λ Emmy Bridgwater (British 1906-1999) Surrealist Figure and Cat Pen and Ink Signed (lower centre left) 18 x 24.5cm (7 x 9½ in.) Executed circa 1941. Provenance: Blond Gallery, London (June 1989) Emmy Bridgwater was the last surviving female member of the original generation of British Surrealist painters. She occupied a distinctive place in the history of Surrealism in Britain as an "Automatist", using a technique deployed by Surrealists for liberating the imagination and for stimulating the subconscious. She produced a small but highly original output of paintings, drawings, collages and poetry. Bridgwater was introduced to the London Group in early 1940 by the painter Conroy Maddox and the critic Robert Melville, members of the group who were also living in Birmingham. From that moment on she was committed to the "liberation of the imagination", as theorised by André Breton in his Manifesto of Surrealism, published in Paris in 1924. In 1942 she held a one-woman exhibition at Jack Bilbo's Modern Art Gallery in London. From 1986, the 60th anniversary year of the International Surrealist Exhibition, hardly a year elapsed without her participating in retrospective or group Surrealist exhibitions: The Mayor Gallery, London (1986), Canterbury (1986), Leeds City Art Gallery (1986), Retretti, Finland, Milan and Frankfurt (1989). Among many others was a touring exhibition during 1992 called "10 Decades: careers of 10 women artists born 1897-1906" and "Real Surreal", in Wolverhampton (1995).