Mary Adshead

Mary Adshead (15 February 1904 - 3 September 1995) was an English painter, muralist, illustrator and designer.

Biography Adshead was born in Bloomsbury, London, as the only child of Stanley Davenport Adshead, architect, watercolourist, and Professor of Civic Design first at Liverpool, and later at London University, and his wife Annie. Mary attended Putney High School from 1916 to 1919 and then spent six months in Paris. Due to her fathers' position within London University, she was able to enrol at the Slade School of Art in 1921, aged just sixteen. This success led to further commissions. Her next mural, A Tropical Fantasy, was carried out in 1924 and was on a desert island theme for the professor of architecture at Liverpool University, Charles Reilly. A large mural by Adshead, The Housing of the People, was part of the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London.

Another mural commission was for Lord Beaverbrook's Newmarket house. The eleven panels, known by the title An English Holiday, was not fully completed as Beaverbrook became concerned that he would be daily faced with the portraits if he ever fell out with any of them. Beaverbrook paid Adshead a two-thirds rejection fee and returned the completed panels which were exhibited in a London department store in Sloane Square in 1930.

In 1934 Adshead was commissioned to paint murals for the auditorium, designed by her father to replace one lost to fire, on Victoria Pier at Colwyn Bay. After the pier's partial collapse, these were thought unrecoverable, but, as of March 2018, several siginificnat parts been recovered, along with parts of another by Eric Ravilious, from the pier's tea-rooms.

Adshead's first solo exhibition was held in 1930 at the Goupil Gallery and included the painting The Morning after the Flood which is now in the Tate collection. During the war, she also created murals for a public canteen in Birmingham and for a service men's club. Despite her busy work schedule, she also found time to organise the Society of Mural Painters.

Exhibited works Adshead's paintings are in many public gallery collections including The Tate, the Graves Art Gallery Sheffield, the Imperial War Museum, Manchester City Art Gallery, the London Transport Museum and The University Art Gallery Liverpool. There are also several surviving mural paintings. Notable works by Adshead included murals, produced with Stephen Bone, for the liner in 1935-36 which were not installed, a triptych for St Mary and All Saints Church in Plymstock near Plymouth in 1957, a decorative pool in the Telephone Exchange Courtyard in Guernsey in 1966 and a mural for a pedestrian subway in Rotherhithe in 1983.

An exhibition of her work was held at The University of Liverpool Art Gallery (January–April 2005), Graves Art Gallery Sheffield (June–September 2005) and Kingston upon Thames Art Gallery (October–November 2005).