Kathleen Temple-Bird
(Ipswich 1879 - 1962 Addlestone)

The Thames as Blackfriars Bridge, c.1904

watercolour on cartridge paper

21.5 x 19 cm.
(framed 34 x 32 cm.)
in a period frame

Kathleen Emily Temple, was born at Ipswich, as the daughter of Thomas Temple; a draper of 12 Strait Bargate, Boston, Lincolnshire, and his Ipswich-born wife Emily Ann nee Bird, who married at Ipswich in 1878. Her father then took a position as a draper's manager at Southampton where Kathleen was sent to school.

Later she then studied at the Slade School under Henry Tonks and Alfred Rich and also studied in Florence. At Kensington, London in 1911, she married Frank Frederick Bird, an insurance company manager, also from Ipswich, like her mother, and possibly a relative.

They moved to Canada where Kathleen was head of art at Havergal College, Toronto 1911-1913 but then returned to England before the Great War.

She became a member of the Ipswich Fine Art Club from 1902-1911 where she exhibited regularly, while also exhibiting widely (as listed below) elsewhere.   She seems to have had a lull in her exhibiting until 1927, when her 72 year old husband died at Fulham, only resuming her exhibiting in 1930, as Kathleen Temple-Bird.

At the outbreak of the Second World War she moved from Chelsea to live at 3 The Warren, St. Ives, Cornwall. By 1949 she had returned to London.  She died in Surrey in 1962, aged 82.

Biography courtesy of Cornwall Artists Index - https://cornwallartists.org/cornwall-artists/kathleen-temple-bird