A Vivid Canvas

A Vivid Canvas, Margaret Collyer, Artist and Pioneer 1872 - 1945

Margaret Collyer's beautifully written autobiography describes her life as an artist and pioneer farmer in Kenya during the first half of the twentieth century.

Margaret Collyer graduated from the London Royal Academy of Art in 1898. Having augmented her Scholarship by painting a number of commissions, she quickly gained a reputation as one of the foremost animal painters, particularly of horses and dogs. Her London studio housed a variety of animals dear to her heart which caused many humorous and worrying moments, from the first fox chase through the streets of London, to the detection of a gang of dog kidnappers.

In 1915 Margaret visited her sister Olive, a coffee farmer in East Africa, a visit which changed the course of her life. Captivated by the country, she bought land near the Aberdare Mountains and never returned to England. An accomplished horsewoman and extremely enterprising, Margaret found both qualities stood her in good stead as undaunted she set to, and built her own house to make a life for herself in this isolated land. With her beloved dogs and a few loyal Kikuyu natives she established a stock breeding farm meeting life-threatening incidents of fire and floods in an area where there were few white people to call on for support. Her description of wrestling a giant python to save her dog from its coils is particularly revealing of her steely 'no nonsense' character.

Margaret Collyer died in Mombasa in 1945 leaving a remarkable collection of paintings and drawings now scattered world wide. This is the first time that almost her entire body of work has been collected in a book.

REVIEWS RECEIVED SO FAR:

The Scottish Field

Anecdotes and incidents abound in these entertaining extracts from the colourful life of the artist and pioneer. Collyer mixes an inflinchingly Victorian attitude with a charming eccentricity and appears equally at home wrestling with pythons, domesticating toads and even rescuing a pet fox from the clutches of a rabid London mob.

Country Life

A Vivid Canvas is the beautifully illustrated memoir of a remarkable woman. Born into a respectable Victorian family in 1872, Margaret Collyer escaped one evening on a horse, in her late teens, with £15 and no luggage. She established herself in London, and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy School of Art and earned her living as an animal portrait painter. Natural talent combined with determination, ingenuity and a lack of fear carried her though escapades such as a confrontation of the president of the RA, resulting in a revision of the unfair conditions for female Academicians. Her descriptions of surviving amid a menagerie of wilful animals and of the execution of some of her commissions are hilarious.

Told with diffident simplicity, Collyer's story was first published in 1935. This edition has been compiled by her great-nieces Susan Duke and Veronica Bellers. Richenda Miers

Sporting Art Notes and Queries (blogspot)

Margaret Collyer is of a different mould to that which we consider a sporting artist usually comes. She does not fit in with her contemporaries: Cecil Aldin, Munnings, Lionel Edwards and F.A. Stewart, or for that matter with Lucy Kemp-Welch. However, this new book provides not only an insight into the subject's art and the popularity of her work as a painter of dogs, horses and people in her day, but also a fascinating portrayal of a student and artist's life in the early part of the Twentieth Century. posted by Charles Lane, Wednesday Wednesday 28th January 2009