Margaret Mellis

Margaret Nairne Mellis (22 January 1914 – 17 March 2009) was a British artist, one of the early members and last survivors of the group of modernist artists that gathered in St Ives, Cornwall in the 1940s. She and her first husband, Adrian Stokes, played an important role in the rise of St Ives as a magnet for artists. She later married artist Francis Davison, and became a mentor to the young Damien Hirst.

Mellis was born in Wukingfu (Wujingfu), Swatow, China, where her father was a Presbyterian missionary. Her family returned to East Lothian when she was one year old, shortly after the First World War broke out, so her father David Barclay Mellis-Smith could join up.

Abandoning an initial interest in music, she studied at Edinburgh College of Art from 1930 to 1934, under colourist Samuel John Peploe and landscape painters William Gillies and John Maxwell, alongside Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and William Gear. She used a travel scholarship to study with André Lhote in Paris. She met art critic Adrian Stokes in 1936 and they married in 1938. They visited Ezra Pound in Italy during their honeymoon and returned to London, where she studied at the Euston Road School.

Looking for a refuge from London before the Second World War broke out, they moved to "Little Parc Owles" in Carbis Bay, near St Ives, in 1939. The couple's move to Cornwall was to be a catalyst for the burgeoning modernist movement that was to become internationally renowned throughout the middle of the 20th century. They were soon joined by their friends Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth and their triplets, and Naum Gabo and his wife Miriam Gabo, and then subsequently Margaret's college friend Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Margaret was encouraged to paint small abstract works, and to produce intricate collage. She was inspired by naive painter Alfred Wallis. Her son, Telfer, was born in October 1940.

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