Hilda Jillard: The Story of a Painter by Keeble, Lisette - 1982

Lisette Keeble, 1982. Typed manuscript containing the biography of 20thC British artist Hilda Jillard (1899-1972), written by her long-time friend and sometime neighbour Lisette Keeble, an interior decorator and designer. Jillard was associated with artist colonies at Newlyn and St Ives, Cornwall, and lived in both Cornwall and Surrey. Her work is now held at the Newlyn Art Gallery and the Imperial War Museum as well as in private collections.

Jillard sketched from an early age, but received formal art training at the Farnham School of Art in Surrey, and subsequently at the Slade School of Fine Art, under the tutelage of Professor Henry Tonks between 1920 and 1921. Jillard continued her studies in London at the Calderon School of Animal Painting, before moving to Paris for further study. By 1936 she had returned to the UK and joined the Guildford School of Art in Surrey, and established her first studio.

Her noted painting "What Harvest" (1939) was finished for her first London show at the Wertheim Gallery, a short-lived but pioneering, boundary-pushing contemporary art gallery in London established in 1930 by the formidable collector and modern art advocate Lucy Carrington Wertheim.

By the late 1940s, now living in Cornwall, Hilda Jillard became a member the Penwith Society of Arts, a new modern art society established by renowned British sculptor Barbara Hepworth and her husband, the painter Ben Nicholson, among others. She had another one-woman show in 1948 at the New Gallery in St Ives. Other significant exhibition of Jillard's work were held in 1965 at the Gordon Gallery in Wimbledon and 1969 at the Haslemere Gallery in Surry, both in conjunction with the sculptor Iris Sonnis.

Jillard was a distant relation of pioneering Victorian social commentator, theorist and traveller Harriet Martineau.

This affectionate portrait of Jillard brings into focus her struggles to create art in the midst of chronic and frequently debilitating illness, having been diagnosed (secretly) with multiple sclerosis.

59 pages, Inscribed by Lisette Keeble, with a signed letter from Keeble laid in. Includes mounted photo of Jillard, and mounted reproductions of four of her works: "What Harvest?" (1939), "Anthony" (1941), "Zennor Symphony" and "Gossip".