Janet Cree was only in her early twenties, when she had already forged a distinctive practice. All her Academy exhibits were small, figurative tempera paintings. Cree's portrait can be located as part of the early twentieth century revival of tempera, a challenge to the dominance of oil painting. The Society of Painters in Tempera, which had numbered Mary Sargant Florence among its founder members, had increased in size, and in 1930 Maxwell Armfield published his Manual of Tempera Painting. For artists working in this medium, who included Margaret Gere and Winifred Knights, early Italian painting was the inspiration. This ran counter to the narrow definition of modern art as following a French legacy. Cree took up the conventions of Italian quattrocento portrait painting, with its composition of head and shoulders set against a plain background and the scroll declaring her identity as artist. The contemporary vogue for all things oriental is combined here with a style of portraiture that had been used historically to represent wealthy, powerful Italian sitters.
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