©2023 David Messum
World copyright reserved
First published in 2023 by Studio Publications, The Studio, Lord’s Wood, Marlow, Bucks, SL7 2QS
David Boyd Haycock has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this Work
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ISBN 978-1-78884-224-2
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‘For Fiona and Genevieve, Jessica and Kylie – lovers of horses’
handsome sum for a young artist, at a time when a London board school teacher might earn between £150 and £200 in a year. The picture was duly presented to the recently opened National Gallery of British Art at Millbank in London – the building now known as Tate Britain. It was only the second work by a woman to have been purchased by the bequest, and even by 1901 there would only be five female artists represented in the Tate’s entire collection.11 The Times suggested that if Kemp-Welch continued to make such impressive progress, it could surely only be a matter of time before she would become the first woman to become a Royal Academician since Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser over a hundred and thirty years before.
Gypsy Drovers and Colt Hunting marked the beginning of what would prove an extraordinary run of pictures for Lucy Kemp-Welch at the Royal Academy. Between 1895 and 1930 there would be only a single occasion (in 1921) when she did not have at least one work exhibited at the Summer Exhibition, and she would exhibit a further eleven times between 1932 and her final successful submission in 1949. And yet, despite the early approbation, and the continual pressure of such high expectations, Kemp-Welch would never be overwhelmed by them: ‘surely no woman was ever less conscious of her fame, less burdened by the weight of her success,’ a journalist would write in 1904. ‘Then her sense of fun, too! Who would guess at the fund of mirth that lies beneath the quiet manner and deliberate movements?’12
This book is about that woman: her childhood, her training as an artist, her limitless love of horses and animals, and the rise and fall and rise again of her remarkable oeuvre. It is the story of a most extraordinary woman.
was her pet dog – ‘a very good quiet Airedale.’ She followed her pencil drawing with a watercolour, and in notes made for an article on drawing methods she would later write how, ‘although I was too young to know anything about having an urge to paint ... I certainly knew that I felt a perfect thrill after I had done that first drawing and painting.’7 Young Lucy was also very keen on gardening – something that would remain an important pastime throughout her long life. She would write in notes for a never completed memoir that as a little girl she had sometimes risen at three o’clock in morning to water the garden. According to an account written by her friend, Marguerite Frobisher, in later life Lucy would wonder whether carrying these heavy watering cans when she was so young ‘had stopped her growing.’ She was hardly more then five feet tall as an adult, and she thought ‘perhaps that was the reason she was so small. The parents had no idea what this little girl was up to in the early hours of the morning.’
When they were young, Lucy and Edith were educated entirely at home, first by their parents, then by visiting tutors and mistresses. Later, they went to a local private school. One of their favourite pastimes, aside from drawing, was walking in the New Forest with their father, a keen naturalist with a particular interest in the study of insects. Lucy’s early letters to her father feature little drawings of horses and birds, squirrels and bees. In 1878 the family moved from Beaumont Terrace to a larger house in Branksome, on the edge of Bournemouth, closer to the countryside and nearer the home of their grandfather, Martin Kemp-Welch.8 This move may have been due to their father’s increasing ill health: the previous year, he had been diagnosed with phthisis pulmonalis (pulmonary consumption, or tuberculosis), a not uncommon disorder in Victorian England, even among the comfortable middle class. It was thought that a warm climate, sea air and an outdoor life was the best treatment for a debilitating disease that then still had no known cure.
Edwin Kemp-Welch does not appear to have approved of his daughters becoming artists, even if drawing was their favourite occupation. At that time, art was not widely considered an occupation for women – though drawing and painting were encouraged as part of a middle-class female education. Attitudes
was surely confident, for she was already producing work of some quality. Her painting, A Drink by the Way (presumably of a horse, or horses), had been accepted for the first Bournemouth Industrial and Loan Exhibition, held in the grounds of the Grand Hotel in Fir Avenue in April 1890. It was ‘a clever painting,’ The Southampton Herald reported, ‘and evinces a skill in the art which should be stimulated.’31 Though Lucy and Edith set to work drawing heads, they failed to be accepted on their first application. They thus returned to Bournemouth to study at the Government Art School, spending two terms improving their drawing. Both young women developed considerable skill, as evidenced in an 1894 book of sketches they would gift to a cousin in Weston-superMare. Indeed, according to Marguerite Frobisher, whilst Lucy was studying in Bournemouth she earned as much as £60 in a single year, painting portraits in oils of people introduced to her by her aunts at five guineas each.32 Their efforts paid off. The following year, Lucy and Edith were both accepted into Herkomer’s school. With their mother accompanying them, in September 1891 all three prepared to move to Bushey. An exciting new chapter in their lives was about to begin.
