make the Sussex landscapes of Paul Nash comparably twee.
Her thick murky townscapes speak to her upbringing during the Blitz. In the heartfelt documentary on show in the Studio Gallery, directed by her daughter Nicola Bruce, Stanley describes experiencing the Blitz as a child: ‘the siren drowning everything out… then the whistle and bang… everything shook like an earthquake’. Even after V-E day, even after the beach at Hastings was cleared of barbed wire and re-opened, the gloom of war remained in her work; her early paintings aren’t jovial seaside scenes, and there is an unsettling Sickertness, a dark horror and morbid beauty present.
In 'Goldie Escaping, London’ (1965) it’s difficult to tell if it’s day or night… is the solitary figure a zoo-guard or zoo-goer? Above what may be a full moon or setting winter sun, a Golden Eagle, ‘Goldie’, flies freely from the cages, tangled in gnarled black branches scratched into the canvas. This large painting reflects a shift in Stanley’s work and personal life. After both she and her husband were diagnosed with TB, Stanley moved her family to Kent on doctor's orders.
Though the gnarled winter trees remain, her dark wet townscapes open up to sun-kissed fields and pink fluffy clouds. There is still a dystopian palette to her weathered landscapes of the countryside around her new home, a home that would soon become something of an artist commune and party place for Stanley’s circle escaping London for the fresh air of the Garden of England. At Egerton House Stanley’s creativity moved away from the urban and became entwined with the natural world, from then on landscapes would occupy her oeuvre. The 1960s brought the opportunity to travel and the third room of the retrospective is occupied by large works of landscapes from the Grand Canyon to Spanish fincas and an interior scene looking out across the bay of Cape Town.
By the 1970s Stanley had become the third female member of the Chelsea Arts Club; she had left her post as Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and moved to Sandymount, Ireland, where she accepted a position at the National College of Art and Design. The Irish landscape would become a lasting influence, and Stanley travelled throughout the country sketching, representing Ireland at various Biennales including Maastricht, Florence, Cairo and Baden-Baden.
Stanley’s paintings offer an unaltered window into her world. It is always fulfilling to hear an artist talk about their work, and listening to her describe her paintings in her daughter’s documentary upstairs one sees her innate instinct to record the things that caught her eye. She describes one autumn at Egerton when the family found a neglected orchard which had lost its leaves, the apples were still on the trees unpicked and burning against the evening sky like lanterns in red and yellow. Her description instantly calls to mind Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose’ though in Stanley’s ‘Winter Orchard with Red Apples (1960s)’ all the beauty of Sargent’s painting is strung between twisted and broken branches like battered limbs reaching for the sky.
We spoke to the Director of Rye Art Gallery Dr. Julian Day about the curation of the exhibition, particularly the subtle focus on Stanley as a women artist.
Theis exhibition is a retrospective of Stanley but also features the work of two local artists Angela Braven & Liz Finch, who both deal with themes affecting women. What links Jacqueline’s work with these two artists?
There were connections to Jackie in the work as well as a friendship circle. Angela chose subject matter that makes her very angry, so we show a series of paintings reflecting on the horrific subject of Female Genital mutilation and brides for sale. We also wanted to feature women artists from our permanent collection, [Angela and Liz] selected works by Diana Low and Margaret Barnard who were both artists somewhat overshadowed by their male partners' careers.
Jacquelin’s daughter Nichola Bruce also collaborated with Liz Finch in the film ‘The Romance of Bricks' (2000) was there also a connection there?
Nichola Bruce the documentary filmmaker is Jackie’s elder daughter. Her film is a work in progress and shows clips from different periods of Jackie’s career as an artist; the working title is some things I know about my mother. This film is also about Egerton in Kent where the Bruce family spent time in an artists’ commune along with the Tichells and Fred Cuming RA, who was on the board of the Rye Art Gallery during the 80s.
Stanley has exhibited with the gallery before; how has Rye Art Gallery come to acquire such a large number of paintings?
It was really the connections with the Cuming family that started off our relationship with Jackie although she did exhibit work with us in 1971 as part of a show brought to the gallery by the Chelsea Arts Club.
Do you think Jacqueline’s work has previously been overlooked because she was a woman?
Jackie’s career as an artist stopped in the UK because she followed her husband, the artist Campbell Bruce, to Ireland where he became head of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She was not overlooked but exhibited and sold her work in Ireland for more than 20 years.
When I asked Fred Cuming about her he said that had she stayed in the UK she would definitely have been made a Royal Academician - and that her career and life would have been very different.
