Bertha Newcombe

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Bertha Newcombe
Born(1857-02-17)17 February 1857
Lower Clapton, London, England
Died11 June 1947(1947-06-11) (aged 90)
Petersfield, England
Education
Known forPainting, illustration, suffrage activism
Family

Bertha Newcombe (17 February 1857 – 11 June 1947) was an English artist and suffrage activist.

The fourth of seven children of an entrepreneurial father with an interest in education and art, she grew up mainly in Surrey. Aged 19, she entered the Slade School of Art in London and later is believed to have studied at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. She exhibited works in the French naturalist style in the Paris Salon and at the Society of Lady Artists and the Royal Academy in London, with some critical success.

In the 1890s, Newcombe became active in the Fabian Society and she made portraits of a number of prominent socialists, as well as being romantically involved with George Bernard Shaw. At this time the family home – where she had a studio – was in Chelsea, and she became a more-or-less full-time illustrator for publishers of magazines and novels. By the time of the resurgence of the women's suffrage movement in the early years of the twentieth century, she had almost completely stopped working as an artist, but campaigned for the suffragist movement in various capacities. When their father died, in 1912, Bertha and her sister Mabel inherited a sizeable estate. They moved to Hampshire and largely withdrew from public life.

Early life[edit]

Bertha Newcombe was born in Lower Clapton, Hackney, London, on 17 February 1857. The family home, Priory House, had also been the schoolhouse when her father, Samuel Prout Newcombe (b. 1824), had worked as a teacher. He was also the author and editor of children’s educational books.[1] After the death of his first wife[2] – with whom he had two children (Frederick and Mary) – he married Hannah Hales Anderton, and Bertha (b. 1857) was the middle of the three children (Ada b. 1856 and Claude b. 1860) by this second marriage to be born in Hackney.[3] Her uncle was Cornelius Prout Newcombe.[4]

In about 1853, Samuel Prout Newcombe had changed career and started The London School of Photography, a photographic portrait studio that soon had branches across London and beyond, exploiting the public’s appetite for carte de visite portraits.[5] His new business venture was a great financial success, and he moved the family out to Surrey – first to Dorking,[6] then, two years later, to Reigate,[7] where two further children were born: Mabel (b. 1863) and Jessie (b. 1865). Samuel Prout Newcombe took a flippant attitude to census returns – in the 1861 return he described the occupation of the young children as 'Playing!' and gave his own occupation as 'watercolour painter', despite at this point still running the photography studios and beginning to invest in housing developments.[8] In 1868, he advertised in the Croydon Chronicle for a large country house (or building land) ‘not more than a mile from the station’.[9] By 1870, when Bertha was 13 years old, he had sold the photographic businesses and the family had moved to a large property, 'Northcote', in Croydon.[10]

Slade School of Art[edit]

The Slade School of Art life class in an illustration by Bertha Newcombe to accompany the article 'Slade School Revisited' in The Sketch magazine, 13 March 1895.

It seems likely that Bertha Newcombe would have received artistic instruction from her father, who once he was semi-retired was pursuing his own interest in watercolour painting.[11] Samuel’s middle name references his uncle, Samuel Prout (1783–1852), a well-known watercolour artist.[12] At the age of 19, Bertha attended the Slade School of Art in London,[13] where the French painter Alphonse Legros (1837-1911) had recently taken over as professor of drawing, painting and sculpture. Legros was 'a gifted draughtsman and had begun to make his reputation as a realist painter in Paris, moving in the circles of Courbet, Manet, Fantin-Latour and Degas'.[14]

Almost twenty years later Bertha Newcombe returned to the Slade with the writer Alice Stronach when they were preparing an article for the magazine The Sketch.[15] Through Stonach’s article, Newcombe recalls that when she attended the school in the early days of Professor Legros she 'thought that she would never spend a happier time'. She noted that 'The two life-schools – one on the first floor, the other in the basement – were used alternately by men and women, and when the men had their turn of the upper chamber they overflowed to the nether regions and worked with the women.' Newcombe evidently enjoyed the social side and camaraderie at the Slade. This came to the fore at breaks in an improvised subterranean rest space that the students called 'The Beetles’ Home'. Here 'girlish confidences concerning flirtations' were exchanged and 'a certain set, which included some of the prettiest girls in the school, was bitten with the craze for æsthetic dress, then a new fashion, and their taste ran riot among peacock-blues and sage-greens, peacock feathers and poke-bonnets, flowing cloaks and bead necklaces.'

