The Rediscovery of Eileen Mayo

You may, like us, have seen her face in paintings before, but quite probably you haven't seen the art she made herself.

In the 1920s and 30s, Eileen Mayo was an in-demand model for artists including Laura Knight, Dod Procter, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, but at the same time she was pursuing a career of her own as a creative artist in a range of media. She left Britain in the 1950s for Australia and then New Zealand; her name is little known in this country, but she became much more celebrated -- and honoured -- in Australasia. 

Now, for the first time in Britain, she has an exhibition devoted to her. Eileen Mayo: A Natural History at Towner Eastbourne shows her as a model, a painter, a graphic artist, a designer of tapestries and stamps, and as a book illustrator. It's free to visit, and we thoroughly enjoyed it.

Back in 2019, the Dulwich Picture Gallery put on an exhibition about the linocuts that emerged from the Grosvenor School of Art in Pimlico run by Claude Flight; a relatively simple art form that seemed to capture the spirit of the period between the wars. Though we don't recall seeing Eileen Mayo represented in that show, she was one of the students at the school, and her linocuts were key in gaining her attention as an artist in her mid-20s. 

This is Turkish Bath, with the curves of the women bathers contrasted with the stripes of the towels and deckchair, the squareness of the tiles and the zig-zag of the carpet that runs up the stairs. There are distinct Art Deco influences here.

The Eastbourne exhibition starts off, though, with a look at Mayo the model. Born in Norwich in 1906, she began studying art but turned to modelling to finance her studies after her father died in 1926 and her mother and sisters moved to New Zealand. This show has paintings by Harold and Laura Knight, who took her to spend consecutive summers with them in Cornwall, and by their friends and fellow Cornwall artists Ernest and Dod Procter. 

Here's Mayo in a portrait by Dod Procter, full of soft contours and gentle light and shadow. It's perhaps the most attractive of the pictures of Mayo on show in Eastbourne.

"All the time I have been posing for painters I have been studying their methods and listening to their talk," Mayo said. "I have learned more than I ever learned in an art school."

 

Eventually, though, she was able to leave modelling behind her as she achieved success with her linocuts and other commercial work. There are linocuts featuring acrobats and dressing tables -- the sort of subjects Laura Knight would paint -- but everyday observation too. We liked this jaunty milk float. 

Mayo travelled to Germany and South Africa in the early 1930s, and in 1936 married a GP, Richard Gainsborough. They lived in London and then in both West and East Sussex. It was a productive period in her artistic career, with landscapes, designs for tapestries and nature books that she both wrote and illustrated. 

There's a notable precision in Mayo's work -- an appreciation of the textures and patterns that nature creates. Fig trees with almost fleshy foliage; African plants with exotic flowers that are reminiscent of paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, but more focused on detail; cornfields that recall last year's John Nash show in Eastbourne. This conté drawing of Fallen Leaves has something of a Nash feel, too. 

Not just plants, animals as well. Squirrels curl across the page, and Mayo's love of cats meant they appear frequently in her work. You can almost feel the fur of this Tabby Cat Asleep in the folds of a blanket. There's actually a picture in the Tate Archive of Mayo at work on this painting in her studio in London. 

You can't really pin down Mayo as being associated with any particular movement in the development of her art; despite that early Art Deco tendency, there's an inherent realism apparent throughout most of the work on show here, even if sometimes slightly stylised. Surprisingly, it took until 1948 for her to have a picture accepted for the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition.

Like many artists around the middle of the 20th century, she had an interest in Surrealism, and you can see elements of that in this post-World War II picture of Newhaven Harbour, where the apparently random seaside objects in the foreground -- nets, baskets, ropes -- have the slight air of rudimentary life forms invading the jetty.

It wasn't long after she made these pictures that Mayo's life changed completely. Her marriage broke down and in the early 1950s she moved to Australia, and then a decade later to New Zealand. There are fewer exhibits from this period than from her time in Britain, but she undertook a lot of commercial work, including posters, murals and postage stamps.

Much of what we see from her later years continued to reflect her interest in nature and her concerns for conservation. Perhaps most striking are a couple of 1980s screenprints, Black Swans, and this one, Humpback and Bottlenose, the proceeds from which she donated to the Save the Whales campaign. And as you can see, she was still experimenting with styles and innovating. 

Mayo died in Christchurch on 4 January 1994, not totally unrecognised: just three days earlier she'd been made a Dame in the New Year's Honours List. 

It's refreshing to explore the work of a previously unknown artist; we found Mayo's output varied and absorbing; it was a bit of a shock to realise as we left that we'd spent longer getting to know Eileen Mayo than in admiring Vincent van Gogh's Self-Portraits a week earlier.   

Practicalities

Eileen Mayo: A Natural History runs at Towner Eastbourne until July 3. The gallery is open Tuesday to Sunday from 1000 to 1700, as well as on Bank Holiday Mondays. Admission is free of charge and there's no need to book. Allow yourself an hour to take in this exhibition. The Towner is about 10 minutes walk from Eastbourne station, which you can normally reach from London Victoria in less than 90 minutes by a half-hourly direct train. 

While you're at the Towner 

In the very next room to the Eileen Mayo show is the Towner's collection of work by Eastbourne's very own Eric Ravilious, with many works depicting Sussex, including a scene from Newhaven Harbour that you can compare with Mayo's. 

Images

Eileen Mayo, Turkish Bath, 1930, private collection. Photograph by James Ratchford. © The Estate of Dame Eileen Mayo

Dod Procter, Eileen Mayo, c. 1926-30, private collection, on loan to Penlee House Gallery & Museum, Penzance

Eileen Mayo, Doric Dairy, 1935, private collection. Photograph by James Ratchford. © The Estate of Dame Eileen Mayo
Eileen Mayo, Fallen Leaves, 1946, private collection. © The Estate of Dame Eileen Mayo

Eileen Mayo, Tabby Cat Asleep, 1948, private collection

Eileen Mayo, Stage 17, 1948, private collection. Photograph by James Ratchford. © The Estate of Dame Eileen Mayo
Eileen Mayo, Humpback and Bottlenose, 1980, private collection. Photograph by John Hammond. © The Estate of Dame Eileen Mayo