Katharine Maltwood’s legacy illuminated at Legacy Downtown

Longtime residents of Victoria will remember the Maltwood Art Museum on the UVic campus, but may not know much about its namesake, English sculptor Katharine Maltwood and her husband John. In 1964 they left their Tudor-style home in Royal Oak (now the Fireside Grill restaurant) to the university—along with a collection of English furniture, Chinese paintings, Middle Eastern textiles and artifacts collected on their world travels, and an endowment. In the 1970s, the Maltwood museum was unique in North America in its initial Arts and Crafts collecting mandate, with nearly all of the 200 works acquired in the following decade contributing to this focus of the permanent collection.

This October, two exhibitions open at the Legacy Art Gallery Downtown—Magna Mater: Katharine Maltwood and the Arts and Crafts (curated by Caroline Riedel, Legacy Art Galleries) and its companion, Beauty for All: The Arts and Crafts in Europe and North America (curated by Holly Cecil, art history and visual studies). These exhibits provide an opportunity for visitors to view a significant part of our Arts and Crafts collection and learn about the Legacy Art Galleries’ beginning.

Katharine Maltwood led a remarkable life. One of her earliest accomplishments was a commissioned sculpture for Elbert and Alice Hubbard of the Roycroft Workshops in New York. The Hubbards were leading figures of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, and the fact that they selected Maltwood’s work was significant. While the Arts and Crafts movement’s ideals of simplicity and beauty persisted in her work and collecting interests, Maltwood’s complex artistic vision and worldview grew to include interests in astrology, the occult, Eastern religions and theosophy. She claimed to have discovered the Glastonbury Zodiac, a giant earthwork in Somerset that linked the landscape to the legends of King Arthur. She published several books on her theories an even brought a cutting from the original Glastonbury Thorn Tree to Canada, where it now grows outside the University Centre.

Maltwood is also the subject of novel by Lily Adams Beck, and a play, Temple of the Stars, by former UVic writing professor Marilyn Bowering. More recently, her papers have been digitized as part of a digital fieldwork project by University of Washington graduate student Robbyn Gordon Lanning. The Legacy Maltwood Gallery also remains on campus as a space for collaborative interdisciplinary projects.