LIKE her father, the writer J. B. Priestley, who turned to painting late in life, Barbara Wykeham became established as a serious artist around the time that her husband, the Second World War fighter ace Air Marshal Sir Peter Wykeham, returned from commitments abroad.
Thus she had three vocations, first as architect, then as wife of a celebrated airman and finally as an artist. She met the responsibilities that accompanied each challenge with equal determination.
Barbara Elizabeth Priestley was born in Walham Green, southwest London, and despite her father’s international success had a traumatic start in life. First, she was brought up by her grandmother after her mother died when she and her younger sister, Sylvia, were very small. Then, aged 7, she was suspected of having contracted TB and was obliged to spend a year under observation in a nursing home in solitary confinement.
This terrible experience over, she excelled at her preparatory school, going on to Frensham Heights. It was while there, when she was 16, that William Coldstream painted her portrait, one of his finest works.
On leaving there, she was due to go to Oxford, but chose instead the Architectural Association School. “Writing essays difficult,” she explained when interviewed on the occasion of her 80th birthday by The Oldie magazine. “Drawing much more fun.”
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Yet this was not the only attraction of the AA. Possibly because of her father’s connections with the theatre, Barbara became interested in stage design, and a training in architecture at a school with a reputation for freedom of outlook could have seemed a good starting point.
Because of the war the AA had been evacuated to Barnet, then outside London. With student numbers greatly reduced, there was more chance for someone as original and gifted as she was to be noticed. Remarkably glamorous and with a formidable intelligence, she emerged as a student of star quality, a popular leader who joined others in renting a house in Barnet that they named Taliesin after Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece in the Arizona desert. This was a sure sign of their admiration for heroes of the Modern movement, of which Le Corbusier was of course regarded as another.
And so her period as an architect, short-lived as it was, began at the school among a group of brilliant students, some living at Taliesin, who did a great deal to inspire each other, becoming friends for life.
Especially important in this connection was the extraordinarily talented trio of Philip Powell, Geoffry Powell (no relation) and Hidalgo Moya, all winners of notable architectural competitions in the 1940s and 1950s with schemes that did much to establish modern architecture in postwar England.
Barbara Priestley, soon recognised as a first-rate designer, qualified in 1948 and went on to work with Ove Arup, the great Danish engineer, collaborating on two factories at Duxford in Cambridgeshire.
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Shortly after this, in 1949, her life suddenly changed. She met Wing Commander Wykeham, and, after their marriage that year, his increasing eminence led to postings that took them both around the country and abroad during much of their life together. They spent three years in France with Nato, and another three in Singapore when he was Commander Far East Air Force. Friends who had not thought of her as being temperamentally disposed readily to cope with the official duties required of the wife of such a man saw that she executed them effortlessly, as if born into the world of the diplomatic corps.
Later, once settled in England, first at a house in Kew, later at Stockbridge after her husband retired, came the discovery of Barbara Wykeham’s third life interest, her gift as a painter, which was possibly, after all, her first love.
As with everything with which she became deeply involved, she took her work extremely seriously. Ever since returning to England from Singapore in 1966, she had been developing her ideas with portraits, landscapes and other subjects, attending classes at the Richmond Institute and, every year, during a winter week at West Dean.
She showed her work at galleries such as the Camden Library, and at the Ice House at Holland Park, and joined a group called the Circuit painters which put on an annual exhibition. In 1991, at Petworth, she had her first large solo show, and in 2003 followed this with a magnificent retrospective in Stockbridge. It was, an immense success, and she sold 71 paintings.
Many of the works, rich in colour, somewhat abstract in inclination and dating back to the 1960s, had a strength, vitality and integrity that vividly reflected the character of this most unusual woman.
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Her husband predeceased her; she is survived by her two sons and her daughter.
Barbara Wykeham, architect and painter, was born on March 4, 1923. She died on June 6, 2006, aged 83.