“The Greatest Living Critic”: Christiana Herringham and the Practice of Connoisseurship

Clarke, Meaghan

doi:10.1080/01973762.2017.1282658

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…123 The daughter of art collector and stockbroker Thomas Wilde Powell, Herringham was also an artist leading the tempera revival, a translator, and keen traveller in India where she copied Buddhist wall paintings. 124 In addition to providing the initial £200 to cover expenses at the NACF, the organization also benefited from her family connections: co-founder Robert de Witt was a cousin, and her sisters Agnes Dixon (1865-1918), Eleanor Powell, and Theodora Powell (1871-1920) were all early supporters, the latter leaving £1000 to the fund in 1920. 125 Unlike its French original, women could sit on the fund's executive committee -where Herringham was joined by the classicist Eugenia Sellers Strong (1860-1943) -as well as on the council.…”

Section: Cultural Philanthropy and Public Collectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women Collectors and Cultural Philanthropy, <i>c</i>. 1850–1920

Stammers

2021

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Tom StammersAt the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, one of the finest university art m useums in the country, signs of its founding matriarch are few. As an anniversary publication makes clear, Lady Barber -née Martha Constance Hattie Onions (1869-1933) -was 'no great intellectual force or major collector of fine art'. 1 What she bequeathed to the University of Birmingham in 1932 was not a corpus of masterpieces but rather the funds to enable the construction of a building and a major purchasing spree. While subsequent male curators -like Thomas Bodkin -deserve the credit for the astonishing old masters assembled for the institute, Lady Barber's own creative interests during her lifetime were centred on the home. At Culham Court, near Henley-on-Thames, where she lived with her property developer husband from 1893, Lady Barber introduced neo-Georgian decorations and dramatic alpine gardens. Furniture and especially textiles formed the most substantial part of her collecting, whether historic lace -sourced from the Midlands and Europe -or sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Flemish tapestries and cushion covers. These rich fabrics formed the backdrops in several of the twenty-five portraits that Lady Barber commissioned from the Belgian artist Nestor Cambier between 1914 and 1923. These range from highly theatrical full-length portraits in fancy dress, through to evocative sketches of the drawing room at Culham Court, depicting Lady Barber among her cherished possessions (Fig. 1). It appears Lady Barber was determined for the ensemble of portraits to be kept together after her death, since she arranged them into a privately printed book and lobbied (unsuccessfully) for their exhibition in London. Their presence at the Barber Institute remains jarring, even embarrassing, for those who query the aesthetic merits of Cambier's work or the 'social climbing' of his favourite sitter. 2

show abstract

Section: Cultural Philanthropy and Public Collectionsmentioning

confidence: 99%