They appear to have started married life in the architecturally dramatic and to this day bohemian part of Edinburgh, at 21 St Bernard’s Crescent, where their son Martin was born in 1916. The artists John Duncan, Eric Robertson, and Cecile Walton were among their neighbours and acquaintance, and Petrie taught the poet Wilfred Owen German and painted his portrait. When Owen was invalided out of the war and convalescent at Craiglockhart in Edinburgh in 1917, he described Maria as ‘a mighty clever German sculptress’. After the war the Petries returned to Eric’s home county of Yorkshire, where she exhibited locally as ‘Mrs F. E. Petrie’. They moved to London in 1927, where they lived at 25A St Peter’s Square, Hammersmith. This was possibly a basement flat, like that of their neighbour the sculptor Gertrude Hermes, and the area – on the border with Chiswick – was then an artists’ colony that the writer and poet Robert Graves called ‘Free Love Corner’.

The Electoral Roll records them there from 1928 to 1933 but, in 1932, Eric Petrie took up a teaching post at Abbotsholme School on the Staffordshire-Derbyshire border. This was probably from September that year and Maria followed him there some six months later, in the spring of 1933. She also became an art teacher at Abbotsholme and published Modelling for Children (Leicester, 1936), much later reworked as Modelling (Leicester, 1964).

At some point after the Second World War, in which they lost their only son, the Petries settled in Santa Barbara, California, and became American citizens in 1949.

Petrie modelled portrait busts of literary lions such as G. K. Chesterton (1926), who is said to have been a family friend, and Aldous Huxley (1959; both bronze and in the National Portrait Gallery, London). Huxley had settled in California in 1937 and lived there for the rest of his life. Petrie had published her pioneering and influential Art and Regeneration in 1946 and her interest in art as therapy may have led to her joining the Huxley circle in California, not least since his wife, Laura Archera Huxley, was herself a distinguished therapist. At the time, Huxley was also losing his sight, something Petrie observed with great sympathy in her portrayal of the writer.

Maria Petrie died in California in 1972.

Summarised from Art UK's Art Detective discussion ‘Can we confirm that this is a bust of Sir Stanley Marchant by Maria Petrie (1887-1972)?' and Patrick Kelleher, 'Silent Witness' (a Manchester Art Gallery 'MAGnet' blog, 4th December 2019)