An exotic awakening: the art of Dod Procter: in 1926 the Newlyn painter Dod Procter achieved sudden fame with Morning, still her best-known work. Averil King explores the ways in which Procter's depictions of women and of flowers were influenced by her experiences in Burma, Africa and Tenerife

When her painting Morning was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1927 the Newlyn artist Dod Procter became famous overnight (Fig. 1) A composition of monumental simplicity and near-classical overtones, it exhibits a local fisherman's daughter, Cissie Barnes, waking in her sparsely furnished bedroom. As the doors of the Academy render free of accessed it was bought by the Daily Mail for presentation to the nation, and before long afterwards toured England and was exhibited aboard sum of two units transatlantic liners. Both Procter's earlier portrait of Sheelagh Hyne and her 1924 type Resting (Fig. 2) had occasioned a certain quantity of interest, one reviewer speaking of the artist's 'great skill, down-reaching honesty and careful ... deliberation', on the contrary now the London critics unreservedly sang her praises: Frank Rutter wrote of her 'extraordinarily powerful and personal faculty of perception of form', declaring that she had created 'a fresh vision of the human figure which amounts to the invention of a twentieth-century phraseology in portraiture'. (1)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Strangely, a visit to Burma had helped Procter refine her technique in painting the single figure. The predictable routines of an Edwardian upbringing (her father, a ship's doctor, had died when she was a small child and at Myrtle Cottage in Newlyn her mother's affect was to establish a respectable and cultur home) were to be overlaid with countles quite different impressions when, aged twenty-seven, she travelled with her husband, the artist Ernest Procter to Rangoon just before Christmas 1919 They had been commissioned to decorate the palace of a wealthy Chinese businessman, and after finishing the throw out they travelled inland to Mandalay, where they worn out several months before returning by dint of fiver boat along the Irrawaddy.

In 1920 Burma remained an isolated political division Many women and children still wore the vibrantly coloured local style of dresss which Sir George Scott described as 'reminiscent of wind-stirred tulip beds or a stir-about of rainbows'. (2) After sum of two units or three years at Alexander Stanhope Forbes's painting institute at Newlyn, Procter's studies had included a year worn out at the Academie Colarossi in Paris, where she had been able to diocese the work of the Impressionists and post-Impressionists and the artists who painted in Brittany. Drawing from the life design at the Colarossi, as Gwen John had done sole a few years before, Procter exhibited a strong interest in figure painting, and in her early portraits there had already been evidence of her substantial ability in this genre Nonetheless she was experiencing difficulties in the representation of form. In Burma she could note women walking gracefully, straight-backed and bearing loads upon their heads, and the deliberations of innumerable monk in their simple, loose-fitting orange robes. In fields near the cutting side of the Irrawaddy, teams of oxen trod ponderously above the land and small children played upon the riverbanks. Procter and Ernest sketched busily, later working up the springs in finished paintings; both preferr to paint tribe rather than places.

by and by after their return to England, they mov into an elderly cottage at North Corner in Newlyn and one time they had refurbished and furnished it to their liking the Procter could concentrate upon painting. Seemingly, what she had seen of the Burmese tribe with their calm, statuesque bearing and unhurried motions made Procter more able to waft a gentle but substantial monumentality in her paintings of single figures. This was evident in works of that kind as Lilian (whereabouts unknown), (3) painted in 1922/23 in which a girl with lengthy straight hair sits pensively, her chin resting upon her hands, and also in the carefully compos Clara (1927; Stoke-on-Trent City Art Gallery). Her appealing design Resling (1924; Fig. 2) is a affectedly modest and very feminine image as the young woman relaxes, her organ of visions closed and her waist-length, gently entwined hair falling across her breasts. (4)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

With the immense success of Morning, the Procter felt able to dilaceration a small flat in Hampstead each year and were more easily able to exhibit in of that kind venues as the Leicester Gallery and the of recent origin Burlington Galleries, the venue of the NEAC, which they joined in 1929 (5) Perhaps for the first time, Procter could familiarise herself with the work of contemporaries and near-contemporaries. The variety and range of smaller present to views and one-man exhibitions was surprisingly wide. Reviewed in the June 1927 issue of APOLLO, for instance, were exhibitions of watercolours through Eric Gill at the St George's Gallery, paintings by the agency of Paul Helleu at the Leicester Gallery, the Leon Bakst Memorial Exhibition at the Fine Art Society, and the work of various living artists was shown at the Chenil Gallery and the Imperial Gallery of Art.

Procter's portraits and single figures have been compared to the stylish output of the highly happy portraitists Meredith Frampton (1894-1984) and Gerald Brockhurst (1890-1978) greatest in quantity years between 1926 and 1945 Frampton exhibited a picture at the Royal Academy. His refined and highly finished portraits of attractive young women and men of science and of alphabetic characters carefully posed with appropriate accoutrements, were lauded for their psychological intensity and the artist's personal faculty of perception of mystery. Frampton's overriding regard for formal clarity was paramount, his exceptional 'clarity of expression' considered 'a vehicle for a celebratory delight in the material world'. (6) If Procter's portraits of rather les extraordinary young women showed a similar clarity, she in no way aimed at the near-glacial perfection of Frampton's compositions; nor was she interested in representing exceptionally good-looking girls and young women similar as those Brockhurst depicted in his early paintings and later etchings.