I was in the most south-westerly pub in Britain, the Turk’s Head, on the Scilly island of St Agnes (population: 75) when I noticed a poster advertising a local exhibition of the work of ‘renowned artist and birdwatcher Hilda Quick, 1895-1978’.
I had never heard of her, but her work on the poster, ‘The Pursuit of Art’, was compelling. A stylish wood engraving from the 1920s, it showed female art students drawing a male life model. This was the new equality Hilda Quick would have discovered when she left her native Penzance to attend the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in 1919. Even though the male model here was perhaps not particularly inspiring – Quick includes him only as a cadaverous pair of feet in the corner – the women at their easels are striking attitudes of fierce concentration, some more muscular than the model, or trying a little too hard, even though one can still believe in them as the artists of the future. So assured, so simultaneously witty and serious was this picture, that I asked the barmaid at the Turk’s Head if she thought I would make it across the island to the exhibition in time. ‘I guess so,’ she deadpanned. St Agnes is less than a mile long.
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