Nancy Mona Higgins was born on 30 November 1909 in London. Her family were shopkeepers (owners of the store Jones & Higgins in Peckham Rye, which closed in 1980). Her father Douglas Higgins was killed in the Great War. Her mother, Mona Higgins was an Australian, with a fervent belief in the importance of education, culture and foreign travel. Nancy was educated at Wycombe Abbey School and in 1920, entered the Slade. She was tutored by Henry Tonks, a martinet who struck fear into the hearts of students and created a drily empirical approach to painting that survived at the Slade through the 1930s and left its mark, even after the Second World War. Professor Tonks strove to guard his students against ‘contamination’ from the avant-garde, but Nancy side-stepped his concerns with the encouragement of another tutor, Philip Wilson Steer, a painter who had been deeply influenced in his formative years by Impressionism. She met Richard Carline in 1934. His father, George Carline (1855-1920), had been a realist in the manner of his more famous contemporary, George Clausen. Through him, she was drawn into a bohemian, intellectual and politically active group, centred on Hampstead, but with a network of international contacts. The Carline social circle included such notables as Stanley and Gilbert Spencer, Mark Gertler and Helmut Herzefelde, a founder member in 1919 of the Berlin Dada group, who became internationally famous under the name John Heartfield for his bitingly satirical, anti-Nazi photomontages. Nancy’s artistic education was completed when she took a job with Sadler’s Wells Ballet in 1933, the era of Lilian Baylis and Ninette de Valois. One of the designers was Victor Polunin, who had worked as a scenery painter for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, working on the designs of Bakst and Picasso, and who now also taught a class in stage design at the Slade. At the age of 24, Carline returned to the Slade to learn from Polunin; lessons which, although they were intended to turn her into a stage designer, instead filled the gaps in her fine-art education and taught her the fresher, freer approach to painting which yielded the mood pieces, townscapes and landscapes with figures which were her trademark. She also produced portraits, figure groups in domestic settings and biblical and Classical subjects. She was active alongside Carline in the Hampstead Artists’ Council, which helped to bring refugees to London out of Nazi Germany, and through him, moved in Marxist circles, whilst remaining apolitical herself. Richard Carline went on to become a prominent exhibition organiser, as well as a painter. Richard and Nancy both taught art during the Second World War, continued to paint together and finally in 1950, married. Together, they had a son and a daughter. The Carlines were inveterate travellers, and Nancy never went without her painting equipment. Both he and Nancy were for many years Art Examiners for the Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate. Nancy continued to show at the NEAC, which had been founded in 1886 as a pro-French counter-influence to the stuffiness of the RA; but with a fine indifference to history, she also sent her work to the RA summer shows as well. The Carlines lived in Hampstead until Richard’s death in 1980, after which Nancy moved to Oxford. In 1985 she had a retrospective at the Camden Centre, and was made an Honorary Life-Member of the NEAC in 1989.In 1997 the National Theatre put on a show of work by Richard and Nancy Carline and their group of friends and fellow professionals. Nancy Carline died on 18 October 2004. Her painting Supper on the Terrace (1946) may be found in the collection of the Tate. The work is a poignant memorial to the Carline family, blending past and present, with the dappled evening light shining across the garden behind the diners on the terrace of the Carline home in Pond Street, Hampstead. Nancy depicted herself in the background, with Richard seated between his mother and sister, the painter Hilda Carline. By including her husband’s dead mother, Ann Carline, Nancy harked back to a tradition established by Han Holbein the Younger four centuries earlier, who had included the dead King Henry VII in a dynastic portrait of the Tudors during the reign of King Henry VIII. The picture was painted a year after Ann Carline’s death and commemorated her enduring spirit and psychological impact on the members of that close-knit family group.