Still Life with Mushrooms, 1935

Margaret Kemplay Snowdon was born in Leeds, Yorkshire in 1878. Her parents were Richard Kempley Snowdon, Head Curate of St Johns, Leeds, and Mary Louisa Milnes-Wright. She was called Margery by the family and this name stuck for the rest of her professional and social life. She became a close friend of Vanessa Bell when they studied together at the RS Schools and extensive correspondence between them is kept in the National Archives. Virginia Woolf referred to her as ‘old Snow’.

Snowdon was an active exhibitor for twenty years after the Great War, when with enfranchisement and emancipation flowing from the Armistice, woman artists found a new-found confidence to pursue their artistic careers. Margery and her two sisters never married. Neglect continued to be the common experience for many woman artists and after the Second World War Snowdon’s association with the Bloomsbury Group seemed ‘old hat’. She lived in relative obscurity, dying in Cheltenham in 1965, recorded by the London Gazette as ‘spinster’. Why? Her painted still lifes are both beautiful and beautifully crafted, her subjects more than dry, studio props: baskets of fruit, cut flowers, a Staffordshire figure painted with lively strokes and perfect tonal understanding.

Still Life with Mushrooms is a very fine example, making a compelling comparison with William Nicolson (1872-1949) whose Mushrooms were acquired by the Tate in 1940. Snowdon is ripe for rediscovery, her trajectory making her an ideal pick for any survey of British easel painting trying to redress the misogyny which has characterised the art world for much of the last century.