Celebrated artist admired for her paintings of flowers and the first woman to be elected to both the Royal and Royal Scottish academies
In 1994, the year that Damien Hirst made his first vitrined sheep, Away from the Flock, pickled in formaldehyde, the artist Elizabeth Blackadder, who has died aged 89, finished a work called Still Life With Cats. The cats were painted in oil on canvas, joining many others in Blackadder’s oeuvre, alongside arum lilies, Japanese fans and tins of sweets.
Mere difference of age does not explain the gap between Blackadder’s art and Hirst’s. Painters of her own generation – Bridget Riley was born in the same year, 1931 – worked in a style that was insistently modern. This was not Blackadder’s way. When she and her husband, the artist John Houston, visited New York in 1969 on the way to paint the Wyoming landscape, they made trips to the Museum of Modern Art to see Picasso and Matisse, not Pollock and Warhol. Modern art institutions returned the compliment: there are only half a dozen or so Blackadders in the Tate, all but one of them lithographs, few ever on show and none more recent than 1963. The British Council Collection holds only two Blackadders, the Arts Council’s none at all. And yet, there is more to the story than meets the eye.