A Retrospective - Jacqueline Stanley is showing at Rye Art Gallery until the 30th of September.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Dark damp shopfronts and twilight illuminated by a solitary streetlamp allude to the war-torn childhood of Jacqueline Stanley. Stanley knew from an early age she would be a painter, first sketching the view from the windows of her parents’ flat in Southeast London. She would go on to have over twenty landmark solo shows and be involved in over 270 group shows, describing drawing the world around her as ‘something I’ve always done’. She has over thirty pieces in collections in Ireland, one being in the National Gallery. However, back home she is less well known.
There is a deep romance to her early town and landscapes. An ominousness gives her illustrative depictions a visceral edge over better-known illustrative landscapes of the South Coast by artists such as Eric Ravilious, works such as ‘Merry Go Round, Funfair’ (circa 1940’s) or ‘Fishing off Brighton Pier’ (1956) make the Sussex landscapes of Paul Nash comparably twee.
Her thick murky townscapes speak to her upbringing during the Blitz. In the heartfelt documentary on show in the Studio Gallery, directed by her daughter Nicola Bruce, Stanley describes experiencing the Blitz as a child: ‘the siren drowning everything out… then the whistle and bang… everything shook like an earthquake’. Even after V-E day, even after the beach at Hastings was cleared of barbed wire and re-opened, the gloom of war remained in her work; her early paintings aren’t jovial seaside scenes, and there is an unsettling Sickertness, a dark horror and morbid beauty present.
In 'Goldie Escaping, London’ (1965) it’s difficult to tell if it’s day or night… is the solitary figure a zoo-guard or zoo-goer? Above what may be a full moon or setting winter sun, a Golden Eagle, ‘Goldie’, flies freely from the cages, tangled in gnarled black branches scratched into the canvas. This large painting reflects a shift in Stanley’s work and personal life. After both she and her husband were diagnosed with TB, Stanley moved her family to Kent on doctor's orders.
Though the gnarled winter trees remain, her dark wet townscapes open up to sun-kissed fields and pink fluffy clouds. There is still a dystopian palette to her weathered landscapes of the countryside around her new home, a home that would soon become something of an artist commune and party place for Stanley’s circle escaping London for the fresh air of the Garden of England. At Egerton House Stanley’s creativity moved away from the urban and became entwined with the natural world, from then on landscapes would occupy her oeuvre. The 1960s brought the opportunity to travel and the third room of the retrospective is occupied by large works of landscapes from the Grand Canyon to Spanish fincas and an interior scene looking out across the bay of Cape Town.
By the 1970s Stanley had become the third female member of the Chelsea Arts Club; she had left her post as Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and moved to Sandymount, Ireland, where she accepted a position at the National College of Art and Design. The Irish landscape would become a lasting influence, and Stanley travelled throughout the country sketching, representing Ireland at various Biennales including Maastricht, Florence, Cairo and Baden-Baden.
Stanley’s paintings offer an unaltered window into her world. It is always fulfilling to hear an artist talk about their work, and listening to her describe her paintings in her daughter’s documentary upstairs one sees her innate instinct to record the things that caught her eye. She describes one autumn at Egerton when the family found a neglected orchard which had lost its leaves, the apples were still on the trees unpicked and burning against the evening sky like lanterns in red and yellow. Her description instantly calls to mind Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose’ though in Stanley’s ‘Winter Orchard with Red Apples (1960s)’ all the beauty of Sargent’s painting is strung between twisted and broken branches like battered limbs reaching for the sky.
We spoke to the Director of Rye Art Gallery Dr. Julian Day about the curation of the exhibition, particularly the subtle focus on Stanley as a women artist.
Theis exhibition is a retrospective of Stanley but also features the work of two local artists Angela Braven & Liz Finch, who both deal with themes affecting women. What links Jacqueline’s work with these two artists?
There were connections to Jackie in the work as well as a friendship circle. Angela chose subject matter that makes her very angry, so we show a series of paintings reflecting on the horrific subject of Female Genital mutilation and brides for sale. We also wanted to feature women artists from our permanent collection, [Angela and Liz] selected works by Diana Low and Margaret Barnard who were both artists somewhat overshadowed by their male partners' careers.
Jacquelin’s daughter Nichola Bruce also collaborated with Liz Finch in the film ‘The Romance of Bricks' (2000) was there also a connection there?
Nichola Bruce the documentary filmmaker is Jackie’s elder daughter. Her film is a work in progress and shows clips from different periods of Jackie’s career as an artist; the working title is some things I know about my mother. This film is also about Egerton in Kent where the Bruce family spent time in an artists’ commune along with the Tichells and Fred Cuming RA, who was on the board of the Rye Art Gallery during the 80s.
