artists – Artistic Horizons

Betty ‘Duffy’ Ayers, artist, born 19 September 1915; died 10 November 2017.

Duffy was born Betty FitzGerald, with an identical twin, Peggy, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire. Their father, William FitzGerald, the feckless brother of the Irish nationalist politician and poet Desmond FitzGerald, abandoned the family when the twins were very young. Their American mother, Laura (nee Farlow), felt she had no alternative but to leave her daughters in a convent school on the Kent coast while she went to teach English in Turkey.

While the other pupils went home for their holidays, the FitzGerald girls stayed with the nuns, who treated them, they recalled, with great cruelty and starved them of affection. The girls did not recognise their mother on her return after seven years’ absence. Emotionally, Duffy was deeply scarred by this long childhood experience but it consolidated in her a remarkable stoicism and strength of character, and she was herself the gentlest of women.

Peggy and Duffy.

In the early 30s Duffy attended the Central School of Art in London where she met Michael Rothenstein, later to become one of the leading printmaker-artists of his generation. They married in 1936, she 21, and moved to Great Bardfield in 1941. They lived initially in Chapel House (in the grounds of John Aldridge’s Place House) before moving to Ethel House in the High Street.. The north Essex village was home to a distinguished community of artists from the 1930s to the 60s, including Eric Ravilious, Edward Bawden, Tirzah Garwood and John Aldridge.

Duffy’s emergence from the extreme unhappiness of her schooldays no doubt deepened her empathy, during their first years together, with Michael’s slow recovery from the melancholia of myxoedema (arising from a thyroid condition) that had afflicted him throughout his 20s.

Kenneth Rowntree’s painting of Ethel House.

Duffy did little of her own work during these years, but she collaborated with Michael on large-scale paintings and later assisted his printmaking. During the second world war she made few paintings of her own but worked at times with the designer Peggy Angus on wallpaper designs.

Duffy was a gifted portrait painter and an early subject was Tirzah Garwood wife of Ravilious lost over Iceland in 1942.

Later she taught art to the local women of the Women’s Institute proving to be a gifted teacher who encouraged original work of remarkable quality. During the war she maintained a lively correspondence with Robert Graves, a pre-war friend who was a regular visitor to Great Bardfield now living back at home in Deya, Majorca following an exile during the Spanish Civil War and WW2.

During the war Duffy was almost killed when a bomb fell near a bus she was on. “I escaped because I was on the top floor,” she said.

Portrait of Kitty Wilson 1945. Fry Art Gallery. Kitty Wilson was a remarkable woman. Born in Deal, she worked for Dr Barnado’s in Essex for several years, caring for young disabled girls. In 1929 she travelled to Kalimpong in India to look after deprived children, returning to Essex after three years due to health problems.

Duffy and Michael’s son Julian, later founder of Redstone Press, was born in 1948, and daughter, Anne, who became an artist, was born in 1949.

By the mid-50s, Great Bardfield had become famous for its popular Open House exhibitions, initiated in 1951, when several of its artists were employed on murals and design work for the Festival of Britain. For several years, for a summer fortnight, thousands of art lovers descended on the village to traipse through the artists’ houses, delighted by a figurative English modernism that was accessible and stylish, often depicting the life of the village and the landscape around it. During the 40s and early 50s Duffy was a lively presence at the heart of this social and artistic activity. Michael had by this time set up printmaking facilities at Ethel House on the High Street (later enlarged with a studio extension by Frederick Gibberd).

Left: This painting has a strange history. Duffy painted herself, or her twin sister, in the 1950s (she was then Duffy Rothenstein). But she threw the painting away (perhaps she was dissatisfied with it) and it was literally rescued from the wastepaper basket by the babysitter, Mrs Perkins. Her son Don Perkins gave it to the Great Bardfield Historical Society in 2011. Right: Self Portrait by Peggy Fitzgerald, Tullie House Gallery, Carlisle.

In 1955 Duffy and Michael separated, and they divorced in 1956. Duffy married the graphic artist, Eric Ayers (1921-2001). “He was always waiting in the wings,” she said. Duffy left Great Bardfield, and stopped painting for many years. Following her second marriage, to Eric Ayers, she moved to a Georgian house in Bloomsbury, central London, where she lived for the rest of her life. She showed regularly at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions, and in commercial galleries.

Still Life Reclining Nude The Hill Farm Girls

Duffy’s work included a few still life paintings but mainly women, full face in ageless garments. She avoided landscapes, “leaves are horrid repetitious shapes !”

Top left: Scarves, date unknown, Fry Art Gallery. Middle: woman with Scarf. Top right: Unknown. Bottom left: Olive in her garden, presume friend Olive Cook. women in White, 1996. Right: Family Group.

Top left: Girls with Dog. Middle: Girl with Fishes. Tope right: The Apple Eaters. Bottom left: Girls in Blue (portrait of Anne), Fry Art Gallery. Bottom right: Ink Drawing of Daughter Anne.

After Eric died in 2001, Duffy carried on painting until a fall left her frail. In 2006 an Australian couple, Sven Klinge and Belinda Murphy, moved in as temporary carers; they stayed for 11 years. They kept Duffy alive and alert, steered her through many interviews about her years in Great Bardfield and monitored her increasing dementia. Despite the late onset of blindness, her final decade may well have been one of her happiest. Duffy died in November 2017 at the age of 102

Under the Sun, 1999.

