OBITUARIES : Thelma Hulbert

Thelma Hulbert's break as an artist came when she was offered the job of secretary to the Euston Road School, run by Victor Pasmore, William Coldstream and Claude Rogers. She was painted by Pasmore and also by Edward Le Bas, in the Edwardian clothes she favoured and bought from some old ladies' maids who had a stall in the Caledonian Road market. She and Pasmore resembled each other in their black eyes, black hair and pale skin, "like two currant-buns", she used to say, as they walked down Charlotte Street to one of the many restaurants there.

At that time, before the Second World War, London poets, painters and writers used to meet in the restaurants, or pubs such as the Fitzroy Tavern, north of Soho, mingling with elderly members of the Bloomsbury Group; Augustus John and his family still used a studio in Percy Street.

The war changed everything. Hulbert and the Rogerses took a cottage in the country, but she was conscripted and when I came back from abroad in 1944 I found her working in a canteen for refugees from Gibraltar. She was an excellent cook, having learnt from her mother. Soon she was offered a job teaching art in St Albans, by the wife of Henry Moore, while the latter was on holiday. After that she moved to the Camden School for Girls, where she was very popular and made friends for life of some of her pupils; and finally back to the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Holborn, to teach painting. All this was remarkable, because Thelma Hulbert had no real training.

She was an only child. Her formal education had ended at an early age when she joined Bath Art School, which admirably suited her talents. She made her way to London at the age of 20, in the wake of a friend she had made there who had married the artist Merlyn Evans, teaching at the Central School, where I met her. We shared a studio in Charlotte Street which had belonged to Constable, for £2 a week, and she tried to earn a living by painting flowers on china in a sweatshop, and also by giving ballroom dancing lessons to Indians who wanted to master Western rhythms.

After the war she found a studio in Holland Park, really an old conservatory attached to one of the big houses there, and was soon exhibiting small paintings in the Leicester Galleries (with a one-woman show in 1958). Then in 1962 she was given a one-woman show - a retrospective of paintings and drawings executed since 1937 - in the Whitechapel Art Gallery by Bryan Robertson. Her work was bought by galleries in the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the United States.

Hulbert was a meticulous painter, always keeping her glass palette and her brushes clean and tidy, and using larger and larger canvases; her subjects were still lifes, or peacocks seen in Holland Park, or nature scenes from sketches made abroad. The transparent beauty of her colours, and her brushwork, has been compared to Turner, or to the Japanese.

She never married, but had numerous lovers with whom she travelled to Ireland, France, Italy and Switzerland. A trip to South Africa to get married ended in disaster when the man in question could not get a divorce, but what she saw of apartheid convinced her that she could not live there, and she returned by boat with large bunches of African flowers which she dried and used in her paintings.

Before her final and debilitating illness, cystic fibrosis, she was a happy person, a loyal and generous friend. When I saw Victor Pasmore in Malta last spring, after many years, and told him that her tenderness for animals meant that she could not bear to see lambs in a field because they had to be killed, he looked thoughtful. "Do you know," he said, "I rather agree with her."

Iona Wright

Thelma Hulbert, artist: born Bath 9 November 1913; died Honiton 17 February 1995.