The various artistic talents attracted to Bushey in the 1890s and early 1900s by the presence of Herkomer’s school included the American novelist, Gertrude Atherton. Seeking to escape London one winter, she rented a room in the house of a Miss Bogle, whose brother was studying under the Professor. As Atherton later wrote, Hertfordshire ‘always typified England to me, more so than any part I visited. Its wide lonely common, or heath, its quiet woods and fields, slumberous villages, some of them historic, slender gray spires against a red sunset, all seemed to me more Wordsworthian than even the Lake country.’ At dusk, Atherton enjoyed walking in the high-walled garden of her temporary home: ‘nowhere else had I ever realized the peace of England at the twilight hour as I did on those long summer evenings among the hollyhocks, the flitting white moths, the intense silences of Hertfordshire.’1
Herkomer later admitted that, in promoting his new school to potential students, he had ‘dwelt rather romantically on the idyllic life [they] were going to lead in this village ... There was a somnolence and there was a peace unattainable in our day. There were no motor-cars; there were no motorbuses.’2 Sadly, even by the 1890s that was changing. As Herkomer came to realise, being so close to London, Bushey ‘could not escape from the advancing influences of the times, which meant change, if not progress; and it was the formation of my school that perhaps hastened the change ... and now [as he wrote in 1908] the old houses are being pulled down for the erection of modern shops.’3 Over the course of the seven decades Lucy Kemp-Welch would live in Bushey, it changed from a relatively isolated village to – effectively – a busy suburb of London, almost all evidence of its pastoral origins lost beneath brick and concrete. It was into this slowly changing environment that Lucy, Edith and their mother moved in the early autumn of 1891. They rented an old house not far from the art school, which was located in a purpose-built, two-room building situated in the extensive grounds of ‘Lululaund.’
The sisters’ first venture to Bushey was tragically brief. After little more than a week in their new lodgings their mother took ill again, and all three women returned to Weston-super-Mare. Elizabeth Kemp-Welch’s condition was serious, and just a few months later, in January 1892, she died of influenza and pneumonia. She was only sixty. This loss did not deter her daughters, however. In April the newly orphaned sisters returned to Bushey, taking rooms in various houses around the village. 4 They began
too bad that in Art men and women should be separated. Surely Art should be considered sexless.’29 Notwithstanding this remark, by the following year KempWelch was exhibiting work with the Society of Lady Artists – including a picture of sheep among corn that The Times described as ‘a remarkable example of accurate drawing.’30
Dixon opened her 1899 article on Lucy in The Magazine of Art by raising a peculiar problem. Given that England was now ‘honeycombed with art schools,’ and given that female students ‘abound, and not only work with avidity, but enjoy equal facilities with men,’ what was to explain ‘the paucity of the result’ that was so ‘self-evident’ in the small number of women artists going on to enjoy successful careers? ‘To put the case in a nutshell,’ Dixon mused, ‘we see a certain academic excellence, a certain mechanical standard attained, while the special product, the woman-artist of original eye and hand, is as scarce at the present moment as ever before in the world’s history.’31 It was not a question that appeared, to Dixon, to have an immediate answer. It was an important one, however, and it would eventually be analysed in great depth decades later by the art historian Linda Nochlin.
