British artist Ruth Selby-Bigge was born Rachel (Ruth) Humphries, the daughter of a founder of the Lund Humphries publishing company. She became a promising student at the Slade School of Art in London and was awarded four major prizes, including first prize for the Slade School’s Summer Composition Competition in 1912-13 for her large painting, A Group of Figures Standing in a Landscape (UCL Art Collection). A talented and beautiful young woman, she was much admired by fellow students Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth; mixed in Bloomsbury circles; and was a close friend of fellow Slade student, Dora Carrington.

In 1914, Ruth Humphries married another Slade student, John Selby-Bigge before he left to serve in the First World War. By the 1920s, she had little time to paint as she was immersed in looking after their three daughters, their first-born daughter having died in 1919.

The Selby-Bigge family moved to Austria in the mid 1930s, but relocated to rural France in 1937, settling into an old manor house not far from Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas’s home in Bilignin. Stein and Toklas became became their good friends, and Alice continued to correspond occasionally with Ruth into the 1950s.

With war imminent, the family left France for Lisbon where John Selby-Bigge became involved with his future second wife. Ruth Selby-Bigge immediately returned to England with their daughters in 1941 and their divorce was finalised in 1944.

By the end of the 1940s, Ruth Selby-Bigge was living in a converted barn on the Selby-Bigge estate and bringing up her two grandsons. She began to paint again for the first time after their time in France, but did not exhibit, although in the early 1950s some small paintings were shown in the gallery of a London department store. Her later paintings harked back to the Surrealist interests she had shared with her husband and that had developed through her friendships with Wadsworth, Nash, and Hillier: a gentle, lyrical form of Surrealism displaying her interest in the natural world. Her still-life subjects, usually of closely observed plants and vegetables were presented large-scale in the foreground with distant landscapes or beaches beyond. Others featured seashells and exotic fragments of coral and quartz.

England & Co held Ruth Selby-Bigge’s first formal gallery exhibition in December 2025, where her works were presented for the first time alongside those of her former husband husband in the exhibition John and Ruth Selby-Bigge: From the Slade to Surrealism.

• England & Co represent Ruth Selby-Bigge’s estate and are currently further researching her life and career and would be interested to receive any information about her life and and artworks as much of her archive has been lost.