YOUTH
Winifred Turner (British, 1903-1983)
Height: 40½" (103cm)
Plaster
This is the original plaster version of Youth, the model for Winifred Turner's bronze Royal Academy submission of 1934. At the exhibition it was bought by the Tate Gallery and is now on display in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Winifred Turner's powerful and progressive sculpture was rediscovered by Nicholas Penny, formerly Senior Curator of Sculpture at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. and currently curator of the National Gallery London, in its bronze format in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This encounter led to the 1988 exhibition dedicated to Winifred and her father Alfred in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. Here the V&A's old photograph of this plaster version of Youth was illustrated in the 1988 exhibition catalogue and would also feature in Peyton Skipwith's review of the exhibition. At the time the plaster's location was unknown.
Winifred (Winnie or Win) went to the Royal Academy Schools 1924'9 and as early as 1924 she was exhibiting portrait busts of her fellow students. She won all the prizes open to her during the years 1925 and 1926 and next exhibited in 1927, again a portrait, this time of a fellow student.
By 1930 Winifred was fully established as a sculptor and was elected as both a Fellow and Associate of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. She was also teaching at the Central School. In 1932 she moved to Studio K, 416 Fulham Road. Her best work belongs to this period before the outbreak of war in 1938 and her father Alfred Turner's death in 1940. Winnifred married in 1942.
Provenance
Jessica Turner, the artist's sister