Henrietta Rae

A print of Rae's Ophelia (1890)

Henrietta Emma Ratcliffe Rae (30 December 1859 – 26 January 1928) was a prominent English painter of the late Victorian era.[1][2] One of her most well known paintings is the 1891 Miss Nightingale at Scutari, which has been frequently reproduced as The Lady with the Lamp.

Biography

Born on 30 December 1859 in Hammersmith, London, Rae was the youngest of seven children. Her father was a civil servant, and her mother a musically-talented student of Felix Mendelssohn. Her uncle, Charles Rae, was an artist and a student of George Cruikshank.

She began studying art at the age of thirteen, and was educated at the Queen Square School of Art, Heatherley's School of Art (as its first female pupil), and the British Museum. Rae reportedly applied to the Royal Academy schools at least five times before eventually gaining a seven-year scholarship. Her teachers there included Frank Bernard Dicksee, William Powell Frith, and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema; the last of these had the strongest influence on Rae's later work.

Beginning in 1881, Rae became a frequent exhibitor at the annual Royal Academy shows. She gained recognition and success early in her career, specializing in classical, allegorical, and literary subjects, which were often treated in a grand style and scale. Her Psyche at the Throne of Venus (1894) measured 12 by 7 feet (370 by 210 cm) and contained 13 figures.[3] Among her many other paintings in the same classical vein, Eurydice (1886) won medals at exhibitions in Paris and at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

The Lady with the Lamp popular lithograph reproduction of a painting by Henrietta Rae.

Her painting Elaine Guarding the Shield of Lancelot (1885) drew inspiration from a Tennyson poem, and her painting Sir Richard Whittington Dispensing His Charities (1900) from the medieval merchant and four-time Lord Mayor of London. She also painted many socially prominent sitters, including Lord Dufferin in 1901. Rae's 1891 picture of Florence Nightingale, Miss Nightingale at Scutari (1854), was frequently reproduced as The Lady with the Lamp, and is recognized as her best-known work.

In 1884, she married fellow artist, Ernest Normand. They had two children, a son (born in 1886) and a daughter (born in 1893). Henrietta Rae kept her maiden name after marriage as she had already begun to establish her reputation under its use — an unusual choice at the time. She and her husband lived in Holland Park with many other artists of the day.[4] The Normands were "adopted as the proteges of the older artists among whom they lived. Their studio was constantly visited by Leighton, Millais, Prinsep, Watts, and others."[5] The attention was not always welcome. In her memoirs, Rae described the sometimes overbearing attitudes and conduct of senior artists. In one case, Prinsep dipped his thumb in cobalt blue paint and marked up one of Rae's pictures. In return, Rae "accidentally" burnt his hat on her stove.[6] Finally, in 1893 the Normands moved to Upper Norwood, into a studio that was custom-built for them by Normand's father.

The Normands travelled to Paris in 1890 to study at the Académie Julian with Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. In 1897 Rae organised an exhibition of the work of female artists for the Jubilee of Queen Victoria.

Like some other female artists of her time, Rae was a supporter of feminism and women's suffrage.

She died on the 26th of January, 1928.

Works

References

  1. ↑ Arthur Fish, Henrietta Rae (Mrs. Ernest Normand), London, Cassell & Co., 1905.
  2. ↑ Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists, London, Routledge, 1993.
  3. ↑ Meaghan Clarke, Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain 1880–1905, London, Ashgate, 2005; p. 99.
  4. ↑ Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1999.
  5. ↑ Fish, p. 47.
  6. ↑ Debra Mancoff and D. J. Trela, eds., Victorian Urban Settings: Essays on the Nineteenth-Century City and Its Contexts, London, Taylor & Francis, 1996; p. 71.

External links

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