Newnham’s portraits are a highlight of the College’s art collection, from oil paintings of the founders and earliest members to contemporary photography.
This section provides details about both the sitters and the artists and explains how these portraits came to be at Newnham today.
Portrait of Anne Jemima Clough (1882) by William Blake Richmond
Anne Jemima Clough (1820-1892) was Newnham’s first Principal. She herself was educated at home, as was typical for women of her class. She founded and worked at several schools and campaigned for women’s higher education. When ‘Lectures for Ladies’ began at Cambridge, Henry Sidgwick planned a hostel for women students at Regent Street. At his suggestion, he asked Clough to be its Head. She began work in October 1871 with five students. The lectures and hostel soon became Newnham College, and Clough its Principal; a position she held until her death. Clough’s niece Blanche Athena would follow in her aunt’s footsteps to become a notable educationalist and fourth Principal of Newnham. A portrait of Blanche Athena also features in Newnham's collection.
William Blake Richmond (1842-1921) was an important member of the Victorian Neo-Classical or ‘Olympian’ school. Born into a family of artists (and christened after the artist and poet of the same name), his Aesthetic style found a following among intellectuals and fellow artists; Charles Darwin, W. E. Gladstone, and William Holman Hunt also sat for him during the 1880s. Richmond was Slade Professor of Fine Art Oxford from 1878, succeeding his friend and mentor John Ruskin.
Richmond was well known during his lifetime for his work on the vibrant decorative mosaics at the east end of St. Paul’s Cathedral. A painting of Helen Gladstone, then Vice-Principal of North Hall (later Sidgwick Hall), was later commissioned from the artist for Newnham, and also features in this exhibition.
Richmond’s portrait of Clough was completed in 1882 alongside a painting of William Morris; Richmond had spent the previous summer at Morris’s house, Kelmscott Manor. The painting provides an arresting likeness of the sitter, and was described by Simon Reynolds, Richmond’s biographer, as perhaps his ‘most powerful image of a mature lady’. The portrait was given to the college by former students in 1883.
Portrait of Philippa Garrett Fawcett Aged 15 Years (1885) by Selwyn Image
This sensitive portrait of a young Philippa Garrett Fawcett (1868–1948 ) was drawn five years before she scored the highest mark of all the candidates for Part I of the Mathematical Tripos, placing her ‘above the Senior Wrangler’. She was awarded First-Class Honours at Part II in 1891, all achieved at a time when women were not eligible for the award of Cambridge degrees. Philippa was awarded a scholarship for further mathematical study at Newnham, and then became a College Lecturer. She left Newnham in 1902 but maintained strong links with the College, attending Roll meetings into her late 70s. Philippa was the only child of the suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Henry Fawcett, Chair of Political Economy in Cambridge and Postmaster General in Gladstone’s government. The couple were influential supporters of women’s education in Cambridge. A portrait of Millicent Garrett Fawcett also features in this exhibition.
Selwyn Image (1849-1930) was an artist, designer, writer and poet associated with the Arts & Crafts Movement. As an undergraduate he studied drawing under John Ruskin. Image followed in his father’s footsteps by taking Holy Orders, but abandoned the Clergy in 1882. Instead he became an influential designer of stained-glass windows, furniture and embroidery, and was an illustrator of books. Image was an active member of the Art Workers’ Guild in London, becoming a Master in 1900. He was also a writer on design, and gave lectures that were reviewed by Oscar Wilde. In 1910 Image was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford, a post previously held by John Ruskin, and by William Blake Richmond, artist of the portrait of Anne Jemima Clough.
The portrait of Philippa Fawcett was given to Newnham in 2015 by Gillian Metcalfe, from the collection of her late husband, John. Today the portrait is displayed in a corridor at Newnham that looks out onto the Fawcett Courtyard, the design of which takes inspiration from mathematics in nature and is named in celebration of Fawcett’s achievements.
Portrait of Hubert Parry (1898) by Harold Rathbone
This striking and unusual portrait of the composer Hubert Parry (1848-1918) is by the artist Harold Rathbone (1858-1929). Executed in coloured chalks, it portrays the composer in a fresh and unpretentious way.
Harold Rathbone was a pupil of Ford Madox Brown, an important figure in the Arts & Crafts movement. In 1894 Rathbone co-founded the Della Robbia Pottery, a ceramics factory in Birkenhead that produced relief panels for architectural use, alongside ornamental vessels and plates. The pottery was intended as a true Arts & Crafts venture, following principles advocated by William Morris. This included using local labour and raw materials such as local red clay. Della Robbia wares were sold by Liberty & Co. as well as in their own retail outlet in Liverpool. However the costs of making Della Robbia products was greater than the prices that could be charged; the pottery could not make a commercial success of itself and it closed in 1906.
