Muriel Minter

1897 - 1983

A comparatively unheralded artist of the golden Royal College of Art generation around Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, Minter was born in Alverstoke, Hampshire. During World War I, she lived in Malta, where her father was a naval pharmacist. After the War, she studied at Rochester School of Art and the RCA, under the direction of William Rothenstein. A contemporary there of Moore, Hepworth, Edna Ginesi, Roland Vivian Pitchforth, Charles Tunnicliffe and Raymond Coxon, Minter there met and later married fellow student Gerald Cooper. Largely illustrative in her early years, her work was strongly affected by the teaching and her fellow students at the RCA, and some of her subjects in the life class bear comparison with the work of Henry Moore at the time. She later went on to teach at Rochester and designed stained glass windows, principally in Kent and Suffolk. As her career developed, Minter's painting style loosened, as can be seen in her later landscapes, portraits, and fairground and circus scenes.