Elizabeth Blackadder

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder
Flowers on an Indian Cloth
Born	Elizabeth Violet Blackadder 28 September 1934 Falkirk, Scotland, United Kingdom
Nationality	Scottish
Known for	Painting; printmaking

Dame Elizabeth Violet Blackadder, Mrs Houston, DBE, RA, RSA (born 24 September 1931) is a Scottish painter and printmaker. She is the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy.

In 1962 she began teaching at Edinburgh College of Art where she continued until her retirement in 1986. Blackadder worked in a variety of media such as oil paints, watercolour, drawing and printmaking. She attended Glasgow Print Studio where she worked with print makers to produce etchings and screen prints of flowers. In her still life paintings and drawings, she considers space between objects carefully. She also paints portraits and landscapes but her later work contains mainly her cats and flowers with extreme detail. Her work can be seen at the Tate Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has appeared on a series of Royal Mail stamps.

In 2012, Blackadder was chosen to paint Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond's official Christmas card.

Blackadder was born and raised at 7 Weir Street, the third child of Thomas and Violet Isabella Blackadder. Violet Blackadder ensured Elizabeth benefited from a series of promising educational opportunities, determined to sparing her daughter the struggles she had been through convincing her own father to support her training as a domestic science teacher. Blackadder's father died when she was 10, her mother aged 89 in 1984.

She spent a substantial part of her childhood alone, due in part to a keen appetite for reading. During her teenage years Blackadder began meticulously collecting local flowers, compiling the specimens by pressing and labeling them with their full Latin names, a fascination that was to surface much later in her paintings of plants and flowers.