54. Hope Manchester

Hope Manchester was born in Warwick, Rhode Island, the younger child of Albert and Nellie Manchester who were natives of the state.¹ She attended the Rhode Island School of Design from 1925 to 1929, graduating with a diploma in Freehand Drawing and Painting.² Manchester apparently spent the next decade living abroad in France, where she studied with Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, and Stanley William Hayter at his newly formed Atelier 17. Although Manchester’s name has only been connected with Atelier 17’s roster in Paris, her affiliation with the studio continued through its move to the United States, as is evidenced in Martin Harris’s photograph of Manchester among artists discussing the Blake method. Strangely, she did not participate in any of the workshop’s first eight group exhibitions in Europe held between 1934 and 1939, but instead showed new prints with the Atelier 17 group at the Willard Gallery (1945) and Leicester Galleries (1947). Seascape, a print once in Hayter’s collection of exchanged prints, features three women in a barren and surrealistic landscape, struggling to hold up some kind of heavy disc. Sometime in the 1940s, she married fellow artist Theodore Appleby (1923-1985), and in 1950 the couple purchased a home in Alba-la-Romaine, a rural village in the mountains of southern France. Several other artists had studios in Alba, among them Hayter and his wife Helen Phillips and the Cuban-American artist Carmen Herrera and her husband Jesse Lowenthal.³ There she worked as a painter and sculptor, in a semi-representational manner.

Notes