Marion Whybrow, who has died aged 83, was a knowledgable and sensitive writer of art history, biography, plays and fiction, whose best-known work, St Ives 1883-1993, Portrait of an Art Colony (1994), was the most comprehensive book of its kind. Her detailed, original research, empathy with the artists she wrote about and insight illuminated the subject. Her approach was both methodical and imaginative: she knew that this was precious historical material that needed to be gathered and recorded before it was lost; but Marion knew how to tell a story, too, and how to pick out an anecdote that summed up a character. As well as interviewing many of the artists, she talked extensively to St Ives people about the artists they had known, and this oral history gives a unique flavour to the book.
Marion drew from artists as different as Bryan Pearce, Tony O’Malley, Bob Devereux and Kathy McNally “the essence of each artist’s reason for the way they worked and what was important in their thinking”, as she told Rupert White in an interview for the online journal artcornwall.org, in 2009. She always wanted to get to the nub of the matter, whether she was finding out how an artist thought about his or her work, or researching potters’ marks for her book The Leach Legacy: St Ives Pottery and its Influence (1996).
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