Paris[edit]

The model, Corinne, in the life class at the Académie Colarossi. This illustration by Bertha Newcombe accompanied the article 'Paris Art Schools' in The Sketch magazine on 2 May 1894.

A bold but logical step for Bertha Newcombe after the Slade was to move to Paris. Luke Herrmann notes that '[Legros] encouraged his abler students to go to Paris, and thus in several ways the Slade acted as a link between London and Paris, and enabled British students to make contact with the much more liberal teaching methods and atmosphere of the French capital.'[16] The extent and nature of Bertha Newcombe’s visits to Paris are not known, but she and Alice Stronach collaborated on an article entitled 'Paris Art Schools' for The Sketch,[17] and this too seems to draw on Newcombe’s personal experience. Reference is made to 'a small band of English girl artists' who pursued their quest of 'an academy where men and women might work side by side under exactly the same conditions'. Eventually 'fate, or the natural course of events, guided the footsteps of the pioneers to the Académie Colarossi', where 'To Angelo [who ran the Académie] it mattered not whether the ladies did or did not study in the same room with the men students.' Newcombe’s exposure to French culture in the broadest sense and to the 'Paris art scene' in particular would have been an immensely transformative experience for her. She would soon be described by critics as an artist working in the 'French manner'.

Rural scenes in the French manner[edit]

Waterlilies, exhibited at the Society of Lady Artists in 1885.

In 1880, she began exhibiting with the Society of Lady Artists at rooms in Great Marlborough Street, London.[18] The society’s annual exhibition was a large event – with 700 works by over 300 artists – and in 1881 Newcombe exhibited two oil paintings, Gossips and Lingering Footsteps, both priced at £19.[19] Then the Pall Mall Gazette, looking back later, noted that 'Miss Bertha Newcombe made a great success at the [Paris] Salon' in 1881.[20] In relation to the following year’s Salon the Illustrated London News explained the recent tendency of French landscape art towards 'pictures which ... have been painted entirely out of doors'. Examples referred to include Le Père Jacques by Jules Bastien-Lepage and The Ferryman by William Stott. In this context, the reviewer continued, 'We have marked for special approval also a very small picture of a girl resting by a stream, where she has been cutting sedges, by Mdlle. Bertha Newcombe.'[21]

In 1884, The Times felt that 'In the drawing "Home at Last", Miss Bertha Newcombe has given us perhaps the best piece of work that she has yet accomplished in her very French manner,'[22] and the Morning Post the following year explained that she has 'endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of French painters of rural scenes. Her group of peasants returning through the fields in the evening twilight will strongly remind the spectator of the modern Gallic school.'[23] Reviewing the Society of British Artists exhibition in Suffolk Street in 1886 – when James McNeill Whistler had just become president – The Times noted 'the style chiefly in vogue among the exhibitors here ... [has been] picked up in France and transported to England. In the first room, for example, there are good little pictures by Miss Bertha Newcombe, Mr. P. W. Steer ... '[24]

Croydon remained her home address during the 1880s, but she used various London studios,[25] and throughout the decade she was often 'abroad' – presumably in France.[26]

The New English Art Club[edit]

Newcombe had continued to exhibit with the Society of Lady Artists throughout the 1880s,[27] and also at the Royal Academy from 1882.[28] Then, in 1888, she began exhibiting with the New English Art Club.[29] The NEAC had been founded two years earlier by a group of British artists who had been together in Paris – 'many of the works [exhibited at the NEAC in 1886] were in the "rustic naturalist" manner of the short lived but influential French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage.'[30] Stanhope Forbes (1857–1947) was one of the NEAC artists whose work shares some characteristics with Newcombe’s. As even more radical ideas of modernism in 'English' art were emerging, the NEAC’s exhibiting policy became controversial, and Forbes and the group of artists associated with him – known as the 'Newlyn School' – resigned from the NEAC in 1890, 'largely as a protest against the pre-dominance of "Impressionist" artists, led by Walter Sickert'.[31] Newcombe continued exhibiting with the NEAC until 1894.

A Chelsea studio[edit]

While still keeping a country home in Surrey,[32] Samuel Prout Newcombe in 1891 leased No. 1 Cheyne Walk,[33] a recently built town house in fashionable Chelsea, London SW. It was large enough for his family, and for a few years it housed his natural history collection.[34] It also provided an artist’s studio for Bertha, and accommodated four live-in servants.

