Strings of Keats’ Hair: Artist Ann Mary Severn Newton and Her World

Finally written a book proposal and now to start writing the blooming book!

Constructing the world behind Ann Mary Severn Newton’s self portrait, through her own art as well as unpublished letters and sketches, and her connections to key cultural figures in the nineteenth century.

A young woman, holding a palette, confidently looks out from the cover of the Penguin

edition of Anne Bronte’s Tennant of Wildfell Hall. Ann Mary Severn Newton’s 1862 self-portrait is a depiction of her professional self, holding the tools of her trade when she is newly married and embarking on a change in genre. It is remarkably different from the predicament of Helen Graham in Bronte’s novel, who is hiding from her abusive husband and not openly a professional artist. What they do have in common is that they both worked for money. Mary was, however, a professional artist in a family of artists within a respectable, if bohemian, circle of writers, artists, musicians, and diplomat-politicians in London, many with connections to Rome. Overshadowed by the more famous men she knew, and was related to, such as her father Joseph Severn, the artist and friend of John Keats, she is found in the margins of the lives of, for example, Queen Victorian, John Ruskin and Gertrude Jekyll. This book traces glimpses of Mary’s own world through her unpublished letters and sketches as well as objects, such as a delicate lyre made from the strands of Keats’ hair.

Longer description 

Ann Mary Severn Newton’s 1862 self-portrait is a depiction of her professional self holding the tools of her artistic trade when she is newly married and embarking on a change in genre. The only similarity between Mary and Helen Graham, the protagonist of Tennant of Wildfell Hall, the Penguin edition of which uses Mary’s self-portrait on its cover, is that they both made money from their art. Art, like writing and teaching, was one of the few professions that a middle class woman could make a living from, albeit with many obstacles such as lack of training or access to life models. However, Mary came from a family of artists, with her father Joseph Severn well connected with artists in Rome and London. Trained by her father’s friend, the artist George Richmond, who became renown as the celebrity portraitist by the 1850s, Mary picked up commissions from him, such as at Eton College, as he became busier. Her unpublished letters give an account of her practice from starting out in Ireland, shortly after the famine, to drawing the royal family at Windsor in 1857, which established her reputation. These letters are an insight into what she read, where she went, her development as a young woman and an artist, and often have humorous accounts of who she met, such as Queen Victoria in her dowdy gloves or Prince Albert in his ill-fitting clothes.

The life story of Ann Mary Severn Newton is a story about art, marriage, money and the demands on how a young professional woman should be have, as well as travel in Ireland, Italy, Greece and Turkey. Mary could not marry until 1861 as her professional work supported her entire family (including her father) for eightyears, which limited her ability to paint subjects that would be more likely to be bought by a public gallery, thus also affecting her legacy. Mary’s father was the artist Joseph Severn, who is best known for his friendship with the poet John Keats and was present at Keats’ death in Rome. Severn is credited with preserving the poet’s reputation and his posthumous legacy, particularly in the early Victorian period. He had connections with figures of Romantic culture, such as the Shelleys, and figures in art, literature and politics in the Victorian period, such as Gladstone, Tennyson and Rossetti. His wife – Mary’s mother Elizabeth or Eliza - was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Montgomerie (the heir to the 12^th Earl of Eglington) and through them Mary had connections to the upper echelons of aristocratic society. This book considers the social and professional networks Mary used to get commissions through her own words, as well as her life as a wandering artist and young woman between the status of servant and visitor in fine houses in Ireland and Britain. It draws attention to the sexual taboos and social double standards she needed to navigate.

Mary’s life changed when archaeologist Charles Thomas Newton commissioned her to draw excavated sculptures from newly discovered and excavated the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus at the British Museum in 1859. This was a new direction for Mary, personally as well as professionally since it led to her marriage to Newton in 1861 (becoming Mary Newton) and

he did not want her to ‘work for money’. It was not easy for female artists to combine the commitments of married life with professional development. Newton has been blamed for disrupting her artistic career, but Mary had opportunities to travel and paint after marriage that she would otherwise not have had. Cultural travel with her husband and artist (later landscape designer) Gertrude Jekyll, as well as regular trips to Italy, opened new directions for her artistic genre and practice. My research in the Severn family archive places new light on her professional practice and the economic grind of her work before 1859: letters to her mother detail expenditure, from art materials to stockings, and her anxiety about getting commissions. There are also witty and tender illustrations showing her marriage to Newton which gives an insight into the married lives of this culturally connected couple.

