They spend so much on CDs they keep the music industry afloat. These were forerunners of Scott’s authoritative 2002 survey volume Artists at Walberswick, in which both artists are featured.Over the years, Margaret Green’s work was acquired by numerous private collectors and a string of notable public and corporate collections. These included the Chantrey Bequest, the Financial Times, Queens’ College, Cambridge, the Ministries of Information and Public Building and Works, and galleries in Carlisle, Coventry, Leeds and Nottingham.David Buckman. She and Bulmer had shared an exhibition at the Trafford Gallery in 1954.

Otherwise, her characteristically reticent works, oil on board and often no more than a few inches square, made mixed show appearances at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Leicester Galleries’ Artists of Fame and Promise, Roland, Browse and Delbanco, South London Art Gallery, d’Offay Couper Gallery, William Ware and Charles Keyser Galleries, in touring exhibitions and in the provinces.Paintings by Green and Bulmer were included in Richard Scott’s seminal exhibition Walberswick Enigma – Artists Inspired by the Blyth Estuary, held at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich, in 1994, and Green’s work was in Walberswick Post-War to Present, at Chappel Galleries, near Colchester, in 1998. For a while, an unheated, rented room overlooking the River Arun was their country base However, they wanted something more permanent. They bought a van, took Dalton’s Weekly and in the late 1950s, for £850, bought an ancient, wilderness-surrounded thatched cottage at Onehouse, near Stowmarket, Suffolk, while always retaining a base in London.By clearing overgrown gardens running down to the River Rat they created a carefully planned, largely self-sufficient garden. This produced not only flowers and vegetables, quince wine and their own beer but also for Green a compelling subject “Lionel and Margaret were great plantsmen. During the summer they always set aside part of the day to work in the garden,” says Dubery.

“With it and interests such as music, theirs was a very quiet and domesticated life.”At her Suffolk and London studios Green painted steadily, but it was not until 1972 that she had a solo show, at David Wolfers’ New Grafton Gallery. At Walthamstow, “one of her students was Peter Greenaway, who made the film The Draughtsman’s Contract. She thought highly of him.”When they could, early in their marriage the Bulmers explored the countryside for subjects. Sussex and the South Coast were favourite spots and the beach scenes began. Faced with a term like conceptualism, she would say: “I don’t even understand the word.” She would not even begin to think about it.

She would stand her ground and have no messing with anything she didn’t understand.Films were a great interest, Dubery remembers. Dubery believes that despite being outwardly formidable, there was a quiet and rather timid woman behind all the huff-and-puff Margaret never went abstract as a painter. They both taught, she at Walthamstow Art School, eventually to be recruited to the Royal Academy Schools.Green proved an inspiring teacher, especially good at all the practical matters such as colour-mixing, gessoing and drawing, but could appear daunting, especially to female students. They became content with the simple but good life, reflected in the subjects they chose to focus on: commonplace things and occurrences. A still life with apples, friends in an interior, people in a park, a dress shop, Monday washing day and figures on a beach proved the backbone of Green’s work. This was evident in From City to Sea, the exhibition at Messum’s gallery in London just under a year ago that reviewed the Bulmers’ lifetime achievement.After the Royal College and the Scholarship trip, Green and her husband settled in Chelsea, first in a rented room in Elm Park Gardens, then in a studio in Lucan Place. “They were the most married people you could possibly imagine,” says Dubery.