The Conversation

Born in Maidenhead, Peto studied at Maidenhead School of Art and at the London School of Art. She was an illustrator and painter, working in both black and white and in colour. She wrote and illustrated books for children, and contributed illustrations to a number of magazines, including a satirical illustrated diary, which appeared weekly in the Sketch from 1915 to 1926. She also designed pottery, textiles, posters and costumes; and in the 1920s and early 30s, as The Times reports, it was the “in” thing to wear a Gladys Peto dress. She was married to Colonel Cuthbert Lindsay Emmerson and lived in Malta, Cyprus and Egypt, 1924-8 and eventually moving to Northern Ireland in 1939, where she had a number of exhibitions of watercolours of Irish landscapes. Alhough hampered by a stroke, which forced her to use her left hand, she continued to draw the flowers she cultivated for sale. She died in 1977 at the age of eighty-six.