This month sees the opening of a retrospective exhibition of prints, paintings and textiles by Mary Moser in the heart of Oxford. Curated by her children, the show celebrates the extensive artistic output of Mary Moser (1921-2022). Mary was a talented artist, working in screenprints, etchings, pencil, watercolours and fabrics. She was a significant figure in the Oxford art scene from the early 1980s when she and her husband Claus Moser moved to Oxford on his appointment as Warden of Wadham College.
Mary had a major role with Oxfordshire Artweeks, taking on the role of chair for many years, until 2001. During this period, she oversaw the organisation’s development from a struggling festival to arguably the most successful open studio visual arts festival in the country, and she always considered her role in Artweeks to be one of her proudest achievements. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Mary spent three weeks every summer during Artweeks walking the streets of Oxford and driving round the lanes and villages of Oxfordshire to visit as many artists and explore as many open studios and collective exhibitions as possible. A keen artist herself she also exhibited her own work in various settings, including at Wadham College and Sutton Courtney Abbey.
Mary was a member of the Oxford Art Society and Oxford Printmakers Cooperative, contributing work to exhibitions by both organisations.
As someone who had always combined art with her work as a psychiatric social worker, and with her family life, Mary particularly loved meeting artists for whom art was not their first career. This led to the establishment in 2003 of the Mary Moser award – a prize given to an artist exhibiting in Artweeks who had taken up art later in life as a second career. It continues to be awarded annually. Mary herself learned and developed new techniques throughout her life, including attending local etching classes throughout her ‘80s. Well into her ‘90s Mary made a point of meeting the Mary Moser award winner each year. This was something that gave her great pleasure.
As chair of Artweeks she was also instrumental in developing their educational work, widening access to art by setting up both Kids@Art and Art4Age. These local projects involved artist residencies in schools and care homes.
From an early age Mary herself was rarely to be seen without a sketchbook and pencil at hand. She spent most of her early life in Switzerland and was taught at home where she showed a great talent for art from a young age.
“Growing up in the mountains in this way influenced Mary’s vision of the world and the sky and wide horizons were important to her. She had a rather unique way of seeing things, noticing beauty where others may not, perhaps in a shape, in a reflection in a window, a stone in a puddle or in the juxtaposition of an industrial building and elements of the natural world,” says her daughter Sue.
“She loved, for example, the new and the old appearing together in skylines, the beauty of bridges over the motorway and the cooling towers of Didcot Power Station against the Oxfordshire countryside.”
Unsurprisingly, there’s a gentle Oxfordshire theme in the show, many prints inspired by her drives along the M40 between Oxford and London, and yet Mary’s art included relatively few works of iconic Oxford buildings – you’ll see instead a screenprint of the Cowley works! Similarly, Mary’s London views are of the post office tower and the aviary in Regents Park with its unusual shape, rather than iconic views.
“Her style was gentle, joyful and unconfrontational, reflecting the kind of person she was: positive, warm and interested with an eye for small pleasures in life and a gift for spotting shapes and colours,” smiles Sue.
Sue describes how Mary first became interested in screen-printing when making curtains for the large windows of the early Victorian house in London in which she lived until her death in 2022, aged 100.
Mary was well-travelled, and the collection includes screenprints of buildings and landscapes of countries including Hong Kong, Bali and the Australian outback. Others show the outline of Japanese temples surrounded by cherry blossom or the Great Wall of China snaking across a mountainous landscape.
Then, in her 80s, she used the technique of etching to produce her most detailed work – many scenes of Europe – these are mostly timeless views of lakes and forests, trees and mountains, some harking back to her earliest memories.
Indeed, even in her 90s, Mary continued to produce art, attending classes with Oxford artist Ella Clocksin, experimenting with observational, abstract and colour principles and intuitive and expressive processes and this ethos is evident in her later paintings, increasingly abstracted flowers and still lifes.
Music was another great influence in her life: Claus was Chairman of the Royal Opera House for many years and Mary often attended rehearsals. They also hosted chamber music gatherings in their home, and at both she would sit and sketch the musicians. The exhibition includes sketches and monoprints of both individual musicians and groups captured in the moment.
“Because she found herself going to all manner of grand events, and having learnt dressmaking during the war, Mary used her skills to create extraordinary dresses to her own designs, using the end of roll fabric she bought from her local fabric shop in London,” Sue adds. “In the show we will also include examples of her dresses as well as fabrics she designed and printed herself”
Mary’s sense of humour is also evident in the exhibition, in a series of quirky Christmas cards which she created annually and which mark the passing of time throughout this extraordinary woman’s life.
The retrospective runs from Friday 28th Feb - Sunday 9th March 2025 at Kendrew Barn, St John's College, Oxford. Entrance is free.
