Barbara Mary Willett (British, 1913-1993) Strange Encounter, 1960 Tempera on board 9-3/4 x 13-3/4 inches (24.8 x 34.9...
Auction amount: $625.00
Sold: Apr 14, 2022
Barbara Mary Willett (British)
Paintings
Biography:
Barbara Beddoes was born on August 3, 1913 near Kington, Herefordshire to farming parents, John and Fanny Beddoes, who owned and farmed The Heath farm in the village of Lyonshall. She lived in an historical farmhouse on the one hundred acre mixed farm to the sounds of haymaking in summer, and sheep, cows, pigs, and chickens, and the excitable barking of the family sheepdog, Flossie. There were two huge, beautiful carthorses, one called Smiler. At harvest time, a neighbor would bring over a threshing machine. Amid clouds of dust, sheaves of wheat would be pushed in one end, the grain would be shredded out, and the bare corn stalks would come out the other end. Known as Molly, a name that stayed with her life long, she was the youngest of three siblings, and was asthmatic from the age of thirteen. She attended Lyonshall parish church up the lane, and Lady Hawkins grammar school in Kington, and remembered her father traveling to Kington market by horse and buggy. Thus, she grew up a country girl, deep in the beauty of the English rural landscape, and not far from the mountains across the Welsh border. A diligent student at Lady Hawkins grammar school, Molly won annual awards for history, geography, and art, and then became the first in her family to study beyond high school, attending the Hereford School of Art in the early 1930s. Art and teaching became her passion, and for several years she taught art at the Stockport High School for Girls. Around 1940, she met a civil engineer, Bernard Willett, who was working on the new network of electricity pylons in western England. During the war years, he served in the Air Ministry and was posted to Ceylon, Iraq, and Aden, and after 8 years of separation they married on December 29, 1948. In June 1950, they had their only son, Anthony, and a few months later took up a three-year posting to the RAF Abu Sueir airbase, on the Suez Canal near Ismailia, Egypt. During this time, to relieve her asthma, Molly took several trips with Anthony to Cyprus, where the fragrant, herbal aromas of cypress and olive trees must have soothed her breathing and released her to take in and photograph some of the rustic village scenes that she painted. When Bernard was reassigned to the Air Ministry in London, they settled in Reigate, Surrey, purchasing a three-quarter acre orchard of an old estate situated right under Colley Hill, on the chalky North Downs managed by the National Trust with spectacular views of the Surrey countryside. There, on Underhill Park Road, working together as artist and engineer craftsman, they designed and built their dream home and garden, The Walled Garden. This pleasing and well-ordered home and garden became Molly's art studio and the subject of many of her paintings and other works of art during the main period of her career until 1978, the year Bernard died. She developed an abundant garden, with beds of annual flowers, herbs, and flowering shrubs, whose blooms she regularly wove into stunning weekly arrangements for her local church, St Mark's. She also won local awards for garden designs. In the front garden of The Walled Garden, Bernard engineered a cascade of ponds through her rock garden of azaleas, populated by water lilies and goldfish that again became subjects of paintings. During her life as a housewife and mother based in Surrey between 1954 and 1978, she specialized especially in English and European landscapes, and still life subjects such as strangely-shaped plants and driftwood. Many of her scenes and subjects were selected during family summer holidays traveling in the Mediterranean and around historical and religious sites in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Ireland, and elsewhere. Some were sketched and painted on site. Others she developed later at home from color slides, the photos devotedly taken by Bernard who would be ordered to Stop The Car whenever she saw a potential picture along the road. With her eye for detail in the natural world, many of these landscapes and their skies are exquisitely realistic and inviting. Others later on tended to be more abstract or impressionistic, including two sketches from a Botswana escarpment painted while visiting Anthony where he lived and worked in the 1970s. A collection of over 100 of her original paintings is still with her son, Anthony, painted between 1940 and 1978. Paintings from the 1940s, before she married, include traditional still life subjects, such as vases of flowers, some then contemporary inn and party scenes, two masterpieces, 4ft by 6ft tapestry style murals on canvas, and one of trench warfare. Some pictures are still in their original frames crafted by Bernard, a capable carpenter who also meticulously cut the sinuous shapes of Molly's plywood hardboard collages. Most are professionally framed by artisans from Patan, in the Kathmandu valley. While her primary artistic gift might have reflected her inner connection with the English landscape and her early education, Molly was a lifelong learner, and open to new ideas, genres, and media. She frequented the National Gallery in London, and art galleries and museums wherever she traveled or lived elsewhere in Europe. She subscribed to art magazines, and regularly attended art workshops locally in Surrey. These influences can be seen in some of her later more surreal and allegorical paintings. Her paintings are mainly in oil, watercolor, and tempera. She was equally adept in other art media such as collage, wood carving, ceramic, clay, silver, and embroidery. Molly was deeply religious, a devout Anglican, but open to inter-faith including an interest in Catholicism, the evolutionary ideas of Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and ultimately Hindu and Buddhist spirituality. Late in life, with her sister, she made one pilgrimage to Jordan and Israel. Several of her large paintings are inspired by her religious faith and beliefs. She was emotional, and deeply affected and moved by changes, injustices, conflicts, and environmental calamities around the world. She would respond by contributing to missionary and voluntary assistance efforts. She died at 80 during a last brief visit to her son's family home in Ames, Iowa in 1993. Her final painting, dated 1978, was a natural arrangement of a white Christmas rose against a deep green background. Her dying request was to sip rose water with a fragment of white baguette bread, surely representing the communion. Her ashes are buried alongside Bernard's at Lyonshall church, Herefordshire.
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