Artist Database

Jane Tully Heath trained at the Birmingham College of Arts and Crafts and the Royal College of Art, London, as did her husband, Jack, before immigrating to South Africa in 1946. Owing to their training, particularly in London, both artists forged their styles in the wider circle of the great British Modernists, Sir Stanley Spencer and Paul and John Nash. While her art remained ever-rooted in this British, vanguard tradition, the work she later produced in South Africa was based on careful observation and meticulous design, concerned more with decorative, ‘pictorial poetry’ than theory for theory’s sake.

An influential teacher at the Pietermaritzburg Technical College, and Fine Art lecturer at the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of Natal from the early 1950s, Heath produced a large body of work in a wide range of media and, while never seeking the spotlight, exhibited successfully around the country. Her plein-air watercolour studies reveal an outrageous comfort in the medium and a seemingly effortless if decisive use of line.