Artist: Ilsa Rodmell
Date: undated
Medium: Oil on board
Dimensions: 77 x 97 cm
Credit: Towner Collection, the Lucy Wertheim Bequest. Image Towner Eastbourne, © The Artist's Estate
Isobel (Ilsa) Rodmell was a painter and linguist, born in Alsace and educated at Belfort in northeastern France. She began painting at the age of fifteen, abandoned it at eighteen, but resumed twenty years later when living in England.
Her early work was inspired by mythological gods such as Caelus the Roman god of the sky. She painted with vivacity and her deliberately ‘naïve’ depictions featured wide-eyed women doll-like in their appearance.
Rodmell was a friend of the art patron Lucy Wertheim, who included her work in collections of modern and naïve paintings, and Wertheim opened Rodmell’s solo exhibition in Hove in 1965 near to where the artist lived in Brighton.