Dorothy Shakespear

Dorothy Shakespear was born in London in 1886 to Olivia Tucker and Henry Hope Shakespear. Henry, an amateur landscape painter, introduced his daughter to the art of watercolor early in life; her youthful watercolors were traditional in style and technique. In the early 1910s, she became familiar with the artwork of the European avant-garde, in part through exhibitions of their work in London and possibly Rome. These artists likely inspired Shakespear to incorporate more linear designs in her work and veer towards abstraction, as did her circle of artistic and literary friends, in whom originated the Vorticist movement. In the 1920s, Shakespear, along with her husband, poet Ezra Pound, Class of 1905, established residence in Rapallo, Italy. She had been strongly influenced by Italian light and Italian painting, especially in her delicate use of color, simplified forms, and strongly outlined contours, since her first visit to the country years earlier. Based on sketches Shakespear made throughout the 1930s wherein she notated different areas of the composition with specific colors, we can assume that she sketched outdoors and completed watercolors at home. Landscapes, architecture, and animals were frequent subjects, which she incorporated into a series of ornamental letters intended to accompany a number of Pound’s experimental poems, the Cantos. Shakespear completed few paintings during and after World War II. While she received little recognition for her artwork in her lifetime, several posthumous publications and exhibitions have featured her work and acknowledged her contributions to the Vorticist movement. (SOURCE: written by Elizabeth Spangenthal, Class of 2018)