Thetis Hera

Location

Country: Brazil
City: Rio de Janeiro
Place: Consulate-General

Henry Cliffe’s print references Thetis and Hera, two powerful women from classical Greek mythology. Thetis was a sea nymph (a Nereid) loved by Zeus, who was destined to bear a son who would be mightier than his father. Hera, the goddess of women and marriage, was the wife and one of three sisters of Zeus, who was fiercely possessive of her husband. In this semi-abstract print, thickly outlined fractured brown forms suggest a stormy encounter.

Cliffe’s early works were influenced by Surrealism in the 1930s, and later by the Neo-Romantic English landscape style of the 1940s. A decade later, he became more concerned with the relationship between the human figure and the landscape, and his work became increasingly abstract.

Henry Cliffe was born in Scarborough, Yorkshire. He studied painting and lithography at Bath Academy of Art at Corsham Court, where he became principal teacher of painting and lithography from 1950, reaching considerable prominence in this field.  His work was included in many international print exhibitions in France, Germany, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Japan and the United States, and he exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1954. He held solo exhibitions of his paintings at the Redfern Gallery in London in 1956 and 1961. In 1959 the St George's Gallery, London commissioned him to execute a series of lithographs, 'The Metamorphosis Suite' which were exhibited at the gallery that year.

Cliffe was awarded the First Purchase Prize by the Philadelphia Print Club in 1960, and received a Ford Foundation fellowship from the Pratt Institute of Graphic Art in New York in 1961, where he was a Founder Fellow.  His work is represented in many public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum London, the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Places

Subjects

abstract, Hera, Thetis

Materials & Techniques

lithograph

Artist

Henry Cliffe (1919 - 1983)

Title

Thetis Hera

Date

1958

Medium

Lithograph

Dimensions

height: 54.00 cm, width: 73.50 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Editions Alecto, May 1965

Inscription

bc: THETIS HERA ; br: Henry Cliffe 58

GAC number

7022