Artist Sybil Andrews
Title Oxford [Corpus Christie College and Merton Chapel]
Media etching on paper
Size 8.75 x 5.75 in. / 22.2 x 14.6 cm.
Sold $150
Estimate $400 - $600
Notes
signed and titled along bottom; unframed; some handling marks noted in margin
Provenance
private collection, Ontario
Biographical Information
Sybil Andrews ~ [1898-1992] Canadian CPE
Andrews was born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, England and emigrated to Canada in 1947 with her husband, Walter Morgan. Despite her love of drawing and painting as a child, her family was unable to afford further education after her school years and she apprenticed as a welder. She worked as a welder in an airplane factory during WWI and again constructing warships during WWII. In the inter-war period she taught art in Bury St. Edmunds eventually saving enough money to study at Heatherley's School of Fine Art in London by 1922. She was then employed as a secretary at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art and used her wages to take courses and began making coloured linocuts. Upon arrival in Canada, Andrews and her husband settled in Campbell River, British Columbia, in an ocean front cottage with a studio for her art making and teaching. She remained there until her death forty five years later. Her works can be found in major art museums around the world and are highly sought after by collectors.
For detailed biographical information, examples of her work, and the progress of restoring her cottage as a heritage site see Sybil Andrews Heritage Society; for a fascinating essay on modern responses to the work of Andrews see the 2021 exhibit Finding Sybil: Contemporary Responses to the Art of Sybil Andrews at Campbell River Art Gallery; see The Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers in Retrospect, by Andrew J. Oko, pg. 73, pubished by Art Gallery of Hamilton, 1981; Sybil Andrews, Colour Linocuts, by Peter White, published by Glenbow Museum, 1982; Linocuts of the Machine Age, by Stephen Coppel, published by Scolar Press, 1995; North American Women Artists of the Twentieth Century, edited by Jules Heller and Nancy G. Heller, pg. 26, Garland Publishing, 1995 for a biography; Dictionary of British Artists 1880-1940, by J.Johnson, pg. 27, published by Acc Art Books, 2007; On the Curve: The Life and Art of Sybil Andrews, by Janet Nicol, Caitlin Press, 2019; Sybil and Cyril: Cutting Through Time by Jenny Uglow, published by Faber and Faber Limited, 2021; Westbridge, Vol. 1, pg. 5