Charming wonkiness | Lucy Harwood, at Firstsite, Colchester

Lucy Harwood, Hadleigh High Street, date unknown

In 1920, 27-year-old Slade School graduate Lucy Harwood had an emergency appendix operation on the kitchen table of the house she lived in with her parents in East Bergholt, Suffolk. The surgeon blundered: when her bandages were removed three days later, it was discovered she was paralysed down her right side, and had lost the use of the right hand she painted with.

Like most well-to-do young ladies of that time, her social life revolved around piano recitals (she was a talented musician), games of tennis, and ballroom dances, and all these activities were lost to her. But she was determined not to give up painting. She taught herself to handle the brush with her left hand, instead.

The award-winning arts centre Firstsite, in the centre of Colchester, is currently holding a major retrospective of Harwood’s work, the first since 1975. Of the 100-or-so paintings on show, only one was painted before her paralysis. Entitled Entrance to a Farm, and executed in 1909, it is accomplished, painterly… and rather dull. Using her left hand freed her up to adopt a post-impressionistic style, with (necessarily) broad brushstrokes, liberal use of bright colours, and a desire to capture the essence of the subject, rather than achieve figurative accuracy, a la Gauguin, or Van Gogh.

Most of the paintings in the Firstsite show were executed after 1937, when Harwood, by now in her early forties, enrolled in the new art school at Dedham, set up by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. When this institution burnt down in 1939 (some say by the hand of a teenage Lucien Freud) Morris and Lett-Haines moved the school to Benton End, in Hadleigh. Harwood followed them there, buying a house in nearby Upper Layham, where she lived for the rest of her life. She remained a student at Benton End until her death in 1972, aged 76.

Her career played out in the shadow of Cedric Morris, then, but there is an individuality and guileless exuberance about Harwood’s work that sets it apart, whether it’s a still life (she loved flowers, picked from her garden and arranged in a vase in her studio) a portrait (there’s always a charming wonkiness to her subjects), or a landscape (usually of a Suffolk scene, though she travelled abroad to paint every winter). Hadleigh High Street (pictured above) is a case in point, offering the eye a variety of subjects to dwell on, the most dynamic being the blue car (a Morris Minor, perhaps?) careering round the corner into Calais Street.

Like most of Harwood’s works, the painting is undated, and does not have an official title. Curator Hugh St John, a biographer of Morris and Lett-Haines, has overcome this lack of information by captioning the (red, green and blue) walls with entries from Harwood’s diaries, which gives the visitor a sense of her powerful personality. She was an eccentric, by all accounts, always brightly clad in unconventional clothing, and utterly dedicated to her art. Maggi Hambling, another Benton End student, remembers: ‘people maintained a respectable distance both from her paint-spattered car and the lethal port wine she served to visitors.’

Harwood exhibited locally throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s, and was awarded a posthumous retrospective at the Minories Gallery in Colchester in 1975, and further shows at Sally Hughes Fine Art. She was fond of selling her paintings cheaply to friends and neighbours, and until 20 years ago her pieces could be snapped up for a few quid at jumble sales and village fetes in the Hadleigh area. Her stock has since significantly risen, and works can sell at auction for several thousand pounds.

Lucy Harwood: Bold Impressions, which runs until April 14, is the third in an ongoing series at Firstsite exploring the careers of Benton End artists. It sheds welcome light on the prodigious career of a very English post-impressionist, and will deservedly enhance her growing reputation.