1. Biography

2. References

Doris Brabham Hatt (1890 – August 1969),^[1] a painter and printmaker, was a pioneer of Modernism in Britain.

Biography

Doris Brabham Hatt was born in 1890 into a well known and affluent Bath family that ran a successful wig-making, hairdressing and perfumery business.^[2]. She was the daughter of William Edward Hatt (1861-1916) and Mary Emily Hatt (née Brabham) (1862-1929). Her older sister, Rayonette Dagmar Hatt (1889-1911) died young, and she also had a younger brother, Richard William Hatt (1893-1933). Doris's parents and sister are buried at St Mary the Virgin, Bathwick, Smallcombe Cemetery.^[3]

After attending Bath High School she went to finishing school in Kassel, Germany, during 1906-1907. Here she was taken by the paintings she saw in the Neue Gallerie and she decided to pursue a career in art. She studied at the Bath School of Art (1911-1914), Goldsmith's College, London (1914-1916), and the Royal College of Art, London (1919). She also took classes at the Vienna Art School for Women and Girls during stays with her brother, Richard, who was assigned there in the early 1920s. At this time she also made the first of what were to become many visits to Paris, frequenting the same circles as Picasso and Fernand Léger.^[4][2]

Doris Hatt lived in Clevedon, Somerset.^[6] After World War I, she moved to Clevedon with her mother. They bought a plot of land and arranged for an ex-army wooden building to be moved there and converted to a bungalow with a veranda front. This became Littlemead. In 1938 a family inheritance from a maiden aunt allowed her to design and build a Bauhaus/Art Deco house, which survives today as an example of a Modernist house.^[5][3][4][2] Littlemead was a meeting place for radical activity in both arts and politics, and, in an effort to educate minds, she offered free art classes (including ones for children) and gave lectures on art.^[2]

Not only was Doris Hatt an accomplished artist but she was also a socialist and feminist activist. Her political awakenings came while she was in London during the First World war, where she witnessed degrees of poverty she had not seen in Bath and also the plight of returning soldiers. She was also aware of the Women's Suffrage and New Woman movements and the combination of these influences caused her to commit to socialism and she joined the Independent Labour Party in 1917. In response to the rise of Fascism in the 1930s Doris transferred her allegiance and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1935. Two years later, in 1937, she and her partner, Margery Mack Smith, visited Russia for the Pushkin Centenary Jubilee celebrations in Leningrad and Moscow.

In 1946 and 1947 Doris stood as a Communist Party candidate for Clevedon Urban District Council, at a time when there were no women council members, but was unsuccessful on both occasions. None the less, Doris and Margery continued to host Sunday afternoon discussion meetings that were attended by left-wing progressives from the arts, academia, politics, the theatre and journalism.

Hatt first exhibited her paintings with the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers at the Grosvenor Gallery, London, in 1918. Her work was initially influenced by the way the French modernist movement was being interpreted in Britain by artists such as Paul Nash, John Nash, Iain Macnab and Ethelbert White, but as she began to travel, for example, to Paris, and was able to see pictures by Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque at first hand, the influence of Modernism deepened. After her visits to Vienna in the early 1920s she produced a small number of woodcuts and wood engravings between 1925 and 1930, but there were none after that.

By the mid-1930s she had developed her own distinctive style, seen particularly in her landscapes. The joint Braque/Roualt exhibition at the Tate, London, in 1946 and then that for Fernand Leger in 1950 both brought a new impetus and energy to her work. She would often return to a composition - sometimes over decades - and explore it with increasing degrees of simplification and abstraction of its elements. She exhibited her work for five decades, featuring in over 40 exhibitions (many of them solo) in Clevedon, Clifton, Bath, Oxford, London and Paris. Particular exhibitions included the Royal Academy, the Leicester and Redfern Galleries, Jack Bilbo's Modern Art Gallery, and Foyles Gallery.^[4] She was elected an associate of the Royal West of England Academy (RWA) in 1949. In the context of British art in the first half of the twentieth century Doris Hatt stands as a unique and inspirational figure. Like many other women artists she has been overlooked and under-appreciated in the art historical surveys of the period, and the time has come for a reappraisal.

Her lifelong partner was Margery Mack Smith (1890-1975), a weaver, and primary school teacher, and it is thanks to her that a number of Doris Hatt's sketchbooks and folios of working drawings have been preserved.^[6][2] Very shortly after Doris Hatt died on 27 August 1969,^[6] a significant quantity of her correspondence and personal records were burned by a relative.^[6] Two chests of material, however, escaped since they had already been moved to Margery Mack Smith's small house in Watchet.^[6][2][7]

When Doris died, in keeping with her wish, her body was donated to medical research. She has no memorial beyond her art.

"The Art of Doris Hatt", by Denys Wilcox. South West Heritage Trust in association with the Court Gallery, 2019, {{ISBN|978-0-9573802-7-1}}.

"Doris Hatt: Revolutionary Artist", by Adrian Webb, Christopher Stone, Denys Wilcox and Stephen Lisney. South West Heritage Trust in association with the Court Gallery, 2019, {{ISBN|978-0-9573802-6-4}}.

"Doris Brabham Hatt", in "British Women Artists: A Biographical Dictionary of 1000 Women Artists in the British Decorative Arts", by Sara Gray. Bennion Kearney, 2019, {{ISBN|978-1-911121-63-3}}.

"Doris Hatt", in "Voyaging Out: British Women Artists: from Suffrage to the Sixties", by Carolyn Trant. Thames & Hudson, 2019, {{ISBN|978-0-5000218-2-8}}.

References

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