I was awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice Grant by Arts Council England to explore creative non-fiction writing, which resulted in an exhibition at the Hellenic and Roman Library, University of London and Portico Library Manchester as well as an online zine. The book draws on the family archive as well as objects, archives and books in the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, The Royal Collection, Keats’ House, the National Trust and the Portico Library. At her heart, Mary was a romantic, in all the senses of that word, and her most treasured possession, other than her easel and brushes, was a broach with a lyre made from the strings of Keats’ hair.

Synopsis

Acknowledgments 

Illustrations

Introduction: An Artist in the House

How the Angel of the House – the idealised poetic portrait of a middle-class wife by Coventry Patmore - did not really exist other than in the imagination. Virginia Woolf famously killed this Angel due to its legacy that had overshadowed the work of women in the arts (and beyond) ever since the 1850s. Mary Severn Newton laughs at the angel with her sketches of domestic life and how she loses herself in her work. Introducing who Mary was, who she knew and how she worked as well as the methodology for the book – placing her voice at the centre of the page through her letters and sketches – and creating a wider cultural world around this female artist in the mid nineteenth century.

1. Framing Mary’s life: Rome, London and Eglington

Mary was born in Rome on Via Rasella in 1831. Her father Joseph Severn had lived there since accompanying Keats on his death bed journey a decade earlier. An outline of what

Rome was like – the garden city – in the 1830s and the cultural connections of the Severns: George Richmond, John Gibson, John Ruskin, William Gladstone etc. The move to London in 1841 and where they lived over the next decade – increasingly down at heel until they are within streets near to Millbank Prison. By contrast, Mary has aristocratic connections as her mum was the illegitimate daughter of the heir to Eglington and half-sister to the current Lord and sometimes escapes genteel poverty to stay with richer relatives – literally as the poorer cousin and then poorer working cousin.

2. Portraits of Ireland: Anglo-Irish Estates

Mary’s travel to Ireland in 1852, staying with her uncle Lord Eglington, then Governor General of Ireland, in Dublin art the end of the Famine, though there is no mention of it in her letters but Anthony Trollope’s Castle Richmond, set in the time Mary was in Ireland, pictures the horrors of the famine and life at impoverished and wealthy Anglo-Irish estates.  Mary then went around the Anglo-Irish houses and families in Kilkenny, Tipperary and Waterford, which were very much like the ones in Castle Richmond, getting commissions over 9 months - it was the first time she worked within the between role of guest and employee.Her letters to her mother recount who she met, her commissions and getting in trouble for an ‘inappropriate’ relationship as well as the artistic women she made friends with, such as Louisa, Countess of Waterford and Catherine Bernal-Osbourne in Clonmel.  

3. Money Matters: Coming of Age

Recalled home due to the bleak finances of her family in March 1853 and father’s lack of work, Mary’s diary records the frantic month in June / July around her 21^st birthday as the Severns’ try to escape their creditors and debtor's prison. Fortunately, unlike the Dorrits in Dickens’ Little Dorrit, they escape. Joseph goes into hiding, Mary paints at one house, lives at another and all assets are put into her name when she is 21. From this moment she handles her family’s home and works to pay the way of the younger twins, mother and father. George Richmond and Edwin Landseer get her commissions via the art dealer and printer Dominic Colnaghi. 

4. ‘Comms’ and ‘Tin’: Her working life 

From 1853 until 1857, Mary worked mainly in London during the ‘Season’ and had an active social and cultural life, attending parties where she met her heroes / heroines, such as Caroline Norton, and often used these to get commissions. In the summers, she often worked in Margate or the Isle of Wright, where the middle-class families she worked for went on holiday or spent time as a live-in guest / employee at grand houses, such as Sandringham. In all of this she records the ‘comms’ and ‘tin’ she makes for her mother as the two women control the family finance and her anxiety about and ambitions for her work. Her tricky situation as guest / employee and as a single young woman travelling to commissions and parties in London is also exposed.

