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Figure painter and draughtsman, later known as Joan Floyd, who became famous as a teenager in the late 1920s and early 1930s. She was the daughter of the artist George Manning-Sanders and the writer Ruther Manning-Sanders, never went to school and aged only 12 was commissioned by Father Bernard Walke to paint a set of watercolours of New Testament scenes at his church in St Hilary, Cornwall, not far from where Joan lived at Sennen Cove. The following year her oil of David and the Globe was chosen for the Daily Express Young Artists Exhibition and, aged 15, she was filmed and extolled as the youngest artist to have shown at the RA Summer Exhibition, when her picture The Brothers was hung. When Joan was 16 the RA selectors gave her picture The Concertina a favoured place.

Text source: 'Artists in Britain Since 1945' by David Buckman (Art Dictionaries Ltd, part of Sansom & Company)


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