The death, in 2022, of renowned artist Pauline Bewick left an enormous void in the life of her daughter Poppy Melia. The two were so close that they lived beside each other in Co Kerry.
Recently, while sorting through her mother’s archive in preparation for its delivery to the National Gallery, Melia came across a series of commercial artwork her mother had undertaken for Brown Thomas.
“She had a box of work like this, mostly from the 1950s,” explains Melia, who is also an artist. “I rang her publisher to find out more about them because I hadn’t known about the Brown Thomas connection. He said that at the time she took as many commissions like that as she could, to make money.”
Among the commercial commissions Melia had been aware of was one to paint lions and unicorns on flags for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation parade, in 1953. At the time her mother also had a steady line of commissions painting false eyeballs for people who had lost an eye.
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“She’d sit them down in front of her and look at their real eye and paint the artificial one. She once got an awful fright because she met someone on the street who’s eye she had painted but wihch had faded terribly,” she says, a result of a flaw in the paint.
At the time the family was living in Heytesbury Lane in Dublin, where Melia, who was born in 1966, spent the early years of her childhood.
“While I didn’t know about the advertising connection, I knew that she loved Brown Thomas,” she says of her late mum. “Over the years, she certainly bought a lot of clothes there. She never had a clue about money but we would go in together and she’d see something she liked and ask, ‘Can I afford that?’”
Bewick inherited her sense of style and love of fashion from her own mother, says Melia.
“My grandmother always told us she wore drainpipes long before everyone else. She was way ahead of the fashion. Both she and my mother were trend setters,” she recalls.
The family went on to relocate to Kerry, and indeed famously moved to Polynesia for a year, soon after Melia left art college. Her grandmother had always described it to them as the ideal society and, while it wasn’t quite that, the year itself was certainly idyllic for the family – and fun.
One of her clearest memories was of cars that travelled carrying their petrol in big plastic tanks with them, as their drivers waved cigarettes around expansively. The family travelled far and wide from their Kerry base, including summers in Tuscany.
The connection with Brown Thomas continued throughout. “I remember my dad, a psychiatrist whom everyone loved, used to sit us down once a year and do up a budget for our clothes,” says Melia. “He’d ask us what we needed and if it was something big, like a coat, we’d be taken off to Brown Thomas to get it. Not all our clothes were bought there but the important ones were.”
