Doris Emerson Chapman

Miss Doris Emerson Chapman
File:Chapman, Doris Emerson.jpg
Born	1903
Died	1990
Residence	Flat 4, 43 Upper Berkeley Street, W1 [1935]
Occupation	artist
Society Membership membership ordinary fellow elected_AI 1935.11.19

Notes

House Notes

1935.10.22 nominated

Alexander Keiller and his second wife Veronica are also Fellows
Doris Emerson Chapman was his third wife

Notes From Elsewhere

DRAFT - for published article see: http://www.thepcf.org.uk/what we do/48/reference/915
Art and Archaeology: Doris Emerson Chapman, painter and prehistorian.
The earlier twentieth century was a time of extraordinary vitality in relations between art and archaeology. This interdisciplinary nexus has only lately begun to be investigated (1). As an archaeologist, I have recently become interested in Doris
Emerson Chapman - a painter who became a prehistorian and archaeological illustrator. Although she is little written about today, Chapman is one of the few women to tread the paths linking art and archaeology in the interwar period. Her archaeological illustrations form The Doris Keiller Collection at the Alexander Keiller Museum, Avebury, and one of her drawings is held by the National Portrait Gallery. My research is part of a wider project investigating how people drawn from backgrounds in literature, the arts and sciences, came together to establish new ways of imagining prehistory in the early twentieth century.
Chapman emerged as a painter in her twenties. Born in 1903, she was apparently trained in Paris (2), and her later publications on French Palaeolithic art suggest she read and spoke French (3). She exhibited two paintings with the East London Group in their first show in 1929, for which one of her paintings was priced by Lefevre at 17guineas, a reasonably impressive sum (4). In 1930 she sent the oil painting Black& Cloak to the Young Painter's Society exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries. Chapman's exhibitions at the Wertheim Gallery in 1932 and at the Bloomsbury Gallery in 1933 were reviewed in the national press: “Miss Chapman senses the world with the artless and intuitive refinement of a primitive poet,” stated The Observer. Her pictures were, at times, “cubistic” and “quite fictitious when considered in relationship to the laws of perspective and to the relative proportions of objects”, but were nonetheless “charming”, “natural” and “sincere”, demonstrating Chapman's unaffected “spiritual affinity ... with country folk”(5). The reviewer of Chapman's Bloomsbury exhibition was less generous; her paintings were “pleasing” and “decorative”, but also “simple” and “uninquisitive”(6).
What little was written about Chapman in her lifetime chiefly concerned her appearance and love affairs. In 1929 the proprietor of the Spread Eagle, Thame, was sufficiently fascinated by “a most pretty” girl with “hips up to her armpits” to devote a page of his diary to her: Painting “curved-backed shire horses, in face herself rather a horse. Let her at once drop the shire horse and start a rare and happy stud of her own”(7). Virginia Woolf was less impressed when her brother - psychoanalyst Adrian Stephen - fell in love with Chapman, who was twenty years younger than he. Sitting on the floor at Stephen's party, Woolf records Chapman wearing “an ugly rayed dress” (which her sister Vanessa Bell nonetheless “thought nice”). She was “like a dogfish” and Woolf could not “see why all the bees swarm[ed] around her”. The affair ended badly, with Stephen, separated from his wife - “fretted to death - almost to fainting in the street . by the vagaries of his Doris”(8).
In the early 1930s Chapman became a member of the Morven Institute of Archaeological Research, which employed her in drawing the Avebury megaliths. Around this time she set up business with the archaeologist Alexander Keiller, director of the Institute, “whereby he took a photograph of clients and she painted a portrait from the photograph”(2). In 1935, when Keiller moved the Institute to the manor house in the middle of Avebury stone circle, Chapman joined him as “mistress in residence”. At around the same time Chapman modeled for a painting by John
Armstrong - 'Nude' - commissioned by Keiller (9). Three years later Chapman became Keiller's third wife, with a pre-nuptial agreement "renouncing the right to any claim” and agreeing not to “buy any furs or jewellery without her husband's knowledge” (2).
Chapman's art training gave her skills essential to the project of popularizing archaeology, during a period in which media and tourist industries increasingly demanded new ways of visualizing the prehistoric. Chapman's writing and illustrations reached beyond scholarly audiences, towards the thousands of Avebury visitors and the readers of popular science. At Avebury, Chapman made measured drawings of megaliths, designed an advertising poster for Shell, and wrote the popular Avebury guidebook (10). She redeployed her skills as a portraitist to create facial reconstructions from Neolithic, Bronze Age and Roman skulls, publishing these in the Illustrated London News (11). One of few female Fellows of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Chapman also illustrated popular anthropologies reviewing the "races of Man” (12).
The Second World War brought the end of the Morven Institute and divorce. Chapman moved to London to work as a nurse, and Avebury was taken over by the National Trust in 1943. Chapman remarried in 1951, becoming Doris Emerson Chalmers, apparently leaving her art and archaeology careers behind. She died in 1990 aged 86. Please contact me if you have more information to add about this little known, but fascinating, prehistorian and painter.
Sources:
1. See the work of Prof. Sam Smiles, including: Smiles, Sam (2009) 'British Antiquity and the Modern Movement' in Joanne Parker (ed.) Written on Stone: The Cultural History of British Prehistoric Monuments Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle.
2. Murray, Lynda J. (1999) A Zest for Life: The story of Alexander Keiller. Morven Press: Swindon
3. Emerson Chapman, D. and Keiller, A (1936) The Rock Shelter at Cap Blanc, Antiquity vol.10, No. 48: 207-9
4. Buckman, David (2012) From Bow to Biennale: Artists of the East London Group. Francis Boutle: London
5. The Observer, 22nd May, 1932 p14
6. The Times, Wednesday, Apr 12, 1933; pg. 10
7. Fothergill, John (1931) An Innkeeper's Diary. Faber and Faber: London p.2445

8. Bell, Anne Olivier (ed.) (1982) The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 4, 1931-35
9. Lambirth, Andrew (2009) John Armstrong: The Complete Paintings Phillip Wilson Publishers Ltd. London p165
10. Chapman, Doris Emerson (1947) Is this Your First time at Avebury? Avebury: Morven Institute of Archaeological Research.
11. ‘Neolithic Ancient Britons: Racial Types Portrayed from Skulls'. Illustrated London News, Saturday, 27th May 1939 p.390-1.
12. Dunbar, George (1938) Other Men's Lives: A Study of Primitive Peoples. Illustrated by D. Emerson Chapman. London: Scientific Book Club.