Kathleen Evelyn Crosbie McNeil
Other names: née Kennedy
Born 8 February 1894
Died 1968
Active: 1918 - 1944
Country of birth and death: Scotland
Sculptor
Born at Kelvinside, Glasgow. She may have attended Mrs Bogle's boarding school at 29 and 31 St Matthew's Parade, Northampton around 1911. Kathleen went on to study sculpture at Glasgow School of Art. In 1919 she married John McNeil, a mechanical engineer and they settled at Barnaigh House, Kennishead, Glasgow.
McNeil was a ‘lively, well educated, [and] artistic’ woman with an interest in history, period furniture, and vernacular architecture. She became friends with Ingeborg Neufeld and commissioned the younger artist to make a sculpture for her garden at Barnaigh House. This work is now lost but Neufeld (now King) retains a bronze cast of a naturalistically modelled horse, titled 'Peggy M’Neil', a portrait of one of the horses kept by the McNeil family at Kennishead and which she exhibited in 1944.
Information from Jane Eckett, 'Modernist Sculpture in Australia: Group of Four, Centre Five and the Europeans', doctoral thesis, University of Melbourne, begun 2009.
Personal and Professional Connections
Friends with Margaret Kennedy Mackenzie (Priest)
MacKenzie was introduced to McNeil by Ingeborg Neufeld. MacKenzie was taught to carve wood by Neufeld in McNeil's garden at Barnaigh House
Patron to Ingeborg (Inge) Neufeld
They were also friends
Sources
Census Returns of England and Wales, 1911
2009
RG14PN8435 RG78PN434 RD163 SD2 ED13 SN74
Modernist Sculpture in Australia: Group of Four, Centre Five and the Europeans
Chapter 2
Citing this record
'Kathleen Evelyn Crosbie McNeil', Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011 [http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=ann_1301398615, accessed 25 Jun 2022]