At this point, Bertha Newcombe’s career and personal life took a dramatic change. She continued to exhibit a few paintings, but channelled her interests in art into the commercial illustration of books and magazines. She also became increasingly involved in Fabian Society politics.

George Bernard Shaw and the Fabian Society[edit]

The Socialists at Hyde Park, by Bertha Newcombe, published in the Windsor Magazine in 1896.

The Fabian Society, founded in 1884, had attracted many prominent contemporary figures to its socialist cause, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant and Emmeline Pankhurst. By the early 1890s, Sidney and Beatrice Webb were very much at the society’s core. In this context, Bertha Newcombe was commissioned to paint a portrait of George Bernard Shaw. Shaw’s biographer Michael Holroyd draws upon Beatrice Webb’s diaries to provide a description of Newcombe at this time: 'She was in her thirties and, despite her aquiline features, thin lips and a figure that put Beatrice [Webb] in mind of a wizened child, not perhaps lacking absolutely all attraction. At least she was smartly turned out, petite and dark, with neat, heavily fringed black hair. And she was devoted to Shaw.'[35] Shaw began to sit for his portrait at her studio at Cheyne Walk on 24 February 1892. 'As the portrait progressed so, inevitably, did the painter’s fascination with the sitter. On 27 February Shaw gave her a sitting until nine-thirty in the evening and dined with her afterwards.'[36] Shaw was not known as a playwright at this time, and Newcombe’s portrait – entitled GBS – the Platform Spellbinder – alludes to his charismatic presence as a political speaker.

Newcombe’s relationship with Shaw falteringly progressed. According to Webb, Bertha Newcombe 'spoke of her five years of devoted love [to Shaw], his cold philandering, her hopes to marry'. Eventually (in 1898) Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townshend. With hindsight Newcombe could see that Shaw was 'a passionless man ... The sight of a woman deeply in love with him annoyed him. He was not in love with me, in the usual sense, or at any rate as he said only for a very short time ... '[37]

During the time of this relationship, Newcombe provided an illustration of Beatrice and Sidney Webb for the cover of the Fabian pamphlet Problems of Trade Unionism and also an illustration for The Sketch that commemorated the 'breakfast party at Borough Farm, near Milford, Surrey, on 4 August 1894' that led to the founding of the London School of Economics.[38] In 1896 Bertha worked with Alice Stronach on an article, 'Socialist Leaders of Today', for which Newcombe provided portraits of Edward Pease, Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch, Herbert Burrows and Henry Hyndman.[39]

Bertha Newcome as illustrator[edit]

A Madonna of the Cells, an illustration by Bertha Newcombe for the article 'Women Prisoners' published in the Windsor Magazine in 1896.

Although she achieved some critical success as an exhibiting artist, it is not known to what extent Bertha Newcombe sold her paintings or whether she had any patrons. From the mid-1890s she withdrew from all exhibiting groups with the exception of the Royal Academy. In the article on the Slade School referred to above[40] it is acknowledged that, in order to earn a living as an artist, most students will have to combine fine art with work as an illustrator. In 1894 Newcombe provided four illustrations for Henry Stephens Salt’s Richard Jefferies: A Study, published by J. M. Dent, who went on to commission 30 illustrations of Cumbrian life for John Watson’s Annals of a Quiet Valley by a Country Parson. Untypically, some of these illustrations were displayed in a gallery setting alongside work by Walter Crane and Aubrey Beardsley.[41]

Over the next ten years, the illustration of short stories and novels aimed mainly at women became a full-time occupation for Newcombe.[42] The illustrations seem to have pleased both readers and publishers to the extent that she seems to have been continually in work. Promotional copy describes the illustrations as 'pretty' and 'delightful'.[43] On the whole the drawings are competent and follow the literary style of the stories in being conventional and unchallenging. On only a few occasions – such as in relation to Alice Tronach’s assignments for The Sketch (1894–5) and the Windsor magazine (1896) and in illustrations for Major Arthur Griffiths’s article on 'Women Prisoners' for the Windsor Magazine (1896)[44] – does an assignment seem to capture Newcombe’s artistic imagination. With an impressive output, she seems to have been virtually a staff illustrator for the publisher Ward, Lock & Co. until 1906/7.

