Maggi Hambling: ‘The sea is sort of inside me now … [and] it’s as if she has become a wave’

Maggi Hambling’s new and highly personal installation, Time, in memory of her longtime partner, Tory Lawrence, opens the first arts and culture programme at Norfolk’s 18th-century Wolterton Hall as part of the exhibition Sea State

Wolterton, a Palladian house built for Horatio Walpole, younger brother of the UK’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole, who lived about 25 miles away at more opulent Houghton Hall, is the latest to join the trend for stately homes to display modern art. Sea State, its opening exhibition, includes new works by Ro Robertson and Maggi Hambling. One of its 18th-century rooms has been cleared of family portraits to make way for Time, an intimate work by Hambling consisting of a single portrait of Tory Lawrence, her lover and life partner of 40 years, and “like a hug” around the remaining walls, 40 small paintings called “nightwaves”.

Studio International caught up with Hambling in the room dedicated to Time at Wolterton, just before the exhibition opened to the public.

Maggi Hambling (b1945) has long depicted the sea in her work. Born and brought up in Suffolk, she still lives in the county not far from the coast – where her initially controversial sculpture Scallop, created in 2003 in memory of the composer Benjamin Britten, sits on the shingle beach. At Wolterton, in addition to Time, she is displaying a new addition to her Wall of Water series (first shown at the National Gallery in 2015), Wall of Water XVII (2025), as well as Summer Wave Breaking II (2025).

Maggi Hambling, Wall of Water XXVII, 2025. Oil on canvas, 213 x 183 cm (84 x 72 in). Copyright Maggi Hambling.

Hambling’s artistic talent was first spotted and nurtured by a school art teacher before, still only in her mid-teens, she studied at Suffolk’s East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing under Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines (known as Lett), the latter of whom she credits with turning her into an artist. She moved on to Ipswich School of Art, then Camberwell and the Slade, from where she graduated in 1969. Sometimes controversial – usually for what she says or sculpts rather than what she paints – Hambling has work in many collections including the Tate, the British Museum and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1980-81 Hambling was the first artist in residence at London’s National Gallery and soon became familiar to a wider audience through her opinionated participation in the Channel 4 art quiz, Gallery, chaired by the jazz musician George Melly, who became a lifelong friend.

Maggi Hambling, Tory, October 2024. Oil on canvas. Installation view, Time, Wolterton Hall, 2025. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

Maggi Hambling, Tory, October 2024 (detail). Oil on canvas. Installation view, Time, Wolterton Hall, 2025. Photo: Martin Kennedy.

It was in the 80s, too, that Hambling became infatuated with a woman who had joined an art class she was teaching. The feeling was mutual, and in 1983 Tory Lawrence left her husband, the racing commentator Lord Oaksey (John Lawrence) for Hambling. There were ups and downs, including Hambling’s intense affair in the late 1990s with her (and Francis Bacon’s) muse, Henrietta Moraes, but the relationship with Tory endured. Tory was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2019, which cruelly robbed her of her sight and her mind before she died in autumn 2024, prompting the new installation.  

Sea State: work by Maggi Hambling and Ro Robertson
Time by Maggi Hambling
Wolterton Hall, North Norfolk
11 June – 7 December 2025 (Wed-Sun)

Interview by JULIET RIX
Filmed and edited by MARTIN KENNEDY

Maggi Hambling, Time, installation view, Wolterton Hall, 2025. Photo: Eva Herzog, courtesy the artists and Wolterton.

Wolterton Hall, North Norfolk, courtesy of Wolterton.