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The painter, draughtsman and printmaker Hester Frood (1882-1971) was born in New Zealand and came to Britain at the age of seven. She was educated at Exeter High School and studied art in the city and later, for six months, at the Atelier Colarossi, Paris. She was taught etching by the famous D.Y. Cameron, well represented in Te Papa's collection, whom she met in Scotland in 1906. She exhibited at the Royal Academy, Royal Scottish Academy and had her first one-woman show at the prestigious Bond Street print dealers Colnagi's in 1925 and another at Dunthorne's in 1927. In the 1940s she had two exhibitions in Glasgow and 1946-9 showed further with Colnaghi's. Latterly she lived in Topsham, Devon. The Fry Gallery held an exhibition of her work in 1990. The V&A and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art hold examples of her work, as well as the British Museum.
This pencil and wash sketch is of a local landmark of Frood's Exeter, seen from a distant, elevated viewpoint.
Countess Wear, alternatively called Countess Weir, is a residential district within the city. The name derives from the weir constructed in 1286 on the instruction of Isabella de Fortibus, Countess of Devon.Countess Wear is best known today as the location of the Countess Wear bridges, a group of three bridges across the River Exe and the Exeter Canal. Although these bridges are now bypassed by the M5 motorway, they were formerly on the old A38 road, the main route from the rest of England to the popular holiday resorts of Devon and Cornwall. Congestion caused by the constricted width of the original bridges, and by opening of the canal bridges for shipping, led to Countess Wear becoming infamous for holiday delays.
As with all practitioners of the Etching Revival, Frood made no concessions to the modernising of her favoured locales, though the likely date for this work, 1936 or earlier, would certainly not have witnessed the infamous congestion. A finished work of this landscape from a slightly different angle entitled The Countess Weir Bridge on the River Exe in pencil, crayon and watercolour was sold at a Christie's auction, South Kensington on 3 June 2008.
See: British Museum, 'Hester Frood (Biographical details)', https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/term_details.aspx?bioId=124475
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art November 2018