THIS DARK COUNTRY: Women Artists, Still Life & Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century By Rebecca Birrell (PB) Booktopia et al

Lemons gleam in a bowl. Flowers fan out softly in a vase. A door swings open in a sparsely furnished room. What is contained in a still life and what falls out of the frame?

For women artists in the early twentieth century, including Ethel Sands, Nina Hamnett, Vanessa Bell and Gwen John, who lived in and around the Bloomsbury Group, this art form was a conduit for their lives, their rebellions, their quiet loves for men and women. Gluck, who challenged the framing of her gender and her art, painted flowers arranged by the woman she loved; Dora Carrington, a Slade School graduate, recorded eggs on a table at Tidmarsh Mill, where she built a richly fulfilling if delicate life with Lytton Strachey.

But for every artist whom we remember, there is another we have forgotten, one who leaves only elusive traces, whose art was replaced by being a mother or wife, whose remaining artworks lie dusty in archives or attics.

In this boldly original blend of group biography and art criticism, Rebecca Birrell brings these shadowy figures into the light and conducts a dazzling investigation into the structures of intimacy that make and dismantle our worlds.

A dazzling, boldly original work that tells the powerful and passionate stories of a group of extraordinary women as glimpsed through their still life paintings

Longlisted for the William M B Berger Prize for British Art History 2022
**Picked as an Art Book of the Year 2021 by the Guardian**
‘As seductive as it is scholarly…Riveting’ Financial Times

ISBN 9781526604033

Rebecca Birrell | Bloomsbury | August, 2022 | Paperback | 384 pages | 19.7 x 13.1  x 2.5 cm | 310g