Queer Places:
12 Mile End Pl, Bethnal Green, London E1 4BH, UK
Camille Cottage,
Sudbury Rd, Castle Hedingham, Halstead CO9 3AG, UK
Dorothy Rendell (1923 - 2018) was an accomplished artist and much-loved teacher, who is only now being recognised, after her death, for her vivid depictions of London East End life and the working Thames in the 1950s and 60s. She moved to the East End, as many did, out of necessity; she studied at St Martin’s during the War, but despite the support of influential painters like Henry Lamb and Vivien Pitchforth, found she had to take a teaching post to support herself.
Dorothy Rushforth, her mother, came from the north of England and went to art school, she was quite advanced for her time. Her father came from a long line of gentleman farmers in Devonshire and he was a bit of a villain. His family lost all their money through one of them being a gambler. So he travelled the world on luxury liners doing doubtful business deals and brought people back and her mother had to entertain them and cook for them.
She moved to London in wartime and she was by herself, she did not know a soul. She got one room in an attic in Pembroke Sq, Notting Hill Gate. For a time, she had a huge studio at the back of a house in Warwick Gardens, Kensington, which was freezing cold and falling down, the rain would drip in. It had once belonged to Jacob Epstein. It was the most romantic studio. She used to paint there but she wasted an awful lot of time working to make money when she should have been painting. She exhibited at the Leicester Gallery and at the Royal Academy, but she never had a solo show.
She taught at Harry Gosling School in Whitechapel during the ’50s and ’60s, establishing herself in Mile End Place in the ’70s, and becoming in every way part of the fabric of the East End. She taught art at Harry Gosling School, just off the Commercial Rd at Aldgate, until her retirement around 1980. Harry Gosling’s head teacher was Sybil Mary "May" Parry, who became a close friend of Dorothy’s.
RENDELL Dorothy (1923 - 2018) Studio Self Portrait. Oil on canvas. Signed and dated, 1969. Provenance: Artist's Estate (stamped verso). 20x24 inches.
Dorothy Rendell self-portrait, circa 1960s, oil on board. © Estate of Dorothy Rendell.
Camille Cottage by Dorothy Rendell. This small cottage on the Sudbury Road, Castle Hedingham was a much-loved country retreat for Dorothy Rendell and May Parry. © Estate of Dorothy Rendell.
RENDELL Dorothy (1923 - 2018) Camille Cottage Interior (Castle Hedingham)
with Japanese print. Oil on canvas. c.1970. Provenance: Artist's Estate
(stamped verso).
RENDELL Dorothy (1923 - 2018) Camille Cottage Interior (Castle Hedingham) with bathroom mirror. Oil on canvas. c.1970. Signed. Provenance: Artist's Estate (stamped verso). 17.5x11 inches.
RENDELL Dorothy (1923 - 2018) Camille Cottage interior (Castle Hedingham) with table-top still life. Oil on canvas. c.1970. Signed. Provenance: Artist's Estate (stamped verso). 23x15 inches.
RENDELL Dorothy (1923 - 2018) Camille Cottage interior (Castle Hedingham) with red chair. Oil on canvas. c.1970. Signed. Provenance: Artist's Estate (stamped verso).
RENDELL Dorothy (1923 - 2018) Orovida Pissarro (1893-1968). Oil on canvas. c.1960. Provenance: Artist's Estate (stamped verso). 35x27 inches.
For much of her life she lived at 12 Mile End Place, a short street of old terraces hidden through an archway off the Mile End Rd, a quiet enclave. Mile End Place abuts the Jewish Cemetery on Alderney Rd that W. G. Sebald evoked in his novel Austerlitz. The restaurant Verdi’s in the Mile End Road had a lot of Dorothy’s sketches on the walls. Dorothy took friends there and they were always well looked after.
Her art encompassed a deep love of the countryside, from vibrant Tuscan landscapes (she had a life-long passion for foreign travel), to depictions of the Essex countryside around Castle Hedingham. It was here she and her close friend May Parry, bought a retirement bolthole - Camille Cottage on the Sudbury Road, which they enjoyed visiting for long weekends and holidays. Dorothy retired to Castle Hedingham with May Parry. It was their place for weekends and holidays, as they also kept their London home. They used to put their toothbrushes in their handbags and jump on the train to Braintree.
Rendell was an outsider, though not at all an ‘outsider artist.’ She saw people’s ordinary lives and observed them at close quarters. What she did was to place herself outside the bounds of the art world and draw and paint for the whole of her life. The sadness is that almost certainly much of her art is, at least for the moment and quite possibly for longer, lost or misplaced, or unplaced.
In an interview conducted in her last months, she describes her years in Italy where her drawings were ‘scattered everywhere.’ And she says that she would often give portrait sketches to the children at Harry Gosling School, where she taught art for many years.
Just a handful of unexhibited oil paintings and three boxes of sketchbooks bear witness to the significant talent of Dorothy Rendell. Poet & Novelist Stephen Watts who knew Dorothy wrote an appreciation of her work today on the occasion of the creation an archive of her drawings at Bishopsgate Institute.
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