Nora Summers - Oil - Red Tulips in a Lustre Jug

Nora Summers (1892-1948) - Oil On Canvas Red Tulips in a Lustre Jug. Provenance - Sally Hunter Fine Art , London , No 43 in Nora Summers Exhibition 1998 from the state of the Artist purchased by David Abbot Esq February 1998.

Through her art Nora Summers sought a personal vision of Arcadia. She was receptive to the bucolic spirit of the artistic circles in which she moved, and absorbed something of the vivid Post-Impressionism of J.D. Innes, Augustus John and Derwent Lees. Her work often has a sense of hermetic stillness: of frozen time, of unemphatic yet implicit personal allegory.Nora went to Bristol School of Art before enrolling at the Slade School in London where she studied under the formidable Henry Tonks from 1907-1910. She became friendly with J.D. Innes and Derwent Lees and met a fellow student, Gerald Summers (1886-1969), whom she married in September 1912 at Chelsea Old Church.From 1914, Nora became a frequent visitor to Augustus John’s extended household at Alderney Manor overlooking the Purbecks in Dorset. There she photographed the John and Macnamara children while forging lifelong links with both families, especially Yvonne Macnamara, who became for Nora a companion, lover and muse.

When Nora’s only son Vincent was born in London in April 1919, she had the road outside Cheyne Walk strewn with straw to dull the noise of the traffic. Escape was essential. Soon installed at New Milton with the Macnamaras, Yvonne assumed the maternal role while Nora painted. Celebrating the birth of her child, Nora painted a series of flower paintings and maternal groups involving Yvonne and baby Vincent in 1919. In February- March 1920 she had a solo exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea.

From 1911 Nora had shown her paintings regularly at the New English Art Club and occasionally at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Her work was promoted in Colour, an art magazine of the period, and she was represented in the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s exhibition of May/June 1914, Twentieth Century Art: A Review of Modern Movements. She was a Francophile interested in Post-Impressionism and her son Vincent was so named in tribute to Van Gogh.

The war in 1939 bought an end to her bucolic existence and Nora became an alcoholic. She had by the end of the war given up both painting and photography, and died of a stroke in 1948.

61 x 51 cms

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