Margravine Cemetery

 right here, virtually underneath the towering Charing X  Hospital in Hammersmith, the location of Fanny Eaton's grave will be permanently marked on Saturday   4 March 2023 at 12.00 noon.  

As this photo shows,  Brian and Mary Eaton identified the spot six years ago after ongoing research and following obstacles and procedures of various kinds including covid they have now succeeded in publicly memorialising Brian's great-grandmother.  All welcome to come along.

blue plaques

 new blue plaques in London

for CLAUDIA JONES

and 

MARIE SPARTALI STILLMAN 

and

EMILY DAVIDSON 

and 

SOPHIA DULEEP SINGH 

and 

ADA SALTER

announced by English Heritage,  in its efforts towards gender and diversity levelling 

 here is the EH press release.   Below:  The Shrubbery on Clapham Common, the Spartali family home 

In 2023 English Heritage blue plaques will be unveiled to, among others: *

Princess Sophia Duleep Singh (1915–1964): Daughter of the deposed Maharajah Duleep Singh (who already has a plaque in Holland Park) and goddaughter of Queen Victoria, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was an active suffragette and made full use of her royal title to generate support for female enfranchisement. She was a dedicated member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the Women’s Tax Resistance League (WTRL). The plaque will mark the large house near Hampton Court Palace which was granted to Sophia and her sisters as a grace and favour apartment by Queen Victoria in 1896.

Claudia Jones (1915–1964): The plaque to journalist and anti-racism activist Claudia Jones will mark the shared dwelling in Vauxhall that was her home for nearly four years, making it her longest place of settled residence in London. It was during this time that Jones founded the West Indian Gazette and came up with the idea of bringing Caribbean carnival to London. The first carnival took place St Pancras Town Hall on 30 January 1959, and later evolved into an outdoor event, the Notting Hill Carnival.

Ada Salter (1866–1942): Ada Salter became Mayor of Bermondsey in 1922 – London’s first female mayor of a London borough and the first Labour woman to be elected as a mayor in Britain. She also served as a Bermondsey borough councillor and represented Bermondsey West on the London County Council. She had a profound and lasting impact on the hitherto deprived borough, which, by the end of the 1930s, boasted a public health service, palatial baths and wash-houses, and ambitious programmes to clear slums, build new housing and playgrounds, and plant thousands of trees. This revolution was largely due to Ada Salter, who never wavered in believing that beauty, health and welfare were inseparable. The plaque will mark the Southwark building where Ada lived in the late 1890s.

Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927): As a Pre-Raphaelite model, Marie Spartali Stillman featured in paintings by artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. While she became renowned for her classic beauty, she was equally admired as painter. Trained by the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Ford Madox Brown, Spartali Stillman was one of only a small number of professional women artists of the late nineteenth century. She will be commemorated in Clapham, at the house where she first began to realise her ambition of becoming an painter.

Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913): Emily Wilding Davison is one of the best-known suffragettes. Her tireless campaigning for women’s suffrage led to repeated arrests and imprisonment, when she would have endured numerous bouts of solitary confinement and force-feeding. Davison’s actions at the Derby on 4 June 1913 – when an act of protest led to her death – continue to resonate over a century after her death. Her plaque will mark the Kensington house where she lived as she completed her schooling at Kensington High School and embarked on her course at Royal Holloway College, only to have her plans dashed by the severe financial hardship caused by her father’s sudden death.

Ignatius Sancho

 

the half-length portrait of Ignatius Sancho by Thomas Gainsborough is famous, but sadly for British fans it's now far away in Canada.  In compensation, the miniature copy by an unknown artist that recently came to light is now on display at Gainsborough House in Sudbury, as  centrepiece of a room devoted to the Abolition campaign in the 18th century, to which Sancho was a prime contributor.

it's in a period frame, and in a glass case, which makes it rather hard to photograph but the tiny size and somewhat tired condition make it all the more compelling.

the miniature has been jointly acquired by Gainsborough House and the National Portrait Gallery, and will move between the two museums

Phillis Wheatley

 BBC Radio 3 - Free Thinking, Phillis Wheatley

22.00  11  January  BBC 3 

Alice Boyd's Peacock

This nice peacock with swooping tail feathers is pictured on the steps to the   studio at Penkill in Ayrshire.  It's a characteristic  typical watercolour from 1875 by Alice Boyd, laird of Penkill, which is now with the National Galleries of Scotland.   Boyd was a rather tentative artist, given to nervous over-working, which is this case makes the fussy foliage effective against the diagonal lines. 

