Mary Orde Shields, who signed her work M.O.S. when she signed it at all, was born and brought up near the border of Devon and Dorset. She went to London to study at Camberwell School of Art just after World War II. In that overcrowded hothouse of talent she came to the notice of two outstanding painters, Claude Rogers and William Coldstream (although the Government examiners - such was the system then - were not so enthusiastic). When Coldstream left to become Slade Professor of Fine Art in the University of London, he suggested that Mary send him some drawings by way of an entrance exam: this she did - one of them is in this exhibition - and as a result she was accepted as a Diploma student. At the Slade she painted nudes, still lifes, and scenes from her imagination, the latter evoking figures in Dorset landscapes. For young artists (as we all thought ourselves to be) the Slade was a more broadly based hothouse than Camberwell had been, and competition was fierce.

After graduation the struggle to be a real artist began. Shields persisted, in spite of some interruptions for marriage, children and teaching, and extended her range with unflinching perseverance. She painted landscapes near the Suffolk coast and in the West Country, as well as models posing in her studio in Barnes, London; she painted plants and trees in her back garden, and a richly patterned carpet which appeared mysteriously as an object for study. By the 1980s she was working a lot in soft pastels which - on exact analogy with Degas - acted as a liberating factor for the division of colours, leading to wonderful modulations when her crayons explored, for example, the mysterious and sensual translucency of human flesh.  (Her female nudes continued in oil paint into the 1990's). In the countryside there were two motifs which came to dominate her work: the spacious, rolling hills that link Dorset and Devon in the Axe and Blackwater valleys, with their patterns of fields which so helpfully (but sometimes wth deceptive effect) describe the forms of the land; and the close-up character of individual trees and tree-trunks, rendered with an increasing sensuousness that evokes a strange equivalence to human beings. A kind of sub-text to this rapport with landscape occasionally invokes the mysterious light of dusk, as in Barleyfield, Hawkchurch; or even night-time,