Flower and landscape painter, self-taught, married to the artist Harold Harvey. She would have absorbed much while working as a model for her husband, Laura and Harold Knight, Ruth Simpson and other Cornwall-based artists. Gertrude’s maternal grandfather William Curnow ran a market garden and was a notable botanist. A keen gardener, she settled in a cottage in Newlyn, Penzance, Cornwall, and showed at RA, SWA, Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, Fine Art Society and Goupil Gallery. There were joint exhibitions at Leicester Galleries in 1918 and 1920. George Bernard Shaw was an enthusiast for Gertrude’s work, as she recorded in her entry in the 1934 edition of Who’s Who in Art, in which she falsified her year of birth to 1889. Gert Harvey was a witty, forthright character who died in a nursing home in St Just.

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


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