Pamela Watling (1928-2013) was born in Barnehurst, Kent. She studied at Sidcup Art College and the Royal College of Art, London at the end of the 1940s and in the early 1950s. Although her academic specialism was textile design, she painted watercolours for pleasure throughout her life.

Her pictures were chiefly landscapes, views of buildings, still-lifes and studies of people (models), and she almost always worked from the life, except when making commissions, when she occasionally worked from photographs.

She travelled worldwide, and a number of her watercolours survive from her stays in Australia and Sweden (she was the wife of a diplomat).

But the majority date from the latter periods of her life when she lived in Kent, at Yalding (1977-1985) and Chislet (1985-1997) and then in Cornwall, in the village of Coombe a few miles west of St. Austell.