‘Welcome to England’s Most Misunderstood County’, reads an imitation road sign inside the entrance to Firstsite gallery. It’s part of ‘The Essex Way’ (2021), a monumental collage commissioned from local boy Michael Landy to mark the 10th anniversary of the Colchester gallery’s opening. With its discombobulating mix of illustrations of native birdlife and views of landmarks such as the Veolia landfill site at Rainham, Landy’s mural is designed, like the gallery’s current exhibition series, to challenge assumptions about the county now most commonly associated with Towie.

A fellow visitor swore she could smell hay coming off a painting of a sunlit cornfield

The series started in 2021 with a show about the legendary East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, founded in Dedham before the war by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. This was followed in 2022 by a retrospective of Denis Wirth-Miller, a former student of Morris’s and a mucker of Francis Bacon’s who made Wivenhoe his home. Now it’s the turn of another former student – not a famous one like Lucian Freud or Maggi Hambling, but a local girl you may never have heard of. I confess I hadn’t.

Born into an East Anglian farming family in 1893, the gifted Lucy Harwood had hoped to become a pianist before an operation gone wrong left her partly paralysed down one side. Thrown back on her other talent, art, she enrolled at the Slade, where she taught herself to paint with her left hand. It was the making of her. Obliged ‘to swing a loaded brush at the canvas’, in the words of the show’s curator Hugh St Clair, she would earn the admiration of Matthew Smith for her ‘flamboyant impasto’. But it wasn’t until middle age that she found her form.

Harwood was 45 when the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing opened on her doorstep; she enrolled at once and became a living testament to Morris’s belief that ‘an old maid on a camp stool is as potentially capable of achievements in the Arts as a lad of 17 who crashes into the firmament of fame’. She flowered under the teaching of Lett-Haines, who flirted with her, but was more influenced by Morris. Given that they both painted the produce of his famous garden, this was perhaps inevitable: the purple-bearded irises and orange lilies in one still life will have been grown, and bred, by Morris. The rampant chaos of ‘Flowers in the Garden at Benton End‘ (1950s) brilliantly captures the ‘bewildering, mind-stretching, eye-widening canvas of colour, textures and shapes’ of the place as remembered by Beth Chatto. But whereas in a painting Morris would have organised the chaos, Harwood relished it; it was as if she couldn’t contain her enthusiasm. What her still lifes lack in clarity they make up in energy: ‘Fish and Vase’ is so crammed with stuff it’s hard to know exactly what you’re looking at, but the mess of painted marks is a joy to behold. Landscape was her forte. Students were encouraged to get out into nature and learn from its flora and fauna first-hand, which suited Harwood down to the ground. Her diary makes plein air painting sound like an escapade: ‘When I was painting in Colonel Hitchcock’s celery field, my beloved easel,’ records one entry, ‘suddenly collapsed… I felt broken-hearted and grovelled on the ground to continue painting the picture… but it was no use.’ Is this why her works feel so vivid? A fellow visitor swore she could smell hay coming off a painting of a sunlit cornfield, and I seemed to smell it too. Growing up in East Bergholt and Dedham, Harwood was a Constable country girl, but I’ve never smelt hay around Constable’s ‘Cornfield’.

When the school moved to Benton End near Hadleigh in 1939 (after the teenage Freud reputedly burnt down the previous premises with a fag end) Harwood followed it, buying a house in nearby Upper Layham and appointing herself the school’s tea lady and chauffeur, despite her notoriously bad driving. ‘People maintained a respectful distance from her paint-spattered car,’ remembers Hambling.

During the holidays Harwood travelled. ‘Landscape with Blue Mountain’, with its heavy bank of bruised-looking cloud threatening to rain on the parade of trees below, is probably the Lake District; ‘Fishermen at St Malo’ recalls the Brittany landscapes of Christopher Wood. She was comfortable with her status as a lone traveller, ignoring the comments of ‘fools… tied up with husbands or wives or too many daughters’, and philosophical about her lack of fame. ‘Perhaps it’s fair of providence not to allow painters to be known and acclaimed,’ she confided to her diary, ‘even if then they merit success, until after they are dead. The delight which artists experience is so much greater than that obtained from other pursuits.’