Lucy Kemp-Welch

Lucy Elizabeth Kemp-Welch (20 June 1869 – 27 November 1958) was a British artist and teacher who specialised in painting horses. Though increasingly overlooked after the Second World War, from the late 1890s to the mid-1920s she was one of the country's best-known female artists. As 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. Biography Early life Lucy Kemp-Welch was born in Bournemouth, the first child of solicitor Edwin Buckland Kemp-Welch, a solicitor and amateur naturalist. She showed an early excellence in art and exhibited for the first time when she was 14 years old. After attending a local art school, in 1892 she and her younger sister Edith moved to Bushey, Hertfordshire to study at Hubert von Herkomer’s art school. As one of Herkomer's best and most favoured students, she was able to set up her own studio, in an old former inn known as 'Kingsley'. In 1905 Kemp-Welch took over the Herkomer School, and ran it until 1926, first as the Bushey School of Painting and then, after relocating it to premises in the garden of her own home, as the Kemp-Welch School of Animal Painting. After 1928 the school was run by Kemp-Welch's former assistant Lucy Marguerite Frobisher as the Frobisher School of Art. While still a student Kemp-Welch had a painting Gypsy Drovers taking Horses to a Fair shown at the Royal Academy in 1895. Kemp-Welch received further public recognition in 1897 when her painting Colt-Hunting in the New Forest was also shown at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. The painting was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest for 500 guineas, and is now in the British national collection at the Tate. In total, throughout her career Kemp-Welch had 61 paintings displayed at the Royal Academy.