Mary Adshead was born in London on 15 February 1904. She was daughter of Stanley Adshead, the artist, architect and professor of civic design. Her mother Annie took charge of her education and, herself a keen gardener, instilled in Mary an artist’s interest in exotic plants and their foliage. Mary attended the Slade School of Fine Art; 1921-24, where she studied under Henry Tonks and won joint first prize with Rex Whistler in 1924. They both went on to work on their own murals at the Highways Boys’ Club in Shadwell. She designed posters for the Underground Group and London Transport in the period 1927-37 and also carried out decorative works at Bank and Piccadilly Circus Underground Stations. Adshead’s inventions and fantasies were commissioned both to create a backdrop in grand private houses and patrons to enjoy in trains, ships, hotels, clubs, restaurants and churches. They tell stories and are full of incidence and humour, and demonstrate an unusual range and exuberance. She worked on her own murals and on joint projects with artists such as Rex Whistler and Eric Ravilious and for clients such as Professor Charles Reilly, Stephen and Virginia Courtauld, Lord Beaverbrook, Cunards, Selfridges, John Lewis’s, Costains and a number of Anglican churches. Though some of her murals have been painted over, or destroyed, thanks to owners who valued her work and a series of lucky accidents, an unusual number survive. She would claim that during the 1920’s when she had a studio for two years in her parent’s house at Chester Gate she was so busy she never once crossed the road to Regent’s Park. In 1928 Adshead was commissoned by the press baron and politician Lord Beaverbrook to produce a series of murals for the dining room at Calvin Lodge, Newmarket. They were described at the time as being in ‘the manner of English 18th-century sporting prints and acquatints.’ The commission would later be withdrawn by Beaverbrook after the intervention of Lady Diana Cooper, who pointed out that he would quarrel with most of the people (his friends and acquaintances) who served as the models for scheme. In 1929 Adshead married the painter Stephen Bone. Their happy union would produce three children. In the early years of their marriage, they toured Europe, sketching and painting. In 1930 Mary had her first solo exhibition at the Goupil Gallery. She combined family life with active participation in the Women’s International Art Club and supported her husband with fund raising for the Artist’s Refugee Committee. During the Second World War, with the assistance of Kenneth Clarke, she obtained mural commissions at British restaurants, a Services club and a staff canteen. She collaborated with her husband on two illustrated children’s books and in 1949 designed the first pictorial issues of stamps for the GPO. In 1950 she undertook a commission for one of the then largest murals in Britain, decorating the fourth-floor restaurant of Selfridge’s in London. She also performed the role of secretary of the Society of Mural Painters. Her husband died in 1958. She travelled in the USA and Europe, studied mosaic decoration at Ravenna and in Sicily and took a course in Italian techniques in mosaic. In the 1960s she studied mosaic design at Kingston Art School, techniques she incorporated into murals, including decorative work for a pedestrian subway in Rotherhithe in 1983. In the 1980s and 1990s she ran sketching tours in Malta, Turkey and Madeira. Her solo exhibition at Sally Hunter Fine Art in London in 1986 was a critical success. Mary Adshead died in London at the age of 91 on 3 September 1995. Her work may be found in many public collections, including the Graves Art Gallery Sheffield, the Imperial War Museum, Manchester City Art Gallery, London Transport Museum and the University Art Gallery, Liverpool. Her Morning after the Flood (1928) may be found in the collection of the Tate in London. In 2005 a touring exhibition of her work titled ‘Earthly Delights’ was mounted at The University of Liverpool Art Gallery, travelling to Graves Art Gallery Sheffield and Kingston-upon-Thames Art Gallery. Ann Compton would write in the accompanying exhibition catalogue: ‘In many works, and particularly the murals for Lord Beaverbrook (1928), Adshead’s figure painting combines a fashionable primitivism, loosely derived from Stanley Spencer, with a fluency and humour rarely found among her contemporaries.’