Bertha Newcombe

Bertha Newcombe (17 February 1857 – 11 June 1947) was an English artist and suffrage activist.

The fourth of seven children of an entrepreneurial father with an interest in education and art, she grew up mainly in Surrey. Aged 19, she entered the Slade School of Art in London and later is believed to have studied at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. She exhibited works in the French naturalist style in the Paris Salon and at the Society of Lady Artists and the Royal Academy in London, with some critical success.

In the 1890s, Newcombe became active in the Fabian Society and she made portraits of a number of prominent socialists, as well as being romantically involved with George Bernard Shaw. At this time the family home – where she had a studio – was in Chelsea, and she became a more-or-less full-time illustrator for publishers of magazines and novels. By the time of the resurgence of the women's suffrage movement in the early years of the twentieth century, she had almost completely stopped working as an artist, but campaigned for the suffragist movement in various capacities. When their father died, in 1912, Bertha and her sister Mabel inherited a sizeable estate. They moved to Hampshire and largely withdrew from public life.

Early life

Bertha Newcombe was born in Lower Clapton, Hackney, London, on 17 February 1857. The family home, Priory House, had also been the schoolhouse when her father, Samuel Prout Newcombe (b. 1824), had worked as a teacher. He was also the author and editor of children’s educational books. After the death of his first wife – with whom he had two children (Frederick and Mary) – he married Hannah Hales Anderton, and Bertha (b. 1857) was the middle of the three children (Ada b. 1856 and Claude b. 1860) by this second marriage to be born in Hackney. Her uncle was Cornelius Prout Newcombe.

In about 1853, Samuel Prout Newcombe had changed career and started The London School of Photography, a photographic portrait studio that soon had branches across London and beyond, exploiting the public’s appetite for ''carte de visite'' portraits. His new business venture was a great financial success, and he moved the family out to Surrey – first to Dorking, then, two years later, to Reigate, where two further children were born: Mabel (b. 1863) and Jessie (b. 1865). Samuel Prout Newcombe took a flippant attitude to census returns – in the 1861 return he described the occupation of the young children as 'Playing!' and gave his own occupation as 'watercolour painter', despite at this point still running the photography studios and beginning to invest in housing developments. In 1868, he advertised in the ''Croydon Chronicle'' for a large country house (or building land) ‘not more than a mile from the station’. By 1870, when Bertha was 13 years old, he had sold the photographic businesses and the family had moved to a large property, 'Northcote', in Croydon.

Slade School of Art

It seems likely that Bertha Newcombe would have received artistic instruction from her father, who once he was semi-retired was pursuing his own interest in watercolour painting. Samuel’s middle name references his uncle, Samuel Prout (1783–1852), a well-known watercolour artist. At the age of 19, Bertha attended the Slade School of Art in London, where the French painter Alphonse Legros (1837-1911) had recently taken over as professor of drawing, painting and sculpture. Legros was 'a gifted draughtsman and had begun to make his reputation as a realist painter in Paris, moving in the circles of Courbet, Manet, Fantin-Latour and Degas'.

Almost twenty years later Bertha Newcombe returned to the Slade with the writer Alice Stronach when they were preparing an article for the magazine ''The Sketch''. Through Stonach’s article, Newcombe recalls that when she attended the school in the early days of Professor Legros she 'thought that she would never spend a happier time'. She noted that 'The two life-schools – one on the first floor, the other in the basement – were used alternately by men and women, and when the men had their turn of the upper chamber they overflowed to the nether regions and worked with the women.' Newcombe evidently enjoyed the social side and camaraderie at the Slade. This came to the fore at breaks in an improvised subterranean rest space that the students called 'The Beetles’ Home'. Here 'girlish confidences concerning flirtations' were exchanged and 'a certain set, which included some of the prettiest girls in the school, was bitten with the craze for æsthetic dress, then a new fashion, and their taste ran riot among peacock-blues and sage-greens, peacock feathers and poke-bonnets, flowing cloaks and bead necklaces.'

Paris

A bold but logical step for Bertha Newcombe after the Slade was to move to Paris. Luke Herrmann notes that ' egrosencouraged his abler students to go to Paris, and thus in several ways the Slade acted as a link between London and Paris, and enabled British students to make contact with the much more liberal teaching methods and atmosphere of the French capital.' The extent and nature of Bertha Newcombe’s visits to Paris are not known, but she and Alice Stronach collaborated on an article entitled 'Paris Art Schools' for ''The Sketch'', and this too seems to draw on Newcombe’s personal experience. Reference is made to 'a small band of English girl artists' who pursued their quest of 'an academy where men and women might work side by side under exactly the same conditions'. Eventually 'fate, or the natural course of events, guided the footsteps of the pioneers to the Académie Colarossi', where 'To Angelo ho ran the Académieit mattered not whether the ladies did or did not study in the same room with the men students.' Newcombe’s exposure to French culture in the broadest sense and to the 'Paris art scene' in particular would have been an immensely transformative experience for her. She would soon be described by critics as an artist working in the 'French manner'.

Rural scenes in the French manner

In 1880, she began exhibiting with the Society of Lady Artists at rooms in Great Marlborough Street, London. The society’s annual exhibition was a large event – with 700 works by over 300 artists – and in 1881 Newcombe exhibited two oil paintings, ''Gossips'' and ''Lingering Footsteps'', both priced at £19. Then the ''Pall Mall Gazette'', looking back later, noted that 'Miss Bertha Newcombe made a great success at the arisSalon' in 1881. In relation to the following year’s Salon the ''Illustrated London News'' explained the recent tendency of French landscape art towards 'pictures which ... have been painted entirely out of doors'. Examples referred to include ''Le Père Jacques'' by Jules Bastien-Lepage and ''The Ferryman'' by William Stott. In this context, the reviewer continued, 'We have marked for special approval also a very small picture of a girl resting by a stream, where she has been cutting sedges, by Mdlle. Bertha Newcombe.'

In 1884, ''The Times'' felt that 'In the drawing "Home at Last", Miss Bertha Newcombe has given us perhaps the best piece of work that she has yet accomplished in her very French manner,' and the ''Morning Post'' the following year explained that she has 'endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of French painters of rural scenes. Her group of peasants returning through the fields in the evening twilight will strongly remind the spectator of the modern Gallic school.' Reviewing the Society of British Artists exhibition in Suffolk Street in 1886 – when James McNeill Whistler had just become president – ''The Times'' noted 'the style chiefly in vogue among the exhibitors here ... as beenpicked up in France and transported to England. In the first room, for example, there are good little pictures by Miss Bertha Newcombe, Mr. P. W. Steer ... '

Croydon remained her home address during the 1880s, but she used various London studios, and throughout the decade she was often 'abroad' – presumably in France.

The New English Art Club

Newcombe had continued to exhibit with the Society of Lady Artists throughout the 1880s, and also at the Royal Academy from 1882. Then, in 1888, she began exhibiting with the New English Art Club. The NEAC had been founded two years earlier by a group of British artists who had been together in Paris – 'many of the works xhibited at the NEAC in 1886were in the "rustic naturalist" manner of the short lived but influential French painter Jules Bastien-Lepage.' Stanhope Forbes