WINCHESTER.- Dame Elizabeth Blackadder is not a person who has ever courted celebrity, but she is undoubtedly one of Britain’s greatest living artists.

Aged 87, Blackadder’s long and distinguished career began in the mid 1950’s and has continued undimmed into the 21st century.

Now, in a special exhibition spanning all six decades of her career, Hampshire Cultural Trust is affording art lovers a chance to familiarise themselves with Dame Elizabeth’s broad and fascinating oeuvre.

Over 30 works are on display at The Gallery, Winchester Discovery Centre through to 20 March 2019.

“We are receiving works from Elizabeth’s own archive and studio, plus a tapestry kindly loaned to us from the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation in London, as well as loans from Glasgow Print Studio. The works are from across her entire career, covering all periods and all mediums. This will be a fantastic, intimate, introductory exploration of her work,” says Kirsty Rodda, Visual Arts Exhibitions Manager for Hampshire Cultural Trust.

Elizabeth Blackadder: From the Artist’s Studio highlights the breadth of her extensive and distinguished career, but visitors will also see that her art remains quietly personal. Blackadder has charted a very individual course, wholly unswayed by fashion but tirelessly devoting herself to her work as an artist.

Dame Elizabeth was the first woman to be elected both to the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy. In 2001, she was given the prestigious title of Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner in Scotland.

“She is highly admired not only for her talent, but also for carving her own path,” comments Rodda. “She has resolutely stayed out of the spotlight and was never interested in the ‘art scene.’ Although holding fast to her roots in Scotland where she has always lived, her art is adored and respected internationally.”

As Duncan Macmillan, Art Critic of The Scotsman, observed in 2011: “A quiet person by nature, she doesn't step in front of her pictures as someone of her undoubted celebrity might do. She leaves them to speak for themselves.”

The exhibition reveals Blackadder’s diversity and skill as an artist, with a selection which includes some of her early landscapes, several of her perfectly pitched still lifes, mostly in oils, and some fine examples of her work in watercolour, of which her botanical paintings are highlights. Her career as a print maker is also represented by a selection of etchings reflecting both her travels in Italy and Japan, but also by several prints featuring cats.

Rodda again: “Elizabeth is well known for depicting cats in her still life scenes, but it was wonderful to discover that their inclusion was not necessarily intentional. Whenever one of her cats wandered into the picture, it would become one of her props and be painted in. This affection and openness gives us a little glimpse into Elizabeth’s world and character, which makes her all the more enduring to us.”

From the virtuosity of her early drawings of the 1950s, the result of postgraduate travel scholarships from the Royal Scottish Academy and Edinburgh College of Art, to her more recent experiments in colour and space, Elizabeth Blackadder: From the Artist’s Studio contains drawings, watercolours, oils and prints, along with the exquisite tapestry from the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation, onto which her iconic irises are transposed.

“Her unrivalled powers of observation, stemming from a childhood interest in botany, give us her beautiful watercolours drawn from nature, skills which she honed in the 1980s, often with flowers from her own Edinburgh garden. The cats, which are observed with such empathy, but never sentimentality, find their own way in and out of her paintings as if exploring her studio,” says guest exhibition curator, Annabel Stansfeld. “Beyond the intimacy of these domestic subjects, Elizabeth’s travels abroad with her husband and fellow artist John Houston (1930 -2008) offer us another aspect of her career to explore.”

Elizabeth Blackadder: From the Artist’s Studio can be seen for free at The Gallery, Winchester Discovery Centre, and then from 29 March at The Sainsbury Gallery at the Willis Museum, Basingstoke.