Reuniting the pages of time
I wanted to share a lovely little true tale. It's a bit long, but it's worth it. It may even make you smile a little.
While researching my book, I kept coming across an 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.
So I brought four 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 noodled on Google and was surprised to find out that they were initially all from three of her very old, water-damaged sketchbooks and had been separated and resold over the years.
As an artist, I felt very sad about this and wanted to try my best to reunite the pages with the original sketchbooks. Try to put it all back together again for Dorothy. ...so, I got myself a side quest!!!
Which brings me to where I am today. I have managed to acquire as many as I am able to at this point. 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 paintings, drawings, and sketches.) 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.
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."
