16 Facts About Elizabeth Blackadder

Elizabeth Blackadder was the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy of Arts.

Elizabeth Blackadder painted portraits and landscapes, but her later work contains mainly her cats and flowers rendered in great detail.

In 2012, Elizabeth Blackadder was selected to paint Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond's official Christmas card.

Elizabeth Blackadder was born and raised at 7 Weir Street, Falkirk, the third child of Thomas and Violet Isabella Elizabeth Blackadder.

Violet Blackadder ensured Elizabeth benefited from a series of promising educational opportunities and, determined to spare her daughter the struggles she had been through, convinced her own father to support Elizabeth's training as a domestic science teacher.

Elizabeth Blackadder spent a substantial part of her childhood alone, due in part to a keen appetite for reading.

Elizabeth Blackadder later remembered the pleasure she derived from her art classes in particular, but enjoying dissecting and drawing plants as part of her botanical studies; she spent the majority of her sixth year in the school's art room.

Elizabeth Blackadder arrived in Edinburgh in September 1949 to start on the newly approved Fine Art degree and graduated with first class honours in 1954.

Elizabeth Blackadder studied early Byzantine art while at university, and one of the most enduring influences on her work was her tutor and prolific painter William Gillies.

Elizabeth Blackadder spent the fourth and fifth years of her MA course concentrating on her imminent examinations; it was during this period that she met Scottish artist John Houston who was later to become her husband.

Elizabeth Blackadder graduated in 1954 with a first-class degree and was awarded both a Carnegie travelling scholarship by the Royal Scottish Academy and an Andrew Grant Postgraduate Scholarship by Edinburgh College of Art.

In 1954, Elizabeth Blackadder put the money from her Carnegie scholarship towards spending three months travelling through Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy, where she focused on classical and Byzantine art.

Elizabeth Blackadder began working at Glasgow Print Studio in 1985, after being invited to make prints there.

Elizabeth Blackadder worked with master printmakers from that time until around 2014, working predominantly to produce etchings and screenprints with some lithographs and woodcuts.

Elizabeth Blackadder was the first woman to be an academician of both the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Royal Scottish Academy; in 1982 she was appointed an OBE for her contribution to art she was promoted to a DBE in 2003.

Dame Elizabeth Blackadder died on 23 August 2021, aged 89.