Isabel Codrington

Isabel Codrington Pyke Nott was born at Bydown, Swimbridge, in Devon, the daughter of the local squire. Her parents were artistic; her mother wrote and painted and her father was an amateur playwright. In 1883 her family moved to London and two years later Isabel and her elder sister, Evelyn Eunice, were sent to the Hastings and St Leonard's Schools of Art, where their drawing talents were nurtured. This was followed by a year at St. John's Wood School of Art, in preparation for the Royal Academy Schools, which Isabel entered in 1889, at the age of fifteen. Codrington won two medals at the school for her work and began to exhibit. Around this time, Codrington met the ambitious young art critic, Paul George Konody (1872-1933), editor of The Artist, and later a regular reviewer for The Observer and Daily Mail. They were married on the 27th October 1901 and had two daughters. Codrington continued to paint miniatures and imaginative watercolours, for which she won a medal at the Exposition Internationale d'Arte in Barcelona in 1907. The Konodys had a wide circle of friends such as the poet Ezra Pound, the illustrator Dudley Hardy, the portrait-painter Philip Alexius de Lásló and the artist-traveller Mortimer Menpes. Codrington and Konody divorced in 1912 and the following year she married Gustavus Mayer, a director in the London art dealership, P & D Colnaghi. Her success escalated when she secured a commission to paint the Cantine Franco-Britannique, Vitry-le-Franois, 1919 and simultaneously began to exhibit at the Royal Academy. Throughout the 1920s she showed regularly at the Academy and after 1923, at the Paris Salon. She had two solo shows at the Knoedler Galleries in Paris and the Fine Art Society in London in 1926 and 1927. She was an honorary member of the Campden Hill Club, a society established by former Academy students in memory of the painter Byam.