Obituary: Mary MacIver; Edinburgh teacher who became an extraordinary artist very late in life

MARY MacIver was an extraordinary artist because she did not begin her career as a painter until well into her 60s. Up until then, she devoted her artistic gifts to literature in her role as school teacher and eventually as head of English studies at the High School of Portobello. As an inspiring teacher, she also involved herself in the school’s theatre productions.

Her career also directed her towards the world inhabited by her dear husband, Hector MacIver, who more or less personified the cultural life of Scotland with an emphasis on world literature.

In 1990, Mary MacIver wrote a book which she entitled Pilgrim Souls, published by Aberdeen University Press. The dedication was simply: “In memory of my dear husband, Hector MacIver.” I regard it as essential reading for anyone concerned with the cultural life of Scotland during her lifetime. Surely the time has come for it to be re-published.

Mary MacIver describes this book as a mixture of autobiography and biography. She chose to divide it into four parts.

Part One tells of her childhood until the time, as she puts it, when “my future husband, Hector MacIver, was about to come to Portobello High School”.

Part Two consists of the writings of Hector from his various broadcasts and articles, which include talks and features for BBC Children’s Hour, extracts from newspaper articles, his own personal letters and letters to him from his wide circle of literary friends such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, Neil Gunn, Hugh MacDairmid, Dylan Thomas and Louis MacNeice.

Also included are what Mary defines as “jottings” that he made in a notebook about his Gaelic-speaking childhood on the island of Lewis.

This notebook formed the beginning of what he would have published as his autobiography but, in his busy life cut short by his death in his 59th year, it never materialised.

Part Three focuses on the period when Mary met her beloved Hector and contains her own writings by means of quotes from letters to him and by him. It describes their life together in the Midlothian village of Temple after their marriage and also describes his death. Part Four is all about Mary’s life in her widowhood.

There is a short prologue from Mary: “This is a story of a man who was extraordinary and a woman who was ordinary, who came from two very different backgrounds. It tells of their lives, of how they met, eventually married and of how they were parted by death, the woman, bereft, being left to continue on her way alone.” Of course, I heartily disagree with Mary’s description of herself – she was in no way ordinary. The proof I have lies in the way she blessed my life and the lives of others, not just with her extraordinary work as a painter but by her capacity for enduring relationships with a small and discerning circle of friends, and her intrepid spirit which caused her to travel far and wide in the spirit of an “artist-explorer”.

Her career as an artist was defined by her first exhibition in the Scottish Gallery in Edinburgh and, towards the end of her life, in the Inverleith Gallery with an exhibition curated by Paul Nesbitt, and her preparedness to travel on the Demarco Gallery’s “Edinburgh Arts” expeditions to the Venice Biennale, and to the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, and to Ireland, Belarus and Lithuania, as well as to Poland.

Her interest and commitment to Polish culture began with her willingness to teach English to members of the burgeoning Polish community in post-Second World War Scotland brought into being through the tragic fate of the Polish soldiers who found it impossible to return to their homeland.

During the war, she had taught herself Polish when she had become engaged to a Polish army officer.

Sadly, the engagement ended when he was killed, fighting as he imagined for the freedom of Poland. Her first “Edinburgh Arts” experience of Poland naturally meant a great deal to her as an artist.

In Poland during the darkest days when the Cold War, she was inspired to paint two masterpieces, one of a funeral cortege which she observed momentarily from the window of a coach taking her on the journey in a snow blizzard southwards to Kracow.

This funeral procession was on foot, led by a mourner carrying a large wooden cross. The coffin was bedecked with flowers on a horse-drawn farmer’s cart.

The other masterpiece was a painting depicting the Holy Family in a winter woodland, trudging their way through deep snow to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

In the Demarco Archive, there is a small painting on a lighter note celebrating her meeting with two world-famous performance artists, Ava and Adele, as they strolled their way through St Mark’s Piazza during the Venice Biennale towards The Caffe Florian. I remember well Mary’s delight in being in their company, together with her good friend, Maeve Hall, one of the most loyal and astute collectors of her paintings.

