Dame Elizabeth Blackadder, RA, RSA, RSW, RGI
(Scottish 1931-2021)
Blackadder was born and raised at 7 Weir Street, Falkirk, the third child of Thomas and Violet Isabella Blackadder. Violet Blackadder ensured Elizabeth benefited from a series of promising educational opportunities and, determined to spare her daughter the struggles she had been through, convinced her own father to support Elizabeth’s training as a domestic science teacher. Blackadder’s father died when she was 10. Her mother died, aged 89, in 1984. She spent a substantial part of her childhood alone, due in part to a keen appetite for reading. During her teenage years Blackadder began meticulously collecting local flowers, compiling the specimens by pressing and labeling them with their full Latin names, a fascination that was to surface much later in her paintings of plants and flowers.
A former pupil of Falkirk High School, she donated one of her paintings to the school on the occasion of its centenary in 1986. Blackadder remembered the pleasure she derived from her art classes in particular, but also enjoying dissecting and drawing plants as part of her botanical studies; she spent the majority of her sixth year in the art room at Falkirk High School.
She arrived in Edinburgh in September 1949 to start on the nearly approved Fine Art degree and graduated with first class honours in 1954. Blackadder studied early Byzantine art while at university, and one of the most enduring influences on her work was her tutor and prolific painter William Gillies. Blackadder spent the fourth and fifth years of her MA course concentrating on her imminent examinations; it was during this period that she met Scottish artist John Houston who was to later become her husband.
The fifth and final year of Blackadder’s Fine Art degree was spent at Edinburgh College of Art where she researched throughout the year for her dissertation on William MacTaggart. She graduated in 1954 with first-class degree and was awarded both a Carnegie travelling scholarship by the Royal Scottish Academy and an Andrew Grant Postgraduate Scholarship by Edinburgh College of Art.
In 1954, Blackadder put the money from her Carnegie scholarship towards spending three months travelling through Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy, where she focused on classical and Byzantine art. In 1962 her painting, White Still Life, Easter was given the Gurtrie Award for best work by a young artist at the Royal Scottish Academy.
During the 1960s she developed her interests in still life while continuing with her love of landscape by painting landscapes in France, Spain, Portugal, and Scotland and acquired a growing reputation for her paintings of flowers, Flowers on an Indian Cloth being a notable example . During her travels to France she became more aware of the artist Henri Matisse and because of this influence she ended up lightening up her palette.
In the 1980s she visited Japan on a number of occasions and many of her paintings at the time showed the influence of these trips. First visiting in 1985 and returning the following year, Blackadder’s interest in Eastern techniques and subject matter was realised in a series of vibrant oils and watercolours shown at the Mercury Gallery in 1991. Her desire to avoid the technical vibrancy of Tokyo took Blackadder to the Zen gardens of Kyoto; in many ways, her work depicts the principles of Zen which give paramount importance to the idea of empty space. Blackadder also traveled to the United States of America. Souvenirs of her travels would appear in many of her paintings.
Blackadder began working at Glasgow Print Studio in 1985, after being invited to make prints there. She worked with master print makers from that time until around 2014, working predominantly to produce etchings and screenprint with some lithographs and woodcuts. Her subject matter was dominated by cats and flowers but also included images from travels in Europe and Japan.
Blackadder was the first woman to be an academician of both the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Royal Scottish Academy; in 1982 she was awarded the OBE for her contribution to art which was promoted to a DBE in 2003.
In 2001, she was appointed Her Majesty’s Painter and Limner in Scotland. Along with an Honorary degree from Heriot-Watt University in 1989, Blackadder has been awarded honorary doctorates by at least three other universities.
In 1956 she married painter John Houston. The couple took up residence in a large villa in The Grange district of Edinburgh, which she continued to occupy until her death in 2021.
Blackadder died on 23 August 2021, aged 89.
