Fishing Boats 1914 & 2020

A link between two Aldbourne Artists both exploring a theme removed from our downland landscape, and away from land locked Wiltshire.

Andrea West has included several studies of boats in her lock-down gallery, including this one:

Back in 1914, although she didn’t live in Aldbourne at the time, another watercolour artist, Miss Adeline Fox, exhibited ‘Fishing Boats’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (sadly, we don’t have an image of that painting):

The “Twenty Years of British Art” Exhibition, held here in Summer, 1910, showed a review of art as it had developed in this country in the concluding decade of last century and the first of the present century. It showed that artists had moved away from an academic treatment of history, anecdote, and sentimentality, and had gone in search of a more brilliant treatment of light in landscape, of more truly decorative treatments of subject, and of a more intimate treatment of human life generally.
The “Twentieth Century Art“ exhibition (1914) is concerned with the progress of art, since the absorption of the impressionist teaching, as shown in the work of the younger British artists and of artists of foreign origin working in this country.
“Twentieth Century Art. A Review of Modern Movements.” In Database of Modern Exhibitions (DoME). European Paintings and Drawings 1905-1915. Last modified Jul 6, 2020. https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/exhibition/680

Born in 1870, Miss Adeline Fox, who lived with her sister Evelyn at The Old Rectory between 1923-1945, was an accomplished watercolour artist. I have been able to find newspaper articles mentioning her work going back to 1910. During their time in Aldbourne, the Misses Fox were renowned for their generosity to village good causes; lending their grounds for fund-raising events, and most notably paying for senior citizens to be driven to the Annual Tea.