Feom the earliest times I remember, there was the picture of a young girl in a green dress with dark hair and a jolly smile, raking up leaves for a bonfire. The sky was grey and cloudy and it was obviously windy but she was happy outside, no doubt helping dad or mum in the garden. I always thought she was me, and even when I really knew she wasn’t, I still thought she was. I think it was an illustration in a magazine which mum had torn out and put in a frame. Maybe she was reminded of herself as a child, dark haired, energetic and smiley. Maybe she thought the girl looked like me, or how I might be when I was the same age. I don’t know and I’ll never know.
I love that picture, and still have it on my wall in its simple pale wooden frame. At the moment it’s not on the wall as for various reasons we’re putting things away, but it’s safely somewhere, ready to be up again. Because it’s safely stowed somewhere I’ve not been thinking of it, until I found a small label on the floor, with this typed on it: “Muriel Dawson, A.R.C.A. ‘Stoking the Bonfire“. It must have fallen off the back of the picture at some point, but goodness knows how it has suddenly appeared! Maybe the boggart found it a while ago and put it away wherever he stores stuff, and then thought he ought to return it. (A boggart is a friendly little fellow, part goblin part something else, but essentially a house sprite who “tidies” things away, so they mysteriously disappear and then reappear in an unusual and unexpected place.)
I didn’t realise my picture had a title – but now I know. To find out more, for example when Muriel painted it, I Googled her. There was plenty of information, but not a single reference to the illustration I have – maybe it’s a rare piece of her work, maybe it was just in the magazine. The label says the picture is copyrighted to The Medici Society, but Googling brings no results for it. I guess I will have to wait until we unpack our things, and I find the picture and am able to see if there are any more clues!
Meanwhile, here’s something I wrote about it many years ago:
2014: 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.
I’ve struggled to find a featured image, so no garden bonfire, but a fireworks night bonfire as that will be in a couple of days time.
Lois Elsden 