Jill BLYTH was born in Quidenham, Norfolk, the daughter of W D Blyth LL.D, ICS. Educated at Cheltenham Ladies College, she showed early promise as an artist. Taking up art on leaving school, in 1915 she came to Cornwall to study under Stanhope FORBES.

She lived with her mother at Myrtle Cottage, known as 'the Myrtage', run by Mrs Tregurtha and the home of many of the female students of the FORBES SCHOOL. She worked in portraiture, still life and embroidery. It was while she was a student at the Forbes School that she met her first cousin Geoffrey Sneyd GARNIER. They were married in 1917 in St Peter's Church, Newlyn, and settled in Orchard Cottage, Newlyn where they both had garden studios. They had three children - Peter (1918), Ann (1922) and Jeremy (1925).

Family responsibilities stood in the way of consistent work, but she continued to paint in oils and to design and create beautiful embroidered pieces; she was known to complain bitterly about the lack of time that a woman painter with a family could devote to her work.

The influence of Forbes in her portrait work is evident, and her works of Peter and Ann and the family dogs, dating from the early 1930s, are considered her best portrait groups. Nine of her oils were exhibited, all from private collections, at the Falmouth Group show in 1996.