Violet M. Digby
British artist and painter (1900-1960)

Violet M. Digby (née Kidd; 1900–1960) was a British artist.
Digby was born in 1900 into the class of British colonial civil servants and engineers which by the time of her death in 1960 was fast disappearing. She came from a family where painting had been a leisure pursuit for many generations. Violet Digby and her two elder brothers were taught to draw and paint by their father William, who was a skilled draftsman, designer and engineer. Violet Digby took her talents back to India as the wife of Kenelm Digby. After Kenelm's death in 1944 she joined the community of artists in St Ives where she would remain until her suicide in 1960.
She exhibited her paintings regularly at the St Ives Society of Artists exhibitions, including the Festival of Britain Exhibition in 1951. Her paintings were accepted at the annual exhibitions of The Pastel Society, and the Royal Institute of Oil Painters in London. She also put up exhibitions in Delhi and in Cornwall. Her paintings were accepted every year but one from 1950 to 1960 by the Paris Salon of the French Society of Artists.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Violet M. Digby” as british artist and painter (1900-1960). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q22958188. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1900, 1960, 1944 and 1951.
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This entry incorporates text from “Violet M. Digby” 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.