Mary Forbes Evans
English picture librarian and author (1936-2010)
Mary Forbes Evans (née Lander, 5 May 1936 – 29 June 2010) was a British writer, collector and the co-founder, with her husband Hilary Evans, of the Mary Evans Picture Library.
Early life
Caroline Mary Forbes Lander was born on 5 May 1936 at 8 Cotswold Gardens, Hendon, London, the youngest of four daughters of Digby Forbes Lander (1891–1969), an aircraft works accounts clerk, and his wife, Norah Doris Caroline Lander, née Williams (1898–1970). She lived in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, before moving to Southern Rhodesia at the age of seven. The family returned to England in 1950.
Lander met her future husband Hilary Agard Evans (1929–2011), an advertising copywriter, and the son of Eric Agard Evans, a schoolmaster, when she was a teenager at a party. They married in 1956.
Career
Mary Evans had been a collector since childhood, especially of illustrated children's books. She shared a passion for collecting pictures and images with her husband Hilary Evans, and they explored book fairs, bookshops, used book stalls and markets, purchasing books, prints, photographs, engravings, cartoons, illustrations and assorted ephemera - "anything with an image". Their "magnificent obsession" soon filled their small flat in Kensington Church Street, so they moved to a small house in Blackheath, in south-east London.
In 1964, the couple founded the Mary Evans Picture Library, and in 1965, Hilary Evans left his job in advertising to work full-time with his wife on the library.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Mary Forbes Evans” is english picture librarian and author (1936-2010). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Mary, Forbes and Evans, not as a finished interpretation.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19335392. VIAF identifies the subject as 1296864. The Library of Congress control number is n79123977. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 2010, 1891 and 1969.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Forbes Evans” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.