Mercy Hunter HRUA PPRUA ARCA MBE was a Northern Irish artist, calligrapher and teacher.
21 Facts About Mercy Hunter
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Mercy Hunter was born in Belfast on 22 January 1910, one of five children of William Hunter, a Presbyterian minister, and his Russian-born wife Alice Beyer.
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Mercy Hunter's parents served as missionaries in China, with Hunter travelling to Manchuria at the age of four.
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Mercy Hunter spent her childhood there, leaving to attend secondary school in Toronto, Canada, and at Belfast Royal Academy.
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Mercy Hunter went on to attend Belfast College of Art from 1927 to 1929, and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London from 1930 to 1933 where she studied under the calligrapher Edward Johnston.
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Mercy Hunter returned to Belfast in 1937, and married MacCann the following year.
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Mercy Hunter became the head of art at Victoria College, Belfast in 1947, where she remained until her retirement in 1970.
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Mercy Hunter began a life-long relationship with the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1944 when she participated in their annual exhibition for the first time, by showing three portraits.
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Mercy Hunter was to exhibit with their successor organisation, the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts throughout her life, and missed only three annual exhibitions in the thirty years between 1950 and 1980.
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Mercy Hunter was bestowed with an MBE in 1970 for her services to art and education.
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Mercy Hunter is best known for her calligraphy, illuminated addresses, and a small number of illustrated books, including her husband's 1942 book Sparrows Round my Brow.
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Mercy Hunter created costume designs for the local theatres and for Patricia Mulholland's Irish ballet company.
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Mercy Hunter designed all the costumes for the Grand Opera Society of Northern Ireland's 1958 production of Carmen, when it was said that she had already created 200 designs for production up until this date.
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In 1965 Mercy Hunter joined twelve Ulster artists including Alice Berger Hammerschlag, Basil Blackshaw, Colin Middleton, Romeo Toogood, and Olive Henry in an exhibition of diverse landscape paintings at the Arts Council Of Northern Ireland Gallery.
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Mercy Hunter donated a picture to an exhibition to raise funds for victims of civil disturbances in Belfast in the autumn of 1969.
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Mercy Hunter received an honorary Master's degree from Queen's University Belfast in 1975 at the same time as her long-term collaborator Patricia Mulholland.
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Mercy Hunter's work was among 49 works from various artists where she displayed alongside Raymond Piper, Carolyn Mulholland, Joe McWilliams, TP Flanagan, Tom Carr and many others.
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Mercy Hunter was amongst the founding members, and a past president of the Ulster Society of Women Artists, and exhibited frequently with the Ulster Watercolour Society.
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Mercy Hunter showed a number of works including Main Gate: the Citadel Gozo and Church at Jordina Halsa Gozo, with Joy Clements, George C Morrison, Wilfred J Haughton, Robin McCully and Tom Kerr at the Malone Gallery, Belfast in 1982.
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Mercy Hunter died on 20 July 1989, in hospital in Dungannon.
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Mercy Hunter's works are held by many public and private collections including the Ulster Museum, Down County Museum and Grand Opera House, Belfast.