artists comes from a family whose ties with Bermuda reach back through three generations.

Miss Janet Fish, whose realist paintings now hang in some of the world's leading art galleries, is a granddaughter of Clark Vorhees, the celebrated American impressionist who at one time lived at Tranquillity in Somerset. Her mother, Mrs. Florence Fish was a well-known sculptor who lived here until 1977.

Nowadays, Miss Fish divides her time between New York City and the hills and mountains of Vermont. Born in Boston, she spent her early childhood in Old Lyme, Connecticut, an art colony still closely associated with her famous grandfather. When she was ten years old, her family moved to Bermuda where she attended and graduated from the Bermuda High School for Girls.

Speaking from her Vermont home last week, Miss Fish said she was pleased to hear that her grandfather's work is represented in Bermuda's new National Gallery (the Masterworks Foundation recently purchased his Noon-day Sun, which was painted at Tranquillity, in memory of local artist Gillian Ingham).

Although she has not been back to Bermuda since her family returned to the US, Miss Fish said that she would like to return "one day''. Finding the time may well be a problem for this prolific artist, who will be holding an exhibition this summer in Sun Valley, Idaho, teaching a workshop in Santa Fe in October and holding one-woman shows in Aspen, Colorado and at the Robert Miller Gallery in New York this winter.

An early interest in abstract expressionism gave way, under the influence of Alex Katz, to the emergence of the vibrant realism of her still life and landscape paintings.

Modestly maintaining that her present celebrity status was "slow in coming'', she said that her breakthrough came when she received some very good reviews from her exhibition at the Kornblee Gallery in New York. "That started me off,'' she said.

Her climb to fame may have been slow, but it has certainly reached the peaks of artistic aspiration, for two paintings, one of which is a large still life featuring a goldfish bowl and raspberries and the other, a pastel picture of fruit, hang in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and her painting of water glasses is on display at the Whitney Museum.

Miss Fish, who became an intrinsic part of the resurgence of interest in realism in the US during the 1970s, is especially well known for her "table-top'' and common objects which through their reflection and refraction of light, are elevated to reveal unusual beauty.

She is also represented in the Powers Collection in Sydney, Australia, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Cleveland Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. There are countless articles about her in magazines and just this March, her spectacular oil painting of Daffodils and Spring Trees adorned the cover of Reader's Digest.

Laughing about one magazine article which reported that she painted still life because human models were unable to sit still long enough for her to make the necessary careful observations, Miss Fish exclaimed, "I do paint human figures, but I like painting still life because I love to paint the energy and activity of light. Still life is very abstract -- you can control everything in it.'' She said that she also likes to paint the landscapes, birds and flowers that surround her in the rolling hills of Vermont. Her most recent works, which may be said to represent the full flowering of her art, are a glorious mix of richly painted scenes that incorporate still life objects and distant human figures set against the lush countryside of her New England home.

BLACK VASE WITH DAFFODILS, 1980, Janet Fish.

PEARS WITH AUTUMN LEAVES, 1988, Janet Fish.