This site profiles the work of the painter Anne Bruce, who was married to the Stained glass artist Patrick Reyntiens for 52 years, and who painted all her life, having developed the ambition to be “a artist” at the age of 5 years.

Anne Bruce was the eldest daughter of the distinguished Brigadier, Ian Bruce, in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, (an army Company now disbanded) and the eldest daughter of Rowland Feilding, who wrote a definitive account of the first World War in the published letters he wrote to his wife and family from the trenches (War Letters to a Wife).

She was taught to paint, first of all at the Slade after the war by Vladimir Polunin, learning the art of stage set painting in the style made so famous by the Diaghilev ballet, including painting lessons from Tonks and other British greats of the  late 19th and early 20th century. She then went on to study at Edinburgh College of Art under (Sir) Robin Philipson and others, where she met Patrick Reyntiens.

After she left to become  his wife, she continued to paint and won several awards for her painting in the early 1960s. Together with him, she setup and ran the seminal and ground-breaking Arts Educational Trust, Burleighfield House, which pattern of combining residential art courses, good dining , exhibitions and workshops, has been a pioneering force in the Arts Centres of today.

Throughout all this time she continued to paint, and was exhibiting up until her death in 2006. The images here represent the work that she made during her last 20 years when she and Patrick were living in Somerset after Burleighfield closed in 1986. The works are all to degree symbolic, the subjects accessed through her everyday experience of her life. The titles of the work will reveal the themes.