NEWBERY, Jessie Wylie

1864 - 1948

As Jessie Wylie Rowat, she was born at 21 Caledonia Street, Paisley, Renfrewshire, Scotland on 28 May 1864, eldest of the four children of William Rowat, a shawl manufacturer and later tea importer, and his wife Margaret Downie Hill, eldest daughter of Archibald Hill, who married at 10 Corunna Street, Glasgow on 8 July 1863, Margaret died at 21 St James' Street, Paisley on 2 March 1873, aged 28. A visit to Italy when Jessie was eighteen, stimulated a lifelong interest in textiles and other decorative arts. She enrolled as a student at Glasgow School of Art in 1884, and sometime later established its embroidery department, where she was appointed head in 1894 and her teaching and artistic work helped to raise the status of creative needlework at the school until she retired in 1908. She married on 28 September 1889, Francis Henry Newbery, director of the Glasgow School of Art and in 1891, a 27-year-old artist, living at Queen Mary Crescent, Govan, Partick, Lanarkshire with her 36-year-old husband Francis and their newly born daughter Eucot M. Jessie was an active member of the Glasgow Society of Lady Artists and she exhibited at the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour in 1906 when her watercolour 'Fancy Fair' was noted as 'decidedly clever' she also exhibited at the Paisley Fine Art Exhibition in 1907 'whose design for glass is artistic' and she was the craft judge at the Wishaw Arts and Crafts Exhibition in 1907. In 1901, a watercolour painter and embroidery designer, living at 6 Buckingham Street, Govan with her husband and two daughters, 15-year-old [adopted?] Margaret E. and 8-year-old Mary A., both born at Paisley. They had a summer residence 'Rooftree' with a riverside studio, at Walberswick, Suffolk c.1897-1917 where Jessie painted many local scenes. On her husband's retirement they moved to Dorset and in 1921 were living at Eastgate House, on East Street, Corfe Castle where she died on 27 April 1948, aged 63.

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Works by This Artist