In her seminal essay, first published in 1971, ‘Why have there been no great women artists?’, Nochlin rightly suggested that there are no ‘common qualities of “femininity” [which] would seem to link the styles of women artists generally, any more than such qualities can be said to link women writers ... if daintiness, delicacy, and preciousness are to be counted as earmarks of a feminine style, there is nothing fragile about Rosa Bonheur’s Horse Fair.’ Furthermore, Nochlin could see no particular subject matter treated by female artists – be it scenes of domestic life, or children – that had not also been treated by significant male ones. ‘In any case, the mere choice of a certain realm of subject matter, or the restriction to certain subjects, is not to be equated with a style, much less with some sort of quintessentially feminine style.’32
Interestingly, Marion Hepworth Dixon picked out style as something that did distinguish Kemp-Welch from her male peers – insofar as she did not appear to have a style at all. This, Dixon felt, was a characteristic of women artists, who ‘are as a rule deficient in style,’ and who as such differed from many young male artists who ‘are so clearly engrossed with the actual handling of their work that
Mangling Done Here, 1898 oil on canvas
50.8
x 76.2 cms (20 x 30 ins)
lucidity – nay, often enough, truth itself – is sacrificed in the vain endeavor to express a new method.’ That Kemp-Welch’s brushwork ‘has none of the bravura of strictly modern methods’ had not held her back at all, Dixon felt:
On the contrary, the young artist would hardly seem to occupy herself with the clichés of style at all. For the moment, Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch would seem to be occupied in schooling her hand to the difficult task of representing horses in rapid action, and, until she has equipped herself adequately, she, perhaps not unwisely, leaves the technique of her work to develop itself on natural lines ... Busy chasing her forest ponies, she appears in substance to have said, ‘Style, rightly considered, is nothing but the matured expression of a particular temperament; my business is so to fortify myself with my actual contact with nature that I may first of all attain self-expression.’33
It was this, together with her constant watchword, ‘work,’ that had brought Kemp-Welch such success. As Dixon observed, ‘in her engrossing search after nature’s realities she stops at very little.’34
Yet as Nochlin observed, prior to the twentieth century, talent and hard work were still not in themselves enough for a woman to break through the art world’s gender barriers. As she points out, those women who were successful ‘were either the daughters of artist fathers, or ... had a close personal connection with a stronger or more dominant male personality. Neither of these characteristics is, of course, unusual for men artists, either ... it is simply true almost without exception for the feminine counterparts, at least until quite recently.’35 This was true of Rosa Bonheur, Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser, whose fathers were all artists. Kemp-Welch’s father, as we have seen, was not supportive of her ambition, though her mother clearly was – and the death of her father may, indeed, have liberated Kemp-Welch from paternal expectations. With Herkomer as a patron, however, Kemp-Welch certainly had Nochlin’s ‘dominant male personality.’ The young female artist acknowledged as much, with Dixon noting in her 1899 article both Kemp-Welch’s ‘pleasing and graceful habit’ of proclaiming ‘her indebtedness to Professor Herkomer,’ as well as the well-known fact that ‘Bushey is vastly proud
left: Shire Horses, 1928 pastel
50.8 x 61 cms (20 x 24 ins)
below: Sketch of Horse and Rider pen and ink
exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1899 – one biographer suggesting that his large canvas, The Vagabonds (shown at the Summer Exhibition of 1902), might even have been his attempt ‘to outdo Lucy Kemp-Welch’s Colt Hunting in the New Forest ... but he had to admit it was a comparative failure.’ It toured several other art galleries before eventually selling for a meagre £30.13
At the Lyceum Club the two artists discussed the idea of establishing a Society of Animal Painters.14 In November its formation was officially announced in The Times, with Kemp-Welch elected their first president.15 The Leicester Galleries hosted the Society’s first exhibition, in January 1914, though it was considered (in some quarters at least) to have been a ‘disappointment,’ with ‘nothing really distinguished’ to show for itself.16 Yet Kemp-Welch was continuing to develop in technique – perhaps helped by her trips abroad to France and Italy. When she exhibited The Glory of the Day at the Royal Academy in May 1914, the critic Frank Rutter wrote in The Sunday Times that the picture, which shows ducks on a pond, ‘marks both a change and an improvement in her practice, the light reflections on the water are skillfully handled, and the painting has a greater vivacity and luminosity than we are accustomed to find in her work.’17 It is certainly something one begins to see more of in her work after this period – a lighter touch, broader brushstrokes, a clear move away from the busier, more formal Victorian works with which she had first made her name. Further success – and harder times – lay ahead.
is typical: ‘Tremendous news from the front,’ she recorded, ‘a huge upheaval which has been prepared for more than a year at Ypres, it gives us the whole of the Salient, Messines ridge etc. & heaps of prisoners.’22
Despite (or because of) the constraints with which she was obliged to work – including the generally jingoistic reporting of the British press – when Forward the Guns! was exhibited at the RA’s Summer Exhibition in 1917 it would prove another cause célèbre. Most impressively of all, it was immediately purchased by the Chantrey Bequest, and presented to the Tate Gallery in perpetuity for the nation.
‘Hip Hip Hooray!!’ as Lucy wrote in her diary on receiving the news.
