Mary Young Hunter (née Towgood) was born in Napier, Colony of New Zealand (now New Zealand), on 11 April 1872 and, aged nine, she immigrated with her family to England. She trained at Pelham Street Studios in London and at the Royal Academy Schools from 1894 to 1899. She became known for allegorical subject pictures indebted to the Pre-Raphaelites and for portraits of children, later developing low-relief gesso panels painted in tempera and gold leaf. She immigrated further to the USA in 1915. Mary Young Hunter died in Monterey, California, USA, on 8 September 1947.
Painter and miniaturist Mary Young Hunter (née Towgood) was born on 11 April 1872 in Napier, Colony of New Zealand (now New Zealand), the second of four daughters of Edward Towgood, a Welsh-born sheep farmer, and his New Zealand-born wife, Edith Emma, née Tylee. At the age of nine she immigrated with her family to England. Her father died soon after in 1882. She later recalled little of New Zealand, beyond the harbour at Wellington and the waves breaking on the beach at Napier. She was educated in Bath and Wantage and at a finishing school in Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1889 she began her art training at Pelham Street Studios in South Kensington, London, under Arthur Stockdale Cope. She then studied at the Royal Academy Schools from 1894 to 1899, winning four medals, including the first silver medal in 1898 for a painted head from life, admired for its vigorous handling (The Ladies' Field, 1898, p. 89). She is also understood to have studied at Newlyn in Cornwall, prior to her marriage.
In 1899 she married the painter, John Young Hunter (1874-1955), son of the Scottish marine painter, Colin Hunter and took his surname. They honeymooned in Italy, visiting Florence, Perugia, Assisi, Siena and Ravenna. Her early work comprised literary and allegorical subjects in oil, watercolour and tempera, alongside portrait miniatures on ivory. A Song of the Harvest (1898) placed her among decorative painters seeking to reconcile the English rural idyll with the examples of the French painter, Puvis de Chavannes, while The Denial (1900), her Dante and Beatrice subject, followed a Rossettian path (McConkey, 2000, p. 28). In 1903 the critic A. L. Baldry grouped the couple among the 'new Pre-Raphaelites' (McConkey, 2000, p. 7), and Ralph Peacock noted her 'quaint flitting fancy'. The Bow in the Cloud (1906), praised for its 'definite charm in the matter of colour and idea' (Lady's Pictorial, 1906, p. 896), is heavily indebted to John Everett Millais (McConkey, 2000, p. 17). Joy and the Labourer (1901), owned by William Cadbury, was reproduced as the frontispiece to Women Painters of the World (1905). Her portrait Gabrielle (1908) entered New Zealand's national collection, now Te Papa, in 1912.
In 1903 the couple settled at Giffords Hall, Wickhambrook, Suffolk, where their daughter Gabrielle was born in 1905. That April they held a joint exhibition of 38 works, Figure Pictures in Oil, Tempera and Watercolour, at the Fine Art Society, London, 17 by Mary, followed in November by Pictures by Mr and Mrs J Young Hunter at Alexander Reid's gallery in Glasgow (McConkey, 2000, pp. 29-31). She exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts from 1895 to 1914 (first as Mary Towgood, then as Mary Young Hunter), as well as at the Society of Women Artists (1900-01) and the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts (1901-33). In 1907 she and her husband illustrated Neil Munro's The Clyde, River and Firth.
Settled in Kensington, London, from 1909, she concentrated on portraits of children, including Once upon a Time (1909) and Red Slippers (1910), which shows her debt to John Singer Sargent. In 1910 the couple made their first visit to Boston, USA, where Sargent introduced them to Isabella Stewart Gardner (McConkey, 2000, pp. 32-33). Mary's sitters included the daughters of Viscount and Viscountess Castlereagh, whose double portrait she showed at the Royal Academy in 1914. After several visits to America, she exhibited at the Copley Galleries, Boston, in 1914 and at the Ehrich Galleries and Knoedler in New York in 1915, the year the couple emigrated permanently from England and took a studio at 3 Washington Square, New York. Her American sitters included Rosamond Pinchot and Blanchette Hooker, later Mrs John D. Rockefeller III (McConkey, 2000, pp. 111-112). The marriage ended in divorce around 1920.
Young Hunter then moved to California, settling in Berkeley and by 1924 in Carmel-by-the-Sea, and for some years largely gave up painting (McConkey, 2000, p. 36). With the encouragement of Charles Prendergast, she then developed a technique of low-relief gesso panels painted in tempera with gold leaf, as in Buddha and the Christ Child. In 1929 these works were shown at the Fine Arts Gallery, Seattle, Gump's Gallery, San Francisco, Art League Galleries, Santa Barbara, and Wilshire Galleries, Los Angeles. Gumps’ represented her through the 1930s and 1940s (McConkey, 2000, pp. 37, 112). Young Hunter also wrote short stories, children's books and a mystery novel, Shadow over Carmel.
Mary Young Hunter died in Monterey, California, on 8 September 1947 and was buried at El Carmelo Cemetery, Pacific Grove. Poisthumously, Pyms Gallery, London, held the exhibition Edwardian Pre-Raphaelites: The Art of John and Mary Young Hunter in 2000. Her work is held in UK public collections including the National Trust at Mount Stewart, County Down.
Michal Mel