COATS, Alice Margaret

Alice Coats (1905-1978) was a British watercolour painter, engraver, woodcut artist, and author. She was a member of the Central Club of Wood-Engravers in Colour. Coats was educated at Edgbaston High School before studying at the Birmingham Central School of Art between 1922 and 1928, at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and in Paris during the 1930s at Andre Lhote’s school. Coats produced book illustrations, flower paintings on silk, colour woodcuts, and landscape paintings in both oil and watercolours. Between 1933 and 1939 she was an organising secretary of the ‘Birmingham Group’ of artists and during World War II from 1940 to 1945 served in the Land Army helping to cultivate land on which Birmingham University housing was later built. In the 1950s, her artistic career was cut short by arthritis and since then she concentrated on her writings and the study of horticultural history.