My great-aunt Diana Cumming, who has died aged 94, was a painter whose diverse work across a 70-year career can be found in collections including those of the Contemporary Arts Society, the Arts Council and Britten Pears Arts.
As a student at the Slade School of Art in London from 1950 until 1954, she won several scholarships including the prix de Rome in 1954. Her work was admired by the school’s principal William Coldstream and Lucian Freud, a visiting tutor, among others. The Slade’s summer composition competition, which required students to produce a large-scale history painting, allowed Diana to diverge from the standard regime of life painting and work instead from her fertile imagination. The result, Genesis: A Creation (1953), was one of a series that exhibit her mystical, visionary aesthetic.
