Emmy Dinkel-Keet

Artist who produced work of exquisite delicacy

Emmy Gerarda Mary Keet, artist and teacher: born The Hague 5 September 1908; married 1941 Ernest Dinkel (died 1983; one son, two stepdaughters, and one son and one stepson deceased); died Cheltenham, Gloucestershire 27 January 2003.

Emmy Dinkel-Keet was not a prolific artist, but she consistently produced work of exquisite delicacy. She and her husband Ernest Dinkel were inheritors of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts tradition that art should be inseparable from sound craftsmanship.

She was born in The Hague, Netherlands, in 1908, one of five children – two brothers and three sisters – of John Jacob Keet, a businessman, and his wife Mary. When Emmy was about six the family moved to England, where she attended Palmer's Endowed School for Girls, in Grays, Essex.

The Keets were not an artistic family, but bright. Emmy's brother Dick spoke four Chinese languages and did cloak-and-dagger work for the British during the Second World War in Hong Kong, being captured by the Japanese.

Emmy won an Essex County Art Scholarship to Southend College of Art and then attended the Royal College of Art, from 1930 to 1933. This was an illustrious period in its history, in the directorship of William Rothenstein. Dinkel-Keet's tutors included Edward Bawden, Edward Johnston, Malcolm Osborne, Eric Ravilious, Gilbert Spencer and Ernest Tristram. The engraver Robert Austin fostered her interest in Persian manuscripts and Italian wood engravings in the nearby Victoria & Albert Museum.

Emmy Keet taught embroidery and design at evening institutes in London, in 1932-34. A trip to Sopron, Hungary, enabled her to learn about its peasant embroidery and designs, which she incorporated into her own allegorical pictures.

For three years from 1934, she taught arts and crafts at Sherborne School for Girls, was then a freelance illustrator and designer for two years and from 1939 to 1941 was senior staff member at the College of Art, Great Malvern.

She married Ernest Dinkel in 1941, after his first wife died; she had met him at the RCA, where he had been Ernest Tristram's assistant. He had a distinguished career as artist, designer and teacher, becoming professor and head of the design school at Edinburgh College of Art, 1947-61. Emmy managed several years' supply teaching while they were there.

After marriage, much of her time was devoted to looking after her husband, the son and two daughters of his first marriage, and their own two sons. These were both to make notable careers. John, who died in 1991, was an art historian who administered the Burrell Collection in Glasgow and, as Keeper of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, oversaw its restoration. Her second son, Philip, became an architect.

With Ernest's retirement and their settling at Bussage, near Stroud, Emmy was able to spent more time on her art. Her keen eyesight had enabled her to develop a painstaking technique using a brush with only a few hairs, the result like an etching or engraving.

Emmy Dinkel-Keet was a Roman Catholic with a strong religious conviction. Religious subjects were one theme in her work, others including childhood memories of the country; illustrations for Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Mrs Gaskell's Cranford and Mary Webb's Precious Bane; portraits; and the striking The Funeral of Mozart, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1937.

She continued to show at the RA. She was made an academician of the Royal West of England Academy in 1987 and exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy and elsewhere. In 1984, she shared a show with her husband at the Stroud Festival. Dream Children: collected works of Emmy Dinkel-Keet was published privately in 1991.

David Buckman