Elizabeth Forbes (1859-1912)

I’ve just read “Singing From the Walls”, a biography of the Victorian/Edwardian painter Elizabeth Forbes. It’s a wonderful, touching, sad read, a talent of enormous proportions married to an artist of equally great ability.

Her husband Stanhope Forbes came from a monied, middle-class English background, whilst Elizabeth was a Canadian by birth, driven to carve her career out in the male-dominated art world of the latter half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The shame of her career is that she was routinely referred to – as contemporary protocol proscribed – as “Mrs Stanhope Forbes.” Stanhope himself always promoted her name and career as an artist in her own right, not merely the talented wife of a greater painter, yet her story is typical of women artists of the period.

Elizabeth and Stanhope are remembered as founders of the Newlyn School, the group of painters based in Newlyn, Cornwall. Her work is so beautiful: colour, design, observation par excellence. You can feel the nip in the spring Cornish air, hear the rustle in the dresses of her models. She painted among the Pont Aven group in France, where Gaugin worked too, and elsewhere in France and The Netherlands, was friendly with Whistler and Sickert, and lived next door to Rosetti.

Elizabeth died of cancer in 1912. Her son Alec died tragically in the Great War. The story of Stanhope trying to find out what happened to him is heart-breaking. Stanhope remarried and lived into the 1940s. History remembers him more than his wife. But I would recommend you search her work out online and ‘in the flesh.’ It’s absolutely beautiful.