PETER AND THE WOLF, A BOOK ILLUSTRATION
pen and ink and watercolour on card
15 x 10cm (30.5 x 24.5cm framed)

Property from the Estate of Hans Feibusch, London

Provenance
Gifted by the Artist to Hans Feibusch, Hampstead
Thence by descent to the present owner

Phyllis Bray was a versatile painter, lithographer and book designer. She had a succesful career as a muralist, assisting the German mural artist Hans Feibusch (1899-1998), a collaboration that lasted over forty years. A talented illustrator, she completed commissions for major publishers including Faber & Faber, J M Dent and Sons, Arthur Baker Ltd and the Oxford University Press. She also produced commercial work for Shell, London Transport and the John Lewis Partnership, all hugely successful.

Born in Norwood in London, Bray was awarded a scholarship to the Slade School of Art (1927-31) where she was a star pupil under Henry Tonks. During the 1930s she taught art at the Bow and Bromley Evening Institute where she met John Cooper, one of the founders of the East London Group. She joined the Group in 1933, the year she married Cooper and moved to Hampstead. A year later she was invited to become a member of the London Group and showed regularly at The Leicester Galleries, the Royal Academy, the Drian Gallery and Mignon Gallery Bath. Her interest in Surrealism (lot 54) may date from her first solo exhibition at the London Gallery in 1949 run by the Belgian Surrealist E.L.T. Mesens.

Phyllis's connection with the East End was underlined when she completed three large murals (Music, Drama and Ballet) for the 'People's Palace' in the Mile End Road in 1936 for which she was publicly praised by Queen Mary (The building was acquired by Queen Mary University in 1954). Most of Bray's murals were lost under subsequent refurbishments, but one fragment has recently been uncovered. The commission was a forerunner for her collaboration with Feibusch with whom she worked on a series of post-War mural projects including for the ceiling in St Crispin's, Bermondsey, and St Alban the Martyr, Holborn, and large commissions in Chichester Cathedral, Newport Civic centre and Dudley Town Hall amongst a litany of other such large-scale work.

After Cooper and Bray divorced in 1936, Phyllis married the architect Eric Phillips. Bray was a serious collector of Medieval and Renaissance jewellery in the 1950s and '60s. The 'Phyllis Phillips' collection was sold at Christie's in 1989 for £576,000. She had a posthumous studio sale in 2005 which included over 200 landscape gouaches, many featuring the Wye valley where she had a cottage. A long-term resident of Hampstead, some of her gouaches are in the collection of Burgh House.

Her book illustrations included Alison Uttley's A Traveller in Time, 1939 (lot 55), Charles Dickens'The Magic Fishbone and The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin, 1939 and designs for Michael Fyodrov, Matushka, 1946 to name a few.