From the Slade to the convent
Mother Maribel was born Mary Isabella Rough in Weymouth, Dorset, on 16 January 1887, the daughter of an army officer in the 7th Dragoon Guards. She was educated at St Felix School, Southwold, and won a place at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where she studied from 1903 to 1907 and became an accomplished portrait painter. After a short and unhappy spell as an assistant art mistress at Fulham High School, she turned towards the religious life.
In July 1914 she entered the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Wantage, the Anglican sisterhood founded by the town’s vicar, William John Butler, in 1848. She took the name Maribel in religion.
Artist and leader
Inside the community she carried on working as an artist, turning increasingly to sculpture and carving. In 1922 she carved a stone statue of the Virgin Mary for the west end of the convent chapel. She became Novice Mistress in 1931, visited the community’s houses in India in 1934, and in 1940 was elected Mother General, leading the community through the Second World War and its aftermath until 1953. In 1945 she travelled by troopship to visit the sisters’ work in India and South Africa, returning eleven months later.
Her religious work is found in churches across Britain and beyond. Examples include an Ascension mural of 1932 at Milford Haven, the so-called ‘Rabbit Madonna’ at St Faith’s, Great Crosby, a statue of St Francis with the wolf of Gubbio at Northam in Devon, and crib figures and crucifixes for several cathedrals, among them St Paul’s.
The Stations of the Cross
Her best-known work is in Wantage: a set of Stations of the Cross carved in teak for the convent chapel. Because of her duties in the community she could only work on them occasionally, and the set took decades to finish. She added a fifteenth station showing the Resurrection, something unusual at the time.
Mother Maribel died on 29 January 1970, aged 83. A biography was published by SPCK in 1972, and her archive is kept at the convent.
What to see locally
- St Mary’s Convent chapel, Wantage: her Stations of the Cross and the 1922 statue of the Virgin. The convent is a working religious house; contact the community before visiting.
- Vale and Downland Museum for the wider story of the community in the town.