Born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, Rachel Reckitt was the youngest of three children. The family were previously from Hull and were Quakers. She was born into a creative environment; her father Frank Norman Reckitt was an architect and her mother Beatrice Mary Hewett trained as an artist at the Slade School of Art under Henry Tonks whose contemporaries were Augustus and Gwen John, Harold Gilman and Spencer Gore. Rachel’s family’s successful manufacturing business, Reckitt & Sons also established Hull University College’s Ferens Art Gallery, along with other buildings, including the town library. The family moved from Hertfordshire to Golsoncott, Somerset in 1922, which would remain Rachel’s family home (apart from when she stayed in London during the war and her many trips abroad).

Rachel Reckitt was very fond of West Somerset. Her house was situated in a tiny hamlet at Washford, only a few miles from the sea and she immersed herself in rural life: hunting, agricultural traditions, animals, family and friends. This may have influenced her choice of stone and wood for her sculptures, alabaster from nearby Blue Anchor and Kilve and wood from around Watchet. Rachel attended boarding school in Kent and on returning to Somerset began her study of art with local tutor Alec Carruthers Gould before joining Taunton School of Art in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

In 1933 aged 25 Rachel departed for London, having developed an understanding of Modern art. Her notebooks from 1930-31 show notes and drawings containing works by Augustus John, John Nash, Cezanne and copied notes on Cezanne by Roger Fry. Much of her early work in painting and sculpture shows influences from cubist and surrealist artists. Ensconced in a time of radical shift in art, Rachel chose Iain Macnab’s Grosvenor School of Modern Art, one of only two schools in London dedicated to studying Modern art.
At the Grosvenor School Rachel had complete freedom to attend as much or little as she required, there was no curriculum but all students attended life drawing classes and there was an emphasis on printmaking which the school became renowned for. Visiting lecturers at the Grosvenor School included Graham Sutherland and Mark Gertler, whose connection to both Modern art and landscape must have resonated with Rachel’s interests. Macnab himself made wood engravings as well as painting, Rachel went on to establish herself as an accomplished engraver publishing several books of illustrations which was the focus of her work up to 1937. She completed five (known) signs for pubs in Somerset and Devon and continued with sculpture later on in her career, at this time the work was vernacular and developed from sheet metal, riveted together.

The school drawing trips across the Mediterranean each summer could have been responsible for introducing Rachel to a love of travel. She went on to travel extensively, and impressively. The last Spanish sketching trip was in 1936 just before the civil war broke out, but her travels resumed as soon as 1947 when she visited a Romanesque site in south western France, returning a few more times throughout her life. Wherever she travelled to, be it Portugal, Malta, Spain or elsewhere, the focus of her interest seems to be those with a strong connection to living off the land or sea.

During World War Two Rachel returned to London to work at Toynbee Hall. The building was the University of London’s centre for social and educational reform, used as a base for a mobile advice service for displaced Londoners as part of the Citizen’s Advice Bureau. She spent the period during the Blitz there, whilst making sketches, painting and engraving to capture the scenes around her. She kept diaries and wrote regular letters to her mother, excerpts of which can be read in the Museum of Somerset’s exhibition catalogue, Rachel Reckitt: Where everything that meets the eye. In these, her spirit comes through the descriptions, showing Rachel as courageous and unfazed yet sensitive to the impact of the war on fellow Londoners. Speaking of the incendiary bombs creating devastating blazes as they fell across London, she writes, ‘these fell on the empty barges, ours being the only one occupied, and we had to dash about putting them out, not only on the neighbouring barges, but on our own…’

Between 1946-7 Rachel returned to Toynbee Hall to study architectural history which is where her friend and fellow artist Diana Gurney taught art. Rachel visited Italy and Malta, and made a number of linear and planar paintings and drawings, which are in a similar linear style with angular coloured planes to that of the work gifted to Pallant House Gallery. Untitled is, according to Hal Bishop, a reworking of an earlier painting titled Two Women in the backyard, currently on display in Chance Encounters: The Art of Rachel Reckitt at the Museum of Somerset.

In the late 1960s Rachel attended metalwork and blacksmithing courses with Harry Horribin at his forge in Somerset, becoming a member of the British Blacksmiths Association. This development of earlier sculptural skills led to her creating metal work and wood carvings for four local churches.
Her observational drawings of people going about their daily work in the various countries she visited inform her paintings, engravings and sculpture and affirm her connection to traditional agricultural or maritime work and crafts. With her sculpture and screens on display in Somerset churches and chapels, Rachel is well represented in her locale (less so further afield), not forgetting her pub signs in vernacular style.

The exhibition Chance Encounters: The Art of Rachel Reckitt, is open at the Museum of Somerset until 15 March 2025.

A catalogue of her engraving, drawing, paintings and sculptures is available, Rachel Reckitt: Where everything that meets the eye, a retrospective by Hal Bishop.

Images kindly supplied by the Museum of Somerset and copyright permission kindly granted by The Golsoncott Foundation.