Lucy Kemp-Welch, Painter of Horses
Morning Lecture
18 September 2024
Ladies' Army Remount, Rossley Park, Wiltshire, 1918 by Lucy Kemp-Welch
When Lucy Kemp-Welch’s painting Colt Hunting in the New Forest (now in the Tate Gallery) was first exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 1897 it caused a sensation. The Times predicted that the artist would ‘very rapidly become our most successful and popular painter of horses,’ and perhaps the first female Royal Academician in over a century.
Born in Bournemouth in 1869, Kemp-Welch studied at the Herkomer School of Art in Bushey, Hertfordshire, and added to her fame with her defining illustrations to the 1915 edition of Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel, Black Beauty. She also made a number of important paintings of the First World War, of which the image shown is one. This lecture explores her life and work. A new biography of her (written by our lecturer, David Boyd Haycock) was published in March 2023, and two exhibitions of her work curated by him were held in Hampshire and East Anglia in the same year.
Our Speaker Dr. David Boyd Haycock is an established freelance art historian and curator. He is best known for his 2009 book, A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War, and the subsequent exhibition he curated at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Educated at the University of Oxford, and a former curator at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, he is a specialist in British art and culture in the period 1860 to 1940. His latest books include a new biography of the young Augustus John, and a new biography of the equestrian painter Lucy Kemp-Welch. An Arts Society lecturer since 2011, he is based in Oxford.
David Boyd Haycock