Valentine Dobrée (1894–1974) was a visual artist (oil painting and collage), novelist and poet.
Contents
Life and work
Gladys May Mabel Brooke-Pechell was born in Cannanore, India, the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Sir (Augustus) Alexander Brooke-Pechell, 7th Baronet, who was a Surgeon in the Army Medical Department, the Royal Army Medical Corps and later at the Royal Hospital Chelsea during the Great War. She moved to England at the age of three. Her only art education was when she was briefly taught by André Derain. After marrying Bonamy Dobrée in 1913 they went to live in Florence, returning to England with the start of World War I.
She exhibited her figurative oil paintings with the London Group in 1920, becoming acquainted with Dora Carrington and Roland Penrose.
In 1920, with Nancy Cunard, she was briefly involved with the bohemian scene in Paris but soon Dobrée and her husband moved to Larrau in the French Pyrenees in 1921 – at this time she exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants. In 1926 they went to live in Cairo where she wrote her novels Your Cuckoo Sings by Kind, published 1927, and The Emperor's Tigers 1929. They returned to England in 1929 to live at Mendham Priory, Harleston, Norfolk where their daughter Georgina, who became a distinguished clarinettist, was born the next year.
Dobrée's first solo exhibition of thirty-four works was at the Claridge Gallery, London, in 1931. Her book of stories To Blush Unseen was published in 1935. The Dobrées in turn lived in Earl's Colne, Essex, and Collingham, West Yorkshire, before returning to London in 1950. The Institute of Contemporary Arts mounted an exhibition of her collages in 1963 and in 1965 her book of poetry This Green Tide was published by Faber and Faber. T. S. Eliot and Graham Greene admired her writing. The University Gallery, Leeds own some of her paintings and they held a retrospective exhibition in 2000.