Early Life and Academic Training

Fairlie D’Oyly Harmar was born in 1876 in the coastal town of Weymouth, located in Dorset, England. Desiring a professional career in the fine arts, she relocated to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art. During her tenure at the Slade, she received direct instruction from prominent painters Henry Tonks and Fred Brown. Under their strict academic guidance, Harmar mastered both oil painting and watercolor mediums, developing a technical focus on lighting, figures, and tonal values.

Themes, Style, and London Subjects

As a practicing artist, Harmar adopted a style heavily influenced by British Impressionism. She focused her creative efforts primarily on capturing landscapes, domestic interior genres, floral still lifes, and figurative portraits. While she traveled occasionally to gather subjects, she found the vast majority of her inspiration in and around London, particularly focusing on the urban environments, streets, and domestic spaces of Chelsea and the River Thames.

Her verified paintings, documented through exhibition histories and major auction catalogs, detail specific locations and themes. Her landscape and outdoor works include A Walk Along the Thames, The Thames at Battersea, London Street Scene, In a Somerset Village, Chibbet, Exmoor, Somerset (dated around 1928), Brittany Beach, Bateau au Croisic, Brittany (completed in 1941), View on the Seine, Paris, and Cattle Market at Dinan.

Her interior and figurative canvases include Hock Cup (an interior depicting a young girl pouring wine surrounded by bottles, decanters, and a bowl of lemons on a table), After a Game of Lawn Tennis (painted in 1916), Bowl of Flowers(painted around 1936), Still Life of Flowers in Jugs on Table, Lady Arranging Flowers, Breakfast in Bed, The New Hat, Morning Post, Through a Window in Cheyne Walk, Interior of Ramridge House, Figures Before a Tavern, Andover, and Portrait of a Young Woman. She also executed family portraits, including a half-length painting of her sister titled Phyllis Harmar.

Group Exhibitions and the Ezra Pound Review

Harmar maintained a highly active professional profile within the British gallery system. She began exhibiting her work with the progressive New English Art Club (NEAC) in 1906, an organization established as a modern alternative to the rigid traditions of the Royal Academy. Her consistent submissions led to her formal election as a full member of the NEAC in 1917. She continued to exhibit with the club until the year of her death in 1945. Additionally, she exhibited over 30 individual paintings at the annual summer exhibitions of the Royal Academy between the years 1929 and 1944. Her work was also displayed internationally, including in gallery showings in Paris.

Her contemporary reception included a notable review by the modernist poet and critic Ezra Pound. In 1918, while writing an art critique column under the pseudonym “B. H. Dias” for the publication The New Age, Pound evaluated one of her gallery pieces. Mistaking Harmar’s gender due to her signature, Pound noted that after observing the piece from different ranges across the gallery room, “Mr. F. Harmer [sic] has put good work into it”.

The Secret Marriage and Reluctance of Title

In 1932, while living in France, Harmar married Ernest Pomeroy, the 7th Viscount Harberton. The marriage introduced a unique family dynamic, as her new mother-in-law was Florence Wallace Pomeroy, the prominent Victorian dress reformer who had founded the Rational Dress Society in 1881.

Harmar vehemently insisted on keeping her marriage entirely private to preserve her independent status as a professional studio artist. When the British press discovered the union, newspaper reports recorded her explicit irritation regarding the leak. Harmar was quoted as stating: “Please do not call me Lady Harberton. I never want to use a title. I have always been known as Madame Harmar or as Fairlie Harmar.” She added, “I cannot imagine how our secret leaked out. The only person I told was a woman who looks after my house in France and a very close friend in England.” True to her declaration, she continued to paint and exhibit exclusively under her maiden name.

The 1937 Coronation and Public Collections

As a peeress by marriage, Harmar attended the 1937 coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Westminster Abbey. Bypassing strict royal protocols against bringing recording materials into the ceremony, she smuggled drawing paper and a sketchbook into the Abbey. She used these clandestine, eyewitness sketches to execute a finished, full-scale painting of the coronation. This specific artwork was deemed historically significant and was subsequently acquired by the British monarchy for the permanent Royal Collection.

Harmar died in 1945 at the age of 69. Today, her surviving works are preserved and represented across various public museum collections worldwide. These institutions include the Imperial War Museum, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, the Birmingham Museum, the Manchester City Galleries, Bradford Museums & Galleries, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Liverpool, the Southampton City Art Gallery, the National Gallery in Athens, and the Dunedin Public Art Museum in New Zealand.

Self portrait for the coronation of King George VI

1. Primary Biographical Registries & Museum Records

  • The Royal Collection Trust (RCT): Holds the active collection entry and provenance verification for Fairlie Harmar’s 1937 oil painting of the Coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Westminster Abbey.
  • Art UK Database: Publicly indexes her cataloged institutional works across British public collections, confirming acquisitions by the Imperial War Museum, Ashmolean Museum, Manchester City Galleries, and Birmingham Museums.
  • Contemporary Art Society (CAS) Artist Directory: Verifies her birth and death years (1876–1945), her full legal name (Lady Fairlie D’Oyly Harmar, Viscountess Harberton), and documents early authenticated pieces including After a Game of Lawn Tennis (1916) and Chibbet, Exmoor, Somerset (c. 1928).

2. Literary and Historical Media Archives

  • Pound, Ezra (Writing as B. H. Dias). “Art Notes.” The New Age, Vol. 22, No. 12 (1918), p. 236: The primary source documenting Pound’s critique of her artwork, where he famously records his visual analysis of her technique and introduces the spelling mistake “Mr. F. Harmer [sic].”
  • Modernist Journals Project (Brown University and University of Tulsa): Maintained biographical entry confirming her education under Henry Tonks and Fred Brown at the Slade School of Fine Art, alongside her formal election to the New English Art Club (NEAC) in 1917.
  • Historical Press Registries (March–August 1932): Syndicated British newspaper coverage documenting her secret cross-border marriage to Ernest Pomeroy in France and transcribing her direct quotes objecting to the public use of her noble title (“Please do not call me Lady Harberton…”).