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Spring Contemporary

Julia Beatrice How

1867-1932

Julia Beatrice How was born at Bideford, Devon, on the 16th October, 1867. Like the greatest of Devonian painters (Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A.) she came of a family which, although interested in intellectual pursuits, had no special bias towards the fine arts, but, as in his case, her vocation was clear. After her parents died she lived in Bournemouth until she went to study in the Herkomer School at Bushey. About 1893 she decided to go to Paris, where she entered the Académie of M. Delacluse. She found that she could work there much better than in England, where, however, she spent two or three months every year, finding a congenial home with her sister, Mrs Dawe, wife of the Rector of Walkington, near Beverley, in Yorkshire. The simple homely types of subject that especially interested her were best found abroad, on the coasts of Holland and Brittany. Eventually she set up a studio at Etaples. She also visited from time to time most of the other places on that coast which abound in suitable subjects.

Influenced no doubt by Lucien Simon, she early became a contributor to the Exhibitions of the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1904 she was elected an Associé and some years later became a full Sociétaire. From 1902 to 1932 she exhibited 147 works there, and a memorial group was shown the year after her death. Elsewhere in Paris Miss How's pictures were often seen at smaller exhibitions, and she showed twice at the Salon des Tuileries; there were also special exhibitions of her work at the Galeries Georges Petit and the Galeries des Artistes Francais. From 1910 she was a specially invited exhibitor at the Carnegie Exhibitions in Pittsburg, which in 1914 accorded her 'Mention Honourable'.

Although a recognised specialist in the limning of infants Miss How was by no means a one-sided artist. In the painting of fruit and flowers, and in studies of the nude, she did much equally accomplished work. A tribute to her memory published in The Times was an excellent summing up of her claim to remembrance as an artist of genius; 'To her friends there was something very characteristic in the unobtrusive slipping out of life of this brilliantly gifted Englishwoman. Her innate modesty and refusal to impose her own views on others stood in the way of her obtaining recognition in England, where she was convinced that her delicate, elusive work would not please. But in France she found, many years ago, that discerning appreciation of her fragile transparent technique and masterly handling of luminous gradations of colour in the lowest tones that made such eminent critics as M. Arsene Alexandre say of her "un des plus originales artistes femmes de notre temps, et des pénétrantes."' A Memorial exhibition of her work was staged at The New Burlington Galleries, London in 1935.