At the Reading Guild of Artists Twenty-Eighth Annual Exhibition, held in the Municipal Art Gallery, May 3 – May 31, 1958, a set of small woodcuts by Mabel Kendall were exhibited, each no bigger than two inches square. All are of buildings, with titles such as Cotland House, Fulbrook, and The Mill, Swinbrook but included was also Janie in the Water, perhaps a depiction of a beloved companion. 

Mabel Kendall only exhibited for the first three years of her membership, with her ‘exquisite engravings’ which were much admired. Seen as ‘immensely talented’, at the time she lived in Swinbrook, near Burford, later moving to Headington, Oxford and then to north-west London. Born in 1920, Mabel Winifred “Pete” Kendall trained as a botanist at the University of Reading, going on to work as a science teacher in Warrington, Lancashire and London. She was invited to return to the University in Reading as a research botanist specialising in Jurassic Fossils, writing many papers on the subject. In the early 1950s she contracted polio which was to leave her confined to a wheelchair, however she was able to revive her artistic talents which she had developed as a botany student. She died in 2004 in Sussex.