Katharine Jowett

Katharine Alice Jowett née Wheatley (1882–1972) was a British artist, best known for her cityscapes of Beijing in the early to mid-20th century. Along with Bertha Lum and other émigré European and American artists in China, she was a proponent of the shin-hanga style of woodcut printing. Mao Zedong was said to have appreciated and collected her art.

Early life Jowett was born in Oxfordshire in 1882, the daughter of a Methodist Minister. Until after her marriage she spelt her Christian name Catherine or Catharine. In her late teens, she fell in love with a missionary and followed him to China. During her sojourn in Hubei and Hunan provinces, she decided that a missionary life didn't suit her, and she moved to Beijing, where she met and married Hardy Jowett (1871-1936) in 1910. For their honeymoon, they took a trip to England via Japan and Canada, a harrowing journey that involved a near shipwreck.

Jowett had two sons, Christopher and Edward. Some time after 1920, the family moved back to China where her husband took on the management of the Beijing office of the Asiatic Petroleum Company. In 1930, Christopher - then a student at Stroud - was arrested en route to Beijing at the Sino-Soviet border. He'd lost his passport and was incarcerated for a fortnight.

Career Jowett volunteered at the Peiping Institute of Fine Arts, where her husband was on the board. It organised exhibitions and lessons in the arts, its ball was an annual high point of social life amongst the city's foreigners. At this point, Jowett had mainly been producing watercolours and oils, but through the institute's exhibitions, she was introduced to the shin-hanga technique and began to create woodcuts.