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.

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.

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.

Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy, was co-founder of Newnham College with Millicent Garrett Fawcett.  Alongside his lecturing and literary occupations, Sidgwick took an active part in the business of the University and in many forms of social and philanthropic work. He was also one of the founders and first President of the Society for Psychical Research. Sidgwick married Eleanor Balfour, who as Mrs Sidgwick, became the College’s second Principal.  Sidgwick is commemorated in the names of Sidgwick Hall (where this portrait is displayed), as well as Sidgwick Pond, Sidgwick Avenue and the Sidgwick Site.

The portrait of Henry Sidgwick was created posthumously, being commissioned from 1904 by Mrs Emma Winkworth.  Winkworth probably drafted the inscription for the sculpture, though as one of the era’s most influential philosophers, Sidgwick’s wisdom (as referenced in the text and symbolised by the oil lamp) would have been widely known.  Winkworth served on the College Council from 1880 to 1905; she is recognised in Alice Gardner’s Short History of Newnham as a ‘munificent benefactor’, who gave many books to the library. The Council Minutes of February 1904 record Winkworth’s intention to engage the artist Gilbert Bayes to create the portrait, that ‘if successful’ would then be offered to the College.  She sent photographs of the completed work to Council in 1905, and presented the portrait later that year.

Gilbert Bayes (1872-1953) was one of Britain’s major figurative sculptors and craftsmen. He worked in diverse media including bronze, stone, wood, ceramic and enamel, and at varied scale from medals to monumental and architectural sculpture. Bayes produced works in Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau and Art Deco styles during his long career.

Bayes had a keen interest in applied arts, and produced many low relief works similar to the Sidgwick portrait.  The inclusion of the bright blue lapis lazuli in the piece is notable, as Bayes became known for his interest in colour.  His polychrome frieze from the front of Doulton House (demolished) is now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, where Room 111 charting the creative process of sculpture is named after him.

Bayes was a member of the Art Workers’ Guild. He was elected to the Guild in 1896 and became a Master in 1925.  He would therefore have been acquainted with Selwyn Image, the artist of the Philippa Fawcett portrait.

In October 1931, Bayes’ dramatic horological sculpture The Queen of Time was unveiled at the main entrance of the Selfridges building in Oxford Street, a location that became known as ‘London’s Meeting Place’.

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’.

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).

Blanche Athena Clough (1861–1960) was Newnham’s fourth Principal, and niece of first Principal Anne Jemima. Her finished portrait by artist William Nicholson has hung in the same location at Newnham for almost a century. The portrait was paid for by donations by friends, former colleagues and students, and was painted to mark Blanche Athena’s retirement. A special committee was set up in 1923 to select an artist: Sargent, Orpen, Steer and William Nicholson were all proposed. As Sargent was unavailable, the commission was given to Nicholson. Sittings began in Cambridge in the autumn of 1923 and continued into 1924, sometimes at Clough’s home in the New Forest.

Clough is portrayed in a sombre mood, looking straight ahead and lost in thought with her hands folded. It barely represents the warm and sympathetic personality for which she was remembered by students and colleagues alike.

In 2017 the conservator Julie Crick discovered another painting behind Nicholson’s completed portrait.  This second canvas had been hidden for 90 years having been used as the lining for the finished work.  On separating the two canvases the artist’s original, abandoned version of the portrait was revealed.  This showed the cheerful character of Clough that her colleagues knew. Here, by contrast to the finished version, her eyes are alert, with a half-smile playing on her face – and suggests that the subsequent gloomy expression on the completed portrait was a very deliberate choice.

We will never know of the conversation that went on between artist and sitter and what led Nicholson to decide to alter Clough’s expression so crucially. The abandoned painting is now framed and hanging near the finished portrait, as a rare example of an artist’s discarded work to be preserved in this way. It leaves us with more puzzles than it answers about this complex woman.

