One of the pleasures of visiting Greenwich yesterday was meeting Pieter van der Merwe, a former, long-standing curator at the National Maritime Museum, who turned out to be the brother-in-law of Ann Hartree, a person of considerable influence in the craft revival in the late 1970s through the establishment of the Prescote Gallery in a barn on Anne Crossman’s family farm west of Banbury. She held the first exhibition of Romilly’s work in maybe 1982, but closed the gallery in 1985 and moved to Edinburgh. We lost touch with her. It turned out that Pieter had written an obituary of her for the Independent which wasn’t published and I am publishing it now in her memory, together with a photograph of her in her youth:-

Ann  Hartree was a key figure in the British crafts scene of the late 1970s, when she created the Prescote Gallery in Oxfordshire and made it a nationally significant showcase for ‘designer-makers’ in furniture, textiles, bookbinding, jewellery, ceramics and glass, and toy-making, with painters and sculptors also represented. Any list would be invidious –and long– but includes names such as Fred Baier, John Makepeace, Anne Sutton, Terry Frost, Richard Batterham, Steven Newell and David Linley: the last two, and others, had their first solo exhibitions there.

Gallery impresario, however, was a late departure for someone who started as a talented and trained musician, an area to which Hartree later returned as an active promoter in Edinburgh.  She was born in 1933, elder of two children of Arthur Eddy, an accountant, and his Scottish first wife, Nancy Hamilton. With her younger brother John (later permanently hospitalized as a severe epileptic),  Ann stayed with their father after that marriage broke down and, starting in 1941, gained four more half-siblings by his second to May Lindsay. By then, partly owing to WWII, she largely lived – holidays included – at the boarding school in Seaford run by her two paternal aunts. One of them, Enid, was musical (as was Ann’s mother) and a friend of Dame Myra Hess, who left her a Steinway grand piano later passed on to Ann, but it was an unsatisfactory childhood and made her a challenging as well as driven personality. In 1951 she joined the Royal College of Music to study piano and viola, and from 1954 began teaching music at Gresham’s, Holt, in Norfolk – a boys’ boarding school where she rapidly became an inspiring acting head of the subject, and stayed in lifelong touch with some of her pupils. She regretted leaving after her marriage in September 1956 to Richard Hartree – a good amateur French-horn player – whose career in industry took them to south Wales, where their elder daughter was born in 1958. A son and second daughter followed after the next work move in 1959 to live at Cropredy, near Banbury. There they met the politician Richard Crossman and his wife, with children of similar ages, and from 1965 Ann resumed part-time music teaching and played first viola in the Warwickshire Symphony Orchestra. Friends gained at this time included its conductor Guy Wolfenden, the painter Terry Frost and family, and John Makepeace, then making furniture for Prescote Manor, Anne Crossman’s inherited 16th-century family farm.  From 1967 to 1970 the Hartrees were in Montreal, before returning to Oxfordshire where Ann’s fundraising enabled conservation of medieval murals in St John’s church, Hornton, and she began collecting work by craftspeople exhibiting at the Oxford Gallery under Joan Crossley-Holland. By the time Dick Crossman died in April 1974 (his son Patrick following by suicide in 1975) the Hartree marriage was also under strain. The two Ann(e)s then joined forces, with Mrs Crossman using the publishing royalties from her husband’s political diaries to convert farm outbuildings as the Prescote Gallery. She ran its buttery, serving up to 300 people a day, while Ann Hartree fitted out and directed the  gallery itself, including monthly changes of exhibition, with a stable of talent of eventually over 125 designer-makers and artists, all of whom went on to further success. Lord Donaldson, then Minister of the Arts, opened it in May 1977 and from 1982 there were also annual Prescote shows at the Warwick Arts Trust in London and others more occasional at the Bluecoat in Liverpool and the Edinburgh Festival. The project coincided with increased arts funding under the Labour government and the early years of the Crafts Council (est. 1971), but this did not have its own gallery until 1991, making Prescote a leader in the field during its seven years of existence.

It closed in 1985 when the Hartrees divorced and Ann moved to Edinburgh for family reasons, but for a time continued mounting shows there under the Prescote banner. Her later years were again more occupied in promoting music, both personally and as a director of the Hebrides Ensemble (1993–2001). Her two successive flats in the New Town became frequent rehearsal spaces for musician friends, with small orchestras sometimes squeezed in amid her ecletic mix of Prescote furniture, art and design, home clutter and the hard-worked grand piano. For thirty years she presided as both generously hospitable supporter of those who shared her enthusiasms and a grand-matriachal agent provocateur, much loved but often contrarily infuriating. When cancer recurred after successful early treatment, her decision that further cure was worse than the disease was typically resolute, and she insisted that only immediate family know of or attend her funeral. Others from all aspects of her life, and as far as Italy and Hong Kong, defied her self-effacing perversity at a crowded memorial concert in Edinburgh on 14 April 2018. ‘All stuff and nonsense!’ would have been her familiar verdict, while also secretly enjoying favourite pieces by Grieg, Schubert and Brahms, played by talented professional friends – including on the Steinway, which she had made a final gift of to one of them.

Ann Hartree (née Hamilton-Eddy), musician and crafts gallerist; b. London, 8 April 1933, d. Edinburgh, 28 October 2017; m. Richard Hartree [1931–2020], 1 September 1956 (div. 1985); he and their children (two d. one s.) survived her.

Pieter van der Merwe