Kathleen Guthrie

Kathleen Guthrie (lots 1-4)

She makes one realise that one already knew it, but had never seen it with quite that intensity, that quick eye for a silhouette or that gentle feminine touch of humour, [Kathleen Guthrie] is an interpreter.

Eric Newton, 1945

Introduction

Eric Newton, leading critic and broadcaster of the day, was quick to appreciate how Kathleen Guthrie incorporated everyday life into her work with a certain wry understatement in his review of her exhibition at the Little Gallery, Piccadilly. Likewise, in his monograph on the artist Jonathan Eastaway comments how ‘Kathleen Guthrie was an inveterate people watcher, who found the behaviour of human beings and the humour that it inspired a source of endless fascination.’ (Eastaway, A Poet’s Eye, p. 5). The fruits of the artist’s unassuming deadpan observations are in abundant evidence in the following four lots.

All four works were painted in Hampstead, where Guthrie lived for the majority of her adult life, initially with her first husband, the painter Robin Guthrie, subsequently with her second husband, artist John Cecil Stephenson, and when widowed after the latter’s death in 1965. Like Kathleen, Robin Guthrie had been a pupil at the Slade where they had both studied under the influential Henry Tonks. The couple wed in secret in 1927 when Kathleen was at the Royal Academy Schools and began married life together living and working in an old chapel at 7 Park Hill, Hampstead, which they shared with the painter Rodney Burn. Good fortune followed when Tonks recommended Robin Guthrie and Burn for teaching positions at the Boston School of Fine Art in Massachusetts. In the USA, with a baby boy in tow, the Guthries enjoyed a vastly improved standard of living. Kathleen’s own work blossomed, and the intriguing whimsy of her subject matter found a ready audience. In an exhibition of her work at the Grace Horne Gallery, Boston a reviewer commented how ‘a delightfully humorous undercurrent is present in all her small figures.’