'Painting horses is, to me, the breath of life'

Lucy Kemp-Welch was overlooked for RA election and refused to get involved with the feminist politics of her day, letting her powerful and empathetic animal paintings do the talking,

- Octavia Pollock

PAINTING en plein air may be a familiar concept, but most artists confine it to sketching, working up canvases in the studio. Lucy Kemp Welch, however, took the practice a stage further with the construction of a giant packing case (see box). Within this, she would store her enormous paintings, some as large as 10ft by 5ft, in situ, returning day after day to capture plunging horses and tired farmhands, shaggy ponies and brave lifeboatmen. For her, photography was anathema, it was ‘too perfect. It can never leave room for personal temperament to show. All is there except the creative effort’. Absorbed in her work, she frequently lost track of time or what meal she was being called for. Stopping to eat could be problematic; once, she returned to her canvas to find cows had licked off the paint.

Lucy and her sister, Edith, began drawing as soon as they could write, their parents encouraging an interest in the natural world. Their father, Edwin, despite the increasing numbers of women enjoying an artistic education (the Slade taught men and women on an equal footing from 1871), thought a career in art unsuitable, but their mother, Elizabeth, was more encouraging and arranged for Lucy to study anatomy at a veterinary infirmary, in an echo of Stubbs’s examination of horse carcasses. Edwin died when Lucy was 19 and the family moved to Somerset, where, in the 1891 census, both daughters called themselves artists. The following year, they moved to Bushey in Hertfordshire, albeit without their mother, who had died of pneumonia before the trio could settle as planned. From then on, the sisters relied on each other.