About Elizabeth Blackadder
Dame Elizabeth Violet Blackadder, Mrs Houston, (24 September 1931 – 23 August 2021) was a Scottish painter and printmaker. She was the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy of Arts. In 1962, she began teaching at Edinburgh College of Art where she continued until her retirement in 1986. Blackadder worked in a variety of media such as oil paints, watercolour, drawing, and printmaking. In her still life paintings and drawings, she considered space between objects carefully. She also painted portraits and landscapes, but her later work contains mainly her cats and flowers rendered in great detail. Her work can be seen at the Tate Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has appeared on a series of Royal Mail stamps. In 2012, Blackadder was selected to paint Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond's official Christmas card. She 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.
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