When Pauline Caulfield graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1968, her bold, brightly coloured, screenprinted panels were considered by some to be the strongest pieces in that year’s show. At that point, the textile artist’s name was still Pauline Jacobs but, one week after graduating, she married the artist Patrick Caulfield, seven years her senior. The two had met a few years earlier when he was her tutor at the Chelsea School of Art in London. “My fellow graduates were working out what they wanted to do and how they were going to afford to live,” she says. “And I was buying champagne and choosing a dress for the wedding.”