‘I am really rather overwhelmed by it,’ she wrote in a letter of thanks to the President and Council of the RA, ‘so that I’m somewhat at a loss for words to express what I feel. But beyond everything I want to thank you for your good opinion of my work, which is a thing I value before everything else and trust I may never lose.’ She used the £800 payment to finish paying off her mortgage.23
The recognition accorded to Lucy’s latest painting was not, however, universally popular. As a critic for The Pall Mall Gazette reported in May 1917, following a visit to Burlington House, there was ‘trouble brewing’ at the Royal Academy:
From the depth of the soul of the younger members I could clearly hear the rumbling of a threatening volcanic eruption ... they were all equally emphatic in their disapproval. Some were quite angry. None approved of the choice. And yet the choice was made. ‘Forward the Guns’ is a capable enough piece of painting, but Miss Kemp-Welch is already represented at the Tate Gallery by a much finer painting – and there are better, infinitely better, things available for purchase.24
By this date the administration of the Chantrey Bequest had been under fierce criticism for some years, with accusations that the Academy had been misusing it to buy work by their own members. Kemp-Welch, of course, had still not been elected to the Academy, but Forward the Guns! was caught up in the controversy.
A long article by the art critic P.G. Konody appeared in The Observer, arguing that whilst Kemp-Welch was a ‘painter of considerable accomplishment,’ she was already represented ‘as well as could be’ at the Tate, ‘and the purchase of another,
Study for the Straw Ride pencil
10.2 x 20.3 cms (4 x 8 ins)
unsurprisingly, it was also reported that the inspectors who periodically visited the depots ‘say they have never known horses to be so well attended to by men.’34
A fourth depot was added at the end of 1915, when a wealthy racehorse owner, Colonel Hall Walker, offered his horse-training establishment at Russley Park, on the Lambourne Downs in Wiltshire, to the Government. (He also offered his thousandacre racing stud at Tully, in Ireland, and presented a large number of breeding mares, for what became the first National Stud.) 35 Russley Park was placed under the supervision of Lady Mabel Birkbeck (wife of Major-General Sir William Birkbeck, Director of Remounts), with around a hundred horses, and again staffed entirely by women. At the end of the war, and shortly before Russley Park was due to close in June 1919, Lady Priscilla Norman, chair of the Women’s Work Sub-Committee at the Imperial War Museum, offered Kemp-Welch £150 (the most they could afford) to ‘paint for the nation the largest and best painting that you could do for that sum, with a view to its being a contribution to our national collection.’ Visiting Russley in March 1919, Lucy also saw a fine subject for a painting of her own, and despite the relative paucity of the fee, she accepted the commission.36
The result, painted that June, was another immense canvas, thirteen feet wide and six feet high. Originally titled The Amazons, but later renamed The Straw Ride: Russley Park Remount Depot, Wiltshire (opposite), it would prove one of her very finest large works. Using the dramatic framing device of the straw ride’s entrance arch, it depicted six horses being exercised in pairs by three riders. Intended for exhibition at the RA, this was not, in fact, the picture she had intended as the commission for the IWM: they were offered a much smaller, more mundane painting of the horses being exercised out of doors (see pps. 140–1). Not surprisingly, when Lady Norman saw The Straw Ride, the committee requested it instead for the Museum. After some awkward negotiations, Kemp-Welch eventually gifted the picture to the IWM – though as Laura Wortley notes, the whole episode and its arguments rather shook her.37
The following summer she would escape with her sister to the Lizard, at the tip of Cornwall, for a holiday. She did not stop painting, devoting her attention to some beautiful farming pictures, sun-drenched and set against the peaceful backdrop of the sea.
that over the past twenty-five-years there had been ‘more striking changes ... than [in] any other period in history.’ Eyles noted there were now female barristers, doctors and surgeons, there were police constables and female detectives at Scotland Yard, and there was even a female director of the BBC. But it was culturally and socially that Eyles saw the greatest changes as having taken place:
In art, literature, and music, from which it has never been possible wholly to exclude them, women have multiplied their successes. We have a Dame Ethel Smythe in opera; in painting a Dame Laura Knight, an Ethel Walker following the pioneer steps of Lady Butler and Lucy KempWelch, and it is impossible to select any particular name to stand for women’s achievements in poetry and literature, so many at once present themselves for choice ... Women were knocking at the doors when the present reign began [in 1910]; now the doors are open wide, and the whole world of opportunity is before them. 21
Whilst Eyles acknowledged that there was much yet still to be done, nonetheless progress was being made, and Lucy Kemp-Welch was among those women who had led the way.
