Mary Newcomb

This self-confessed “country artist” developed a cult following for her post-war paintings of everyday life. KATIE MCCABE revisits the inspirations behind her art

- KATIE MCCABE

Something strange is at play in the paintings of Mary Newcomb. In one of her better-known works, The Lady with a Bunch of Sweet Williams, a landscape painted in 1988, we meet a woman as she passes through a golden clearing in a field, the dark shadow of a church spire visible in the distance. So far, so pastoral. Nothing unusual to see here. That is until our eyes adjust and we realise the woman’s whole body is dwarfed by her enormous bouquet – size-wise, it’s practically on par with that church spire. Only her legs poke out beneath a firework-blast of red and white blooms that she holds before us like a hypnotist’s wheel. In the Victorian era, when the language of flowers (known as “floriography”) was used to communicate certain meanings, Sweet Williams symbolised gallantry, which could explain Newcomb’s courageous choice of size, but really, it’s about capturing a burst of feeling – the kind you might get when marching across a village to a friend’s house to proudly present them with a bunch of hand-picked flowers.

Like so many of Newcomb’s paintings, it stays true to the intentions she laid out in her diary in 1986: “I wanted… to remind ourselves that – in our haste – in this century – we may not give time to pause and look – and may pass on our way unheeding”.