Born: 14 October 1934, United Kingdom
Died: NA
Country most active: United Kingdom
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
British painter Rose Wylie put her professional ambitions on hold in pursuit of motherhood. After meeting her future husband while earning her degree at the Folkestone and Dover School of Art in the 1950s, her work as a painter was set aside to raise their three children and support him as he followed his own career as a painter. Twenty-five years later, she would complete her MA at the Royal College of Art. Four years after that, in her 50s, she finally had her first solo exhibition, at the Trinity Arts Centre in Kent, with many more to follow both in the U.K. and internationally.
Wylie was the only non-American artist featured in the National Museum of Women in the Arts’ 2010 exhibition Women to Watch in Washington, D.C. The year she turned 78—2012—saw her first large-scale retrospective at Jerwood Gallery in Hastings. In 2014, she won one of the U.K.’s biggest prizes in her field, the John Moore Painting Prize, and was elected a Senior Royal Academician.
Working on large canvases with simplistic, childlike lines, her energetic and unruly paintings reference everything from pop culture to Renaissance masterworks to Persian miniatures to Egyptian wall painting—acknowledging tradition while also defying it. “The childlike quality [of my work] is difficult for some people,” she has observed. “They dismiss it and think I can’t draw and know nothing. But then they find that actually there’s stuff in it relating to Dürer and Cézanne—indisputable figures: Dürer, crikey! Cézanne! Then it becomes more difficult for people. I find that funny.”