The rare find, the circumstances of the portrait commission, and the intriguing differences between the finished and unfinished likenesses of Clough were discussed in an article by Henrietta McBurney Ryan and Gill Sutherland for The Burlington Magazine in 2020. The article was offered in memory of Julie Crick and in gratitude for her dedicated work for Cambridge colleges and many other institutions and private individuals.

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”.

Newnham’s portrait of Mathilde Blind (1841-1896) is the earliest work in this exhibition, 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 Autumn 2021 it will go on loan to the Watt’s Gallery in Surrey, for their upcoming exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Daughters.

Isaline Horner, known to her friends as ‘Squizzie’ joined Newnham College as a student in 1914 and stayed on as Assistant to the Librarian, and then Acting Librarian.  In 1921 Horner travelled with D.J. Stephen (sister of Newnham’s former Librarian and Principal, Katharine) to India and the countries now known as Sri Lanka and Burma. During her tour, Horner became fascinated with the practices of the Buddhist and Hindu religions.

Horner returned to Newnham becoming Librarian in 1923.  She remained interested in Theravada Buddhism and studied Pali texts. In 1936 she moved to Manchester with her companion Elsie Butler, who had been appointed to a Professorship at the University. Horner remained closely involved at Newnham as an Associate and Member of Governing Body, and donated funds towards the extension of the Library in the 1960s.   The University of Ceylon made Horner an honorary Doctor of Letters in 1964, as did Nava Nalanda Mahavihara in 1977. In 1980, Horner received an Order of the British Empire for her services to the Pali Text Society.

Gertrude Hermes (1901–1983) was a highly-acclaimed print-maker; her exquisite wood engravings and prints earned her awards, titles and recognition. Newnham’s art collection includes one of her linocut prints, purchased by students in the mid 1950s.  However sculpture was Hermes’ first love, through which she explored themes from the natural world, and produced portraits of friends and family, and commissioned subjects.

Hermes was born in Kent to German parents, and attended Beckenham School of Art and Brook Green School of Painting and Sculpture, where other students included Eileen Agar, Henry Moore, and Blair Hughes-Stanton whom she married in 1926, but divorced seven years later.   She was influenced by the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Brancusi, and exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1934 and at the Venice Biennale in 1939.  Hermes taught wood-engraving and linocutting at the Central School of Art and was elected as a Royal Academician in 1971. She received an Order of the British Empire in 1981.

Hermes’ became noted for her busts of writers, such as those of A.P. Herbert, Kathleen Raine and David Gascoyne, and for her sculpted heads of children.  Hermes’ portrait of Horner is typical of her work of the 1950s and 60s.  The obituary of Horner by M J Waley in Newnham’s 1982 Roll Letter says ‘her portrait in bronze reminds those who knew her of the rugged look of her later years’.  Other examples of Hermes’ portraits in a similarly strong-featured style can be seen in the collections of the Tate and National Portrait Galleries.

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 later.

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, will go on display.

The statue of Newnham’s co-founder Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929) was created by Turner Prize-winning artist, Gillian Wearing (b.1963).  The full-size statue stands in Parliament Square, following a campaign by the journalist Caroline Criado Perez.  The campaign highlighted that fewer than 3% of statues in the UK are of women, other than those of members of the royal family.

The statue was commissioned to recognise the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918 which gave some women the right to vote.  It portrays Millicent at the age of 50, when she became President of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.  The names and images of 55 women and four men who supported women’s suffrage also appear on the statue’s plinth.

In describing the banner that appears in the statue, Wearing explained ‘The words ‘courage calls to courage everywhere’ are shortened from a sentence that Millicent wrote a few years after the death of Emily Davison who was struck by the King’s horse at Epsom Derby. Millicent believed in non-militant action and Emily, who was a Suffragette, believed in the opposite. The Suffragettes were part of a movement born out of the frustration that, even after decades of protests and petitions, women were still not being listened to. They believed that the only way forward was to create civil disobedience. By using this quote from Millicent, I am bringing the two groups together symbolically’.

The banner also references Wearing’s early 1990s work Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say And Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say in which she took a series of photographs of strangers holding up their personal thoughts on pieces of white card.

