New Collections for New Women: Collecting and Commissioning Portraits at the Early Women’s University Colleges

Abstract

In 1899 Irish suffragist Dorothea Roberts gave Bedford College a portrait of Millicent Fawcett by the artist Theodore Blake Wirgman. This gift commemorated Fawcett’s acceptance of her honorary degree from the University of St Andrews, an important celebratory moment for the women’s higher education movement. At one of the earliest women’s colleges in the country, Fawcett’s portrait joined a growing collection of portraits of pioneering professional women at Bedford College. The art collections at the newly established women’s colleges heralded a new kind of collector: collectives of educated women, staff, students, and alumnae. These women were not necessarily wealthy individuals, but as collectives they could commission artworks through the intricate networks that threaded between the different institutions promoting higher education for women. Focusing on three very different early women’s colleges — Newnham, Bedford, and Royal Holloway — this article explores the motivations, networks, and inspirations for the collections formed by women’s university colleges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Including portraits by celebrated artists like James Jebusa Shannon, Philip de Laszlo, and William Orpen, these collections were among the first to celebrate female sitters for their academic achievements and leadership, and among the first to be collected for the edification of a largely female audience. I argue that networks stretching across different colleges were utilized to share knowledge of appropriate and preferred artists, who could be trusted to produce work that was aesthetically conservative but radical in subject. These collectives of educated women deliberately cultivated art collections that would present a new visual history of education, with women as its leaders.