Marion Whybrow, who has died aged 83, was a knowledgable and sensitive writer of art history, biography, plays and fiction, whose best-known work, St Ives 1883-1993, Portrait of an Art Colony (1994), was the most comprehensive book of its kind. Her detailed, original research, empathy with the artists she wrote about and insight illuminated the subject. Her approach was both methodical and imaginative: she knew that this was precious historical material that needed to be gathered and recorded before it was lost; but Marion knew how to tell a story, too, and how to pick out an anecdote that summed up a character. As well as interviewing many of the artists, she talked extensively to St Ives people about the artists they had known, and this oral history gives a unique flavour to the book.
Marion drew from artists as different as Bryan Pearce, Tony O’Malley, Bob Devereux and Kathy McNally “the essence of each artist’s reason for the way they worked and what was important in their thinking”, as she told Rupert White in an interview for the online journal artcornwall.org, in 2009. She always wanted to get to the nub of the matter, whether she was finding out how an artist thought about his or her work, or researching potters’ marks for her book The Leach Legacy: St Ives Pottery and its Influence (1996).
All these writerly qualities are evident in the more than 20 books that Marion published during a career that began when she and her husband, the painter Terry Whybrow, moved to St Ives 35 years ago. She built up a rapport with the artists she interviewed, and they opened up to her. On one occasion, for instance, Patrick Heron had agreed to give Marion an hour in the morning, and she went up to Eagle’s Nest, his house near Zennor. Heron showed her his garden and began to talk about his work. Marion had told her husband she would be back by the late morning. “Ring Terry and tell him you are staying for lunch,” said Heron. He continued to talk while Marion took notes. “Ring Terry and tell him you are staying for tea.”
She was born in Kilburn, north-west London, second of nine children of Leslie and Doris Davis, and grew up in the depression and second world war years, during which she was evacuated briefly to rural Wales. Her ambition was to be a writer and, back in London, because she had not enough money to buy the paper she wanted, she would write on the till rolls at her Saturday job at the local bakery. She met and in 1953 married Terry, who was beginning his career as an industrial designer, and the couple became part of the jazz scene in London; one of Marion’s four novels, Narcissus Road (2007), drew on her life during this period.
Marion studied shorthand typing at night school and worked for the Brook Street Bureau in its swinging 60s heyday, but she wanted a greater challenge. After teacher training college, she taught at St Augustine’s junior school in Kilburn and Wykeham school in Neasden. Then, in the 1970s, she joined the Open University in its early years and gained a degree in English.
In 1980, when Terry and Marion’s children were grown up, the couple settled in St Ives. Marion flourished there as a writer, formed many friendships, and gained a profound understanding of the town’s artistic life past and present. She was an important figure in the campaign for the Tate in St Ives, and after the gallery opened in 1993 became a valued volunteer.
Very often, her professional life and her friendships were entwined; for example, Bryan Pearce, A Private View (1985), developed from the hours that Marion spent with Pearce helping him with his reading and writing. The gradual, in-depth understanding gained through their many hours of conversation allowed Marion to write a fascinating portrait of an artist shaped by his organic connection with St Ives.
Marion’s keen interest in women’s creativity is reflected in Twenty-two Painters Who Happen to be Women (1993) and in the important study Virginia Woolf & Vanessa Bell, A Childhood in St Ives (2014), in which she explored the formation of a female creative identity in terms of place, and cast a new light on the sisters’ early years.
The last years of Marion’s life were remarkably productive. In the 1980s she had recorded detailed interviews with O’Malley about his life and work, and in 2014 she published Free Spirits: Jane & Tony O’Malley. She had not long completed Borlase Smart: St Ives Artist – Man of Vision (2012) and St Ives, The Story of Porthmeor Studios, her series of interviews with artists working in the renovated Porthmeor Studios, was published in 2013.
Marion also took her own photographs and built up a photographic library of St Ives artists at work. She shared her unrivalled knowledge of St Ives’s artistic heritage with characteristic generosity and was modest about her achievements; perhaps too modest, sometimes. Her contribution to art history was significant and sustained.
She is survived by Terry, their daughters Kim and Tracey, and four grandchildren.
• Marion Whybrow, art historian, born 29 November 1931; died 19 July 2015
