Kate Elizabeth Bunce

Kate Bunce painted in the late Pre-Raphaelite style of Birmingham: medieval maidens, knights and saints drawn with strong outlines and filled with clear colour and rich decorative detail. Her women, with long hair and flowing gowns, owe much to Rossetti and Burne-Jones.

Born in Birmingham in 1856, she studied at the Birmingham School of Art in the 1880s and belonged to the city’s Arts and Crafts movement. She exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1887 and in London, Manchester and Liverpool, and was elected an associate of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists in 1888. Much of her work was for churches: she painted a reredos for St Alban’s in Bordesley, with metalwork by her sister Myra. She lived all her life in Edgbaston and died in 1927.

Melody, also called Musica, painted around 1895, is her best-known picture.