My great-aunt Diana Cumming, who has died aged 94, was a painter whose diverse work across a 70-year career can be found in collections including those of the Contemporary Arts Society, the Arts Council and Britten Pears Arts.
As a student at the Slade School of Art in London from 1950 until 1954, she won several scholarships including the prix de Rome in 1954. Her work was admired by the school’s principal William Coldstream and Lucian Freud, a visiting tutor, among others. The Slade’s summer composition competition, which required students to produce a large-scale history painting, allowed Diana to diverge from the standard regime of life painting and work instead from her fertile imagination. The result, Genesis: A Creation (1953), was one of a series that exhibit her mystical, visionary aesthetic.
These earlier paintings, populated by luminous figures against brooding backgrounds, stand on a knife edge between naive innocence and something altogether more disturbing, expressing what Frank Auerbach called a “manic, pure and uncorrupted” quality. Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears were early collectors of her work, some of which is on display at the Red House in Aldeburgh, Suffolk.
She eschewed the exactitude of Coldstream’s teaching, focusing on the act of perceiving. One sitter recalled Diana’s unusual method of beginning with the mouth. Commissioned to paint a portrait of Pears (1961), Diana painted her husband’s hands into the portrait when Pears was unavailable to sit; Britten demanded the hands be removed as they clearly didn’t belong to Pears and the bottom of the canvas was promptly sawn off.
Aside from a rich vein of strangeness, Diana produced expressive portraiture, and explored the shimmering interplay of light and water in naturalistic scenes. Her work was characterised by a childlike enthralment with the world, remaining attuned to the textures and poetry of everyday life. Diana said: “Part of what has to happen is exploring, honestly. There are so many possibilities all the time.”
Born in Hereford, she was the daughter of Dorothea (nee Trippel) and Herbert Cumming, a doctor. Her father died unexpectedly when she was four, and she and her two siblings were sent away to boarding school. After a year Diana moved to the Royal Masonic school for girls, Rickmansworth.
Following the Slade she took up her scholarship at the British School at Rome, where she met Neil Macfadyen, an architectural scholar; they married there in 1955. Returning to London, Diana and Neil, by now a qualified architect, applied their creativity to the renovation of their home in Blackheath, south-east London, including converting a wartime bomb crater in the garden into a pool. Both house and garden – which Diana lovingly tended over nearly 70 years of occupancy – became backdrops for many celebrations.
Despite the challenges of raising children, and episodes of depression, Diana continued to paint well into her eighth decade; exhibition highlights included solo shows at Beaux Arts (1964), the Serpentine Gallery (1987) and Thompson’s Gallery (2005). Her enthusiasm for travel inspired her work, and a trip to Australia shortly after the turn of the millennium proved to be particularly fruitful in her later experiments with colour.
Neil died in 2017. Diana is survived by her three children, Rachel, Flora and Angus, and four grandchildren.
