Hilda Carline was born in north London in 1889 and her family moved to Oxford when she was three. Her brothers Richard and Sydney all became artists and Hilda was left to potter about Oxford, until, at the age of 24, her father let her go to an art school in Hampstead run by Percyval Tudor-Hart. He was a man of strong avant-garde, Post-Impressionist views, who adopted Wassily Kandinsky’s theories, some time before that Russian was well-known in England. Carline later moved to the Slade and studied under Professor Henry Tonks, martinet of formalism and line. She thus acquired two very different perspectives on the aesthetic process. This enabled her to switch effortlessly from the portraiture, nudes and garden scenescapes that her Slade days had helped refine to a particularly striking, near-abstract landscape style that she had developed under her first tutor. Carline got to know several prominent London artists and exhibited at the RA, the NEAC and with the London Group. In 1919, aged 30, Carline met Stanley Spencer at a family dinner and while there is little doubt that she was an opinionated and passionate woman, she would be overshadowed by the ‘indefatigable worker and talker’ who became her husband. Spencer was impressed by her work from the off: he wrote to her a couple of weeks after their first encounter, asking if he could buy a little painting of a group of sheep she had shown him. He wrote that he felt ‘there is something heavenly in it’ and ‘the more I look at it, the more I love it.’ Carline painted 72 pictures between 1910 and 1946, four years before her death. The couple married in 1925 at the weathered old church at Wangford, in the wilds of north Suffolk, where Carline had been a Land Girl during the Great War. Their first daughter, Shirin, was born at the end of the year. However, whereas nothing could keep Spencer from his outsize biblical canvasses, Carline suddenly had to cope with the demands of motherhood and was distracted from her painting by the ongoing conflict in her relationship with Spencer. It was nearly four years into her marriage before she produced another major painting and in his letters to her, Stanley accused her of ‘ceasing to paint and draw’. Her Lady in Green reveals Carline’s struggle to get under the skin of the woman who came between her and her husband. Patricia Preece’s heavy features are set in an expression of solemnity but the discomfort in her eyes is palpable. The portrait was painted at Spencer’s insistence. In 1930 Carline fled to Hampstead to find the space she needed to develop her work and to give birth to her daughter, Unity. Spencer began to see Patricia Preece on an almost daily basis and Carline later came to believe that Preece’s closeness to her husband was motivated by money rather than attraction, since Preece was involved in a life-long lesbian relationship with the artist Dorothy Hepworth. Initially overwhelmed by despair about her marriage, Carline fought for its survival. However, when her brother George became seriously ill towards the end of 1932, she went to London to be with him. By the time Carline finished the portrait of Preece in 1934, she knew that she could no longer stay with her husband and moved to London. She attempted to make sense of the breakdown of her marriage through her art, but became increasingly depressed by it all. Despite struggling to become emotionally and artistically independent of her husband, Carline was hurt by Spencer’s attempts to persuade her to join a ménage à trois with Preece. Battles over maintenance followed, which led to Carline having a breakdown in 1942. During her stay in hospital, she began to rebuild her relationship with Spencer, who visited frequently. However, she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1947 and never regained her strength. According to arts consultant Janita Elton, ‘Spencer is usually mentioned in the same breath as Patricia Preece, in spite of the fact that his second marriage in 1937 was probably never consummated. Hilda’s work became subsumed by her husband, who was quite a powerful character,’ Carline underwent a radical mastectomy in 1948 and died at the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead in November 1950. Spencer was by her bed ceaselessly, but to the end of her days, she could never quite grasp how he could expect her to become his mistress, when she had previously been his wife. Her remarkable Self Portrait (1923) was painted shortly after Carline graduated from the Slade and hangs in the Tate in London.