Dod Procter 1890-1972

Dod Procter was a British woman artist and one of the most celebrated painters of the second quarter of the twentieth century.

Born Doris Margaret Shaw, she was brought up first in Tavistock, Devon, then in Newlyn, Cornwall, by her mother, who had been a successful student at the Slade School of Fine Art. She began her artistic career at fifteen as a pupil at Stanhope and Elizabeth Forbes' School of Art in Newlyn, which had been instrumental in building an artists' colony there from the 1880s. It was there that she met her lifelong partner and collaborator, Ernest Procter, whom she married in 1912. 

Procter and her husband studied together at art schools in England and in Paris, including the Collège de France where they were both influenced by Impressionism and the Post-Impressionism movements. The couple worked together at times, sharing a number of commissions and showing their work alongside one another in exhibitions. Both are known for their work in Cornwall, particularly Newlyn. Procter chose her androgynous epithet, Dod, to obscure her gender at a time when women artists struggled for recognition. 

In the 1920s Procter painted a number of portraits of Cornish models which were greatly celebrated, for example Morning, 1926 (Tate Collection), of Cissie Barnes, which was acquired for the Nation by the Daily Mail in 1927 after being singled out from that year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and touring 23 cities and two ocean liners. Laura and Harold Knight both recorded their startled reactions to seeing it looking decidedly out of place in Procter's primitive studio, bleakly furnished with what Procter blithely informed them was a sofa the colour of manure, while the erstwhile Newlyn resident Gluck believed Morning 'in some curious way... marked a milestone'.

Procter was a lifelong artist, though most active after the untimely death of her husband in Newcastle in 1935. After Ernest's death, Procter travelled to the United States, Canada, Jamaica and Africa before returning to west Cornwall in 1938. She was a member of several artists organisations, such as the Newlyn School and became President of St Ives Society of Artists (STISA) in 1966. She died in 1972 and is buried next to her husband at St Hilary Church, Cornwall.

Her work was regualrly exhibited at the Royal Academy and is in the collections of the RA, Southampton City Art Gallery, Bristol Museum, Jerwood, Ingram Collection, Royal West of England Academy, The Potteries Museum, Ferens Art Gallery, Laing Art Gallery, Leamington Spa Museum, Towneley Hall, Glynn Vivian, Cornwall Council, Penlee House and Plymouth Museum.