Stanley has exhibited with the gallery before; how has Rye Art Gallery come to acquire such a large number of paintings?
It was really the connections with the Cuming family that started off our relationship with Jackie although she did exhibit work with us in 1971 as part of a show brought to the gallery by the Chelsea Arts Club.
Do you think Jacqueline’s work has previously been overlooked because she was a woman?
Jackie’s career as an artist stopped in the UK because she followed her husband, the artist Campbell Bruce, to Ireland where he became head of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She was not overlooked but exhibited and sold her work in Ireland for more than 20 years.
When I asked Fred Cuming about her he said that had she stayed in the UK she would definitely have been made a Royal Academician - and that her career and life would have been very different.
A Retrospective - Jacqueline Stanley is showing at Rye Art Gallery until the 30th of September.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Dark damp shopfronts and twilight illuminated by a solitary streetlamp allude to the war-torn childhood of Jacqueline Stanley. Stanley knew from an early age she would be a painter, first sketching the view from the windows of her parents’ flat in Southeast London. She would go on to have over twenty landmark solo shows and be involved in over 270 group shows, describing drawing the world around her as ‘something I’ve always done’. She has over thirty pieces in collections in Ireland, one being in the National Gallery. However, back home she is less well known.
There is a deep romance to her early town and landscapes. An ominousness gives her illustrative depictions a visceral edge over better-known illustrative landscapes of the South Coast by artists such as Eric Ravilious, works such as ‘Merry Go Round, Funfair’ (circa 1940’s) or ‘Fishing off Brighton Pier’ (1956) make the Sussex landscapes of Paul Nash comparably twee.
Her thick murky townscapes speak to her upbringing during the Blitz. In the heartfelt documentary on show in the Studio Gallery, directed by her daughter Nicola Bruce, Stanley describes experiencing the Blitz as a child: ‘the siren drowning everything out… then the whistle and bang… everything shook like an earthquake’. Even after V-E day, even after the beach at Hastings was cleared of barbed wire and re-opened, the gloom of war remained in her work; her early paintings aren’t jovial seaside scenes, and there is an unsettling Sickertness, a dark horror and morbid beauty present.
In 'Goldie Escaping, London’ (1965) it’s difficult to tell if it’s day or night… is the solitary figure a zoo-guard or zoo-goer? Above what may be a full moon or setting winter sun, a Golden Eagle, ‘Goldie’, flies freely from the cages, tangled in gnarled black branches scratched into the canvas. This large painting reflects a shift in Stanley’s work and personal life. After both she and her husband were diagnosed with TB, Stanley moved her family to Kent on doctor's orders.
Though the gnarled winter trees remain, her dark wet townscapes open up to sun-kissed fields and pink fluffy clouds. There is still a dystopian palette to her weathered landscapes of the countryside around her new home, a home that would soon become something of an artist commune and party place for Stanley’s circle escaping London for the fresh air of the Garden of England. At Egerton House Stanley’s creativity moved away from the urban and became entwined with the natural world, from then on landscapes would occupy her oeuvre. The 1960s brought the opportunity to travel and the third room of the retrospective is occupied by large works of landscapes from the Grand Canyon to Spanish fincas and an interior scene looking out across the bay of Cape Town.
By the 1970s Stanley had become the third female member of the Chelsea Arts Club; she had left her post as Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and moved to Sandymount, Ireland, where she accepted a position at the National College of Art and Design. The Irish landscape would become a lasting influence, and Stanley travelled throughout the country sketching, representing Ireland at various Biennales including Maastricht, Florence, Cairo and Baden-Baden.
Stanley’s paintings offer an unaltered window into her world. It is always fulfilling to hear an artist talk about their work, and listening to her describe her paintings in her daughter’s documentary upstairs one sees her innate instinct to record the things that caught her eye. She describes one autumn at Egerton when the family found a neglected orchard which had lost its leaves, the apples were still on the trees unpicked and burning against the evening sky like lanterns in red and yellow. Her description instantly calls to mind Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose’ though in Stanley’s ‘Winter Orchard with Red Apples (1960s)’ all the beauty of Sargent’s painting is strung between twisted and broken branches like battered limbs reaching for the sky.
We spoke to the Director of Rye Art Gallery Dr. Julian Day about the curation of the exhibition, particularly the subtle focus on Stanley as a women artist.
Theis exhibition is a retrospective of Stanley but also features the work of two local artists Angela Braven & Liz Finch, who both deal with themes affecting women. What links Jacqueline’s work with these two artists?