5. Boys and Royalty: Eton and Windsor

In the autumn of 1857, Mary steps into to take over some of George Richmond’s commissions of schoolboys at Eton College and becomes sought after by Masters and their wives for their own portraits. She is commissioned to draw Queen Victoria’s mother as a present and this leads to her drawing the younger royal children and spending 4 months working in Windsor Castle. Her observations of the Queen and Prince Albert are witty and fond, giving a new insight into the royal couple and their children. The lithographs of these portraits make her name and helped ease the family fortunes. 

6. Lions, lions and more lions: At the British Museum 

In 1859 Mary has a new and unusual commission (particularly for a woman), to draw the sculptures of the newly discovered wonder of the world – the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos – for the British Museum and the archaeologist Charles Thomas Newton. This is a time of great expansion for London museums in terms of collections at the British Museum and visitor access at the South Kensington Museum, where Newton uses Mary’s drawings in a high-profile lecture. Mary (and her brothers’) sketches capture the vast numbers of lions brought to the museum and Newton’s fondness for his ‘mutilated’ sculptures. They also capture her fondness and growing mutual love and passion between Mary and Newton. 

7. Viewer, I Married Him

In 1861, Charles and Mary could finally marry as their networking and advocacy secured Joseph Servern the job of British Consul at Rome, though he was far too old. Letters in the family archive show how many influential figures they used to support Severn’s application – Gladstone, Ruskin, G. F. Watts and many more.They settled into life together near the British Museum, where Mary also worked, and looked after her family London due to her mother’s illness and then death in Marseilles in 1862. This was the year of her self-portrait, but there were also strains as she grabbled with being a wifely housekeeper as well as an artist, which are depicted in a series of sketches. 

8. Travels: A woman’s view of the Ottoman Empire

Throughout their short marriage, Mary and Charles visited Joseph at Rome and other cities in Italy for Charles’ work for Mary to see family and friends. In 1863, they went further afield to the Eastern Mediterranean at Athens, Constantinople, Corfu and Ephesos for Charles’ work for the British Museum and for two weeks holiday at Rhodes. Mary’s sketches of this voyage together with Gertrude Jekyll’s diary give an insight into the two women’s travels and their experience in the Ottoman Empire. 

9. Wonderland: Married Life 

Mary carried on working throughout her married life, but not for ‘comms’ and ‘tin’. She exhibited her self-portrait at the RA as well as other work and on her death in 1866, had been preparing work made on her travels in 1863. She also made portraits of her friends through her marriage, such as  Lorina Liddle (mother of Alice Liddle aka Alice in Wonderland), whom she stayed with at Llandudno and Oxford. There is some controversy about Charles’ working of her ‘too hard’, but no evidence for that in the archive. 

10. Her Death and Finding Mary Today  

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On 2 January 1866 Mary died of measles, it was a short but brutal illness that left Charle scarred by grief for the rest of his life. An insight into her work can be found in his Will, made 23 years after her death and 5 years before his own in 1894. He also looked after Arthur and Eleanor, the twins in London, and a long and fond relationship with Eleanor, who married one of his Oxford classicist friends, Henry Furneaux. Very little of Mary’s work is in public collections, partly as she worked for private commission in the 1850s and died, just as she was working on mythic and historical genre that would be more likely to be collected. Access for women into art and education more generally dramatically changed in the decades after her death, partly due to the work of women like Gertrude Jekyll. 

Finding Mary today has been one of a painstaking digging through archives, books, and unexpected and delightful connections, much like the Victorian novels that echo through Mary’s life.

Notes

Bibliography

Three reasons to publish this book

1. Interest in women’s history and art

2. A snapshot, through a lively voice, of early Victorian cultural and social circles, including the royal family, life at Eton, artists such as G. F. Watts, and travels to Italy and Greece and Turkey.

3. Use of unpublished material from a family archive as well as incorporating the practice of finding information in archives, finding sitters in hitherto unknown portraits by Mary, looking at associated objects, such as the lyre made from Keats’ hair, and reading the books Mary read to capture her world into the journey of finding Mary.