Dorothy Moss Kay (née Elvery), an Irish-born South African artist, dies in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, on May 13, 1964.

Elvery is born on December 3, 1886, in Greystones, County Wicklow. Her father is William Elvery, whose family owns Elverys Sports store in Dublin. Her sister, Beatrice Elvery, also known as Beatrice, Lady Glenavy, is a painter, stained glass artist and sculptor. Elvery trains at Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1900 and at the Royal Hibernian Academy school, but promotes the notion that she was “self-taught.”

In 1910, Elvery moves to South Africa to marry Hobart Kay, FRCS. By 1916 they have settled in Port Elizabeth.

Kay is a founder member of the Eastern Province Society of Arts and Crafts. In 1924 she is elected a member of the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists. She paints and makes etchings, and in 1926 her etching Romance is bought by Mary of Teck, Queen of the United Kingdom, at the Dominion Artists’ Exhibition in London. She travels widely in South Africa and sketches as she goes, and is also commissioned to make many portraits of mayors of Port Elizabeth, many of them lost when the City Hall burns down in 1977. During World War II she is commissioned by the government to record the war on the home front, and some of her work is held in the South African National Museum of Military History. From 1927 to 1945 she produces two to four illustrations each week for The Outspan.

Kay’s largest painting is the 1937 work Surgery, showing a patient undergoing abdominal surgery (a cholecystectomy). She portrays herself as the scrub nurse and her husband Hobart as the surgeon. In preparation for this painting she visits three hospitals and observes at least two operations, making 27 pages of preliminary sketches of people and equipment used in surgery. During World War II she paints further medical paintings: Operation in a Base Hospital and Blood to Save Lives.

Kay holds one-woman exhibitions from 1922 to 1955, and retrospective exhibitions of her work are held at the Iziko South African National Gallery in 1965 and 1982.

In her early days at Port Elizabeth, Kay is a keen sailor and is described as “for a time the fastest spinnaker-hand in South Africa.”

Kay has three daughters and one son. Her daughter Joan Wright (1911-91) teaches painting at the Port Elizabeth Technical College School of Art and Design, and her daughter Marjorie Reynolds writes and publishes a biography of her mother in 1989, and a further book about the Elvery family in 1991, and also donates her mother’s collection of works and archives to the Iziko South African National Gallery as “The Kay Bequest” in 1992.

Kay dies at Port Elizabeth on May 13, 1964.