There were connections to Jackie in the work as well as a friendship circle. Angela chose subject matter that makes her very angry, so we show a series of paintings reflecting on the horrific subject of Female Genital mutilation and brides for sale. We also wanted to feature women artists from our permanent collection, [Angela and Liz] selected works by Diana Low and Margaret Barnard who were both artists somewhat overshadowed by their male partners' careers.
Jacquelin’s daughter Nichola Bruce also collaborated with Liz Finch in the film ‘The Romance of Bricks' (2000) was there also a connection there?
Nichola Bruce the documentary filmmaker is Jackie’s elder daughter. Her film is a work in progress and shows clips from different periods of Jackie’s career as an artist; the working title is some things I know about my mother. This film is also about Egerton in Kent where the Bruce family spent time in an artists’ commune along with the Tichells and Fred Cuming RA, who was on the board of the Rye Art Gallery during the 80s.
Stanley has exhibited with the gallery before; how has Rye Art Gallery come to acquire such a large number of paintings?
It was really the connections with the Cuming family that started off our relationship with Jackie although she did exhibit work with us in 1971 as part of a show brought to the gallery by the Chelsea Arts Club.
Do you think Jacqueline’s work has previously been overlooked because she was a woman?
Jackie’s career as an artist stopped in the UK because she followed her husband, the artist Campbell Bruce, to Ireland where he became head of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She was not overlooked but exhibited and sold her work in Ireland for more than 20 years.
When I asked Fred Cuming about her he said that had she stayed in the UK she would definitely have been made a Royal Academician - and that her career and life would have been very different.
A Retrospective - Jacqueline Stanley is showing at Rye Art Gallery until the 30th of September.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Dark damp shopfronts and twilight illuminated by a solitary streetlamp allude to the war-torn childhood of Jacqueline Stanley. Stanley knew from an early age she would be a painter, first sketching the view from the windows of her parents’ flat in Southeast London. She would go on to have over twenty landmark solo shows and be involved in over 270 group shows, describing drawing the world around her as ‘something I’ve always done’. She has over thirty pieces in collections in Ireland, one being in the National Gallery. However, back home she is less well known.
There is a deep romance to her early town and landscapes. An ominousness gives her illustrative depictions a visceral edge over better-known illustrative landscapes of the South Coast by artists such as Eric Ravilious, works such as ‘Merry Go Round, Funfair’ (circa 1940’s) or ‘Fishing off Brighton Pier’ (1956) make the Sussex landscapes of Paul Nash comparably twee.
Her thick murky townscapes speak to her upbringing during the Blitz. In the heartfelt documentary on show in the Studio Gallery, directed by her daughter Nicola Bruce, Stanley describes experiencing the Blitz as a child: ‘the siren drowning everything out… then the whistle and bang… everything shook like an earthquake’. Even after V-E day, even after the beach at Hastings was cleared of barbed wire and re-opened, the gloom of war remained in her work; her early paintings aren’t jovial seaside scenes, and there is an unsettling Sickertness, a dark horror and morbid beauty present.
In 'Goldie Escaping, London’ (1965) it’s difficult to tell if it’s day or night… is the solitary figure a zoo-guard or zoo-goer? Above what may be a full moon or setting winter sun, a Golden Eagle, ‘Goldie’, flies freely from the cages, tangled in gnarled black branches scratched into the canvas. This large painting reflects a shift in Stanley’s work and personal life. After both she and her husband were diagnosed with TB, Stanley moved her family to Kent on doctor's orders.
Though the gnarled winter trees remain, her dark wet townscapes open up to sun-kissed fields and pink fluffy clouds. There is still a dystopian palette to her weathered landscapes of the countryside around her new home, a home that would soon become something of an artist commune and party place for Stanley’s circle escaping London for the fresh air of the Garden of England. At Egerton House Stanley’s creativity moved away from the urban and became entwined with the natural world, from then on landscapes would occupy her oeuvre. The 1960s brought the opportunity to travel and the third room of the retrospective is occupied by large works of landscapes from the Grand Canyon to Spanish fincas and an interior scene looking out across the bay of Cape Town.
By the 1970s Stanley had become the third female member of the Chelsea Arts Club; she had left her post as Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and moved to Sandymount, Ireland, where she accepted a position at the National College of Art and Design. The Irish landscape would become a lasting influence, and Stanley travelled throughout the country sketching, representing Ireland at various Biennales including Maastricht, Florence, Cairo and Baden-Baden.
Stanley’s paintings offer an unaltered window into her world. It is always fulfilling to hear an artist talk about their work, and listening to her describe her paintings in her daughter’s documentary upstairs one sees her innate instinct to record the things that caught her eye. She describes one autumn at Egerton when the family found a neglected orchard which had lost its leaves, the apples were still on the trees unpicked and burning against the evening sky like lanterns in red and yellow. Her description instantly calls to mind Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose’ though in Stanley’s ‘Winter Orchard with Red Apples (1960s)’ all the beauty of Sargent’s painting is strung between twisted and broken branches like battered limbs reaching for the sky.
