The emergence of this exhibition-size work by the unfairly over-looked artist Theodora Noyes – or Dora Noyes as she was called – is revealing. Noyes was an artist of considerable competence, whose early work was shown regularly at the London exhibiting societies and elsewhere. The Royal Academy was her venue of choice, where she had some 26 pictures accepted between 1883 and 1903. But she exhibited at the R.B.A., the Grosvenor Gallery and the New Gallery as well. She was also a designer and is noted in the Building Magazine in 1888 as having produced the designs for the reredos of St Luke’s Church in the Uxbridge Road in London in that year.

Biographical detail of Dora Noyes’ early life is still a little thin. We know that she was one of three daughters and two sons born to a London solicitor. Initially they were all based in London, with Dora sending her pictures in from Wimbledon, Earlsfield and Manresa Road addresses. But her father seems to have died in the mid-1890s at which point Dora moved to Wiltshire with her older sisters, the writer Ella Noyes, and the musician Minna Noyes. They eventually set up in a house called ‘Fosters’ in Sutton Veny near Salisbury by about 1906.

These later years of Dora and her sisters in Wiltshire have helpfully been quite well documented - mostly through the diaries of the writer Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969), with whom the sisters were closely acquainted. Despite Ivy being some 20 years younger than the Noyeses, she stayed with them almost every summer between the wars - sometimes with her long-term partner Margaret Jourdain and sometimes alone. She describes the sisters as in some ways creatures from a world long-disappeared, dressing and using language in a way that belonged to an era some 40 or 50 years earlier. But Ivy was also a friend of no less an art-world figure than Sir William Nicholson (1872-1949), who co-incidentally lived at The Old Manor at Sutton Veny for some 20 years when the Noyeses were there. She tells us that there was much interaction between the two houses and Dora and Sir William got on well. The Manor though still had some formality about its customs in those days and many of its visitors – particularly children and the more artistic and creative people in the Nicholson circle – were often seen escaping to Fosters where they could enjoy the refuge of the extremely tolerant Noyes sisters.

But reading Ivy Compton-Burnett’s observations of those days, the Noyeses emerge as curiously modern as well. She noted a distinct feminism about them. All three of them had made up their minds that they would not marry. But for all that they were very fond of children and were much interested in their education, particularly that of young girls. Similarly they were not remotely reactionary in their politics. They were certainly socialists and even with a Fabian flavour about them. And if Dora by 1920 had settled for a straightforward career as a traditional watercolour illustrator, their artistic tastes ran far wider. They would have known the work of Sir William Nicholson, but it was his avant-garde son Ben Nicholson’s work that they actually bought. Ben’s Foothills, Cumberland 1928 was one that they owned and is now held by Tate Britain. Looking at Tate’s documentation of this picture it can be seen that it was “given by Miss Dora and Miss Ella Noyes in 1950”.

Dora’s work as an artist can be divided into two separate phases. By the time she had moved to Wiltshire and the twentieth century was beginning to unfold, she devoted almost all her time as an artist to illustrating her sister Ella’s books. These were typically art historically and architecturally-slanted travel guides, with a large focus on Italy, where the two sisters travelled often. Dora’s illustrations were by now worked exclusively in pen and ink or in watercolour. In this vein she appears as a typical topographical watercolourist of her day, with a concentration on views of towns or the local costumes of the regions. But she was also capable of rendering frontispieces to her sister’s books with an exquisite sense of design for lettering, giving them a feel of latter-day illuminated manuscripts. To complement this she also in those Wiltshire days made portraits of many of the local residents - particularly children. Almost every child connected to Sutton Veny was drawn in chalk or painted in watercolour by Dora, ranging from the butcher’s boy, to the sons and daughters of the local gentry and right up to the eventual 6^th Marquis of Bath when a boy.

But if her later work was almost exclusively in watercolour, this present picture shows us something quite different. Painted at the end of the 1880s when she was still a young woman in her twenties, it shows us that Dora Noyes at that moment was fully aware of the new developments in plein-air painting that were unfolding in England. The French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884) and his fellow Salon Naturalists in Paris advanced a semi-impressionistic style which greatly appealed to a number of younger English painters. Bastien-Lepage favoured loose, impressionistic backgrounds to his pictures, but the front planes of his pictures concentrated on solidly rendered figures – particularly field-workers – placed in foregrounds composed of meticulously rendered natural detail. English artists such as George Clausen and Henry La Thangue were committed disciples of Bastien-Lepage. And the painters of Newlyn in Cornwall and the Glasgow Boys in Scotland were also strongly influenced by him. Whether Dora Noyes went to France and absorbed these approaches at first hand, or whether she was working alongside painters in England who had themselves been there is not yet known. But her rush-gathering girl in this painting has noticeably strong overtones of both Lepage and more specifically Clausen. She has ‘square-brushed’ much of the foreground and treated her girl’s costume with bold geometric strokes. The picture, typical of that school, is directly and representationally delivered in the foreground. The figure is solid, the gate and particularly the armful of reeds she is carrying are well detailed. The background however drifts – again typically - into a more impressionistic haze. The horizon is noticeably high. This last was a relatively new approach from the plein-airists, which had the effect of pushing the figure more closely into the front plain of the picture and thus seemingly into more direct contact with the viewer. The girl herself is presented in a direct and unsentimentalized way. She is attractive, but with an expression in her face that is enigmatic and open to interpretation. Her clothes, her boots and particularly her hands are presented in a thoroughly realistic way.

Looking through Dora’s exhibited pictures, the titles suggest that at this stage of her career she was a committed plein-airist. At the (Royal) Society of British Artists for example she exhibited After the Reapers (1884/5) and Born to Labour (1886/7). At the Royal Academy she showed A Rest by the Wayside (1891), Summer-time (1893) and Two at a Stile (1894). Investigating her titles for our present picture, we can safely assume that we are looking at her 1890 exhibit at the Grosvenor Gallery entitled Rush-Gathering. The picture is of suitable size for public exhibition, the title fits exactly and this style of execution - what would now be classified as British Impressionism - is entirely appropriate for a date of the late 1880s or early 1890s. Further, if the date of exhibition was 1890 and the dating of her picture appears to read “188…” we can probably also assume that this work was painted in 1889. And it is interesting to note that this painting did indeed hang at the Grosvenor Gallery. This exhibiting society - along with another where she showed, the New English Art Club - were considered at that stage to be very much the avant-garde alternatives to the Royal Academy. That she submitted Rush-Gathering to the Grosvenor Gallery shows her not only to have been aware of these more modern, French-learned tendencies herself, but it also tells us that the hanging committee of the Grosvenor Gallery also recognized that Dora Noyes’ picture was indeed at that time fully in tune with their forward-looking ideas.

Dora Noyes’ later work is that of a competent but conventional watercolourist. However Rush-Gathering shows her in the 1880s and 90s to have been an artist fully in tune with the developments of her day, not afraid to paint on a bold scale and capable of producing a picture of considerable poetry. That this present work, so closely comparable to the very best plein-air artists of the 1880s, is by a female hand about which so little is known is both revealing and exciting.Where, one wonders, are the rest of her early exhibits?