Mary Slatford was born on 25 January 1922 at Harrow-on-the-Hill, Middlesex. She was the daughter of Charles and Mabel Slatford. The family later moved to Trowbridge in Wiltshire, near the White Horse carved into the Downs at Westbury. The children would climb up to the horse, while their mother sat nearby, and Mary recalled sitting in the equine eye. She would later paint The White Horse, Westbury (1984). Mary was educated at Trowbridge High School and was in the sixth-form doing her Higher Certificate during the Fall of France in the summer of 1940. Art school might well have been her preferred option, but was considered irrelevant to the war effort. Instead, she read for a science degree at Reading University, the course including zoology, botany, chemistry and mathematics. In 1944, she gained her teaching diploma and until 1950 taught science and mathematics at Bath High School. While teaching, she took evening classes at the Bath School of Art, whose head was Clifford Ellis. With his wife Rosemary, Ellis would make the Bath Academy of Art, based at Corsham Court from 1946, one of the most dynamic art teaching centres in Britain. At that juncture, Slatford was not confident enough of her abilities to study as a painter, so instead took up pottery. In 1950 she married Godfrey Newcomb, a farmer, and they moved to a small mixed farm in the Waveney Valley. A few years after, their two daughters were born. Mary set up a pottery in which Godfrey joined her, later taking it over altogether. They produced decorative slipware for the craft shops that were then becoming fashionable. But Mary Newcomb’s wider artistic ambitions remained. While still at Bath, she volunteered as a student helper at the Flatford Mill Field Studies Centre being set up by the self-taught bird painter Eric Ennion on the Suffolk-Essex border. He encouraged her to take up painting. She next progressed to landscape in watercolour and gouache. Alongside her paintings, she continued to make detailed drawings of plants and insects. In 1986, she began a diary, in which she chronicled her drawings of such subjects as insects on hogweed. These delicate studies belie her claim that she did not ‘really know how to draw’. Newcomb said: ‘Visually I only see what I want to see, and shut my eyes to a lot of it, so quite often an animal hasn’t enough legs or the wings are joined on at the wrong place’. Late in life she thought she had finally understood the meaning of the word ‘tone’. Newcomb’s works seduced the viewer with a charm and gentle humour that disguise an underlying seriousness. They are tinged with an unpretentious eccentricity of the sort found in the work of artists such as Cecil Collins, David Jones, Carel Weight and Christopher Wood. Like them, Newcomb drew inspiration from her particular surroundings and personal vision. She became a stalwart of the Norwich Twenty Group and in time, achieved an international following and an impressive series of exhibitions and clients. Unexpected colours, lightness of touch and felicitous juxtaposition of shapes are among her hallmarks as a painter. ‘For people who have been taught, their thoughts are second-hand,’ said Newcomb said. She later claimed to be ‘untaught’ as an artist. This is not evident in the final results, produced apparently with ease, but often after a struggle. Her biographer Christopher Andreae has demonstrated how diary entries are linked to paintings prompted by Newcomb’s observations of life. An event, such as balloons spotted in the fading light, resulted in Balloons, 5pm late October evening (1987), or a man on a bicycle emerges later as Man Cycling Madly Down a Hill (1988). Poppies Angered by a Passing Cloud and Lady Defying Advancing Waves and Hot Driving Sand (She is Quite Safe) (both 1988) are other titles. Newcomb’s career took off in 1970 when the Crane Kalman Gallery in London gave her a show, another taking place that year at the Vaccarino Gallery in Florence. Newcomb also exhibited elsewhere in Britain and extensively abroad. Her work found its way into public collections including the Tate Gallery and the Arts Council of Wales. In 1996-97, there was a touring retrospective from the Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. She made her first visit to Le Lavandou on the Côte d’Azur in 1986, returned for a second painting visit in 1987, with a trip to the Dordogne in 1991. She moved to Peasenhall, Suffolk, in 1999, where her husband died in 2003 and where she eventually departed this life on 29 March 2008.