Sadly, her place in the avant-garde of female artists was dwindling by the mid 1930s, and the world of horses in which she had grown up in was rapidly disappearing. These changes were witnessed in her last major work, The Call (pp. 198–9). It was Edward Seago who suggested the subject to her. He had seen a team of horses launching a lifeboat at Brook, on the Isle of Wight, and he told Lucy ‘of the fine and dramatic possibilities’ it offered as a picture. She had seen such a launch herself once, in Dorset – but when she now set out to paint the scene in 1937, she discovered that the last horse-launched lifeboat had been taken out of commission. Nevertheless, she was able to reconstruct the event, amalgamating elements from the Brook boat with others at Newhaven and Worthing.22 It was an impressive achievement for a woman now approaching seventy.
On the eve of another global conflict, more of the old world was lost when in 1939, in a terrible moment of shortsighted cultural vandalism, ‘Lululaund,’ which had been left vacant since Herkomer’s death in 1914, was demolished.
Much of the Bushey that Herkomer and Kemp-Welch had known and loved was increasingly being lost beneath housing developments, as the London suburbs stretched ever northwards. The peace ended – along with Lucy’s travels with the circus – with the outbreak of a new war with Germany in September 1939.
Petrol was rationed, and Lucy’s car would be laid up for much of the next six years. The conflict was even closer to home this time, as German bombers came over in far greater numbers than had been seen in the First World War. During the London Blitz of 1940 bombs landed in Bushey – one exploded almost directly in front of ‘Kingsley,’ and another landed in the orchard behind. Two men were killed in a house nearby, but Lucy and Edith were both unharmed in their air-raid shelter in the garden. On another occasion a land mine went off over the village, causing further damage. Two artist friends whose house was bombed out in London came to stay, and a member of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force would be billeted with them. Edith was now seriously ill with cancer, and on 3 November 1941 she died. The sisters had lived together their entire lives, and Lucy invited Marguerite Frobisher to move in to keep her company. ‘I didn’t know whether it was meant to be permanent or not,’ Frobisher later recalled, ‘so after a while I suggested I should move out and she was horrified. So I stayed ...’23
Mustapha also died during the war, and would not be replaced, as Lucy now felt too old to ride. But she retained her love of animals. Frobisher brought her parrot to live with them, and Lucy acquired a number of chickens again. One, named Tenpence (which was how much he had cost to buy) would follow her everywhere, Frobisher remembered, ‘like a dog.’ He would sit on Lucy’s knee, but fiercely attacked anyone else who came into the orchard and field that was his domain. Lucy painted him (opposite), and she continued to be busy. As she explained in a 1943 letter to the director of the Russell-Cotes Museum in Bournemouth, who was looking to purchase her pastel drawing Sport of Imperial Rome, she was ‘like everyone else these days ... doing the work of three.’24
Marguerite Frobisher recorded that once the war was over ‘we gradually returned to a normal way of life.’ They both started painting again, ‘but Miss Kemp-Welch only for a short time.’ She was losing her sight, and she spent more time gardening instead of painting. In the evening, Frobisher would read aloud to her, and encouraged Lucy to talk about her childhood and youth.
below:
Study for Launching the Lifeboat oil on board
25.4 x 40.6 cms (10 x 16 ins)
right:
Launching the Lifeboat (originally titled The Call), 1937 oil on canvas
182.9 x 167.6 cms (72 x 66 ins) by kind permission of Bushey Museum
Lucy exhibited for the final time at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 1949, with her oil painting, Harvest of the Beech Woods. In her final years she did no painting at all.25 Relatives would sometimes visit, and John Kemp-Welch, a distant cousin, recalls meeting her with his parents at ‘Kingsley’ after the war, and finding her ‘delightful and modest.’26
On 21 November 1958, aged eighty-nine, Lucy fell at home and broke her leg. She was taken to the Peace Memorial Hospital in Watford, where she contracted pneumonia, and died six days later. ‘Like most artists who came to maturity and were established before the end of the nineteenth century,’ her obituary in The Times recorded, ‘Lucy Kemp-Welch suffered somewhat in her later reputation from the violent changes in art which followed. In her prime as an animal painter she held a position in this country comparable to that of Rosa Bonheur in France, and the only British woman artist of her generation who was more talked about was Lady Butler, painter of The Roll Call.’27
Lucy Kemp-Welch was buried across the road from her home, in Bushey churchyard, alongside her sister, and not far from her old friend and mentor, Sir Hubert von Herkomer.
