Emmy Bridgwater

[3] Emmy Bridgwater was born in the upmarket Edgbaston district of Birmingham, the third daughter of a chartered accountant and Methodist.

Forming a close friendship with Edith Rimmington and having a brief but intense affair with Toni del Renzio, she contributed to numerous international surrealist publications (including del Renzio's Arson: an ardent review) and held her first solo exhibition at Jack Bilbo's Modern Gallery in 1942.

[5] Her personal iconography often featured organic imagery such as birds, eggs, leaves, fruit and tendril-like automatist lines depicted with a sense of "surrealist black humour and violence", often within a dreamlike landscape.

[9] In 1946, she contributed to Free Unions Libres, a collection of texts by French and English surrealists and edited by Simon Watson Taylor.

"[10] Robert Melville described Bridgwater's paintings as depicting "the saddening, half-seen 'presences' encountered by the artist on her journey through the labyrinths of good and evil ... although they are dreamlike in their ambiguity they are realistic documents from a region of phantasmal hopes and murky desires where few stay to observe and fewer still remain clear-sighted.

"[11] Her obituary in The Independent said "Her paintings show an ability to enter a personal dream world and transform the visions she experienced there into bold, unselfconscious, emotionally charged landscapes which more often than not strike into the very depths of one's mind.