Martin Harris, Hope Manchester (standing, far right, with cigarette) with members of Atelier 17 reviewing the Blake Method, ca. 1947. Gelatin silver print, image: 7 9/16 x 7 11/16 in. (19.2 x 19.5 cm). Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Gift of Robert Flynn Johnson, 2004.140.7.2. Courtesy estate of Martin Harris.
Hope Manchester, Seascape, 1946. Engraving and etching, plate: 7 7/8 x 14 7/8 in.; sheet: 13 ¼ x 18 in. Dolan/Maxwell, Philadelphia.

54. Hope Manchester

Life Dates1907-1976
Place of BirthWarwick, RI, USA
Place of DeathAlba, France
Birth NameHope 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


  1. Biographical information about Manchester is scant. Galerie Michelle Champetier in Cannes, France, represents her work. Census information provides basic details: 1910 census, Warwick, Kent, Rhode Island; Roll: T624_1436; Page: 11B; Enumeration District: 0016; FHL microfilm: 1375449; 1920 census, Warwick, Kent, Rhode Island; Roll: T625_1671; Page: 1B; Enumeration District: 22; Image: 346; 1930 census, Warwick, Kent, Rhode Island; Roll: 2169; Page: 15A; Enumeration District: 0016; Image: 414.0; FHL microfilm: 2341903.
  2. Manchester’s attendance records confirmed by Douglas Doe, Associate Archivist, RISD Archives, email to Christina Weyl, April 21, 2017.
  3. Dana Miller, Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight (London: Distributed by Yale University Press, 2016), 198, 201; Peter Black and Désirée Moorhead, The Prints of Stanley William Hayter: A Complete Catalogue (Mount Kisco, NY: Moyer Bell, 1992), 391.