Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting exhibition at the National Theatre looking at the role of the theatre in the movement to win the vote for women. The show was mainly information boards and archive photographs. There was good use made of quotes and I was amazed to find that there had been over 100 suffrage plays written between 1908 and 1914. I liked the incorporation in the display of a prison cell to represent the role of the theatre at suffrage fairs including re-enacting prison life. I loved a hand bill of the entertainments at the fair. The show threw up lots of fascinating stories and people you want to find out more about. Actress Muriel Matters flew over London in an airship dropping leaflets and Edith Garrud was known as the jujitsu suffragette who taught self-defence to the suffragettes and set up and trained body guards for the leaders. The Actress Franchise League also campaigned for more opportunities for women in the theatre, the end to unsafe working conditions and the end to...

Interesting exhibition at the Houses of Parliament looking at the role of women in Parliament.   It’s arranged chronologically but cleverly focuses it around four spaces used by women over the years, recreating them and discussing the history of that era. It started with the Ventilator in the attic from which women viewed the actions in the house from 1818 to 1834. The picture attached is by 15 year old Georgina Chatteron of her view of how the women might have looked. This was the age of the Great Reform Act which expended voting rights to more men but no women.   Next was the Cage was the purpose built ladies gallery in the new Palace of Westminster which again was high up and had metal grilles over the windows. This section was used to discuss the suffrage and suffragette movements. It was moving to see prison and force feeding medals and the sign that Tony Benn had put on the broom cupboard where Emily Davidson spent the night of a census so she could list herse...

Small display at the National Portrait Gallery looking at pioneering Victorian women to mark the centenary of women getting the vote.   There is another display at the Gallery looking at the campaigners for the vote but there was some overlap with this as both included Mary Wollstonecraft and Millicent Fawcett. This displayed focused more on the first women to do certain things such as Jane Cobden Unwin who won a seat on the inaugural London County Council but due to legal challenges to her eligibility was prevented her from serving as a councillor.   Millicent Fawcett sisters were featured too. I knew one, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson,   was the first woman to qualify as a doctor but not that another sister Agnes Garrett, was the first female mayor in Britain.   Closes on 2 December 2018

Small exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery to mark 100 years since the passing of the Representation of the People Act which gave women the vote. This was part of a series of displays which the gallery is running over the year and this one focused on the main figures who campaigned for the vote and pioneering political women since. The earliest picture was of Harriett Mill, the wife of John Stewart Mill, and was a picture from a different world to the other Victorian and Edwardian images. There was a nice picture of Millicent Fawcett, who presented the first petition to Parliament in 1861. I always forget that Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first women to qualify as a doctor, was her sister.   Mrs Pankhurst was represented by the famous pictures of her being arrested at Buckingham Palace and giving a speech in Trafalgar Square. The Christabel Pankhurst portrait by Ethel Wright was there plus a lovely portrait of Sylvia by Henry Cole shown here.   Look...

Fascinating display at the National Portrait Gallery on suffragettes to mark 100 years since their campaign of damaging pictures in public galleries. On the way to the display, the gallery is currently showing a lovely portrait of Christabel Pankhurst in a pale green satin evening dress wearing the suffragette purple, green and white sash. It’s almost an action shot of her proclaiming something. There is a very similar photo of her giving a speech in the display so maybe she always stood like that! The display itself has a great selection of newspaper photographs such as the one of Mrs Pankhurst being carried off from a protest outside Parliament with her legs kicking. The main section was given over the surveillance pictures of women in prison which were circulated to galleries to warn them these women might come in and do harm. One of the women had been force fed 236 times! The pictures often looked slightly odd until you realised the women were often being held by ...

Fascinating exhibition at Tate Britain looking at occasions in English history where art has been destroyed whether for religious, political or aesthetic reasons. The religious section was probably the most detailed and looked three distinct periods, the Dissolution of the monasteries, the reformation under Edward VI and the Civil War. We think of the Dissolution as a destructive phase by actually Henry tended to just remove things that would make him money. It wasn’t until later that we see the wholesale destruction of images because of religious ideology. These displays showed just how much Britain had lost at this time. I think most countries had an artistic golden age, or maybe more than one, and I suspect the late medieval period was one of Britain’s yet we largely ignore it because so little is left. I loved the fragments form the screen at Winchester which were so crisp because they’d been buried rather than weathering, it gave a wonderful view of what the world mus...

Nice little exhibition at Greenwich Heritage Centre on a local suffragette Rosa May Billinghurst. The Centre has made the most of the few items them had and put them into context by looking at the life of an Edwardian lady and society at the time. As Rosa was disabled it also enabled them to look a health and disability in this era too. Inevitably though it was the items about Rosa’s own campaign and about the suffrage movement in Greenwich were most interesting.   I loved the idea of being able to catch a ‘brake’ from Beresford Square to the great Hyde Park rally. At this point I should say that I live about 100 yards from this museum so I was imaging myself queuing up for a ticket! A nice touch was to end the exhibition with a display on women’s issues in the borough now.