Around this time her life took another turn: she stopped taking commercial illustration work and became more involved in the women’s suffrage movement. Her mother died in 1905, and she exhibited at the Royal Academy for the last time in the following year.

Women’s suffrage[edit]

Bertha Newcombe’s parents had supported women’s suffrage, and her mother, Mrs Hannah Hales Newcombe, had been treasurer of the Croydon branch of the National Society of Women's Suffrage in 1873.[45] With the resurgence of the women's suffrage movement from 1903 and given her involvement in Fabian politics, it is not surprising that Bertha herself was active in the London Society for Women's Suffrage – a branch of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), also known as the 'suffragists'. The NUWSS pursued 'Votes for Women' through peaceful, non-violent, constitutional means, and was critical of the aggressive methods of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) – the 'suffragette' movement. In 1909 Bertha Newcombe was on the NUWSS’s executive committee.[46]

Bertha was fully committed to the unglamorous realities of political campaigning: fund-raising,[47] personal financial contributions,[48] propagating the NUWSS’s message through the sale of its newspaper, Common Cause,[49] and playing a role on organising committees. Perhaps her most significant intervention was her letter-writing campaign to influential men within London’s cultural elite,[50] and a related letter published in The Times in 1909[51] to publicise the petition that the NUWSS was organising for men to support the Votes for Women campaign.

Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davis presenting the 1866 Women's Suffrage Petition to Sir John Stuart Mill in Westminster Hall, painted in 1910.

That Bertha Newcombe was an artist was only of minor relevance to her activism. She is listed as being in the Artist’s Suffrage League (established in 1907)[52] – the league’s organising committee were largely Chelsea-based female artists – but no known work was produced by Newcombe under the ASL’s auspices.[53] An oil painting Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davis presenting the 1866 Women's Suffrage Petition to Sir John Stuart Mill in Westminster Hall was submitted to the Royal Academy in 1910 but was not selected for exhibition.[54] What prompted the painting is not known, and what it depicts – in the rather pedestrian style of her illustrations for romantic fiction – is not obvious.

Retirement[edit]

GBS – the Platform Spellbinder, 1892.

Bertha Newcombe and her younger sister Mabel were still living with their father at Cheyne Walk at the time of the 1911 census; however, in the following year he died,[55] leaving an estate of £25,629 10s. 6d. – equivalent to about £2.9 million in 2018.[56] Bertha was 55, Mabel 50, and by the 1920s they were living at Petersfield in Hampshire.[57] There are few records of Bertha’s life after she left London. Apparently she donated money to the Women's Pioneer Housing Association, a not-for-profit organisation which aimed to help single women find secure, affordable housing in the 1920s, and in 1934 she supported the Shoreditch Housing Association to provide good housing for the needy.[58]

In 1929 Bertha Newcombe and George Bernard Shaw attended a much-belated unveiling of her 1892 portrait GBS – the Platform Spellbinder, at the National Labour Club.[59]

Legacy[edit]

