MARY EDWARDS MCEVOY | PORTRAIT OF A GIRL WITH RED HAIR

Knoedler, London, acquired directly from the artist by September 1928 (no. A338)

Knoedler, New York, by 1942

Gifted from the above

Mary Edwards McEvoy was born in Somerset in 1870, the daughter of an army officer. She entered the Slade School in London in the 1890s, where her classmates included William Orpen, Augustus John, and Ambrose McEvoy, whom she would marry in 1902.

Mary’s talent was prodigious, and as her contemporary at Slade Dora Meeson Coates remarked, her “nude studies at school were superb, and her small interiors, in their luminosity and golden harmonies and fine painting of details, were worthy of the best Dutch period” (Anne Gray, ed., The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and TheArt Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2004, p. 194). Mary embraced interiors and portraiture, such as the present work, in which she conveyed her subject’s personality and vigor through active brushstrokes.

Ambrose McEvoy died of pneumonia in 1927, the year before Mary sold the present work to Knoedler. After her husband’s death, Mary reclaimed her art career, exhibiting at the Royal Academy, as her husband had and alongside her Slade classmates, between 1928 and 1938, and at the Paris Salon. She spent the last fourteen years of her life living between London and Somerset, painting until her death.