We spoke to the Director of Rye Art Gallery Dr. Julian Day about the curation of the exhibition, particularly the subtle focus on Stanley as a women artist.
Theis exhibition is a retrospective of Stanley but also features the work of two local artists Angela Braven & Liz Finch, who both deal with themes affecting women. What links Jacqueline’s work with these two artists?
There were connections to Jackie in the work as well as a friendship circle. Angela chose subject matter that makes her very angry, so we show a series of paintings reflecting on the horrific subject of Female Genital mutilation and brides for sale. We also wanted to feature women artists from our permanent collection, [Angela and Liz] selected works by Diana Low and Margaret Barnard who were both artists somewhat overshadowed by their male partners' careers.
Jacquelin’s daughter Nichola Bruce also collaborated with Liz Finch in the film ‘The Romance of Bricks' (2000) was there also a connection there?
Nichola Bruce the documentary filmmaker is Jackie’s elder daughter. Her film is a work in progress and shows clips from different periods of Jackie’s career as an artist; the working title is some things I know about my mother. This film is also about Egerton in Kent where the Bruce family spent time in an artists’ commune along with the Tichells and Fred Cuming RA, who was on the board of the Rye Art Gallery during the 80s.
Stanley has exhibited with the gallery before; how has Rye Art Gallery come to acquire such a large number of paintings?
It was really the connections with the Cuming family that started off our relationship with Jackie although she did exhibit work with us in 1971 as part of a show brought to the gallery by the Chelsea Arts Club.
Do you think Jacqueline’s work has previously been overlooked because she was a woman?
Jackie’s career as an artist stopped in the UK because she followed her husband, the artist Campbell Bruce, to Ireland where he became head of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She was not overlooked but exhibited and sold her work in Ireland for more than 20 years.
When I asked Fred Cuming about her he said that had she stayed in the UK she would definitely have been made a Royal Academician - and that her career and life would have been very different.
A Retrospective - Jacqueline Stanley is showing at Rye Art Gallery until the 30th of September.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Dark damp shopfronts and twilight illuminated by a solitary streetlamp allude to the war-torn childhood of Jacqueline Stanley. Stanley knew from an early age she would be a painter, first sketching the view from the windows of her parents’ flat in Southeast London. She would go on to have over twenty landmark solo shows and be involved in over 270 group shows, describing drawing the world around her as ‘something I’ve always done’. She has over thirty pieces in collections in Ireland, one being in the National Gallery. However, back home she is less well known.
There is a deep romance to her early town and landscapes. An ominousness gives her illustrative depictions a visceral edge over better-known illustrative landscapes of the South Coast by artists such as Eric Ravilious, works such as ‘Merry Go Round, Funfair’ (circa 1940’s) or ‘Fishing off Brighton Pier’ (1956) make the Sussex landscapes of Paul Nash comparably twee.
Her thick murky townscapes speak to her upbringing during the Blitz. In the heartfelt documentary on show in the Studio Gallery, directed by her daughter Nicola Bruce, Stanley describes experiencing the Blitz as a child: ‘the siren drowning everything out… then the whistle and bang… everything shook like an earthquake’. Even after V-E day, even after the beach at Hastings was cleared of barbed wire and re-opened, the gloom of war remained in her work; her early paintings aren’t jovial seaside scenes, and there is an unsettling Sickertness, a dark horror and morbid beauty present.
In 'Goldie Escaping, London’ (1965) it’s difficult to tell if it’s day or night… is the solitary figure a zoo-guard or zoo-goer? Above what may be a full moon or setting winter sun, a Golden Eagle, ‘Goldie’, flies freely from the cages, tangled in gnarled black branches scratched into the canvas. This large painting reflects a shift in Stanley’s work and personal life. After both she and her husband were diagnosed with TB, Stanley moved her family to Kent on doctor's orders.
Though the gnarled winter trees remain, her dark wet townscapes open up to sun-kissed fields and pink fluffy clouds. There is still a dystopian palette to her weathered landscapes of the countryside around her new home, a home that would soon become something of an artist commune and party place for Stanley’s circle escaping London for the fresh air of the Garden of England. At Egerton House Stanley’s creativity moved away from the urban and became entwined with the natural world, from then on landscapes would occupy her oeuvre. The 1960s brought the opportunity to travel and the third room of the retrospective is occupied by large works of landscapes from the Grand Canyon to Spanish fincas and an interior scene looking out across the bay of Cape Town.