Bertha and Mabel Newcombe lived at 'Redlynch' in Petersfield for twenty years, and died in 1947 three months apart: Bertha on 11 June and Mabel on 12 September. Bertha was 90 years old. Her estate was worth £15,473 (equivalent to about £595,000 in 2018), and most of it was bequeathed to the Shoreditch Housing Association to be 'devoted to the housing in flats or rooms of elderly women of strictly limited means'[60] – in 1952 Lady Cynthia Colville opened the 'Newcombe estate' at Aberdeen Park, Highbury.[61] Four oil paintings by Bertha Newcombe – Water Lilies (c.1885), Winter Fuel (1886), Landscape with Pond, Sheep and Figures (1892) and The Goatherd (1893) – are in the collection of Southwark Council’s Arts and Heritage Unit at the Cuming Museum, London.[62]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Fireside Facts from the Great Exhibition: Being an Amusing Series of Object Lessons on the Food and Clothing of All Nations in the Year 1851 and Pleasant Pages for Young People, or Book of Home Education and Entertainment, both published by Houlston & Stoneman, London, c.1851.
  2. ^ Mary Harriet Newcombe (née White) died in 1853.Details of Samuel P Newcombe’s first and subsequent marriage are taken from ‘The Family of Samuel Prout Newcombe’ at https://photohistory-sussex.co.uk/Hastings_Newcombe.htm
  3. ^ Ancestry.co.uk. The 1861 England census shows Samuel P Newcombe (37) head of household and his wife Hannah H. Newcombe (37) living at Rose Hill Estate, Rose Hill, Dorking Surrey.Their children: Ada M Newcombe (5); Bertha Newcombe (4) and Claude Newcombe(1). The 1871 England census , also accessed from ancestry.co.uk shows Samuel P Newcombe (47) head of household and his wife Hannah H. Newcombe (47) living at ‘Northcote’, Park Hill Road, Croydon. Their children listed show two older children not included in the previous census: Frederick I Newcombe(20) and Mary W Newcombe (19). Ada M Newcombe (15); Bertha Newcombe (14) Claude Newcombe (11) are now also joined by two new arrivals: Mabel Newcombe (8) and Jessy W Newcombe (6) – making a total of seven children.
  4. ^ "Charles Thomas Newcombe of London and Hastings". Sussex PhotoHistory. Archived from the original on 25 June 2012. Retrieved 22 February 2021.
  5. ^ For a full account of the photography business, see Professional Photographers in Hastings.
  6. ^ Census 1861: Rose Hill Estate, Rose Hill, Dorking.
  7. ^ 'Westfield', Reigate, Surrey.
  8. ^ "A document dated 28th December 1865 lists Samuel Prout Newcombe as one of 17 investors in a property development scheme to build houses on the Farncombe Place estate near the West Sussex seaside town of Worthing" – Professional Photographers in Hastings.
  9. ^ Croydon Chronicle and East Surrey Advertiser, 21 November 1868.
  10. ^ Census 1871: 'Northcote', Park Hill Road, Croydon, Surrey – with four live-in servants. Bertha is shown as one of seven offspring, along with Frederick (a clerk), Mary, Ada, Claude, Mabel and Jessy (now spelt with a y). Samuel Prout Newcombe describes his occupation as ‘retired solicitor’ – which appears to be a fanciful claim.
  11. ^ Mallalieu 2002: 71.
  12. ^ For more details of the family connection between the Newcombe and the Prout families, see Professional Photographers in Hastings. Five works by Samuel Prout were in Bertha Newcombe’s estate in 1947, presumably inherited from her father, and were gifted to Southampton Art Gallery.
  13. ^ The University College, London, Calendar for 1878–9 records Bertha Newcombe of Croydon as having entered the Slade in the 1876–7 academic year. She does not appear in other years' calendars, so presumably attended for only one year.
  14. ^ Herrmann 2000: 370.
  15. ^ 'The Slade School Revisited', The Sketch, 13 March 1895, pp. 367–9.
  16. ^ Herrmann 2000: 370.
  17. ^ The Sketch, 2 May 1894, pp. 25–6.
  18. ^ The Graphic, 13 March 1880.
  19. ^ Baile de Laperrière 1996.
  20. ^ Pall Mall Gazette, 31 October 1882.
  21. ^ 'J.F.R.' in Illustrated London News, 20 May 1882.
  22. ^ The Times, 12 March 1884.
  23. ^ Morning Post, 19 March 1885.
  24. ^ The Times, 27 November 1886.
  25. ^ London studio addresses include 55a Bedford Gardens in 1883 (Graves 1989), 1 Cheniston Gardens in 1884 (Baile de Laperrière 1996), Clareville Grove Studios, Queen’s Gate, in 1890 (Baile de Laperrière 2002) and Bolton Studios, London, from 1886 (Graves 1989).
  26. ^ In a newspaper article – 'Surrey Artists and Their Homes' – based on an interview with the Croydon artist Miss M. E. Kindon, reference is made to a large landscape painting on the wall 'that is by a lady friend of mine who resides when she is in England, at her home in Croydon, Miss Newcombe. She is abroad now' – Croydon Advertiser and East Surrey Reporter, 21 January 1888. Bertha Newcombe's trips abroad continued into the 1890s. On 15 May 1896 George Bernard Shaw wrote to William Archer about a proposed production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt in Paris that 'Bertha Newcombe, who is in Paris, writes to ask whether I am coming over supposing they do it, & offers me a ticket.' And on 9 November he wrote to Bertha, 'I shall start on Wednesday morning, and arrive at the Gare du Nord at seven. If you are there, well & good.' He evidently stayed at the same lodging house as her. (Shaw 1965: 628, 697, 699).
  27. ^ Baile de Laperrière 1996. Twenty-three works were exhibited at the SLA: Gossips and Lingering Footsteps (1880); A Flirtation, All Alone, Les Blanchisseuses and Baby’s Breakfast (watercolour) (1882); The Gleaners, The Riverside and The Sunshine (1883); Home at Last (watercolour), The Little Knitter (watercolour) and Three Studies of French Peasants (watercolour) (1884); Evening, Through the Long Grass (watercolour), The Bridge near the Mill Shere (watercolour) and Going Fishing (1885); Waterlilies and Father’s Beer! A Disagreeable Errand (1886); A Late Spring (1887); Mending Nets (1888); In the Orchard and A Lancashire Garden (1889) and The Way of the Wood (1893).
