Jill Young Obituary - Colin Maitland

Jill Young

Jill Young (née Innocent) was a farmer’s wife, a countrywoman through and through, and a painter of rare skill. In her studio directly above the flagstoned kitchen, in which frosted lambs, in the cold winters of those days, were revived in a low oven, stood a mahogany easel, with mahl stick, palette and brushes to hand for any free moment. Down the back staircase came the evocative and unmistakable smells of pure turpentine and linseed oil. On a marble ledge, its crack emblematic of decay, would rest a vase or jug arranged with fresh flowers of all the seasons, captured as they came and went. A ladybird might creep into the composition, a lily beetle or a Painted Lady.

Jill Innocent, as she then was, enrolled at Wimbledon College of Art in 1945 and studied under the principal, Gerald Cooper, by whom she was much influenced. This was succeeded by a course of teacher-training (1948-49) at London University, for an Advanced Teaching Diploma (ATD).

Cooper’s style was generally considered unfashionable in avant-garde circles and she was, as was her son also, proof against the allure of often facile Modernism but a brief (1951-54) ‘kitchen sink’ period, painting moribund farm vehicles and the like, is a nod to the vogue of the day.

However, for the majority of her painting career, she steadily produced flower still lifes in the manner of the 17th-century Dutch masters, whose timeless images, simultaneously glorifying the abundance of nature, while acknowledging the brevity of life and the vanity of material wealth, she emulated with patient and painstaking personal craft. Her work was sold mainly privately but she exhibited occasionally in various local galleries and at the Sladmore Gallery in London’s West End in the 1970s. 

On retirement in 1980, she and her husband moved to West Wales, where they already had strong connections. Strong too was her interest in the many Neolithic standing stones of Pembrokeshire, and she devoted three years to finding and comprehensively documenting these monoliths in diminutive (6 x 8 inch), atmospheric, often dramatic, panels. Some 53 of these were exhibited at Picton Castle in 2011 and the whole collection was bought by the National Library of Wales, at Aberystwyth, where they are now preserved, along with her extensive notes on location, dimensions and condition.

She died at her home near Cardigan on the Teifi estuary in 2012.

Pembrokeshire Standing Stones, Jill Young, was published in 2015 by Carreg Gwalch

By Colin Maitland - Jill’s Nephew