Exhibition History:
-London, Royal Academy, 1915, number 1463

Violet Mimpriss was born in Kent on the 7th January 1895. She attended the Dulwich High School, before the Royal Academy Schools where she undertook a five-year course graduating in 1923. She won a silver medal at the Royal Academy for portrait painting, and she also won the Armitidge Prize.

She travelled to Kenya in 1930, where she met and married her husband Colonel Mason. Due to her husbands ill health they moved to the coast of Africa in 1940, and after Colonel Mason's death her sister Sybill Eileen Mimpriss joined Violet in 1947. In 1959, they moved back to England, and Violet settled in Guilford.

Her miniatures were usually commissioned by clients. She would arrange that they were photographed, and then she would have the photographs developed to the size that she was going to paint the miniature. She felt it was easier to paint from a reduced photograph than from real life. However she did make many life-sized paintings, some of which were sold at the artist's studio sale somewhere in Dorset or Exeter.

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