This picture hung on the wall at home for as long as I can remember; I knew it wasn’t really a picture of me, but I always thought my mum had got it because the little girl looked like me. I actually think maybe it reminded her of her own childhood. I had also thought she had found the picture in a magazine and framed it herself, but in actual fact she must have bought it because there is a label on the back which gives the title and tells me that it was painted by Muriel Dawson A.R.C.A.
Muriel Helen Dawson was born in Christchurch New Zealand in 1897 but she left in 1913 to travel round the world to England. Her parents were Scottish, but Muriel enrolled in an English art school, first in Richmond, then Leigh-on-Sea, and then Southend. She finally went to the Royal College of Art in Kensington until 1922, when she was twenty-five. By that time she had begun to illustrate children’s books and a magazine called the Woman’s Pictorial.
I don’t know any of her other pictures, but apparently she was fascinated by plants and animals, and natural history in general. She eventually moved to the Shetland Isles, at about the age of sixty, somewhere I would love to visit one day. It must have been in great contrast to south-east England where she had studied as a young woman, but maybe there were aspects of it which reminded her of New Zealand. She died in 1974, so it is the fortieth anniversary of her death this year. Apparently little is known of Muriel’s life, apart from the main outlines of where she studied, lived and worked, but she was extraordinarily prolific; the Natural History Museum has more than a thousand pieces of her art.
Lois Elsden 