Biography
Betty Rea was born in London in 1904. Her father was Dr. Arthur Bevan and her mother's maiden name was Barnardo; Dr.Thomas John Barnardo was her great-uncle.
She was educated at Downe House School (in Kent at that time) and began to study painting at the Regent Street Polytechnic in 1922, almost at once changing to sculpture and transferring her studies to the Royal College of Art in 1924. Her teacher there was Ernest Cole. Henry Moore was a student teacher at the RCA at that time, and became a friend.
In 1926 she married James Rea, whose father became Baron Rea, a Liberal peer, their two sons, Nicholas and Julian, were born in 1928 and 1931. The couple divorced in 1942, he died in 1954.
During the 1930s, partly influenced by her friendship with Professor John Desmond Bernal, Betty Rea was greatly involved in anti-fascist, leftwing politics. From 1934 to 1936 she was secretary of the Artists' International Association, founded in 1933, this organization sought to oppose imperialism, fascism and colonialism through art.
For most of the war, Betty Rea taught painting and modelling in evacuated children's homes in Huntingdon and the surrounding country. She set up home with her colleague, Nan Youngman, first in a caravan in the grounds of Hinchingbrooke House then in Godmanchester and in 1946 at 'Papermills' in Cambridge. The children's paintings from this time were included in several British Council exhibitions sent abroad and some are illustrated in Herbert Read's "Education Through Art".
From 1949 she taught sculpture at Homerton College, continuing this part-time until 1964, she also worked for some years as craft examiner for the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate.
Betty Rea died in 1965.
Read more about this topic: Betty Rea
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)