While she valued her Irish roots, artist Hilda van Stockum found that she could express herself best in the Dutch genre of still life, writes Hilary Pyle
When Hilda van Stockum, 1908-2006, was honoured with a retrospective exhibition in the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1991, she contributed an essay to the catalogue describing how her painting technique had evolved through a study of the representation of light over the centuries by various artists. From the 17th century on, she wrote, there was a sort of ‘uniform day-light effect which called no attention to itself ’. Then the Impressionists arrived and Cézanne. It was ‘an intense relief ’.
