Untitled ('Female figures imprisoned')

Copyright

© Estate of Helen Saunders
Image: Courtauld
ⓒ Work in copyright. All rights reserved.

Maker

(artist)
1885-1963

Title

Untitled ('Female figures imprisoned')

Date of Production

(circa) 1913 - 1914

Medium

black ink, watercolour and bodycolour on laid paper; some strokes of watercolour on the verso

Dimensions

Height: 15.8 cm
Width: 19.6 cm

Object Number

D.2016.XX.11

Mode of Acquisition

Brigid Peppin, gift, 2016

Credit

Courtauld Gallery, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust)

Location

Not currently on display

Keywords

Label Text

This small watercolour depicts seven figures with masklike faces enclosed within a confined space bounded by a heavy black line. The pressure the walls appear to exert on the figures, whose spindly bodies seem deformed by their close quarters, evokes a sense of claustrophobia.

The title ‘Female figures imprisoned’ is modern and not Saunders’s own. However, the subject matter, combined with her known sympathies with feminism and the women’s suffrage movement, make it likely that this is her most explicitly feminist surviving work.

Inscriptions

Watermark: Watermark: none.

Inscription: Verso: upper left corner, graphite, circled: "1"; upper centre, graphite: an arrow pointing up; lower right, graphite: "51".

Collector's mark: none.

Provenance

with the artist until her death in 1963; bequeathed to her sister, Ethel Saunders; bequeathed to her first cousin once removed, Helen Peppin, 1971; given to her daughter, Brigid Peppin, 1989; offered by her as a gift and part-purchase to the Samuel Courtauld Trust, 2016

Exhibition History

Praxitella: Wyndham Lewis, Helen Saunders and Iris Barry, Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds, 22/06/2023-05/11/2023
Drawings Gallery Display - Helen Saunders, Courtauld Gallery, London, 14/10/2022-29/01/2023
Radical Women: Jessica Dismorr and her Contemporaries, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 02/11/2019-23/02/2020
...More
CORPUS: The Body Unbound, Courtauld Gallery, London, 16/06/2017-16/07/2017
Helen Saunders (1885-1963), Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 09/01/1996-03/03/1996; Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, 16/03/1996-20/04/1996
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Literature

James King, 'Our Little Gang': The Lives of the Vorticists (London: Reaktion Books, 2025)
pp. 96-97
Radical Women: Jessica Dismorr and her Contemporaries by Alicia Foster, published by Lund Humphries, 2019, page 34., Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 2 Nov. 2019 - 23 Feb. 2020 London 2019
p. 34
Georgina Williams, Politics and Aesthetics of the Female Form, 1908-1918, Springer International Publishing AG 2018 - pp. 61-76
pp. 61-76
...More
Peppin, Brigid, and Cork, Richard, Helen Saunders (1885-1963), exh. cat., Ashmolean Museum, Oxford and Graves Art Gallery ,Sheffield, 1996
p. 11, 44
ill. on p. 35
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