MARGARET GREEN (BRITISH 1925-2003)
FESTIVAL GARDENS
signed M Green lower left
oil on board
35 x 25.5cm; 13 3/4 x 10in
unframed

MARGARET GREEN (LOTS 56-67)

Introduction
Margaret Green’s elegant paintings offer delightful, often contemplative, observations of quotidian post-War Britain.

The daughter of a Teeside steelworker worker in West Hartlepool, Green was inspired to paint by the young Patrick Heron, who drew her portrait during a family holiday in Yorkshire. She first studied at Hartlepool College of Art before joining the Royal College of Art, where she met Lionel Bulmer, her future husband (see lots 40-55). At the RCA, she was taught by Ruskin Spear and Carel Weight, and was also influenced by the New English Club, established by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent and Philip Wilson Steer, who had championed Impressionism in British Art. Green developed a colourful, loose and distinctive style of painting which captured the mood and landscape of Post-War Britain with a poignant delicacy. A cafe scene rendered with gently fluttering tonal strokes and bold expanses of colour bears a characteristic heaviness, each figure bearing a distinct individual weight (lot 58).

Green was granted a travel scholarship from the RCA where she and Bulmer spent over a year painting in France and Ireland, returning to London where they undertook part-time teaching roles at both the Kingston and Walthamstow Schools of Art whilst also exhibiting at the New English Arts Club and Royal Academy. The French sun and deep greens of the Irish landscape left a permanent mark on both artists, whose works of the familiar and everyday are dappled with soft warm light, vibrant freshness, joy and memory (lots 59, 62, 63).

The couple eventually tired of the city and sought to set up home in the countryside, in particular closer to the sea. Since childhood, Green had captured the fishing and sea coal mining industries in and around Hartlepool, which would remain a recurring theme in her work (lot 65). She and Bulmer renovated an ancient, thatched cottage in Shelland near Stowmarket, Suffolk, where they enjoyed a bucolic existence painting, growing their own food and making their own wine.

Grief stricken by Bulmer’s death in 1992, Green stopped painting for the rest of her life. Painting and partnership had become intertwined to both artists, and when asked how she was coping following her husband’s death, Green answered that 'love was an absolute and so was its loss.' Her energetic early portrait of Bulmer, capturing him in an introspective moment (lot 60) serves as an intimate tribute to their relationship, and a testament to Green’s tactful and lasting ability to render the life she loved.