Mary Millicent Wigg (nee Lamphee) was born at Kensington Park, South Australia, on 8 October 1904 to parents Phillip and Clara (nee Dunstan) Lamphee. Phillip was Manager of the English, Scottish & Australian Bank in Adelaide. She died in Adelaide on April 29 2001, after being tragically injured in a car accident returning from a painting trip to the Flinders Rangers in South Australia.
She was a South Australian artist active from the 1940s and 2001 where she held several exhibitions including one at the Walkerville Gallery opened by Sir Henry Newland in September 1963 where her oil works featured two Sydney street scenes ‘Kings Cross’ and ‘Old houses, Pyrmont’ which art critics described as being drawn with assurance and clarity.
Other exhibitions followed in the Adelaide Festival of Arts – exhibition of Australian art, March 6-21, 1964 and a second exhibition at the Walkerville Gallery in 1967 where reviewers described her impressions as rather tight and air-less, painstakingly accurate, and becoming almost primitive in a piece titled ‘South Kensington’. '
Her work has been sold at auctions in Australia.
She is well known for her landscapes often undertaking trips to the Grampians in Victoria.
Her works are typically oil on board or masonite and include diverse subjects such as Churches in well-known South Australian coastal locations like Goolwa.
Mary also painted South Australian coastal scenes such as Parsons Beach also known as Pareena beach, which lies immediately west of Waitpinga Hill head, and has stunning cliff top views of the 1.2 km long beach.
She married engineer and pilot Ronald Melrose Wigg M.E. on 20/6/1931 at St. Peter’s College Chapel, Hackney, South Australia when he was 35 and she was 26. He was the grandson of well-known businessman and stationer E.S. Wigg and they had three children.
She went to Girton Girls School Adelaide and the Elder Conservatorium of Music. At Girton she met Jessamy Bruce, the woman whom Mary Wigg exhibited her paintings with in 1967. Jessamy and Mary also were of the same social set and went to the same dances. She was a talented musician and played the viola and violin with the South Australian Symphony Orchestra. She studied under prominent South Australian artist Ingrid Ernst.
Art collector Thomas Murrell is reintroducing the talents of Mary Wigg to the public through educational author talks such as the one held at Walkerville Town Hall on May 2023
