Katherine Fryer
Painter and engraver whose subjects included abandoned farmsteads, landscapes and interiors
KATHERINE FRYER, who has died aged 106, was a painter and printmaker known for her landscapes, coastal scenes and still lifes; her deft and vigorous figurative style owed a debt to French painters like Bonnard and Renoir.
Born in Leeds on August 26 1910, Katherine Mary Fryer enrolled as a student at what was then Leeds School of Art in 1926, where she was inspired by such figures as E Owen Jennings (who encouraged her interest in wood engraving), Loris Rey and Jacob Kramer, winning the Princess of Wales Scholarship and graduating in 1931.
Interviewed in 2003, Katherine Fryer recalled that during her time at the college, the “winds of change” were blowing through its studios: “Down came the prints of Bacchus and Ariadne and The Origin of the Milky Way and up went Sunflowers and Mont Sainte-Victoire. Things were looking up but some of the old studio taboos still held sway; drawing and painting of the female nude was never done in a mixed class…. And there were no women tutors in the Painting School.”
But her training equipped her with an acute visual memory and the ability to capture a quickly changing scene without recourse to a camera.
During the 1930s and 1940s she taught for several years at Bath School of Art, where she got to know Walter Sickert, a fellow teacher, and his wife, the artist Thérèse Lessore. She then moved to Leicester Museum and Art Gallery before settling in Harborne to take up a post in the Painting School at the Birmingham College of Art under Bernard Fleetwood-Walker, staying there until her retirement in 1970.
Katherine Fryer’s art changed little in essentials over the years. She travelled widely, drawing and painting as she went. An extended stay in Ireland and the Isles of Aran in the 1950s resulted in a large body of work recording abandoned farmsteads, donkeys, carts and coastal scenes.
One of her paintings from this time, The Road to Kilmurvey, was hung in the Royal Academy summer show in 1958 and later bought by the academy. Works such as Deserted Homesteads, Connemara, a depiction of ruined cottages and glowering skies, To the Lighthouse, in which the brush strokes appeared to whip up the sea breezes lashing the passers-by, or Hauling the Nets, Banff, were painted with a sense of movement and expressionism lacking from some of her more descriptive Yorkshire landscapes or her domestic interiors.
In 1969, she won the HoffmanWood Gold Medal for her painting Pigeon Show, inspired by the Bingley Hall livestock show, and at about the same time she was commissioned to paint a mural-sized work for the Birmingham Register Office, now re-housed at the city’s Millennium Point. In 1972 her painting of Hambleton Post Office, Selby, was acquired by the Department of National Savings and reproduced as an advertising campaign poster.
Katherine Fryer exhibited widely – from the 1960s at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (of which she was an honorary life member), which held a 90th birthday exhibition of 72 of her works, One Point of View, in 2000 to coincide with the publication of Before the War…and Long Ago, a selection of her engravings, linocuts and reminiscences. She continued to produce work until her 101st year, when her paintings were included in the RBSA’s “Ten years at St Paul Square”.
Katherine Fryer was unmarried. Katherine Fryer, born August 26 1910, died January 11 2017