  28. ^ Graves 1989; Royal Academy of Arts 1981. Thirteen works are listed as having been selected for the RA summer exhibitions: Cecile (1882); Fragrant Posies and Evening (1883); The Last Load (1884); A Late Spring (1886); On the Avon near Salisbury (1888); The Way in the Wood (1891); A Meadow Stream (1892); A Story of the Woods (1893); A Daffodil Field (1895); A Primrose Copse (1904); An April Moon (1905) and The Shadowed Pond (1906).
  29. ^ Baile de Laperrière 2002.Six works were exhibited at the NEAC: Apples (1888); Mrs. S. Prout Newcombe and Doubt (1890); Evening Primroses (1891, winter); Sweet Lilac (1894, summer) and A Blue-bell Wood (1894, winter).
  30. ^ Herrmann 2000: 371.
  31. ^ Herrmann 2000: 378.
  32. ^ Noble's Green, Lingfield, Surrey.
  33. ^ Survey of London, Vol. 2: Chelsea, Pt I (London County Council, 1909), which says, 'The ground landlord is the Earl Cadogan, the present leaseholder being S. P. Newcombe, Esq.'
  34. ^ The 9 February 1899 edition of Nature – the weekly illustrated journal of science – reported that 'Mr. S. Prout Newcombe has offered the London County Council his educational collection of natural history specimens and literature.' This collection included 'about 21,000 objects' and 'a considerable number of works on natural history subjects'.
  35. ^ Holroyd 1997: 239.
  36. ^ Peters 1980: 96.
  37. ^ Meyers 2005.
  38. ^ The Sketch, 17 July 1895, p. 636, where captioned 'The Extreme Left'.
  39. ^ Stronach, Alice, 'Socialist Leaders of Today', Windsor Magazine, Vol. 3 (1896).
  40. ^ Stronach, Alice, 'The Slade School Revisited', The Sketch, 13 March 1895, p. 368.
  41. ^ The Times, 18 September 1894. The exhibition of book illustrations and bindings sponsored by the publisher J. M. Dent was at the Royal Institute of Watercolour Painters in Piccadilly.
  42. ^ Magazines who employed her included Sylvie’s Home Journal, English Illustrated Magazine, Windsor Magazine, The Sketch, The Graphic,Young Woman, Lady’s Realm and Home Messenger. Novels illustrated included Maureen’s Fairings and Other Stories by Jane Barlow, The Dwarf’s Chamber and Other Stories by Nora Vynne, Mrs Martin’s Company and Other Stories by Jane Barlow, The Charmer by Shan F. Bullock, My Lady Frivol by Rosa Nouchette Carey, Love in Our Village by Orme Angus, Jan Oxber by Orme Agnus, Zike Mouldom by Orme Agnus, The Unexpected by Rowland Grey, Sarah Tuldon – a Woman Who Had Her Way by Orme Agnus, Esau & St. Issey by Joseph Hocking, The Master of Marshlands by E. Everett-Green, Hope My Wife … by Lucy Gertrude Moberly, The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot (1906 edition) and Dan – and Another by Lucy Gertrude Maberly.
  43. ^ The Queen magazine, 19 December 1900: 'A word of praise should not be lacking for the pretty and characteristic illustrations by Bertha Newcombe.'
  44. ^ Windsor Magazine, Vol. 4 (July–November 1896), pp. 433–5.
  45. ^ Professional Photographers in Hastings.
  46. ^ Common Cause, 11 November 1909.
  47. ^ An advertisement in the 8 August 1912 issue of Common Cause announces a 'Bazaar and Oriental Fête' in aid of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage at the Royal Palace Hotel, Kensington, on 5, 6 and 7 December 1912, when Bertha Newcombe would be running the 'Art Stall' and 'The Old Curiosity Shop'.
  48. ^ Itemised in Common Cause – for example on 21 November 1913.
  49. ^ Common Cause 24 August 1911 notes Bertha Newcombe working within the newly formed East Dorset Federation – on a stall in Wareham and selling 'our newspaper' in Corfe.
  50. ^ See letters from and to Bertha Newcombe in the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics.
  51. ^ The Times, 23 March 1909; reprinted in the Daily News, 25 March 1909.
  52. ^ Records of the Artists' Suffrage League are in the Women’s Library at the LSE, reference 2ASL.
  53. ^ A draft design by Newcombe for a poster is owned by the Women’s Library (item 2LSW/E/01/2/19), but does not have 'ASL' branding.
  54. ^ The painting is in the Women’s Library at the LSE: item TWL.1998.60. For a further discussion of the painting, see Crawford 2018: 169–70. Papers regarding the painting are also in the Women’s Library: 2LSW/B/4/12/8.
  55. ^ On 14 October 1912, aged 88.
  56. ^ Probate Records on Ancestry.co.uk; Bank of England inflation calculator.
  57. ^ In spring 1920 they were living at 'Ciddy Hall', Liss, Petersfield; in 1923 at Palmer’s Farm, Petersfield; and by 1927 they were at 'Redlynch', Tilmore, Petersfield, where they remained.
  58. ^ Professional Photographers in Hastings.
  59. ^ Daily Herald, 1 November 1929. Later the painting was thought to have been lost during the Second World War, but it was rediscovered in 2012 and moved to Labour Party headquarters in London. A 22 June 212 BBC News report estimated the painting to be worth between £10,000 and £20,000. A photographic reproduction of the painting is in Shaw’s former home 'Shaw’s Corner', in Ayot St Lawrence, Hertfordshire – now a National Trust property.
  60. ^ The Times, 24 September 1947; Bank of England inflation calculator.
  61. ^ '[O]ne of the schemes of the Shoreditch, Hackney and Highbury Housing Association for the benefit primarily of old people. The estate is on an acre of land and comprises 36 flats in four houses … The estate is named after Misses Bertha and Mabel Newcombe, who left a legacy to be devoted to the housing of elderly women' – The Times, 18 July 1952.
  62. ^ "Newcombe, Bertha, 1857–1947". Art UK. Archived from the original on 1 December 2017. Retrieved 11 December 2021.

