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Artist/Maker Dorothy Shakespear (British, 1886 – 1973)

Datec. 1914-19

MediumWatercolor and graphite on paper

DimensionsSheet: 4 1/2 × 8 3/16 in. (11.4 × 20.8 cm) Frame: 14 1/16 × 17 3/4 × 1 1/2 in. (35.7 × 45.1 × 3.8 cm)

Credit LineGift of Omar S. Pound, Class of 1951

Object number1994.200

Not on view

DescriptionOver the span of a decade, Omar S. Pound, Class of 1951, donated to the Emerson Gallery an impressive collection of watercolors and drawings by his mother, Dorothy Shakespear, along with works by a number of her contemporaries. The Wellin’s collection of her works is complemented by archival holdings related to Shakespear and her husband, the poet Ezra Pound, Class of 1905, H1939, in the Hamilton College Special Collections at Burke Library. Shakespear was born in London to two artistically inclined parents: Henry Hope Shakespear, an amateur watercolorist, and Olivia Shakespear (née Tucker), a novelist and close friend of W. B. Yeats. Dorothy Shakespear met Pound in 1909, and they married in 1914. Although extremely proficient, Shakespear’s early watercolors were executed in a traditional manner. In 1911, when the artist visited Italy and “experienced color for the first time,” her style began to evolve. A major shift occurred the following year, in the same year Pound’s poetic style also underwent a profound evolution. Shakespear’s work became abstract, with intricate shapes distilled into angular planes. This change coincided with the beginnings of a new avant-garde movement in London, led by the artist Wyndham Lewis and the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, among others, which would come to be called Vorticism. Shakespear remained acutely interested in draftsmanship, breaking forms down into simple planes and demarcating geometric angles with contour lines in ink or graphite. Her drawings were published in the Vorticists’ talking piece, BLAST magazine (1914–15), and in B. Cyril Windeler’s Elimus (1923), published by William Bird’s Three Mountains Press in Paris. She also created typographic designs, including the initials that complemented her husband’s poetry in A Draft of XXX Cantos, published in Paris in 1930. She subsequently created initials for all of Pound’s Cantos, along with tailpieces and illustrations for a project that was published by Omar Pound only in 1999, after his parents’ deaths. Illustrated here and on the following spread are two early abstractions and Hommage à GB WL TSE EP, which celebrates the artist’s close circle of creative friends: Gaudier-Brzeska, Lewis, T. S. Elliott, and Pound. The watercolor includes references to Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture Water Carrier (cat. no. 58), to an abstraction by Lewis, and to a medieval prison in the Gulf of Rapallo in northwestern Italy, where Shakespear resided at the time. Created in 1937, the work is nostalgic in outlook, as Gaudier-Brzeska had died years earlier, during World War I; Shakespear’s marriage with Pound was unhappy; and the Vorticist movement had ended long before. (SOURCE: Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS, 2017)

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Additional Details

Alternate Titles Untitled (Abstract Composition)

Exhibition History 2017
Clinton, NY (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College). "Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years, Highlights from the Permanent Collection," September 9 - December 10, 2017 (cat. no. 66, illus.);

2011
Durham, NC (Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University). "Vorticism in London and New York, 1914-1918," September 30, 2010 - January 2, 2011. Traveled to: Venezia, Italy (Peggy Guggenheim Collection), January 29 - May 22, 2011; London, England (Tate Britain), June 22 - September 18, 2011.

Provenance 1994: Hamilton College (Fred L. Emerson Gallery), by gift of Omar S. Pound;
c. 1973 - 1994: Omar S. Pound, by inheritance from his mother, Dorothy Shakespear.

Published References Christine Macel and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, eds., WOMEN IN ABSTRACTION (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2021), p. 73, illus., 73.

Christine Macel and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, eds., MUJERES DE LA ABSTRACCIÓN (Paris: Centre Pompidou and Bilbao: FMGB Guggenheim Bilbao Museum, 2021), p. 73, illus., 73.

Christine Macel and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, eds., ELLES FONT L'ABSTRACTION (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2021), p. 73, illus., 73.

Katherine D. Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS: THE RUTH AND ELMER WELLIN MUSEUM OF ART AT FIVE YEARS, HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION (Clinton, NY: Wellin Museum of Art, 2017), p. 162;

Mark Antliff and Vivien Greene, eds., THE VORTICISTS, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2010), p. 136, illus., 40.