About the artist:

'Kechie' was a brilliant painter of English and Bavarian landscapes in watercolour. After training at the Slade from 1912-1914, she worked primarily in the periods of 1920-33 and 1950-65. In between, she devoted herself almost wholly to her brother's child, Anne Tennent, who she and her husband adopted in 1933 following the death of Anne's mother in Malaya, Although Kechie and her husband lived in North Norfolk, they also spent time with friends in Bavaria, Southern Germany, where the landscape inspired her early paintings.

Kechie was born in Penang, Malaya, where her father, Charles Tennent, was in business, at that time working as a broker for Lewis & Peat of London. Her mother, Marion Ethel Edwards, came from a Welsh family who were then based at Blackheath in London. Kechie was christened Emma Marie, the eldest of eight children, but was known throughout her life by her Malayan nick-name 'Kechie', meaning "small". On returning home to England the family settled near her mother's home at Blackheath.

It was here she later met her future husband, Claughton Pellew, the elder son of a neighbouring family, who was attending the Slade School of Art (1907-11). It seems he encouraged her talent to such good effect that she later trained at the Slade (1912-14). There she studied alongside Christine Kühlenthal who in 1918 married John Nash, a lifelong friend of Claughton's. The intimate story of these young artists, wonderfully gifted, growing up and then suddenly caught up and divided by the miseries of the First World War, and eventually finding their own paths, is vividly told in Ronald Blythe's book "First Friends".

From 1916 Kechie spent two years as an auxiliary nurse at St Dunstan's (for blind veterans) in London's Regents Park. Claughton, however, was a pacifist of an extreme kind, refusing to cooperate in any way with the prosecution of the war. While many of his artist colleagues became 'non-combatants', he refused the draft and was imprisoned for two years. When he came out of Dartmoor in 1918 his feelings of alienation from society were almost complete: John Nash described it as "a sense of permanent isolation from which Claughton never recovered". Kechie married this traduced and rather dispirited man in 1919, and they withdrew to a remote corner of north Norfolk. There she succeeded in bringing him back to life and painting again, although he remained reclusive and shy of publicity. In 1922 they left Norfolk to make the first of several long visits to friends in Bavaria where she too took up her paint brush.

Following their marriage in 1919, Kechie and her husband had been renting a house in the village of Overstrand, on the coast just east of Cromer. They had each exhibited a picture at the New English Art Club in 1921, and the following year they left Norfolk for their first visit to Bavaria, where they stayed for six months. The result of Kechie's exposure to this new environment is illustrated on the previous pages. In 1923 Claughton started wood engraving and exhibiting with the Society of Wood Engravers. They had little money but in 1926-27 Kechie's family helped them purchase land in open country between Southrepps and Trunch where, with a local builder, they designed and built a house, "The Pightle". They lived a simple but labour-intensive life without electricity, using bicycles for transport, oil lamps, and pumped well water, with their privacy protected by a couple of geese. Electricity did not reach them until 1955. Originally their two-acre garden was bare of trees and plants, but the Pightle was very different when Kechie painted it in the 1950s.

In 1927, with Claughton's reputation as a wood engraver growing, Kechie held her first one-woman exhibition at the Goupil Gallery. Thirty of her watercolours of Norfolk and Bavaria were enthusiastically received, with epithets like "Pre-Raphaelite" on one side, and "Japanese" on the other, both recognising different elements in her painting. With the arrival of her brother's daughter, an 18 month old baby, who they adopted in 1933, Kechie's life changed completely and she did not paint regularly again until the mid 1950s. The depression of the 1930s also affected her husband for whose prints there was no longer a demand, and they entered a financially lean period during which they took in a paying guest, and in 1939-41 let the Pightle and moved to Sheringham. When Kechie's painting once again flowered after this long gap, she worked hard and was able to hold another successful exhibition of her watercolours in 1965, this time at the Assembly Rooms at Norwich, and despite suffering from the form of Parkinson's which eventually killed her three years later.