Education
She was educated at Saint Anne"s Diocesan College at Hilton, KwaZulu-Natal. She was awarded a Royal College scholarship in 1925 and studied bronze casting at an engineering firm in London.
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Mary Stainbank
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Stainbank born in 1899 on the farm Coedmore in Bellair, Durban. She trained at the Durban School of Art from 1916 to 1921 under John Adams and Alfred Martin, and from 1922-1924 at the Royal College of Art, London, under William Rothenstein and Frederick John Wilcoxson. On her return to South Africa in 1926 she established a sculpture studio – Ezayo - on the Coedmore estate where, between 1926 and 1940, she produced her finest work. she was influenced by Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein.
Though credited with introducing a modern school of sculpture to South Africa during her early career, she was often criticized for her use of avant-garde images.
Her choice of African subject matter and her use of sharp, angular forms and distortion of limbs to depict her subjects shocked the largely conservative viewers of the time, who were used to the romantic-realist style of South African artists. As a result, her sculptures did not appeal to the buying public of the day.
Many of her freestanding sculptures were shown during the 1930s at exhibitions organized by the Natal Society of Artists. After service in a military drawing office during World World War II she was appointed as head of the sculpture department at the Durban School of Art, where she lectured until 1957.
Though her work did not sell, she continued to create sculptures, which were housed in her studio at Coedmore.
In the 1980s, a large body of these works went on display at the Old Parliament Buildings in Pietermartzburg. This collection was subsequently transferred to the Voortrekker/Msunduzi Museum in Pietermaritzburg. With the restructuring of that museum, the work was returned to the Stainbank family.
The Stainbank collection is generally regarded as the largest body of work by a single artist in South Africa to have remained intact.
The collection is housed at the at Coedmore, the original Stainbank family estate, where the family settled in the 1880s.
