Reuniting the pages of time
Frances Dorothy Beresfield Maule Kerr
I wanted to share a lovely, true tale. It's a bit long, but it's worth it. It may even make you smile a little.
While researching my 'Anicurio Collection' book, I kept coming across a Victorian/ Edwardian English artist, Dorothy B. M. Kerr. Her 1902 illustrations were beautiful character studies of friends, family, and people of the time. They captured the emerging dress sense of both men and women. Particularly the 'new woman' of the Edwardian era. Free-spirited.
In my book, I have opportunities to add several small illustrations, I was trying to emulate the traditional style of the time. So I I brought four small paintings to inspire me and inspected them closely to try and unlock her secret of how she could do such fine work of relatively small sizes. Then, I saw online other small illustrations by Dorothy available from various sources. I was surprised to find out that they were all initially from three very old, water-damaged sketchbooks and had been cut and separated and resold over time.
As an artist, I felt very sad about this. Sketch books are very personal to an artist. It's where they allow you to be bold and adventurous, and explore. Sort of like a diary - very personal. So I wanted to try my best to reunite the pages with the original sketchbooks. Try to put it all back together again for Dorothy.
Which brings me to where I am today. I've managed to acquire as many of her works as I am able to at this point. Doodle, sketches, paintings, drawings and ink work. Some finished, others not. The rest are off the radar entirely or owned in private collections. But I was able to reunite about half the books, a total of 66 pieces. I also acquired an original letter from Dorothy and returned it to one of the books. I feel good about this because its magnificent body of work tells us so much about the period. It needs to be together as a story.
Dorothy herself remains an enigma to me. I kind of like it that way. I've done my research to the best of my abilities, and all I can find about her is that her drawings are from 1903-05. She studied at art school (rare for a woman then) and aspired to be an illustrator before marrying William Arthur Griffiths (born 1881). They had two children. Both served in WWII. Patrick was killed after boarding a French submarine during Operation Catapult. A controversial operation that pitted the British and French against each other. The younger brother, Guy, was a POW at Stalag Luft III (Immortalized in the film 'The Great Escape.' He was the officer who, by using his artistic skills, created fake sketches of nonexistent planes and forged documents to confuse Nazi intelligence. Guy died in 1999. And that, frustratingly, is all I could find. Virtually nothing on the mysterious lady herself. Not even her date of birth.
I was thrilled to notice that her son, Guy Griffiths, owned one of the sketchbooks. He hand-dated it in 1959 as GBK Griffiths. I also suspect that the torn letter in this book, which is in a different writing style, maybe from Dorothy's husband, William (but I couldn't swear to it). So that nicely tied their story together, Mother, Father, and Son.
She's a bit frustrating, because I see a huge progression and potential in her style and confidence in just 2-3 years. Her proportions got better, her pen and ink work was first class, and she clearly studied Charles Dana Gibson and his 'Gibson Girls' stye. But seemed to move beyond that and was finding her own signature style. And then it gets frustrating, because She was still a teenager when she stopped drawing and got married. She always wanted to be a book illustrator. I don't know how Dorothy's story ends, but I like that in her letter, she says, "I do hope I'm going to get on and do something."
