In Her Nature

With access to her diaries, biographer WILLIAM PACKER offers fresh insight into the charming rural paintings of the late, great MARY NEWCOMB

Whether as plain drawing or as watercolour, Mary’s works on paper are almost solely concerned with useful subject matter, with the quality of the marks made, effective and captivating as they are, graphic or painterly alike, all but incidental to the business of record in hand.

This great miscellany of information, with its recurrent themes and categories – bridges, locks, church steeples in the distance, birds, insects, animals, gates, people in boats, stiff ladies, men with bikes and bunches of flowers – falls into several distinct kinds, from the fugitive and fragmentary to the detailed and precise. At their most extreme, some are reduced in notation almost to the degree of an ideogram or hieroglyphic, the image registered in a pictorial shorthand all Mary’s own. Her bikes seen scattered on the bank beside the road are hardly exact in the description, but bikes they undoubtedly are. A light aircraft comes in low over a church tower, its image caught with wonderful clarity in no more than three more-or-less vertical and two horizontal lines, a dark blob and a few squiggles. Bouncing down the lane comes a motorbike and sidecar, again reduced in wonderfully effective expression to a single bent horizontal augmented by a few dark vertical blobs. A couple of horses stand alongside a row of low trees.

Though described by little more than an extended scribble, they are as clear as could be. The lone pig on the hillside, the fox crossing the field, the cow peering over the field-bank, they were all glimpsed in a passing moment. None stood still: none offered more than a second or two to stamp themselves onto Mary’s retentive visual memory. And what is left, as a record on the page is, in its guileless directness and sophistication, all the more useful, potent and effective for that.