Elisabeth Jessie Vellacott, was born at Grays in Essex on 28 January 1905. Her father was an accountant, who would later be ordained a Presbyterian minister. One of her three younger brothers, Philip, became a noted classical scholar. Moving between London and Cambridge homes and boarding school in Lincolnshire, Elisabeth decided at the age of ten to become a painter. At the RCA a decade later, she was taught life drawing by Tom Monnington. But crucial lessons in colour and form came from seeing Indian textiles, Persian miniatures, Chinese and Japanese ceramics in the V&A and British museums, the 1928-29 Diaghilev ballet season and paintings by artists from Piero Della Francesca to Picasso and Matisse. Returning to Cambridge to work as a textile designer and printer, she devised sets and costumes for the Cambridge University Musical Society, often with her friend Gwen Raverat. That experience lured her back to London, to work as an assistant scene painter at the Old Vic under Lillian Baylis, but was unable to make ends meet on £1 a week. The outbreak of the Second World War brought land work and lodgings with Lucy Boston at Hemingford Grey, near Huntingdon, with resulting commissions for fabrics and murals for the nearby moated Norman manor house. The two women gave gramophone concerts for the nearby Royal Air Force and US Army Air Force. In the post-war period, with all her early designs lost – Vellacot eked out a living as a teacher and examiner and concentrated on paintings and drawings much admired by the teenage Bryan Robertson, then commencing his curatorial career as director of Heffer’s bookshop art gallery in Cambridge. Trips to the Scillies, Wales and Scotland produced studies of rock formations and mountain rivers; people, trees and flowers were also to be depicted in compositions formed from thousands of tiny pencil or chalk strokes. Jim Ede bought several such landscapes for his Kettle’s Yard museum and gallery at Cambridge and it was there that the artist would enjoy a 90th birthday exhibition. With her Cambridge base lost to a car park, Vellacott bought a corner of an orchard at Hemingford Grey and commissioned Lucy’s son, Peter Boston to build her a studio house on a tight budget. The resulting triangular structure in glass and wood was an aesthetic triumph, soon adorned with exquisite junk stall finds. Around 1963, the key elements of her painting began to come together when she abandoned canvas for wooden panels. Painting thinly on to a white ground, she recreated the luminosity of frescoes for her own lyrical designs. A fresh palette was established for every slowly evolving picture. She wrote of her ‘language of colours’ with ‘its own strictness: each painting works within its own “key”, varied by surprise “accidentals”, as in music – but the sequence must work, as in music’. She expounded her theory of art in a South Bank Show television profile in the 1980s. After a 1968 solo display at the Minories in Colchester, there was a string of successful shows at London’s New Art Centre and a retrospective exhibition organised by Bryan Robertson for the Warwick Arts Trust. Her images of people in houses, gardens and landscapes have a timeless air – as if figures from Italian frescoes had changed their clothes and wandered into Cambridgeshire. At the John Moores exhibition in Liverpool in 1993, she showed an unusually topical and tormented scene. The Expulsion, bought by the Walker Art Gallery, was a painterly protest over events in Bosnia. It shows a crowd fleeing flames and ruins and refers back to the painting by the early 15th-century artist Masaccio of Adam and Eve being forced out of Eden. An Amnesty International stalwart, Vellacott knew a bit about conflict. Her Cambridge studio was hit by a bomb during the Second World War, one of the few Nazi bombs to hit the city. Her beloved pacifist brother, died at the hands of the Japanese, whilst serving in Singapore as a padre and medical orderly. The inside-outside theme in many of her paintings began with memories of devastated buildings. The harmonious world depicted in scores of her icon-like panels had been hard-won. As she said: ‘It’s almost like an eggshell, a house. It holds you, but it can be broken into so easily, or broken out of.’ Having had her first solo show at 60, got into her artistic stride in her 70s, reached her prime at around 80 and painted her last picture at the age of 92, Elisabeth Vellacott died at the age of 97 on 21 May 2002.