Anne Estelle Rice 1877-1959

Anne Estelle Rice painted a striking series of views of harbours and beaches on the coast of Brittany in the late 1920s and 1930s. She favoured views of fishing boats moored within sheltered harbours and at Concarneau and Tréboul she found subjects that could be painted from the quayside. A painting of Tréboul Harbour, Brittany was sold by Sotheby's at Gleneagles last year whilst several pictures painted in Brittany harbours were exhibited at the Fosse Gallery in 1986. The picturesque harbours and villages of Brittany had lured artists since the nineteenth century but in the twentieth century, when transport links were improved, many artists from Paris and London travelled to Brittany for inspiration. A colony of artists was established, particularly around Tréboul, Christopher Wood being perhaps the best known resident. Rice's pictures are evidently influenced by the pictures painted by Wood at Tréboul, such as Tréboul, the Blue Sea and Tréboul both painted in 1930 (private collections). The similarities are not simply that both artists painted similar subjects of stranded boats on the beach. Rice was clearly influenced by the way in which Wood applied paint and his use of the palette knife to scrape the paint away from the surface to reveal the texture of the panel beneath.