Description:Joscelyne Gaskin (1903-1993) was the daughter of the Birmingham artists and designers Arthur Joseph Gaskin and Georgie Evelyn Cave France. Her parents both worked in a variety of media, with Georgie initially specialising in illustrations for children’s books, although after 1899 she concentrated on jewellery-making.
Growing up in an artistic household, it is no surprise that Joscelyne began to draw from a young age. Her childhood drawings focus on domestic life – her parents, her sister Margaret, their nurse – but are also shaped by the books she read and films she saw at the cinema. Joscelyne’s parents both encouraged her creativity. They collected and annotated the drawings she gave them, and later showed them to the artist and critic Roger Fry, who was interested in what he saw as the special vitality of children’s art. Fry praised the drawings made by Joscelyne aged 7 as ‘altogether marvellous’ and reproduced one of them in a piece on children’s art which he wrote for The Burlington Magazine in 1917. Joscelyne continued her art practice as an adult. She became a painter and calligrapher, and like her parents exhibited her work at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists.
From an album of childhood drawings, presented by Mr John F. C. Turner, 2010.