Duffy attributed her long life to simple living. “I used to smoke but I stopped years ago, and for a long time now I have lived an austere life, never eating too much or drinking – though I still like the odd glass of red wine.”

Duffy at home, 4 Regent Square, by Richard Bawden 2009.

Graham Bennison, November 2025, Thanks to Wikipedia but mostly to Mel Gooding, Guardian 11^th Dec. 2017 who penned Duffy’s obituary which forms most of the text here given the lack of other sources.

Ewin La Dell, Self Portrait.

Edwin La Dell was born 7th January 1914 in Rotherham, Yorkshire. La Dell was the son of Thomas La Dell, a Sheffield-born bookbinder, and Ellen (née Boardman) He was christened Thomas (after his father and grandfather) Edwin (following a family tradition on his mother’s side) but appears always to have been known as Edwin.

One of La Dell’s earliest lithographs is ‘The Rush,’ 1937,a typical London street scene from the 1930’s.

After attending Sheffield School of Art in 1935 he won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art where his tutors included John Nash, Percy Horton, Charles Mahoney, Gilbert Spencer, Barnett Freedman and Robert Austin. On finishing, he was, in 1938, included in the 28th annual exhibition at Zwemmers of the Senefelder Club of which Frank Brangwyn was President and Matisse and Sir Muirhead Bone were Honorary members. He sold well; his career began successfully, and it wasn’t long before he began teaching – at Camberwell School of Art.

La Dell had begun to establish himself as a lithographer before the war. In 1939 he joined the Civil Defence Camouflage Establishment in Leamington Spa and worked as a camouflage designer. He became involved with the Artists International Association and also submitted work to the War Artists Advisory Committee.

The Camouflage Workshop Leamington Spa. Testing netting at a Camouflage Station Leamington Spa.

In 1943 he was sent on active service, stopping first in Belgium (billeted with Mme Berger, the sister-in-law of Magritte) and then moving to the German Front.

Calcar, smoke screen over the Rhine 1945. Ruined Landscape, Reichwald Forest 1945. VE Street Party 1945.

From 1946 to 1949, he produced paintings, lithographs and murals for the Central Office of Information. One of the artists La Dell worked with during the war was Charles Mozley whose wife’s sister, Joan Kohn, married La Dell in 1940. In 1948, his work was included in a survey of 150 years of lithography that began with its invention in 1798. Exhibited alongside Piper, Aldridge, Scott and Bawden, it cemented his reputation.

Colour lithograph by Edwin La Dell depicting a steam boat on the River Thames with the Tower of London in the background, 1946.

Through-the-Window wife Joan at their home at Grafty Green in Kent, 1948.

After the War, he continued making art and was employed as a teacher, initially working as a tutor at the RCA in 1948 before becoming Head of the Printmaking. In this role, his impact on post-war printmaking and future generations of printmakers was enormously influential. He was instrumental in raising the appeal of printmaking and was involved in many of the commissions such as the Lyons Lithographs and the School Prints together with his own series of Oxford, Cambridge, Kent and New York. His vibrantly coloured lithographs drew inspiration from French artists such as Vuillard, Denis and Bonnard.

The Oxford and Cambridge series of lithographs.

La Dell’s best known works are those from the post-war era, in particular the lithographs he created for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. For the Coronation a group of artists were invited to create lithographs for the Royal College of Art. Following the success of the Schools Prints series and Contemporary Lithographs, these prints were sold in limited editions and helped boost the RCA’s skills at reviving lithographic techniques. They were exhibited at the Redfern Gallery from April – May, 1953.

Bandsmen in the City. Rehearsal for the Coronation. Royal Homecoming. The Crowd In the Mall, Coronation 1953. Horse Guards Parade.

Another contribution was ‘Newmarket,’ one of six lithographs by various artists commissioned for Guinness in 1956. Originally the title was ‘Newmarket Races’ but it was shortened to just ‘Newmarket.’ La Dell chose a subject relevant to the pub audience. In the Guinness Book of Records Newmarket is listed as the world’s largest racecourse.

He wrote and illustrated Your Book of Landscape Drawing and illustrated Wilkie Collins’ novel The Moonstone.

He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts on 24th April 1969. His work was exhibited throughout the world under the auspices of the British Council.

La Dell continued as head of the Department of Lithography at the RCA until his death on 27th June 1970, aged 56.

Edwin La Dell by Robert Darwin RCA 1910 – 1974. Self Portrait

La Dell’s work is currently held in many collections, including those of the Royal Academy, Government Art Collection, the Tate and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

There is no definitive text re Edwin la Dell therefore this blog is cobbled together from many small sources, Wikipedia did give me a start though. HOWEVER 4th Nov. 2025. Today I received ‘Edwin La Dell,’ Lithographs and Etchings, edited by Tom and Maria La Dell, cheap at £10.to buy at Emma Mason Gallery, https://www.emmamason.co.uk/p/edwin-la-dell—lithographs-and-etchings

Graham Bennison, June 2025. https://www.facebook.com/BennisonArtist

Tag: artists

Duffy Ayers

Edwin La Dell