There was a long hiatus in Mary Spencer McEvoy's career. She had studied at the Slade, where she met the painter Ambrose McEvoy, whom she married in 1901. Between 1899 and 1910 she exhibited regularly at the New English Art Club. The work she showed there suggests that she shared the predilection of some of her Slade contemporaries, such as Gwen John, for portraiture and interior painting after the Dutch masters. There are works titled The Student. The Blue Dress and An Old Letter. Interior: Girl Reading clearly refers to Dutch painting, with its stilled atmosphere, but it can also be understood in the context of the young women of her circle who were entering the new century having been able to study seriously. Maud Suiter noted in her catalogue for the exhibition Echo (Tate Liverpool 1991) that the painting of a female figure reading did not only signify the sitter's gentility, but also 'a quest for knowledge and new ideas.'
Then McEvoy disappears from the lists of exhibitors. It is assumed that her time was devoted to her children and to helping her husband, who built a hugely successful career as a society portrait painter. It seems that this help included painting for him. Soon after they were married, Ambrose McEvoy was commissioned to paint a series of works for Long Tower Church, Londonderry. They were to be a mixture of three original paintings and twenty-two copies of old masters depicting the life of Christ. While Ambrose painted the originals Mary worked on the copies, finding suitable works and making cartoons, which she then laboriously squared up and painted onto copper panels. The year after Ambrose McEvoy's death in 1927, she began to exhibit again, showing a series of portraits of women at the Royal Academy, and at Knoedler's Gallery, London, in the 1930s. |
