To round off May’s Handwriting theme, Tilly Heydon reveals some insights into the collections (and handwriting) of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham.
When abstract painter Wilhelmina Barns-Graham died in January 2004 at the age of 91, she left behind an archive of over 200 boxes. Much of the contents is what you would expect from an artist: exhibition catalogues and correspondence, diaries, notes made in her studio, photographs of the artist at work, and newspaper cuttings. However, seemingly random pieces of paper also revealed another of Barns-Graham’s skills.
From Lynne Green’s monograph, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: A Studio Life, we knew that the artist was ambidextrous. In early education in the 1910s, preferring to use her left hand to pick up bread earned swift punishment from her teachers.[1] Barns-Graham later reminisced that these arbitrary rules and punishments had a confusing effect on how she understood ‘left and right’ and even ‘right and wrong’:
I confused ‘Right’ from ‘Wrong’ why did I have to learn things the difficult way? Right to me meant my wrong hand. Took me years to solve this.[2]
However, this ambidexterity would soon serve Barns-Graham well. While studying at the Edinburgh College of Art, she found that if one hand became tired while taking notes, she could switch to the other hand, and “mirror-write”. She would write on single, thin sheets of paper so she could turn them over and read the notes through the reverse.[3]
Eventually this ‘mirror-writing’ became a party trick that Barns-Graham would delight in demonstrating to friends, or would use in her diaries to encrypt more sensitive thoughts. It is these examples of mirror-writing that we have since come across in the last few years of cataloguing Barns-Graham’s archive.
Another Special Skill
However, it was not just mirror-writing that Barns-Graham excelled at. While a student at the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science (1930-31), and then the Edinburgh College of Art (1931-37), she also offered to analyse her friends’ handwriting to give them an insight into their character. She used this skill to find comparisons in character between her artist cousin Allan Barns-Graham and herself while he was staying with her family. This comradeship was crucial to her finding her identity as an artist, and she took great comfort from being able to find similarities in the handwriting (and therefore character) between her artist cousin and herself in the summer before she started art college:
Joined A [Allan Barns-Graham] in porch & we talked about C. [character] of handwriting & compared ours. Found very similar. His more angular.[4]
Later, in an interview with Tamsin Woollcombe for the British Library’s National Life Stories: Artists’ Lives collection, Barns-Graham described how she had to stop using this gift during the Second World War:
I had a great gift, which I still have, of analysing handwriting, and I can tell all sorts of things from the vibration of handwriting, a sort of psychic thing… I’ve stopped doing it because I’ve had too many funny experiences out of it. During the war somebody in hiding, I almost described where this person was, and there was a terrible shriek in the room and the letter snatched from me. And so I decided it was best to cool it.[5]
Apart from the early diary entries, unfortunately no further evidence of Barns-Graham’s ‘psychic ability’ remains. However, it is a reminder of the importance to social history that handwriting can hold. Both of these examples give an insight into how Barns-Graham navigated life as a child and young women who did not necessarily adhere to the expectations of society.
Further information
Barns-Graham’s diaries from 1930-2004 have been digitised and can be viewed online or in person by appointment in Edinburgh by contacting tilly.heydon@barns-grahamtrust.org.uk.
Written by Tilly Heydon, Archivist at Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Trust.
Edited by Isabel Lauterjung, Blog Coordinator for Explore Your Archive.
[1] Lynne Green, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: A Studio Life, (Lund Humphries, 2026), 18.
[2] W Barns-Graham, ‘Right Left’, Reminiscences 1993-1996, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Archive, WBG/2/6/1.
[3] Ibid.
[4] W Barns-Graham,’ Saturday 22 August 1931’, 1931 Diary, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Archive, WBG/4/1/2.
[5] Wilhelmina Barns-Graham interviewed by Tamsin Woollcombe, National Life Stories: Artists’ Lives, The British Library, 06/06/1994-10/06/1994, C466/34/01-05, page 5.
