My friend Hermione Carline, who has died aged 74, came from a long line of artists stretching back to the 19th century. But although she was an artist almost from birth, making just the sort of animal drawings and miniature books that remain a family tradition, she resisted following in the footsteps of her parents, the painters Richard Carline and Nancy Carline (nee Higgins), and began her career as a textile designer.
Born in London, Hermione grew up in Hampstead, in a house filled with old books, old furniture and old paintings by generations of Carlines. It was “more like a museum than a house,” she said, and it left her “craving the modern world”. After Hampstead school for girls, she studied fine art at Camberwell School of Art, followed by an MA in textile design at the Royal College of Art from 1974 to 1977.
She took a first job at the Bodansky and Dickinson studio in 1979 and then co-founded The Collection in the early 1980s, producing fabric designs for Nicole Farhi in London, Dior and Ungaro in Paris and Donna Karan in New York, travelling the world to sell them. It was around this time that she met Philip Hunter; they married in 1981 and had three children.
Hermione was proud of her family history and when I met her in 2022 it was to interview her for a newspaper feature on Those Remarkable Carlines, an exhibition at Burgh House, Hampstead, featuring four generations of the family, including Hermione and two of her daughters, Madeleine and Josie. The exhibition took its title from Henry Lamb’s description of the Carline siblings – fellow painters Sydney, Hilda and Hermione’s father Richard – who all attended the Slade School in the first decades of the 20th century, and whose family home in Hampstead was, in the years after the first world war, a gathering place for artists including Lamb, Stanley Spencer, and Paul and John Nash.
Hermione shared her father’s passion for travel, and like him she was an inspiring and dedicated teacher. She gave art classes from her south London home from when her children were small, and at one point took six children’s and two adult classes a week (the classes continue, taught by two of Hermione’s daughters and a former pupil).
She returned to oil painting in 2004, developing a distinctive style in which veils of colour evoke myriad light effects, in paintings that are neither fully abstract nor entirely representational, and retain a structure and fluidity evocative of textiles. She exhibited widely, including with the Turps Art School, and the UNPRIMED Collective that grew out of it, and carried out projects with Claridge’s Hotel and Visto Images.
She is survived by Philip, their daughters, Madeleine, Josie and Isabel, and grandsons Freddie and Theo.
