‘Welcome to England’s Most Misunderstood County’, reads an imitation road sign inside the entrance to Firstsite gallery. It’s part of ‘The Essex Way’ (2021), a monumental collage commissioned from local boy Michael Landy to mark the 10th anniversary of the Colchester gallery’s opening. With its discombobulating mix of illustrations of native birdlife and views of landmarks such as the Veolia landfill site at Rainham, Landy’s mural is designed, like the gallery’s current exhibition series, to challenge assumptions about the county now most commonly associated with Towie.

A fellow visitor swore she could smell hay coming off a painting of a sunlit cornfield

The series started in 2021 with a show about the legendary East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, founded in Dedham before the war by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. This was followed in 2022 by a retrospective of Denis Wirth-Miller, a former student of Morris’s and a mucker of Francis Bacon’s who made Wivenhoe his home. Now it’s the turn of another former student – not a famous one like Lucian Freud or Maggi Hambling, but a local girl you may never have heard of. I confess I hadn’t.

Born into an East Anglian farming family in 1893, the gifted Lucy Harwood had hoped to become a pianist before an operation gone wrong left her partly paralysed down one side. Thrown back on her other talent, art, she enrolled at the Slade, where she taught herself to paint with her left hand. It was the making of her. Obliged ‘to swing a loaded brush at the canvas’, in the words of the show’s curator Hugh St Clair, she would earn the admiration of Matthew Smith for her ‘flamboyant impasto’. But it wasn’t until middle age that she found her form.

Harwood was 45 when the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing opened on her doorstep; she enrolled at once and became a living testament to Morris’s belief that ‘an old maid on a camp stool is as potentially capable of achievements in the Arts as a lad of 17 who crashes into the firmament of fame’.