“I wanted … to remind ourselves that—in our haste—in this century, we may not give time to pause and look—and may pass on our way unheeding.” So wrote the English artist Mary Newcomb on New Year’s Day in 1986. Her life was all about taking a step back and heeding the natural world. Newcomb graduated from Reading University in 1943, with a degree in the natural sciences, and later taught science and mathematics at a high school in Bath. It was only when she settled in rural East Anglia that she began to paint. Her subject was the land, the seasons, and the creatures she saw daily. Newcomb’s paintings contain delicate distortions, a lovely naiveté. They are also deeply knowing. Newcomb died in 2008, at age 86. With over 50 works, this is her largest retrospective yet. —E.C.