Rathbone’s portrait of Parry was drawn the same year that the sitter was knighted by Queen Victoria. Parry is shown not formally in academic robes, but stylishly in a suit, brimmed felt hat, and sporting a rose in his buttonhole. He is seated in front of his piano, with an open score spread out behind him. The portrait is inscribed, ‘Hubert Parry, with fond wishes from Harold Rathbone, 1898’, indicating that it was not a commission, but a gift from the artist.
The drawing seems to have returned to the artist after Parry’s death, as in 1925 it was given to the College jointly by Rathbone and Millicent Garrett Fawcett.
Parry was a strong supporter of women’s education and the suffrage movement, while Millicent and her husband Henry Fawcett were music lovers, and these shared interests cemented a friendship between them. After Millicent heard Parry’s Jerusalem performed in the Albert Hall in 1918, she asked the composer if it could be used thereafter as the Suffrage anthem.
The portrait underwent conservation in 2018, fittingly in the centenary year both of Parry’s death, and the granting of the vote to selected women.
Portrait of Helen Gladstone (1889) by William Blake Richmond
Helen Gladstone (1849–1925) was the youngest daughter of Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone. She came to Newnham as a student in 1877 and stayed on as Principal’s Secretary and then Vice-Principal of Sidgwick Hall.
Helen Gladstone thrived at Newnham, where she was known for her sweet character and sound judgement. In 1886 she turned down the chance of becoming the first Principal of Royal Holloway College, suspecting that they simply wanted ‘a Gladstone’. Instead, she decided to care for her elderly parents, and later, with Octavia Hill, helped to found the Women’s University Settlement, Southwark.
The portrait was given to Newnham by ‘Students and Friends’ of the College in 1889, with Helen’s sister Mary Gladstone being one of those who contributed to the fund. The first artist considered was Hubert von Herkomer, famed for his 1885 painting Hard Times. However the commission was subsequently awarded to William Blake Richmond, an influential figure in the Arts & Crafts movement. Richmond is best known as a portrait painter, and Newnham’s art collection also includes his earlier portrait of Anne Jemima Clough, as seen in the first slide of this exhibition.
Alongside his artistic career, Richmond was also an environmental activist, being an early campaigner for clean air in London. He was frustrated by the low light levels in winter caused by air pollution, which he described in a letter to the London Times as darkness ‘comparable to a total eclipse of the sun’. In 1898 he founded the Coal Smoke Abatement Society, one of the first environmental NGOs in the UK, now known as Environmental Protection UK. He published numerous articles and gave public lectures on the dangers associated with coal smoke.
Portrait of Jane Ellen Harrison (1909) by Augustus John
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
Portrait of Mathilde Blind (1872) by Lucy Madox Brown
Newnham’s portrait of Mathilde Blind (1841-1896) is the earliest work in this gallery, dating from 1872, but was given to the College in 1929, the gift of Helen Chamberlain (NC 1889). Mathilde was born in 1841, the daughter of Jacob Abraham Cohen and his wife Friederike. Mathilde’s father died when she was a child and her mother remarried to Karl Blind. They immigrated to London, and the young Mathilde took her stepfather’s surname.
Blind travelled extensively in Switzerland from the age of 18, studying Latin, medieval German and literature. She set up her own household when she was 30. She continued to travel, spending part of each year in Manchester with her friend Ford Madox Brown and his family. Blind became known as a writer, her first piece appearing in the Westminster Review. Her first book, a narrative poem The Prophecy of St Oran appeared in 1881. The Ascent of Man, an epic poem inspired by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, is considered her masterpiece.
In the mid-1890s Blind spent time in Cambridge, her purpose being a serious one; she was conscious of her failing health and wished to use her estate to support women’s education. After visiting several institutions, she chose Newnham as that which was most aligned to her ideals. Blind died in London in 1896 and left her residuary estate to the College to provide scholarships to study ‘English or Foreign or Ancient Literature’.
Lucy Madox Brown (1843 – 1894) was the eldest daughter of Blind’s friend the artist Ford Madox Brown. Through their father, Lucy and her sister Catharine were closely associated with members of the pre-Raphaelite circle, including the Rossettis, Burne-Jones, William Morris, Holman Hunt and another woman artist Marie Spartali.
