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Title edit
Ishbel McWhirter
Description edit
“I see my pupil Ishbel McWhirter moved by curiosity...she pictures her heroines with a serene remoteness, lovely restraint, and the strangeness of the designers of the white funeral vases of ancient Greece.”
Ishbel was born in London, the daughter of a Welsh mother and a Scottish father and spent her childhood in North Wales, later attending A.S. Neill’s progressive boarding school Summerhill. Coincidentally the school evacuated to North Wales, and it was Neill who first recognised and encouraged her talent. At a Summerhill exhibition held at the Arcade Gallery in London, Ishbel was ‘discovered’ and hailed by the BBC as a rising star. The following year at the age of eighteen she held her first one-person exhibition. Her work came to the attention of the great Viennese artist Oskar Kokoschka, who invited her to become his pupil in London.
An excerpt from the V & A museum catalogue describing her portrait of A. S. Neill succinctly summarises the two formative influences on her life:
