Take 5

Edith Ray

_{Image: Edith Ray (1905–1989), Dinan, Brittany, c. 20^th century, wood engraving, ink on paper, 10.2 x 15.3 cm (image). Flinders University Museum of Art, 263. Gift of Miss M. E. Wharmby. © the estate of the artist.}

Edith Ray was a British painter, printmaker and teacher whose work reveals a measured engagement with the principles of modernism as they evolved in mid-20th-century Britain. FUMA holds 36 of her works, gifted by Miss M. E. Wharmby, a long-standing donor who made several significant contributions to the collection between 1971 and 1991.

Born in Hobart to an English father and Scottish mother, Wharmby had a passion for learning. After graduating from the University of Tasmania in 1919, she travelled to England in 1924 and returned regularly between 1953 and 1963. During the early 1960s she was introduced to the art world by her London friend, Edith Ray, whose work inspired her to begin collecting.

_{Image: Edith Ray (1905–1989), Fish net houses, Hastings, c. 20^th century, wood engraving, ink on paper, 14.2 x 20.3 cm (image). Flinders University Museum of Art, 271. Gift of Miss M. E. Wharmby. © the estate of the artist.}

Based in Kent, Ray trained in the 1920s at Portsmouth College of Art and later with Sussex painter Philip William Cole. Over the following decades she exhibited widely in the UK and Europe, including at the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, the Royal Scottish Academy and the Paris Salon, and in 1955 was elected to the Society of Women Artists in Britain.

Ray worked primarily in watercolour, oil, and wood engraving. Her subjects were drawn from her travels in Britain and Europe—harbours, villages, and rural landscapes in East Sussex, Pembrokeshire, Provence, and the Balearic Islands. Her paintings are characterised by tonal restraint, formal balance, and keen observance of light and structure. Her engravings explore similar motifs through finely controlled compositions, aligning her practice with the mid-20th-century revival of wood engraving in Britain.

_{Image: Edith Ray (1905–1989), Haverford West – Pembrokeshire, c. 20th century, wood engraving, ink on paper, 10.3 x 7.7 cm (image). Flinders University Museum of Art, 653.010. Gift of Miss M. E. Wharmby. © the estate of the artist.}

_{Image: Edith Ray (1905–1989), Epping Forest, c. 20^th century, wood engraving, ink on paper, 17.8 x 12.6 cm (image). Collection of Flinders University Museum of Art, 595. Gift of Miss M. E. Wharmby. © the estate of the artist.}

The prints held in the FUMA collection exemplify Ray’s engagement with modernist strategies: bold graphic contrasts, compositional drama, and an expressive handling of line and form. Rather than reproducing her subjects with naturalistic detail, these works privilege mood and spatial tension, resonating with the formal and conceptual concerns of early European modernism, particularly Expressionism and the modernist print revival.

Though working outside avant-garde circles, Ray’s art aligns with a broader, regionally rooted strand of British modernism. Her work distils everyday landscapes into compositions that are quietly modern—structured, atmospheric, and deftly attuned to place.

_{Image: Edith Ray (1905–1989), Sussex Barn, 20^th century, wood engraving, ink on paper, 9.3 x 11.9 cm (image). Flinders University Museum of Art, 653.002. Gift of Miss M. E. Wharmby. © the estate of the artist.}