By the 1970s Stanley had become the third female member of the Chelsea Arts Club; she had left her post as Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and moved to Sandymount, Ireland, where she accepted a position at the National College of Art and Design. The Irish landscape would become a lasting influence, and Stanley travelled throughout the country sketching, representing Ireland at various Biennales including Maastricht, Florence, Cairo and Baden-Baden.
Stanley’s paintings offer an unaltered window into her world. It is always fulfilling to hear an artist talk about their work, and listening to her describe her paintings in her daughter’s documentary upstairs one sees her innate instinct to record the things that caught her eye. She describes one autumn at Egerton when the family found a neglected orchard which had lost its leaves, the apples were still on the trees unpicked and burning against the evening sky like lanterns in red and yellow. Her description instantly calls to mind Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose’ though in Stanley’s ‘Winter Orchard with Red Apples (1960s)’ all the beauty of Sargent’s painting is strung between twisted and broken branches like battered limbs reaching for the sky.
We spoke to the Director of Rye Art Gallery Dr. Julian Day about the curation of the exhibition, particularly the subtle focus on Stanley as a women artist.
Theis exhibition is a retrospective of Stanley but also features the work of two local artists Angela Braven & Liz Finch, who both deal with themes affecting women. What links Jacqueline’s work with these two artists?
There were connections to Jackie in the work as well as a friendship circle. Angela chose subject matter that makes her very angry, so we show a series of paintings reflecting on the horrific subject of Female Genital mutilation and brides for sale. We also wanted to feature women artists from our permanent collection, [Angela and Liz] selected works by Diana Low and Margaret Barnard who were both artists somewhat overshadowed by their male partners' careers.
Jacquelin’s daughter Nichola Bruce also collaborated with Liz Finch in the film ‘The Romance of Bricks' (2000) was there also a connection there?
Nichola Bruce the documentary filmmaker is Jackie’s elder daughter. Her film is a work in progress and shows clips from different periods of Jackie’s career as an artist; the working title is some things I know about my mother. This film is also about Egerton in Kent where the Bruce family spent time in an artists’ commune along with the Tichells and Fred Cuming RA, who was on the board of the Rye Art Gallery during the 80s.
Stanley has exhibited with the gallery before; how has Rye Art Gallery come to acquire such a large number of paintings?
It was really the connections with the Cuming family that started off our relationship with Jackie although she did exhibit work with us in 1971 as part of a show brought to the gallery by the Chelsea Arts Club.
Do you think Jacqueline’s work has previously been overlooked because she was a woman?
Jackie’s career as an artist stopped in the UK because she followed her husband, the artist Campbell Bruce, to Ireland where he became head of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She was not overlooked but exhibited and sold her work in Ireland for more than 20 years.
When I asked Fred Cuming about her he said that had she stayed in the UK she would definitely have been made a Royal Academician - and that her career and life would have been very different.
A Retrospective - Jacqueline Stanley is showing at Rye Art Gallery until the 30th of September.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Dark damp shopfronts and twilight illuminated by a solitary streetlamp allude to the war-torn childhood of Jacqueline Stanley. Stanley knew from an early age she would be a painter, first sketching the view from the windows of her parents’ flat in Southeast London. She would go on to have over twenty landmark solo shows and be involved in over 270 group shows, describing drawing the world around her as ‘something I’ve always done’. She has over thirty pieces in collections in Ireland, one being in the National Gallery. However, back home she is less well known.
There is a deep romance to her early town and landscapes. An ominousness gives her illustrative depictions a visceral edge over better-known illustrative landscapes of the South Coast by artists such as Eric Ravilious, works such as ‘Merry Go Round, Funfair’ (circa 1940’s) or ‘Fishing off Brighton Pier’ (1956) make the Sussex landscapes of Paul Nash comparably twee.
Her thick murky townscapes speak to her upbringing during the Blitz. In the heartfelt documentary on show in the Studio Gallery, directed by her daughter Nicola Bruce, Stanley describes experiencing the Blitz as a child: ‘the siren drowning everything out… then the whistle and bang… everything shook like an earthquake’. Even after V-E day, even after the beach at Hastings was cleared of barbed wire and re-opened, the gloom of war remained in her work; her early paintings aren’t jovial seaside scenes, and there is an unsettling Sickertness, a dark horror and morbid beauty present.
In 'Goldie Escaping, London’ (1965) it’s difficult to tell if it’s day or night… is the solitary figure a zoo-guard or zoo-goer? Above what may be a full moon or setting winter sun, a Golden Eagle, ‘Goldie’, flies freely from the cages, tangled in gnarled black branches scratched into the canvas. This large painting reflects a shift in Stanley’s work and personal life. After both she and her husband were diagnosed with TB, Stanley moved her family to Kent on doctor's orders.
