Noah's Ark (1909)

This ‘arts and crafts’ Birmingham Group style tempera on silk panel picture was displayed at the Goupil Gallery in 1913 when it was called by its longer biblical text title ‘By Faith Noah...prepared an Ark to the Saving of his House’. This was the first Contemporary Art Society exhibition in London after its foundation in 1910. ‘Noah’s Ark’ had been shown in a joint exhibition with Margaret Gere’s brother, Charles March Gere RA RWS (1869-1957) at the Carfax Gallery, Piccadilly in April 1912 when it was purchased by the CAS. It is also the first work by a woman artist to be purchased by the CAS; Vanessa Bell's The Spanish Lady (1912) was bought later in the autumn of the same year. Noah's Ark (1909) was subsequently exhibited at another CAS show 'Modern Paintings' in Belfast in 1914.

After being taught by her brother at the Birmingham School of Art and a formative visit to Florence in 1901, she came to the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1905, where she studied fresco and tempera painting and befriended the older Scottish artist Ethel Walker (1861-1951). Another picture, The Garden of the Slothful (‘A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest’), in the same medium and square size at Royal Holloway College, was from the collection of Christiana Herringham (1852-1929), co-founder of the Art Fund in 1903, a precursor to the CAS. Herringham had also founded the Society of Mural Decorators and Painters in Tempera in 1901 that had Margaret Gere as a member.

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