Jane Harrison (1850–1928) was a British classical scholar and linguist. She spent most of her professional life at Newnham, from 1874 being one of the College’s first students, then returning to College as a lecturer in 1899, a position that was renewed continuously until Harrison retired in 1922. Mary Beard has described Harrison as ‘… the first woman in England to become an academic, in the fully professional sense – an ambitious, full-time, salaried, university researcher and lecturer’.
This vibrant portrait was commissioned from Augustus John by Harrison’s friends, to cheer her up in a period of depression. John has respected her dark mood by showing her reclining gloomily on her chaise longue, dressed in deepest black, her pale face relieved only by scarlet lipstick. But he lightens the atmosphere by including as a backdrop Harrison’s beloved painting of Philip Wilson Steer’s light-filled A Procession of Yachts (1892-3), by introducing the bright cushions and drapery of the chaise longue, and by colouring the book in her hands lipstick red. The composition as a whole may be seen as a witty allusion to, and contemporary development on, the long artistic tradition of the reclining nude in a landscape. Harrison was pleased with the portrait saying she looked ‘like a distinguished prize-fighter who has had a vision and collapsed under it’.
Augustus Edwin John (1878-1961) was a Welsh painter and draftsman, at one point considered the most important artist at work in Britain. One year before the Harrison portrait was commissioned, Virginia Woolf would state that ‘the age of Augustus John was dawning’.
From 1894 to 1898 John studied at the Slade School of Art with his sister, Gwen, who became an important artist in her own right. Within 20 years he had become Britain’s leading portrait painter. He painted many distinguished contemporaries, including T. E. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and, most famously, Dylan Thomas. John was elected a Royal Academician in 1928 and appointed to the Order of Merit in 1942. On his death an obituary in The New York Times observed that ‘He was regarded as the grand old man of British painting, and as one of the greatest in British history’.
Image: © the artist’s estate / Bridgeman Images