An extraordinary woman: The Art of Lucy Kemp-Welch, at Russell-Cotes Art Gallery, reviewed

In March 1913 two horse painters met at the Lyceum Club to discuss the establishment of a Society of Animal Painters to raise the profile of their genre. Of the two, it was Alfred Munnings whose profile needed raising. Lucy Kemp-Welch had been a celebrity since her twenties when her 5x10ft canvas ‘Colt Hunting in the New Forest’ caused a sensation at the 1897 RA Summer Exhibition and was purchased by the Chantrey Bequest for the new National Gallery of British Art on Millbank.

The daughter of a Bournemouth solicitor, Kemp-Welch had been riding and sketching horses since the age of five and had developed a photographic memory for catching them in action. Her first Academy submission, ‘Gypsy Horse Drovers’ (1894), painted while still a student at Hubert von Herkomer’s Art School in Bushey, was inspired by the sight of gypsies driving horses through the village to Barnet Fair; rushing out after them, she had dashed off an oil sketch on the wooden slide of her paintbox. As fresh as the day it was painted, the sketch hangs in the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery’s current retrospective curated by David Boyd Haycock, author of a new biography of this extraordinary woman who threw herself into every activity she depicted, whether rounding up colts or hauling timber.

To Kemp-Welch, every horse was an individual: ‘Mixed Company at a Race Meeting’ (1905) is a tour de force of equine group portraiture, the foreground horses’ heads so close to the picture plane you could pat them and feed them sugar lumps. A race meeting was an unusual subject for a painter who preferred working horses, finding racehorses ‘too perfect, polished and shiny… Perfection in the subject painted does not lead to interest in the picture,’ she thought.