DUBLIN art circles will have no difficulty in recalling the exhibition of paintings by Marie Louise von Motesiczky at the Royal Hospital, Kilmainham, in 1988. She exhibited there as the guest of the now dissolved Figurative Image and she came in person from London to opening, though by then she was in her eighties. At that age she was still tall, erect and rather regal, though with no airs or affectations whatever.

She died on June 10th in her house in Hampstead, some months short of 90 - her birthdate was October 24th, 1906. (At the age of 10, from her mother's house in Vienna, she had witnessed the funeral cortege of the 86 year old Emperor Franz Joseph.) Her death was easy and peaceful, it seems, in contrast to much of her life, and several of the English national newspapers paid her extended tributes.

With her a whole epoch ends, since her roots were in the old, cosmpolitan, multi cultured Vienna; and during her long exile in England - which began more than half a century ago - she was a central figure in the extraordinary congregation of Austrian artists, writers, philosophers, scholars and musicians who had taken refuge there from Hitler. There were, of course, many German artist refugees there as well, yet for the most part they seem to have remained apart and distinct from the Austrians proper. Many of these emigres were Jewish or with some Jewish ancestry, like Anna Mahler, the sculptor daughter of the composer, and Marie Louise herself was Jewish on her mother's side.

Her mother, Henriette, lived to be 96 and appears frequently in her daughter's paintings, sometimes in extreme old age smoking a pipe. Henriette was descended from the von Lieben and Todesco families, and her own father had been president of the Vienna Stock Exchange. Wealthy and cultured, the family played host to many figures in literary and artistic Vienna, including the poet Hofmannsthal. MarieLouise's father, Edmund von Motesiczky, was an Austro Hungarian army officer who once, as an amateur cellist, had played chamber music with Brahms. He died young, at 28, and his youthful widow never remarried.

In a biographical note, written late in life Marie Louise wrote: "I left school at 13 (a mistake). From then on I learned drawing in a Viennese studio . . . At 16, after some difficult personal experiences, I was sent to Holland - armed with a violin which I promptly forgot on the train! I stayed with my aunt and cousins, and had the chance to attend a studio . . . I had my first experience of van Gogh when I saw his pictures in a room in The Hague - it was unforgettably wonderful - so much light . . . I thought: if you could only paint a single good picture in your lifetime your life would be worthwhile."

Back in Vienna again, she attended art school, but a turning point was her encounter with her mother's friend Heinz Simon, chief editor of the Franfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and a widely cultured man. He encouraged he early efforts and introduced her to Max Beckmann then, probably the leading German artist and a lifetime influence on her. After she had studied and worked for some months in Paris Beckmann invited her to join his master class in Frankfurt, on an informal basis. Later she recalled that of her classmates, "the most gifted student died of tuberculosis in poverty and neglect. Another emigrated to Israel. Yet another committed suicide in a camp."

The connection was a personal turning point for Beckmann, too. As a 40 year old divorcee he visited her mother's house in Hinterbruhl and met an 18 year old student of singing from Munich, Mathilde von Kaulbach, who was staying with the family. It was Marie Louise's mother who nicknamed her "Quappi" (Tadpole) a name which stuck for the rest of her life and by which she is remembered. Quappi became Beckmann's second wife, stayed with him through his years of exile and hardship, and outlived him by more than 30 years, dying in New York.

Meanwhile, the privileged, cultured world to which Marie Louise belonged was nearing its end, as Austria - a rump country deprived of its polyglot empire - wrestled with unemployment and inflation and political unrest. Finally, in 1938, Hitler matched in and the old Austria was soon quenched for ever; Jews were proscribed and many of the artists and intellectuals poured into exile. She and her mother escaped to Holland, where she had her first one woman exhibition, in The Hague. Her only brother, Karl stayed behind for reasons of conscience, became involved in an underground group which smuggled out victims of Nazism, and was eventually arrested and sent to a prison camp, dying in Auschwitz a month before the end of the war.

Then Holland, in turn, was invaded by Hitler - so mother and daughter fled to England, crossing the Channel in a small and overcrowded boat (the incident is shown in one of her paintings). She left a number of pictures behind, stored in a wool factory from which they disappeared and have not been sighted since. In England, they lived at first at Amersham in Buckinghamshire, later in London, and both homes became a meeting point for the Middle European intelligentsia in exile. Oskar Kokoschka, a friend and regular visitor with his Czech wife Olda, nicknamed Marie Louise Florizel", and painted her portrait; another regular was the writer Elias Canetti, later to win the Nobel Prize. Her painting Conversation in the Library shows Canetti, short and shock headed, arguing vehemently with another Jewish emigre Franz Steiny, a fine (and neglected) poet noted for his learning, his acidulous wit and unfailing bad luck.

Canetti, then an unhappily married man, became the great love of her life and in the end he predeceased her by only a few years. The relationship lasted for decades and though eventually it quietened into friendship, there is little doubt that it scarred her deeply and may have been the chief reason why she never married. As for Canetti, his blazing egotism preserved him from emotional wounds, as it usually did.

All this time she painted, though she was a slow worker and her total output remains rather small. She exhibited occasionally in London galleries, though the war years were a twilight period for the arts; then in 1950 Helen Lessore gave her a solo exhibition at the influential Beaux Arts Gallery. After this she sank virtually out of sight from the British public, until in 1985 the Goethe Institute in London mounted 70 of her paintings. (Influential friends, such as the art historian Sir Ernest Gombrich, may have played a part in this). She had, however, shown in her native Vienna in 1966, when the novelist Heimito von Doedeier - an old friend of her dead brother opened her exhibition there. The London show was a critical success and was accompanied by an excellent catalogue which reproduced her Self portrait with Red Hat on the cover. Recognition had come at last, in old age, and it was climaxed two years ago when the Austrian Government mounted a retrospective of her work in the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. This was later shown in the Manchester City Art Gallery, but in truncated form, and when I went to see it I felt that she had been rather poorly served (Dublin would surely have treated her better?).

Paintings by her hang in the London Tate, and in public galleries in Vienna, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and in various provincial ones in Austria. She was, however, rather reluctant to let go of her work, though she accepted numerous portrait commissions and some of these produced real masterpieces of the genre. Self portraits play a major part in her output, from youth to old age - At The Dressmakers (1930) shows her trying on a long gown for an impending ball. She painted still life subjects with intimist poetry, and in old age did a series of lyrical pictures based on London gardens, including her own in Hampstead (she continued to garden until the last years of her life).

THE big influences on her style, obviously, were Beckmann and Kokoschka, but in each case this is more obvious than deep; emotionally and intellectually, her world is much quieter, intimate and less apocalyptic than theirs. Their respective portraits of her hung on opposite walls of her Hampstead living room where old family furniture from Vienna and bookshelves lined with the German and Austrian classics created a very special ambience, in which time ceased to matter.

Even in old age she was tall and formidable, fixing you imperiously with her large, luminous, golden green eyes, and carrying herself with a mixture of grande dame dignity and almost homely simplicity (a very old Austrian characteristic, so I am told). Though she knew her own worth, she was usually much quicker to talk about Beckmann or Canetti's work than her own, of which she was rather diffident. She looked and sounded what she was a woman of remaikable gifts and character and a survivor from a great, but haunted, epoch and culture.