Artwork of the Month - November 2007
Flowers
Artist: Miss Katie Edith Gliddon (1883 - 196?)
Medium: Watercolour
Status: Permanent collection
Item No.: GMAG 5633c
A Love of Flowers
Katie Gliddon was born in Twickenham in 1883. From 1900 to 1904 she studied at the Slade School of Art, which was one of the most important English art schools of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather than studying from the antique as favoured by institutions such as the Royal Academy, the Slade emphasised life drawing. It was also the first English art school to offer female students equal opportunities to study from the life model.
As well as her passion for art, Gliddon was strongly political. She was active in the women's suffrage movement and in 1912 was arrested for breaking the window of a Post Office in Wimpole Street. For this she served a period in Holloway Prison from March to April.
Gliddon went on to become an art teacher, later retiring to Worthing and lived well into her eighties.
The work chosen for this months Artwork of the Month is typical of Gliddon's work, which comprises flora and fauna drawn in meticulous detail. This echoes the still lives of Dutch Old Masters such as Jan van Kessel (1626-1679). Such reverence for the intricacies of nature results in wonderfully understated and delicate drawings.
