ATTRIBUTED TO KATE ELIZABETH BUNCE (BRITISH 1858-1927)
Still Life of flowers and berries in a silver pot
initialled KB (lower left)
oil on panel
23 x 14.5 cm

PROVENANCE: From a private collection

Kate Elizabeth Bunce was an English poet and painter associated with the Birmingham Arts and Crafts movement. She was born in Birmingham in 1856 and was the daughter of the newspaper owner and chairman of the City Art Gallery. She studied at the Birmingham School of Art in the 1880s where she excelled. Her first works were in the manner of the Birmingham School, but she was later inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite circle. She exhibited her works in Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and London at the Royal Academy. In the late 1890s she was invited to hang two works in Birmingham Town Hall as part of the historical sequence dedicated to the city’s past.

Two of her most famous paintings are The Keepsake and Chance Meeting, the first was chosen as “picture of the year” at the New Gallery in 1901. It is based on Rossetti’s poem The staff and scrip and it is a decorative, medievalising representation with Arts and Crafts details of a seated woman accompanied by three attendants. The painting Chance Meeting that was recently sold at auction, depicts the encounter of Dante and Beatrice from La Vita Nuova. The figures are richly dressed in historical costumes and the artist paid particular attention in painting the details such as the biblical triptych hanging behind the mother and the child or the bunches of flowers and vegetables on Dante’s right side, reminiscent of the way Still Life of flowers and berries in a silver pot is painted. Bunce was also a devout Christian and painted several works for churches in Britain and in Canada in collaboration with her sister Myra Louisa Bunce, a metalworker and watercolourist. She lived most her life in Edgbaston, close to Birmingham where she died unmarried in 1927.

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