Though the gnarled winter trees remain, her dark wet townscapes open up to sun-kissed fields and pink fluffy clouds. There is still a dystopian palette to her weathered landscapes of the countryside around her new home, a home that would soon become something of an artist commune and party place for Stanley’s circle escaping London for the fresh air of the Garden of England. At Egerton House Stanley’s creativity moved away from the urban and became entwined with the natural world, from then on landscapes would occupy her oeuvre. The 1960s brought the opportunity to travel and the third room of the retrospective is occupied by large works of landscapes from the Grand Canyon to Spanish fincas and an interior scene looking out across the bay of Cape Town.
By the 1970s Stanley had become the third female member of the Chelsea Arts Club; she had left her post as Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and moved to Sandymount, Ireland, where she accepted a position at the National College of Art and Design. The Irish landscape would become a lasting influence, and Stanley travelled throughout the country sketching, representing Ireland at various Biennales including Maastricht, Florence, Cairo and Baden-Baden.
Stanley’s paintings offer an unaltered window into her world. It is always fulfilling to hear an artist talk about their work, and listening to her describe her paintings in her daughter’s documentary upstairs one sees her innate instinct to record the things that caught her eye. She describes one autumn at Egerton when the family found a neglected orchard which had lost its leaves, the apples were still on the trees unpicked and burning against the evening sky like lanterns in red and yellow. Her description instantly calls to mind Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose’ though in Stanley’s ‘Winter Orchard with Red Apples (1960s)’ all the beauty of Sargent’s painting is strung between twisted and broken branches like battered limbs reaching for the sky.
We spoke to the Director of Rye Art Gallery Dr. Julian Day about the curation of the exhibition, particularly the subtle focus on Stanley as a women artist.
Theis exhibition is a retrospective of Stanley but also features the work of two local artists Angela Braven & Liz Finch, who both deal with themes affecting women. What links Jacqueline’s work with these two artists?
There were connections to Jackie in the work as well as a friendship circle. Angela chose subject matter that makes her very angry, so we show a series of paintings reflecting on the horrific subject of Female Genital mutilation and brides for sale. We also wanted to feature women artists from our permanent collection, [Angela and Liz] selected works by Diana Low and Margaret Barnard who were both artists somewhat overshadowed by their male partners' careers.
Jacquelin’s daughter Nichola Bruce also collaborated with Liz Finch in the film ‘The Romance of Bricks' (2000) was there also a connection there?
Nichola Bruce the documentary filmmaker is Jackie’s elder daughter. Her film is a work in progress and shows clips from different periods of Jackie’s career as an artist; the working title is some things I know about my mother. This film is also about Egerton in Kent where the Bruce family spent time in an artists’ commune along with the Tichells and Fred Cuming RA, who was on the board of the Rye Art Gallery during the 80s.
Stanley has exhibited with the gallery before; how has Rye Art Gallery come to acquire such a large number of paintings?
It was really the connections with the Cuming family that started off our relationship with Jackie although she did exhibit work with us in 1971 as part of a show brought to the gallery by the Chelsea Arts Club.
Do you think Jacqueline’s work has previously been overlooked because she was a woman?
Jackie’s career as an artist stopped in the UK because she followed her husband, the artist Campbell Bruce, to Ireland where he became head of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She was not overlooked but exhibited and sold her work in Ireland for more than 20 years.
When I asked Fred Cuming about her he said that had she stayed in the UK she would definitely have been made a Royal Academician - and that her career and life would have been very different.
A Retrospective - Jacqueline Stanley is showing at Rye Art Gallery until the 30th of September.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
Dark damp shopfronts and twilight illuminated by a solitary streetlamp allude to the war-torn childhood of Jacqueline Stanley. Stanley knew from an early age she would be a painter, first sketching the view from the windows of her parents’ flat in Southeast London. She would go on to have over twenty landmark solo shows and be involved in over 270 group shows, describing drawing the world around her as ‘something I’ve always done’. She has over thirty pieces in collections in Ireland, one being in the National Gallery. However, back home she is less well known.
There is a deep romance to her early town and landscapes. An ominousness gives her illustrative depictions a visceral edge over better-known illustrative landscapes of the South Coast by artists such as Eric Ravilious, works such as ‘Merry Go Round, Funfair’ (circa 1940’s) or ‘Fishing off Brighton Pier’ (1956) make the Sussex landscapes of Paul Nash comparably twee.
