Victoria Crowe was born in Kingston-on-Thames on 8 May 1945 and educated at Ursuline Convent Grammar School, London. She studied at Kingston College of Art from 1961-5, before undertaking further study at the Royal College of Art in London from 1965-68. On the strength of her postgraduate exhibition, she was invited to teach at Edinburgh College of Art by Robin Philipson, Head of Drawing and Painting. She worked at ECA for the next thirty years as a part-time lecturer in Drawing and Painting, while also developing her own artistic practice. She and her husband Michael Walton settled at Kittleyknowe near Carlops in the Pentland Hills, Scotland, where they befriended the shepherdess Jenny Armstrong. In 1973 she had a son and in 1976 a daughter. Her son passed away in 1995. They set up a trust in his name to raise awareness and funds to tackle oral cancers in young people.
Work
She began painting formal portraits in the early 1980s. She has produced many individual portraits, including RD Laing, Kathleen Raine, Tam Dalyell, and Peter Higgs. Her work includes the series A Shepherd's Life, painted between 1970 and 1985 and first shown at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh in 2000, which portrays the life of Jenny Armstrong, an elderly shepherd from the Scottish Borders who was Crowe's neighbour at Kittleyknowe. One of the works in the series, Two Views, was converted into a tapestry by Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh, commissioned by Richard Scott, 10th Duke of Buccleuch. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1983 at the Thackeray Gallery, London, where she would continue to exhibit regularly until 2007. Between 1970-85, Crowe undertook study trips to Russia, Denmark and Finland. She visited Italy in the early 1990s, which added the influence of Italian Renaissance art to her works, leading to a new phase of increased confidence and achievement. However, in 1994 her art was forced to respond to her son's diagnosis with cancer and then to his death in 1995, which resulted in a series of works expressing her grief, through repeated motifs such as the moon and flowers. Her works in the 21st century included wintry landscapes with skeletal hazel trees which Duncan Macmillan called "numinous pictures; they are spiritual landscapes". In 2004 Crowe was appointed Senior Visiting Scholar at St Catherine's College, University of Cambridge. The work she produced during this period was shown at the exhibition Plant Memory at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh. In 2017 Crowe designed The Leathersellers' Tapestry for the Dining Hall of the Leathersellers' Building in London. The forty metre-long tapestry was woven at Dovecot Tapestry Studios in Edinburgh.
