Victoria Crowe


1945 -

Artist, noted as a painter of landscapes, still-lifes, portraits, and self-portraits, in watercolour and oil. Born in Kingston-upon-Thames, the only child of a machine buyer, Crowe trained in London, before moving to Scotland in 1968 to take up a lectureship in drawing and painting at Edinburgh College of Art. She had met her husband at art college. The couple settled in Kitleyknowe in the Scottish Borders where she began to produce work inspired by the surrounding landscape such as Beech Tree, Winter (1973) now in the collection of the City Art Centre in Edinburgh and Tom Wickham's Barns (1977) held by the McLean Museum and Art Gallery in Greenock. Her most famous works of this period capture the life of her neighbour, Jenny Armstrong, an elderly shepherdess. Crowe is also noted for her portraits of figures important in the arts, politics and sciences including the politician Tam Dalyell (1932 - 2017), theologian The Very Rev. Prof. John McIntyre (1916 - 2005), actor Graham Crowden (1922 - 2010), psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1927-89), composers Thea Musgrave (b.1928) and Ronald Stevenson (1928 - 2015), physicist Peter Higgs (b.1929) and politician Sir Menzies Campbell (b.1941), several held by the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

She retired from Edinburgh College of Art in 1998. Crowe and her husband divide their time between a house in West Linton and a studio in Venice (Italy). She was awarded an OBE in 2004, and was elected to the Royal Scottish Academy (2005) and to the Royal Society of Edinburgh (2010).


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