The Fitzwilliam Museum - University of Cambridge

Pat Douthwaite
(1939–2002)
Self portrait
Black, blue, red and white chalk
and red bodycolour on paper
73.9 x 54.8 cm
Given by David Mackie on behalf
of the family of David and Nan
Mackie, in their memory.
PD.5-2006
Born in Glasgow in 1939, Pat Douthwaite
was largely a self-taught painter whose
work draws on the influence of earlier
twentieth-century expressionist and
primitive painters to express emotionally
powerful themes. Her subjects are
frequently violent and disturbing: as she
herself wrote, ‘I deal in anger, joy, rage and
happiness.’ As this self-portrait of 1980
proves, she spared not even herself from
her unforgiving artistic scrutiny. In
Glasgow, she studied mime and modern
dance with Margaret Morris, whose
husband, the Scottish colourist, J. D.
Fergusson, encouraged her to paint. In
1958 she went to live in Suffolk with a
group of painters, including other Scots
expatriates, Robert Colquhoun, Robert
Macbryde and William Crozier, as well as
the artist Paul Hogarth, whom she married
in 1960. Over the subsequent thirty years,
she travelled widely, to North Africa, India,
Peru, Venezuela, Europe, U.S.A., Kashmir,
Nepal, Pakistan, Ecuador, and Majorca,
where she lived on a semi-permanent
basis from 1969 and became part of the
circle of the writer and poet Robert Graves.
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Major Acquisitions