When she retired from teaching in 1980, she enrolled at Napier College in a crash course on the theory of music, which led her to spend four hours a day practising piano. Her music teacher, Sheila Desson, advised her to spend time studying painting as an evening class student at Edinburgh College of Art. There, she received great encouragement from Janet Jackson and Michael Docherty. This special evening class led her to meet Sally Chisholm, who was then the secretary of the Friends of the Richard Demarco Gallery. Sally was invited to the studio that Mary had built in the loft of her house perched high on the slopes of the Braid Hills. This house was surrounded by a garden that gave Mary much delight and inspiration.

This gardenscape and the pathways across the Braid Hills afforded panoramic views of Edinburgh and beyond to the hills of Fife across the Firth of Forth. This combination of cityscape and landscape presented her with the opportunity to paint what can be defined as portraits of Edinburgh.

The house contained an inspiring collection of art, silverware, ceramics and glass in relation to an extensive library. Mary had a hawk eye for the best objects d’art. It is, therefore, the saddest of thoughts to face the fact that all this treasure trove is no more. Surely something must be done to preserve the ambience in which artists choose to live and work.

Thankfully, Mary donated a large number of her paintings to the Demarco Archive, and now I feel the moral obligation to organise an exhibition of her paintings in relation to those of the Scottish artists she admired and collected, primarily William Gillies, William MacTaggart, John Knox, Robin Philipson, John Bellany and Anne Redpath.

In 1986, I organised an exhibition of her work in the Saddler’s Gallery in Durham, and the next year, following her exhibition in the Andrew Grant Gallery at Edinburgh College of Art, I presented a large-scale exhibition of her paintings under the aegis of the Demarco Gallery in Blackfriars Church.

1989 was a special year for her because the Demarco Gallery’s Edinburgh Festival exhibition was a celebration of the 100th anniversary of Hugh MacDiarmid’s birth. Naturally, she was a part of it. This calls to mind immediately one of the key works in the Demarco Archive, a large watercolour entitled In the how-dumb-deid o’ nicht. It is subtitled Chris Grieve, Hector MacIver and Bill Gillies treat Mary to a Highland Reel.

Two of the illustrations in Pilgrim Souls depict Mary’s father, John Brown, in full Highland dress when he was serving in a Highland Regiment as a professional soldier. Alongside is a dignified portrait of Mary’s mother, Mary McNally Brown.

For most of her childhood and adult life, her much-loved father was employed as a miner in the Midlothian coalfields and her parents, despite their impoverished state, lived intellectual and creative lives exploring the surrounding countryside.

Under the guidance of her mother, she discovered a love for the visual arts through visits to the National Gallery and the Royal Scottish Academy.

Her father was a natural-born storyteller with a love of Scotland’s folk culture and flora and fauna. Mary’s early years were spent in a miner’s cottage in Gorebridge, near Temple. This is the landscape celebrated in the paintings of William Gillies, who was to become her friend and next-door neighbour.

Mary MacIver died on 12 October in the Braid Hills Nursing Home at the grand old age of 92. She was laid to rest in the grave Hector had chosen for them both at Crichton Church, where they were married.

Sandy Moffat painted a magnificent portrait of her, seated by a window overlooking her garden.

I cannot imagine a better tribute to her than that by Sandy Moffat, written as her friend, as a contribution to this obituary.

RICHARD DEMARCO

My first encounter with Mary MacIver’s paintings took place in Richard Demarco’s Blackfriars Street Gallery in 1987. On seeing her large oil painting The Holy Family at Auschwitz, I immediately decided to buy it – here was an artist with a truly unique vision, capable of addressing the most serious of subjects.

Her way of seeing the world, fusing reality and imagination in the telling of stories, was underpinned by a vast knowledge of Scottish and English literature, not to mention the

various mythic literatures of the world.

For Mary, painting was a spiritual search. Max Beckmann’s statement, “Space, space, and space again, the unending divinity that surrounds us”, seemed to me to sum up perfectly her quest as an artist.

In my portrait of Mary, made in the summer of 1988, I attempted to incorporate all of the above. She is seated between her piano and a window looking onto the garden she so carefully tended.

One of her watercolours rests on top of the piano, depicting Hades, the river Styx, the souls of the dead and Cerberus, the three-headed guard dog. The image is beautiful, yet disturbing, and speaks of the almost mystical truth her paintings often conveyed.

SANDY MOFFAT