Lucy’s mother had died when she was a baby, so she was brought up by an aunt. She later moved to her father’s home once he could afford a larger house in London. Lucy often modelled for her father, providing, for example, the hand of the woman in his painting The Last of England. She worked for a while as his studio assistant and secretary, receiving training from him through classes which he organised for other women pupils. She then studied art at the School of Design. Lucy began to exhibit in 1869, one painting being accepted for the Royal Academy exhibition of 1871. Lucy specialised in the standard Pre-Raphaelite topics of scenes from Romantic literature and history, and also painted her family and friends. Her work was well received by the critics and made a modest contribution towards her father’s finances.
In 1874, at the age of thirty-one, Lucy married an old family friend William Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina. He was a member of the original Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, a writer and art critic, whose edition of Shelley’s poetry had been reviewed by Mathilde Blind in 1870. The portrait of Blind is one of the few works that Lucy produced after her marriage and is signed with her married name.
In 1999 the portrait was lent by Newnham to the exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists, which toured to Manchester, Birmingham and Southampton City Art Galleries. In 2021 it was loaned to the Watt’s Gallery in Surrey, for the exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Daughters.
Portrait of Lettice Ramsey (1915) by Frances Baker
Lettice Ramsey (1898-1985) is known for her work as a portrait photographer. Ramsey came to Newnham in 1918, describing how “Everyone was dancing mad after the First World War. They thought here is peace, everything is going to be wonderful. My time at Newnham was spent dancing.” Ramsey went on to work for a time in London before returning to Cambridge. She met Frank Ramsey, a brilliant mathematician and philosopher. The couple had two daughters, Jane and Sarah, but sadly after only 5 years of marriage, Frank died suddenly in 1930.
In need of an income, Ramsey went on to study photography at the Regent Street Polytechnic in London, though she stayed for just one term. It was through the Polytechnic that she was introduced to Helen Muspratt, with whom she founded a studio, Ramsey & Muspratt, in Cambridge in 1932. Ramsey brought her Cambridge connections to Muspratt’s photographic expertise to create an informal style of portraiture popular with academic and artistic figures. They also opened a studio in Oxford in 1937. In 2012-2013 the National Portrait Gallery presented an exhibition of the work of Ramsey & Muspratt, which also explored Ramsey’s friendship with the Bloomsbury Group poet Julian Bell.
The portrait of Ramsey was painted in 1915 when she was around 17 years old. The artist was Ramsey’s mother, Frances Baker (1873-1914). Frances had studied in her youth at the Slade School of Art, taking a certificate in figure drawing. Frances married Cecil Cautley Baker, a surveyor, and soon after Lettice, and then a second daughter, were born. Cecil died suddenly in 1903 and Frances took up work as a photographer and continued painting. Her experiences were thus, sadly, not dissimilar to what had later led Ramsey to take up paid work as a portrait photographer.
Frances Baker’s portrait shows the teenage Ramsey with a relaxed pose and dress – or perhaps smock. The design of the dress is notable as Baker was interested in textiles; a few years later she would open a weaving workshop in Dublin that became well known as part of the craft revival of handwork. The landscape shown in the background is probably the Irish countryside where the family had been living.
The painting passed to Ramsey’s elder daughter Jane Burch, who came up to Newnham herself in 1948, and then worked for many years in the department of Biochemistry at the University of Leeds. Upon Burch’s death in 2010, the family gave the portrait to the College. The portrait thus reflects three generations: artist (mother), sitter (daughter) and donor (granddaughter).
Portrait of Pernel Strachey (1926) by Henry Lamb
Tutor, writer, and translator Pernel Strachey became Newnham’s fifth Principal in 1923. Her portrait was commissioned three years later, as a gift to the College from former students. Strachey is depicted wearing one of her trademark brocade coats, painted in vibrant and expressive brushstrokes.
The artist Henry Lamb (1883-1960) was an obvious choice for this portrait, as aside from his notable painting of Strachey’s younger brother Lytton, the Lamb family was very well connected to the College; two of Lamb’s sisters, Dorothy and Helen, studied at Newnham, the latter staying on as a tutor and later Director of Studies in Architecture. His elder brother Walter, also a member of the Bloomsbury Group, read Classics at Trinity, from where he joined Newnham as a lecturer.
Henry Lamb was a founding member of the Camden Town Group of English modernists, having trained in London and Paris. He painted portraits for much of his working life (Evelyn Waugh being one sitter), he had many points of inspiration, for instance the old-fashioned streets of Poole, Dorset, which became the setting for several paintings in the mid-1920s.