The maquette at Newnham is one of a small edition with a design based on the original sculpture, and using materials informed by the full-size work. The maquette was acquired in 2018 and is shown in the Millicent Garrett Fawcett room.  Also displayed nearby are the tiles depicting supporters of women’s suffrage (on loan from the GLA), that were created as sample pieces by the artist in the preparations for the sculpture as well as a poster from the Wearing’s Signs That Say series, purchased as part of the 2020Solidarity fundraiser.

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.

This portrait, of current MCR student Shanice Collins, is part of a new series commissioned via the Open Programme for Newnham’s 150th Anniversary. Initially proposed by Oluchi Ugochukwu and other JCR members of the anti-racist organisation OBR Collective, and supported by the College’s Curator Laura Dennis, the portraits feature eight Black students who are currently studying at Newnham.

Myah Jeffers (b.1994) is a Barbadian-British dramaturg, director and photographer, living in London and working across the UK and internationally.  She was a recent Literary Associate at the Royal Court Theatre and previously the New Work Coordinator at Talawa Theatre Company.  Jeffers is a 2019 Portrait of Britain winner. Her work interrogates themes of diasporic identity, mental health, Queer existence and intergenerational dynamics within Black communities.

Jeffers’ previous photographic projects and commissions include work for The Sunday Times, The Empathy Museum and NHS, The National Youth Theatre, and Black @ The Bar, a series of portraits of Black UK barristers. She has recently collaborated with the artist collective Brownton Abbey as a director, working closely with artist Sonny Nwachukwu for the film Re (Union) which explores religion from a Black, Queer and disabled perspective.

Jeffers’ photographic commission makes visible Newnham’s aim to be an inclusive and welcoming space. It is a step towards portraiture displays that better represent the values and true diversity of Newnham today. The portraits will go on display in College ready for Black History Month in October 2021 and will remain on view throughout the Anniversary celebrations and beyond.

Portrait of Anne Jemima Clough (1883) by William Blake Richmond, oil on canvas © Newnham College

Portrait of Philippa Garrett Fawcett aged 15 years (1885) by Selwyn Image, red chalk on paper, photo credit © Alan Davidson

Portrait of Hubert Parry (1898) by Harold Rathbone, chalk on paper © Newnham College

Portrait of Helen Gladstone (1889) by William Blake Richmond, oil on canvas © Newnham College

Portrait of Henry Sidgwick  (1905) by Gilbert William Bayes, marble, silver and lapis lazuli © the artist’s estate

Portrait of Jane Harrison (1909) by Augustus John, oil on canvas © the artist’s estate / Bridgeman Images

Portrait of Lettice Ramsey (1915) by Frances Baker, oil on canvas © Newnham College

Unfinished portrait of Blanche Athena Clough (1924), by William Nicholson, oil on canvas © Newnham College

Portrait of Joan Pernel Strachey (1926) by Henry Lamb , oil on canvas © estate of Henry Lamb / Bridgeman Images

Portrait of Mathilde Blind (1872) by Lucy Madox Brown, chalk on paper © Newnham College

Portrait of Isaline Blew ‘Squizzie’ Horner (c.1957) by Gertrude Hermes, bronze © the artist’s estate

Portrait of Jane Goodall (1998) by Julia Hedgecoe, photographic print © the artist

Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere (2018), maquette for the statue of Millicent Garrett Fawcett by Gillian Wearing, bronze, granite and stone © the artist, courtesy Maureen Paley Gallery

Portrait of Carol Black (2018) by Saied Dai, oil on panel © the artist

Portrait of Shanice Collins (2021) by Myah Jeffers, photographic print © the artist

The Curator wishes to express her gratitude to Lucilla Burn, Heidi Egginton, Henrietta McBurney Ryan and Gill Sutherland, whose published research was invaluable for the preparation of the captions for the following works:  Portrait of Anne Jemima Clough, Portrait of Hubert Parry, Portrait of Jane Harrison, Unfinished Portrait of Blanche Athena Clough, Portrait of Joan Pernel Strachey, Portrait of Carol Black.