References[edit]

  • Baile de Laperrière, Charles (ed.) (1996). The Society of Women Artists Exhibitors 1855–1996, Vol. 3: L–R. Calne: Hilmarton Manor Press
  • Baile de Laperrière, Charles (ed.) (2002). The New English Art Club Exhibitors 1886–2001, Vol. 3: L–Q. Calne: Hilmarton Manor Press
  • Crawford, Elizabeth (2018). Art and Suffrage: A Biographical Dictionary of Suffrage Artists. London: Francis Boutle
  • Graves, Algernon (1989). The Royal Academy of the Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and Their Work from its Foundation in 1769 to 1904, Vol. 3. Calne: Hilmarton Manor Press
  • Herrmann, Luke (2000). Nineteenth Century British Painting. London: Giles de la Mare
  • Holroyd, Michael (1997). Bernard Shaw: The One-Volume Definitive Edition. London: Chatto & Windus
  • Mallalieu, Huon L. (2002). Dictionary of British Watercolour Artists up to 1920, Vol. 2: M–Z. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors' Club
  • Meyers, Jeffrey (2005). Married to Genius: A Fascinating Insight into the Married Lives of Nine Modern Writers. Harpenden: Southbank Publishing
  • Peters, Margot (1980). Bernard Shaw and the Actresses. New York: Doubleday
  • Royal Academy of Arts (1981). Royal Academy Exhibitors 1905–1970: A Dictionary of Artists and Their Work in the Summer Exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Arts, Vol. 5: LAWR–SHER. Wakefield: EP Publishing
  • Shaw, [George] Bernard (1965). Collected Letters 1874–1897, ed. Dan H. Laurence. London: Max Reinhardt
  • Southwark Heritage, Bertha Newcombe

External links[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Bertha Newcombe.
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