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| Les Baux, France 1938 |
1905 - 1991
A painter, etcher, pioneering art educationalist and war artist. Evelyn Gibbs was the first woman to win the coveted Prix de Rome for Engraving. In 1934 she was appointed lecturer at Goldsmiths' College, the year in which her book The Teaching of Art in Schools was published. (It remained in print in Britain, Europe and USA until 1956.) Gibbs moved to Nottingham when Goldsmiths' was evacuated at the beginning of World War II. She founded the Midland Group in 1943 and in September that year received a War Artists' Advisory Committee commission. In 1945 she married Hugh Willatt, founder of the Nottingham Playhouse and later Secretary General of the Arts Council. She lived and worked in London from 1960 and in Gozo where they had a farmhouse. In 1964 she visited Iran with the Ballet Rambert, resulting in a remarkable series of drawings and prints of Muslim women. At about this time she also returned to printmaking. Her large colour etchings of rock formations were printed at Editions Alecto, and lithographs of Gozo were made at the Curwen Studio in 1976.
In 2000 The School of Art at Aberystwith University purchased the Evelyn Gibbs Collection from the Special Trustees of the Estate of Sir Hugh Willatt with grant aid from the National Art Collections Fund and Re:source/V&A Purchase Fund. This included 98 prints, drawings and watercolours representing Gibbs' career over five decades, from her portrait and figure etchings of the 1920s to the large abstract compositions drawn from aspects of the landscape of Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Corsica, Gozo and Italy.
Exhibitions Include:
Twenty One Gallery (1931); Midland Group (1944 and onwards); Zwemmer Gallery, London (1954 & 57); Royal Academy; Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers; Leicester Gallery, London (1960); Drian Galleries, London (1970 & 72); Museum of Fine Arts, Valetta, Malta (1977); New Art Centre, London (1977); Garton & Co., London (1988); Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham (1993)