Her thick murky townscapes speak to her upbringing during the Blitz. In the heartfelt documentary on show in the Studio Gallery, directed by her daughter Nicola Bruce, Stanley describes experiencing the Blitz as a child: ‘the siren drowning everything out… then the whistle and bang… everything shook like an earthquake’. Even after V-E day, even after the beach at Hastings was cleared of barbed wire and re-opened, the gloom of war remained in her work; her early paintings aren’t jovial seaside scenes, and there is an unsettling Sickertness, a dark horror and morbid beauty present.
In 'Goldie Escaping, London’ (1965) it’s difficult to tell if it’s day or night… is the solitary figure a zoo-guard or zoo-goer? Above what may be a full moon or setting winter sun, a Golden Eagle, ‘Goldie’, flies freely from the cages, tangled in gnarled black branches scratched into the canvas. This large painting reflects a shift in Stanley’s work and personal life. After both she and her husband were diagnosed with TB, Stanley moved her family to Kent on doctor's orders.
Though the gnarled winter trees remain, her dark wet townscapes open up to sun-kissed fields and pink fluffy clouds. There is still a dystopian palette to her weathered landscapes of the countryside around her new home, a home that would soon become something of an artist commune and party place for Stanley’s circle escaping London for the fresh air of the Garden of England. At Egerton House Stanley’s creativity moved away from the urban and became entwined with the natural world, from then on landscapes would occupy her oeuvre. The 1960s brought the opportunity to travel and the third room of the retrospective is occupied by large works of landscapes from the Grand Canyon to Spanish fincas and an interior scene looking out across the bay of Cape Town.
By the 1970s Stanley had become the third female member of the Chelsea Arts Club; she had left her post as Senior Lecturer of Fine Art at Canterbury College of Art and moved to Sandymount, Ireland, where she accepted a position at the National College of Art and Design. The Irish landscape would become a lasting influence, and Stanley travelled throughout the country sketching, representing Ireland at various Biennales including Maastricht, Florence, Cairo and Baden-Baden.
Stanley’s paintings offer an unaltered window into her world. It is always fulfilling to hear an artist talk about their work, and listening to her describe her paintings in her daughter’s documentary upstairs one sees her innate instinct to record the things that caught her eye. She describes one autumn at Egerton when the family found a neglected orchard which had lost its leaves, the apples were still on the trees unpicked and burning against the evening sky like lanterns in red and yellow. Her description instantly calls to mind Sargent’s ‘Carnation, Lily, Lily Rose’ though in Stanley’s ‘Winter Orchard with Red Apples (1960s)’ all the beauty of Sargent’s painting is strung between twisted and broken branches like battered limbs reaching for the sky.
We spoke to the Director of Rye Art Gallery Dr. Julian Day about the curation of the exhibition, particularly the subtle focus on Stanley as a women artist.
Theis exhibition is a retrospective of Stanley but also features the work of two local artists Angela Braven & Liz Finch, who both deal with themes affecting women. What links Jacqueline’s work with these two artists?
There were connections to Jackie in the work as well as a friendship circle. Angela chose subject matter that makes her very angry, so we show a series of paintings reflecting on the horrific subject of Female Genital mutilation and brides for sale. We also wanted to feature women artists from our permanent collection, [Angela and Liz] selected works by Diana Low and Margaret Barnard who were both artists somewhat overshadowed by their male partners' careers.
Jacquelin’s daughter Nichola Bruce also collaborated with Liz Finch in the film ‘The Romance of Bricks' (2000) was there also a connection there?
Nichola Bruce the documentary filmmaker is Jackie’s elder daughter. Her film is a work in progress and shows clips from different periods of Jackie’s career as an artist; the working title is some things I know about my mother. This film is also about Egerton in Kent where the Bruce family spent time in an artists’ commune along with the Tichells and Fred Cuming RA, who was on the board of the Rye Art Gallery during the 80s.
Stanley has exhibited with the gallery before; how has Rye Art Gallery come to acquire such a large number of paintings?
It was really the connections with the Cuming family that started off our relationship with Jackie although she did exhibit work with us in 1971 as part of a show brought to the gallery by the Chelsea Arts Club.
Do you think Jacqueline’s work has previously been overlooked because she was a woman?
Jackie’s career as an artist stopped in the UK because she followed her husband, the artist Campbell Bruce, to Ireland where he became head of the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. She was not overlooked but exhibited and sold her work in Ireland for more than 20 years.
When I asked Fred Cuming about her he said that had she stayed in the UK she would definitely have been made a Royal Academician - and that her career and life would have been very different.
A Retrospective - Jacqueline Stanley is showing at Rye Art Gallery until the 30th of September.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
