Kathleen Bridle's first impressions of Enniskillen were not encouraging. She arrived there on a dark, dreary winter's evening in 1926 to take up a job as art teacher with the local technical school. The headmaster met her at the station and drove her to the hotel through pouring rain in, she later recalled, "a kind of hearse". She found she had to teach in five different schools in the town, which meant she worked five days and four evenings a week, plus most Saturday mornings. She missed the lively social life she had enjoyed in London and Dublin. Little wonder that she was unhappy during her first year. "I thought it was a dreadful place," she bluntly told the painter T.P. Flanagan.
Yet despite this unpromising start she not only settled in the town but stayed there for the rest of her life. After her retirement, a plan to go and live with her sister in Wales was abandoned when she realised, to her own surprise, how much she'd grown to love the Fermanagh countryside. So her sister came to live with her in Enniskillen instead.
She painted all the time, both at home and on her frequent travels abroad, and she exhibited regularly as well as being active in the artistic life of the province. She was also an inspirational teacher, and was extremely popular with her students. Two of these students, William Scott and Flanagan, went on to become major painters. Now Bridle's niece, Carole Froude-Durix, has written a study of her life and work, and its publication coincides with an exhibition mounted by the Fermanagh County Museum in Enniskillen, a show that will later travel to the Ulster Museum in Belfast.
Bridle was born in Kent in 1897. Her father was a coastguard, which meant the family frequently moved, and it was while they were based in Holyhead that she came to lodge with her aunt and uncle in Dublin so she could attend the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. There she was taught by Sean Keating, Oliver Shepherd and George Atkinson. The latter, her watercolour teacher, was the greatest influence on her. They became friends and, vitally, he introduced her to the National Gallery's collection of Nathaniel Hone watercolour landscapes. The Metropolitan School didn't, however, provide a professional qualification, which is why she followed her friend John Hunter to London in 1921 to attend the Royal College of Art. There at the same time were sculptors Henry Moore, who became a good friend, and Barbara Hepworth. Her first job wasn't as a teacher but as a glass-painter in Harry Clarke's stained glass studios in Dublin where, incidentally, she took over Sean O'Casey's lodgings.
To her dismay, she'd discovered in London that while the Royal College provided her with a teaching qualification, it didn't provide theoretical expertise. Her solution was to follow the lead of her instructors and teach by example - with one exception. She hated the way Keating and Atkinson came along and blithely took over the students' work - common practice in art schools - and she resolved never to do that herself. As a teacher in Fermanagh, while her own work was quite conservative, she was a champion of new thinking in art. Despite her own reservations, she recognised that art must develop. When Scott went on to study at Belfast College of Art he discovered that, thanks to her, he knew much more about modern French painting than any of the people who were supposedly teaching him.
Flanagan remarks that he always associates her "with an easel pitched in a field or by an open window". His dedication to her is testament to her inspirational character. She inspired him with a passion for watercolour - conventionally regarded as oil paint's poor relation - as a volatile, quicksilver medium in itself, and it was her stories about the young Scott that set him on the road to be a professional artist.
Scott's father was a sign-painter. He approached Bridle shortly after her arrival in Enniskillen, said that his son showed an aptitude for drawing, that he felt the boy should have the requisite training to become an artist, and asked if she would help. Bridle took on young William, even granting him a special dispensation to attend evening life drawing classes though he was technically under age. At weekends he leafed through art books in her flat or accompanied her on painting trips.
He was keen and attentive, but tragedy struck when his father was killed when he fell from a ladder while fighting a fire. A deputation from the civic authorities enquired of Bridle whether William's talent merited assistance. She said yes and a fund was set up to enable him to attend Belfast College of Art. That simple yes was, Froude-Durix points out "the foundation stone of Scott's brilliant artistic career".
The exhibition in Enniskillen comprises a broad representative selection of Bridle's own work and provides a chance to assess it on its merits. Does it live up to T.P. Flanagan's high opinion? It is true that she did produce some outstanding watercolours, but it has to be said that the quality of her output is uneven.
She had a tendency to allow her palette to darken precipitately, and to delineate her compositions with a heavy, deadening line. However, her liking for dark umber could work to her advantage. Burnt Strawfield, Oxford, for example, is beautifully judged. And Flanagan rates her dark, moody view of Lough Erne as among the best Irish watercolours ever produced. It could have been what John Hewitt had in mind when he wrote of the way her work focused on moments of drama, like "the dark storm about to break".
She was better with natural forms than with the geometry of towns or the simplicity of still life objects. Flanagan feels that she peaked in the mid-1940s, but that may be partly modesty on his part. For, while her later work really does get better and better, delicate studies of Fermanagh's lakelands suggest that she was looking carefully at the pictures of her erstwhile pupil. He is, after all, probably the finest Irish landscape water-colourist of the century.
The exhibition includes some sketchbooks, one opened on a beautiful panorama of hills and lakes, made with an engaging combination of spontaneity and sureness that she found it hard to recreate in the more intimidating framework of the full-sized watercolour sheet.
Froude-Durix's study is exemplary as a chronicle of her aunt's work, but it doesn't really provide a rounded portrait of the woman. In fact she intimates that it was difficult to get close to her personally. She would try, tactfully, to quiz her but "it was always difficult to find a space between my interest and what she may have considered prying, for she was a very private person even within the family".
As far as personality goes, S.B. Kennedy, in his study of Flanagan, provides what still sounds like the most accurate characterisation: "She had a warm personality, yet remained dignified and a little Edwardian in the formality of her manner." She died in 1989. Everyone agrees that she was a genuinely modest person, and she deserves this belated recognition of her achievements.
The Life And Art Of Kathleen Bridle by Carole Froude-Durix (with a foreword by T.P. Flanagan) is published by Four Courts Press at £45 cased and £9.95 paperback.
Kathleen Bridle: Landscape painter and water-colourist can be seen at the Fermanagh County Museum, Enniskillen Castle, until August 31st.
