Kathleen Guthrie

Kathleen Guthrie (née Maltby) (26 February 1905 – 7 September 1981) was a British artist who exhibited with the London Group and at the Royal Academy and also had several solo exhibitions. During a long career Guthrie painted in oils, watercolours and acrylics. She also produced silkscreens and murals and wrote and illustrated children's books.

Biography Guthrie was born in Feltham in Middlesex, the youngest child of Dr Ernest Maltby and Emily Worsfold. Her father's family were lawyers, architects and land agents from Mansfield, Nottinghamshire. She had one sibling, her elder sister Phyllis.

The family moved to Brighton, where Kathleen found life with her old-fashioned parents difficult and suffocating. Kathleen continued to sign her pictures with her married name, because it was known to art dealers and patrons.

During World War II, Guthrie submitted several works to the War Artists' Advisory Committee, which acquired one of the paintings she produced during the conflict, that of a bombed hospital ward. The painting shows the scene in a hospital ward after it has been hit by a bomb that has left a large hole in a wall and mangled beds. The expressions on the faces of the attending staff, and the blood stained sheets, suggest dead or severely injured patients lying on the floor out of sight of the viewer.

Guthrie married the abstract artist Cecil Stephenson in 1941 and the couple settled in Hampstead, where Guthrie completed a mural for a local health centre.

Guthrie experimented with different styles of painting during her career. These included the traditionalism of her first husband and the abstraction in which her second husband specialised. In her later years she settled on a simplified style which owed little to either of them.