The British artist whose paintings of China’s capital were so sought after, even Mao Zedong was a collector

British artist Katharine Jowett is little remembered today, but in the mid-20th century she was extremely popular for her oil paintings and woodcuts. But not in Britain. She would come to be known as one of only a few Western female artists who chose to live and work in Japan, Korea and northern China in the years between the two world wars.

Jowett’s informal cohort included Americans Helen Hyde, Lilian May Miller and Bertha Lum, along with Scottish artists Elizabeth Keith and Anna Hotchkis. Never to meet as a formal salon, the artists all shared an interest in shin-hanga, or the “new prints” movement in Japanese art, which had revitalised traditional woodblock printing techniques of the earlier Ukiyo-e school.

While some did know each other personally or had crossed paths at exhibitions, most of these artists only knew each other through comparisons of their work.

Hyde – born in 1868 in New York state, and who parlayed her training at art schools in California, Berlin and Paris with time in the atelier of the Japanese artist Kano Tomonobu – was the most established. She was also the oldest, and died in 1919 just as several others were first visiting the region.

Miller, born in Tokyo in 1895 to an American diplomatic family, was introduced to engraving and woodblock printing by Hyde in Tomonobu’s studio. Keith, born in 1887, had travelled from Scotland to Japan, where she studied shin-hanga techniques before sojourning in Beijing for a time.

Fellow Scot Hotchkis, born in 1885, went to China to visit her sister, working in a YWCA-funded girl’s school in Shenyang, northeast China, but stayed on after being offered an art-teaching post at Beijing’s Yenching University. She worked mostly in oil paints and occasionally printmaking and established her own studio in a secluded traditional hutong lane.