Maria Webb was probably a student at the RDS Schools. She started exhibiting at the RHA in 1873, and won several prizes at the Amateur Artists’ Society in 1877. She went to Paris in 1880, becoming a pupil of Robert-Fleury at the Academie Julian. She made regular summer visits to Brittany (c.1881-1885) initially to Pont-Aven, then becoming one of the early foreign members of the artist colony at Concarneau. There she stayed at the Hotel des Voyageurs.
She became a close friend of Finnish artis
t Maria Wilk. She is thought to have met her future husband at Concarneau and they were to later become central figures in the artists’ colony at St. Ives, Cornwall. Their house provided studios for friends and visiting artists. Maria exhibited a large number of her Breton paintings, of fishermen and peasant women, of street, market and woodland scenes, at venues in Dublin, London and Liverpool (1881-87) and significantly at the Paris Salon (1883-84). Today her works are extremely rare.
Maria Webb's work was included in 'The French Connection' exhibition (2010).
Webb also featured in 'Irish Women Artists: 1870-1970' (2014). Please click here to view the catalogue.
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