Mary Newcomb; painter
Hyfler/Rosner
Last Updated: 1:22am BST 26/04/2008
Daily Telegraph
Mary Newcomb, who died on March 29 aged 86, was a
lyrical painter in the English naïve tradition, but her airy
pictures of the rural scene were grounded in a firm
knowledge of natural science and intense observation.
When Christopher Andreae published a monograph on her
work in 1996, Mary Newcomb received congratulations from Sir
David Attenborough - who also mentioned that two featured
paintings of "tern feeding its young" in Southwold harbour
in fact depicted a courtship ritual.
Mary Newcomb, thrilled with the note until she got to
the rider, declared: "How would he know? He wasn't there!"
She was born Mary Slatford at Harrow-on-the-Hill on
January 25 1922. Her father worked in the Savile Row cloth
trade. But she developed a passion for the English
countryside while growing up in Wiltshire, close to the
textile mills of Trowbridge. After taking a Science degree
at Reading University she taught at Bath High School.
Her path was really set from 1945, when she became a
student helper at the Flatford Mill Field Studies Centre
established on the Suffolk-Essex border by the bird painter
Eric Ennion.
Lodging at Willy Lott's Cottage, which features in
Constable's Hay Wain, Mary Slatford learned the crucial
discipline of careful note-taking and sketching.
With Ennion and Peter Scott she helped to create
scrapes for avocets at Minsmere. On an expedition to
Walberswick to encourage reed-beds that would be suitable
for bitterns she met Godfrey Newcomb, who was gaining
experience of farming after being brought up in India.
After their marriage they lived on small farms in the
Waveney Valley, in Suffolk, running a pottery until, in the
mid-1950s, Mary Newcomb found her vocation in painting.
At first she exhibited locally in East Anglia -
especially with the Norwich Twenty Group - but she
eventually plucked up the courage to show her work to the
London dealer Andras Kalman, the Hungarian refugee who had
championed LS Lowry.
On her first visit to the Crane Kalman gallery in
Knightsbrige she fled, unnerved at finding the premises
crammed with people; but her second attempt was the start of
a fruitful relationship between artist and dealer.
There were a dozen solo exhibitions at Crane Kalman
from 1970, and more displays across Europe and in America.
Admired by artists as diverse as Ben and Winifred
Nicholson, William Scott and Mary Fedden, Mary Newcomb's
pictures came to grace company boardrooms and galleries such
as the Tate.
Her art celebrated the rhythms of nature and the
rituals of rural life; wildlife and farm animals, village
fetes and agricultural shows, incidents glimpsed as she
travelled by bus, train or bicycle. She was an inveterate
walker until falling in a remote Norfolk lane during a
snowstorm some 20 years ago, when she was fortunate to be
rescued.
Towards the end of her life Mary Newcomb's paintings
became sparer, lighter, larger and ever more abstract; but
they always referred back to specific incidents, noted,
savoured and remembered.
Mary Newcomb was also a gifted writer. The jottings in
her diaries include observations such as: "Today a man
cycled madly down a hill between yellow rape fields, head
down, trousers flapping. There was a grey church on a hill,
a farm house tucked into a corner of trees - a typical East
Anglian scene perpetuated from spring to spring. Time still
passes but it passes more slowly here."
Her successive studios contained jumbled notes and
drawings and souvenirs from rural journeys as far afield as
Holland, France, Orkney and Wales.
Mary Newcomb found a kindred spirit in the East
Anglian author Ronald Blythe, and his words and her drawings
combined memorably in a book of essays, Borderland, lately
reissued as a Canterbury Press paperback. The cover
painting, showing bullfinches whirring around a thistle, was
later destroyed in a fire at Andras Kalman's flat.
Godfrey Newcomb died in 2003 and Mary Newcomb suffered
a debilitating stroke six months later.
Although she was partially paralysed, and unable to
eat or speak, she would draw in the air with her one good
hand, or trace the outlines of her paintings illustrated in
books.
She spent her last years in a Suffolk nursing home
near Saxmundham.
Mary Newcomb is survived by her two daughters, Hannah
and Tessa (the latter is a successful artist in her own
right).