Lucy Elizabeth Kemp-Welch

Why this artist matters now

Lucy Elizabeth Kemp-Welch was a British artist and teacher who specialized in painting horses. Though increasingly overlooked after the Second World War, she was, from the late 1890s to the mid-1920s one Britains's best-known female artists. Her obituary in The Times noted, "Like most artists who came to maturity and were established before the end of the nineteenth century, Lucy Kemp-Welch suffered somewhat in her later reputation from the violent changes in art which followed. In her prime as an animal painter she held a position in this country comparable to that of Rosa Bonheur in France, and the only British woman artist of her generation who was more talked about was Lady Elizabeth Butler, painter of The Roll Call." Her reputation has since revived, and she is best known today for her large paintings of wild and working horses in the New Forest, and those in military service which she produced during the First World War, as well as for her illustrations to the 1915 edition of Anna Sewell's novel Black Beauty.

Source: Aic · Trust score: 95% · Updated 9d ago