Margaret J. Hambling (born 23 October 1945) is a British artist. Though principally a painter, her best-known public works are the sculptures A Conversation with Oscar Wilde and A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft in London, and the 4-metre-high steel Scallop on Aldeburgh beach. All three works have attracted controversy.
Maggi Hambling was born in Sudbury, Suffolk to Barclays bank cashier and local politician Harry Smyth Leonard Hambling (1902–1998) and Marjorie (née Harris, 1907–1988). Her parents married in 1933. She had two siblings: a sister, Ann, who was 11 years older, and a brother, Roger, nine years older than Hambling. Her brother had wanted a younger brother and ignored the fact that his new sibling was female and taught her carpentry and "how to wring a chicken's neck." Hambling was close to her mother, who taught ballroom dancing and took Hambling along to be her partner. It was from her father that she inherited her artistic skills. She was not as close to him as she was to her mother but when her father retired at the age of 60, she gave him some oil paints and discovered that he had a knack for painting; he went on to have seven well-received solo shows, and exhibited twice at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition; his paintings were owned by George Melly, Delia Smith, and Paul Bailey, among others, and are held in public and private collections including in America and Australia.
Hambling first studied art under Yvonne Drewry at the Amberfield School in Nacton. She then studied at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing from 1960 under Cedric Morris and Lett Haines at Benton End, then at Ipswich School of Art (1962–64), Camberwell (1964–67), and finally the Slade School of Art (1967–69) at UCL, graduating in 1969.
Hambling is known for her intricate land and seascapes, including a celebrated series of North Sea paintings. Among her portraits, several works are held by the National Portrait Gallery, London.
In 1980, Hambling became the first artist in residence at the National Gallery, after which she produced a series of portraits of the comedian Max Wall. Wall responded to Hambling's request to paint him with a letter saying: "Re: painting little me, I am flattered indeed – what colour?" She has taught at Wimbledon School of Art.
Women feature prominently in her portrait series. Hambling was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery to paint Professor Dorothy Hodgkin in 1985. The portrait features Hodgkin at a desk with four hands, all engaged in different tasks. Her wider body of work is held in many public collections including the British Museum, Tate Collection, National Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Hambling is known for painting the dead, including portraits of her parents and Henrietta Moraes in their coffins, saying that she "found it rather therapeutic to go on painting them after death". George Melly was the subject of a series that documented his approach to death, and said she would go down in history as "Maggi 'coffin' Hambling". Some of her recent work is spurred through anger—for the destruction of the planet, about politics, for social issues. She has also said that "Making a work of art is making a work of love."
In 2013, she exhibited at Snape during the Aldeburgh Festival, and a solo exhibition was held at the Hermitage, St Petersburg.
Hambling is a patron of Paintings in Hospitals, a charity that provides art for health and social care in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Hambling's 1998 outdoor sculpture at Charing Cross in central London as a memorial to dramatist Oscar Wilde, the first public monument to him outside his native Ireland.
Derek Jarman first suggested a memorial in the 1980s and a committee chaired by Sir Jeremy Isaacs including actors Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen and the poet Seamus Heaney, raised the money and commissioned Hambling. Her design features Wilde rising from a polished green granite coffin holding a cigarette. The coffin is intended to serve as a public bench rather than the more conventional stone plinth, hence Hambling's name for the memorial A Conversation with Oscar Wilde, as visitors sit next to the writer's effigy. The work bears a quotation from Lady Windermere's Fan: "We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars."
Some critics were severe in their criticism of the work, but supporters said it was well-loved by the public. The chief art critic of The Independent wrote that ultimately the sculpture was not about Wilde or the viewing public, but a reflection of Hambling herself. The cigarette was repeatedly removed, "the most frequent act of vandalism/veneration to a public statue in London", and is now no longer replaced.
Scallop (2003) celebrates the composer Benjamin Britten and stands on the beach outside Aldeburgh, Suffolk, near Britten's homes and not far from Hambling's village. The four-metre-high (13 ft) cast stainless steel sculpture is in the form of the two fractured halves of a scallop shell, etched with the quotation from Britten's opera Peter Grimes: "I hear those voices that will not be drowned."
Hambling describes Scallop as a conversation with the sea: "An important part of my concept is that at the centre of the sculpture, where the sound of the waves and the winds are focused, a visitor may sit and contemplate the mysterious power of the sea."
Opponents claimed the sculpture ruined a previously unspoilt stretch of beach. A local petition against it attracted several hundred signatures, and it has been vandalised a number of times.
For this work, Hambling received the 2006 Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture.
Memorial to Mary Wollstonecraft
In May 2018, Hambling was chosen to create a statue commemorating Mary Wollstonecraft, the “foremother of feminism”. The Mary on the Green campaign has been working to erect a permanent memorial to the philosopher and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman since 2011. It chose Hambling for the sculpture unanimously. Hambling's design features a figure – described as an everywoman – emerging out of organic matter. It is inspired by Wollstonecraft's claim to be “the first of a new genus”. Wollstonecraft's famous quotation, “I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves”, appears on the plinth.