At the time Lamb received the commission, in the autumn of 1926, he was without a studio. He had given up his Hampstead base and had recently been evicted from the home of his sister and her husband. Sittings for the portrait therefore took place in Lamb’s spartan lodgings in West Kensington. Being mid-December, and without heating, Lamb purchased an oil stove that was positioned behind Strachey whilst she posed. As described in Keith Clements’ Henry Lamb: The Artist and His Friends (Bristol: Redcliffe, 1985) the whole endeavour was “absurdly hurried”, as Lamb had only a fortnight for the sittings, before Strachey left London on New Year’s Eve. He went on describe Strachey as “quite fascinating” but confessed, “the only difficulty is to keep the dear lady amused. She is rather inclined to go to sleep unless I talk”.
Portrait of Jane Goodall (1998) by Julia Hedgecoe
This portrait by photographer Julia Hedgecoe (b.1938) is part of a series, Educating Eve, exhibited at the Arts Theatre in July 1998, at the time of the 50th Anniversary of the formal admission of women to the University. Many of the photographs were then shown at the National Portrait Gallery before being donated to the College. The portraits were on display in Newnham’s performing arts space, the Old Labs, for more than 20 years, and are now hung in the entrance to the Sidgwick building.
Jane Goodall (b.1934) is a renowned primatologist and environmental campaigner. She is recognised for her work to understand primates’ cognitive ability. As a young woman growing up in Britain in the 1950s, a career as a zoologist seemed an unlikely option. She attended secretarial college, before travelling to Kenya in 1957. There, she met Dr Louis Leakey, renowned palaeontologist, who was seeking someone to begin a study of chimpanzees. He arranged for her to have initial training in London, before she headed out on her first field studies in Tanzania. Goodall joined Newnham in her late twenties, working towards her PhD in Ethology from 1962 to 1966. She published numerous papers during this period, including one in the National Geographic. Her work revolutionised primatology, yet some have said that her greatest academic legacy is the many distinguished women scientists empowered by her example.
In 1977, Goodall founded the Jane Goodall Institute, a non-profit organisation that empowers people to make a difference for all living things. Appointed Dame Commander of the Order of The British Empire in 2004, she received the French Legion of Honour and the UNESCO Gold Medal Award two years latter.
Julia Hedgecoe’s work spans a wide range of subjects, though portraiture has always been a strong element of her practice. She moved to Cambridgeshire in the 1990s and is one of the most prominent photographers in the region. A graduate of the Guildhall School of Photography, Hedgecoe was employed by The Observer, soon moving into freelance work for The Telegraph and many other newspapers and magazines. As well as the Educating Eve portraits, Hedgecoe’s work is shown at Newnham via an ongoing commission to photograph the College’s Professorial Fellows. In 2021, two new portraits for this series, of Professor Laura Itzhaki and Professor Róisín Owens, went on display.
Portrait of Carol Black (2018) by Saied Dai
Saied Dai’s portrait of Carol Black is the most recent painting to be commissioned for Newnham’s series of Principals’ portraits. Carol was the College’s Principal until 2019, formerly a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, and the current Chair of the British Library. Black originally studied History and worked as a schoolteacher, but retrained in Medicine, graduating in the subject at the age of 30. She became an Expert Adviser on Health and Work to the NHS and past-President of the Royal College of Physicians, during which time she was awarded her DBE.
Chosen for his original, meticulous and timeless style, Saied Dai (b.1958), was trained at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design, before studying at the Royal Academy of Arts. He later taught at the RA Schools and at the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture. Dai was elected to the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 2004 and won the prestigious Ondaatje Prize for Portraiture and the Society’s Gold Medal in 2006. Notable subjects for Dai’s portraits include Christopher Frayling the former Chair of Arts Council England and Rector of The Royal College of Art, and the popular children’s author Jacqueline Wilson, which was commissioned for The Foundling Museum.
Dai’s portrait of Carol shows her wearing a white silk jacket with a length of blue silk draped over her shoulders. She stands against a background of bamboo and foliage inspired by the design of a folding screen in the atrium of Lloyd Lodge. Dai explained that he and Carol had together chosen clothing ‘that would offer a simplicity of design, a good silhouette and most importantly, a combination that would appear as timeless as possible’.
Dai’s technique, using oil painted on a gessoed panel, employs the same materials as described by the Renaissance artist and author, Cennino Cennini in Il Libro del’ Arte (c. 1400). This choice of technique, in which the paint bonds with the surface to create a unified object, conveys a monumental, icon-like quality to the painting. On display in the College’s newest building, the portrait thus carries a message of modernity linked to tradition.