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Artist, art-historian and writer, Gereth (usually known as Gerry) was the younger daughter of Colonel Frank and Madelein Watson of The Glebe House, Dinton, Buckinghamshire. Interested in art from an early age, she studied at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford under Albert Rutherston MA, AWRS as an external student in 1937-8, and again under Percy Horton MA, ARCA in 1954-5. She also spent time in Paris in early 1939 studying with a French art tutor, M, Alfred Martin. She married Dr Arthur Spriggs in 1943, and from 1947 lived at Gozzards Ford, Nr Abingdon, Oxfordshire .
Her paintings were mainly done in pen and ink with watercolour wash, and Gereth worked direct from nature, just putting the finishing touches to the paintings later on. Her local subjects were mainly architectural, with churches and classical buildings predominating, but also riverside scenes with boats, and views in parks with statuary. Her many trips abroad, often to Italy and Greece, brought scenes of village squares, olive-groves and fishing harbour in a richer, more colourful palette than her English scenes. In later life, almost all her work was executed abroad.
Gereth exhibited her work regularly during the 50s and 60s. She showed the Royal Society of British Artists in 1958 and at the Royal Institute for Painters in Watercolours in 1959, the Oxford Art Society shows (‘57,’58,’64), Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford (‘63); and ‘one-woman’ shows at Foyles Bookshop Art Gallery, London (‘57); and at Halifax House, Oxford (‘61) and several times at the English Speaking Union, Oxford. Many of Gereth’s paintings are in the possession of friends and relatives. However, they do turn up occasionally in sale rooms, one example being a painting of Beacon St, Boston, Mass. she painted in 1953 and gave to an American friend. This sold at Skinners Auctioneers, Boston in 2003. She occasionally painted to commission, one such being of a mounted statue of ‘Physical Energy’ by G.F.Watts in Kensington Gardens that she painted in 1958 for the celebrated actress Lady Keeble (Miss Lillah McCarthy) who happened to be passing by where Gereth was painting and requested one similar.
The style and quality of Gereth’s work is possibly best summed up by two contemporary reviews of her exhibitions. An early exhibition at the English-Speaking Union, Oxford, was reviewed by Frank W. Dibb of the Oxford Times, who says: “It is always a pleasure to see the watercolours of Gereth M. Spriggs....and there are several pictures on show which reveal her individual qualities as a painter. One of these qualities is the telling us of light, whether it be in sunny Mediterranean subjects or cooler English landscapes and interiors. In the first category is her olive-grove subject with its pre-eminently luminous use of the coppery hues of sun-baked earth and the sharp, yet warm, hue of Continental skies. This is a cheering picture to look on when the greyer sort of autumn day looms at us. Amongst the cooler-mooded work on show the studies of the library at Milton Manor and the Milton chapel interior are the most rewarding. In the first, we see Mrs Spriggs’s sensitive response to a decorative subject, an attribute that has often caused me to think that she might prove to a good designer for the theatre. In the second picture, the artist shows how effectively she can suggest the age and weight of old masonry by both the economical use of a seemingly delicate line and superficially deceptive employment of a very austere lightly-placed wash. The pillars in this picture, for instance, have a thickness and a complete lack of the tenuousness which might result from the use of such sparse means of expression by a less confident hand. A small, elegantly-treated Folly Bridge (Oxford) architectural subject of considerable character and charm, is also included in the exhibition”.
Of her 1957 Foyles Art Gallery exhibition, ‘F.W.D’ writes in the Oxford Times: “Mrs Spriggs reveals in her ‘Winter in Northumberland’ a keen realization of the compelling attraction for the artist with a boldly attacking style of the sweeping spaciousness of the treeless expanses of far Northern landscape and its gun-metal-hued winter skies. The handling of the watercolour medium in this picture produces something of the chunky texture of strongly-used oil paints. In gentler and more elegiac mood, her ‘College Barges at Oxford’ also shows us a softer landscape under winter’s stresses, with the deserted barges and leafless trees invested with a melancholy grace. For her other subjects the artist has ranged wide, from the powerfully-stated interiors of Oxfordshire churches at Adderbury and Chiselhampton , the cleverly-composed ‘New College Ante-chapel, Oxford’ (complete with her own impression of the Epstein figure of Lazarus) and Oxford’s architecturally elegant Divinity Schools, to Greek landscape, with its sturdy scrubby bunches of olive trees, the Essex marshes, and a radiantly exotic Spanish scene. To all these scenes and climates she has a flexible and intuitive response. In all her painting she transmits to us an infectious delight in the use of her chosen medium”.
In the mid 1960s Gereth was recruited to work as a volunteer in the Department of Western Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Her work involved classifying designs in illuminated manuscripts of the 14th & 15th centuries. Some of these manuscripts had never been adequately studied before, and she began doing research of her own, and publishing the results. Her most extensive work concerned the artist of illuminated miniatures, Hermann Scheere, and she wrote an important article on the magnificent ‘Neville Hours’ containing his work, then in private hands (1974). Between 1967 and 1987 Gereth wrote articles for the magazine ‘Country Life’, with illustrations often taken from medieval manuscripts. Some of these articles appeared in the Christmas number of the magazine. She also researched the definitive publication on the so-called ‘Maiden’s Garlands’ in English churches. Besides these activities, Gereth was also for about 25 years a ‘reader’ for the Oxford University Press, reading obscure publications and recording the first uses of new words for the Oxford English Dictionary. She also left a corpus of poetry, mainly unpublished.