Bertha Newcombe

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.

[5] His new business venture was a great financial success, and he moved the family out to Surrey – first to Dorking,[6] then, two years later, to Reigate,[7] where two further children were born: Mabel (b.

[12] At the age of 19, Bertha attended the Slade School of Art in London,[13] 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'.

[14] 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.

[15] 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'.

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.'

[19] Then the Pall Mall Gazette, looking back later, noted that 'Miss Bertha Newcombe made a great success at the [Paris] Salon' in 1881.

[20] 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'.

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.

'[23] 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 ... [has been] picked 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 ... '[24] Croydon remained her home address during the 1880s, but she used various London studios,[25] and throughout the decade she was often 'abroad' – presumably in France.

The Fabian Society, founded in 1884, had attracted many prominent contemporary figures to its socialist cause, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Annie Besant and Emmeline Pankhurst.

'[36] Shaw was not known as a playwright at this time, and Newcombe’s portrait – entitled GBS – the Platform Spellbinder – alludes to his charismatic presence as a political speaker.

He was not in love with me, in the usual sense, or at any rate as he said only for a very short time ... '[37] During the time of this relationship, Newcombe provided an illustration of Beatrice and Sidney Webb for the cover of the Fabian pamphlet Problems of Trade Unionism and also an illustration for The Sketch that commemorated the 'breakfast party at Borough Farm, near Milford, Surrey, on 4 August 1894' that led to the founding of the London School of Economics.

[38] In 1896 Bertha worked with Alice Stronach on an article, 'Socialist Leaders of Today', for which Newcombe provided portraits of Edward Pease, Harriot Eaton Stanton Blatch, Herbert Burrows and Henry Hyndman.

In the article on the Slade School referred to above[40] it is acknowledged that, in order to earn a living as an artist, most students will have to combine fine art with work as an illustrator.

[46] Bertha was fully committed to the unglamorous realities of political campaigning: fund-raising,[47] personal financial contributions,[48] propagating the NUWSS’s message through the sale of its newspaper, Common Cause,[49] and playing a role on organising committees.

[53] An oil painting Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davis presenting the 1866 Women's Suffrage Petition to Sir John Stuart Mill in Westminster Hall was submitted to the Royal Academy in 1910 but was not selected for exhibition.

Bertha Newcombe and her younger sister Mabel were still living with their father at Cheyne Walk at the time of the 1911 census; however, in the following year he died,[55] leaving an estate of £25,629 10s.

[58] In 1929 Bertha Newcombe and George Bernard Shaw attended a much-belated unveiling of her 1892 portrait GBS – the Platform Spellbinder, at the National Labour Club.

[61] Four oil paintings by Bertha Newcombe – Water Lilies (c.1885), Winter Fuel (1886), Landscape with Pond, Sheep and Figures (1892) and The Goatherd (1893) – are in the collection of Southwark Council’s Arts and Heritage Unit at the Cuming Museum, London.