 

'Finishing Touches' by Alfred Emslie

Has anyone ever seen or read information about the present whereabouts of this painting?

 

It's notable for depicting  a Black artist at work with his wife and daughter in a domestic interior that is part studio and part parlour.  I have long hoped for the re-emergence of  the original on which this illustration is based.

The painting was included in the spring exhibition of 1878 at the Dudley Gallery in London (no.384)  It was placed on the line  so must have been regarded as worthy of notice.

It's not clear if the original was in oils or watercolour - which the Dudley favoured - but the artist is shown in working in oils on a standard-sized portrait canvas, albeit with an elaborate frame already in place, perhaps justified by the title, since final touches could be added up to and beyond exhibition.  The figure on the canvas looks to be three-quarter or full-length.  The whole image is however an invented scene.  It was engraved for the Illustrated London News  (13 April 1878, p.337) 

There are two critical comments on the picture from the ILN,  which have to be slightly censored but still retain their offensive quality.

The first (9 March 1878, p 219) is brief:

'Nor is Alfred Emslie's "Finishing Touches" (384) - a swell n**** painting his wife's portrait - destitute of the comic element; and, though the pigment here and there seems forced, may be regarded as in keeping with the negro sense of colour'.

The second (ILN 13 April 1878, p.339) accompanied the engraving:

'Mr Alfed E Emslie has produced an amusing picture in which he sets forth the imitative nature of the negro.  The artist's profile has a touch of the Caucasian about it; and it is this element in his nature which has no doubt prompted him to become a painter; but in the determined action of his extended leg, throwing the whole of his left side  into a straight line, forming the hypotenuse  of the right-angled triangle into which, by the aid of his dressing gown, the rest of the figure falls, is seen the extravagance of the negro.  The ladylike repose of his sitter - who is likely to be his wife and the mother of the ebony little cherub who clambers up so gleefully behind the artist's chair - was probably learned from her white mistress, before the great war in America set the slaves free. We see how apt a pupil she is; and although she cannot change her skin or alter her features, there is a kindly intelligence beaming in her face  and a quiet gentleness in her whole air and aspect, that one feels to be ladylike.  The original picture, which we noticed at the time of its exhibition in the Dudley Gallery, where it occupied the line, is full of sparkling colour.' 

The whole of this is an eloquent example of Victorian racism that does not perceive its racism, but nonetheless seems to regard Emslie's picture as a provocation.

[A good copy of the engraving is in the British Museums collection (2010,7033.6) presented by Donato Esposito]

 

Lord Monboddo's African manservant

 

 

 

On the famous tour of Highland Scotland taken by Dr Samuel Johnson and James Boswell in 1773, the pair stopped off at the estate of jurist Lord Monboddo [aka James Burnett], located in the Mearns [Kincardineshire] south of Aberdeen.    They left on 21 August, according to  Boswell’s journal:

Gory, my lord’s black servant, was sent as our guide, to conduct us to the high road [to Aberdeen]  The circumstance of each of them having a black servant was another point of similarity between Johnson and Monboddo.   I observed how curious it was to see an African in the north of Scotland, with little or no difference of manners from those of the natives.  Dr Johnson laughed to see Gory and Joseph riding together most cordially.  ‘Those two fellows’ said he, ‘one from Africa, the other from Bohemia, seem quite at home’.

Joseph was presumably manservant to either Boswell or Johnson or maybe to both for this excursion.  ‘Gory’ – named from Goree Island, Senegal, one of the slave-trading sites in West Africa -  was employed by Monboddo, who was known for the ‘magnetism of his conversation’ and his ‘paradoxes’ or eccentric opinions, which included pre-Darwinian speculation over the relationship between primates and humans.   The conversation at Monboddo House involved a sort of debate comparing or contrasting the capacities of  ‘the savage and the London shopkeeper’.  To Monboddo citing ‘the savage’s courage’, Johnson responded, ‘it was due to his limited power of thinking’.

With his notorious toast ‘to the next insurrection of the Negroes in Jamaica’, Johnson was of course a notable opponent of enslavement on the grounds of natural justice, though evidently unpersuaded of natural equality.

When Gory was about to part from us, Dr Johnson called to him. ‘Mr Gory, give me leave to ask you a  question! Are you baptized?’  Gory told him he was and confirmed by the Bishop of Durham. [Johnson] then gave him a shilling.