[2] ‘[William] came into some money from his father and succeeded in amassing a tolerably fair fortune’[3] – by 1861 he was a successful builder and contractor, employing 160 men,[4] and at some point he also acquired a saw mill at Canon's Marsh, Bristol.

[8] She ‘graduated’ in 1864, winning a prize for Outline of Flowers[9] – a work which qualified for the only National Medallion to be awarded to Bristol School of Art in that year.

[4] The acceptance of a watercolour drawing, Greenfell Lane, Gloucester, by the Royal Academy in 1869 seems to have been a turning point for Blanche's artistic career.

[19] The extent to which the changed circumstances at Sneyd Park Villa may have prompted Blanche to move from Bristol is not known, but a brief item in the Western Daily Press of 17 January 1878 noted that ‘Miss Blanche Baker has retired from the committee of the Boys’ Home in consequence of having left Bristol.’ The second marriage of William Baker proved even more calamitous than the family had feared.

The Baker siblings took the unusual, but understandable, step of forming a committee and filing for divorce on behalf of their father, who was deemed incapable of representing himself.

Although Blanche was said to have left Bristol in 1878, at the time of the 1881 census she was living with her sister Laura on the farm adjacent to Sneyd Park Villa.

[21] However, a few years later she had moved to the outskirts of London – to Spring Cottage, Hanwell, Ealing, near where her father was living in a small private asylum, Wyke House, in Isleworth.

[22] Blanche had apparently left Bristol to teach art in a London school, partly inspired by a collection of essays on education by the philosopher and social theorist Herbert Spencer.

[23] By coincidence, her sisters Rosa and Mabel Baker would be managing house for Spencer in the late 1880s and ‘we told him how the reading of this book [Education] by [Blanche] had induced her to take the post of art mistress in a London school, and had led to our leaving the country to join her in town.’[24] It may have been Spencer's ideas on what was later termed a ‘child-centred’ approach to education that resonated with Blanche.

The earlier reference to her serving on the committee of a boys’ home[25] seems to suggest social concern on her part and an awareness of the lack of opportunities for underprivileged children at this time before education had become nationally compulsory.

Blanche and her elder brother, Herbert Baker – who was now running their father's business at Canon's Marsh Steam Saw Mills – were the two executors of the will.

[31] Cabbages and The Thames from Streatley were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1888, and by the end of the year Blanche had moved back to Bristol, living at Leworthy Lodge, Stoke Bishop.

In the Winter Exhibition of the Bristol Academy ‘A Weedy Pond affords a glimpse of a retired spot, where the quiet beauty of nature has been well observed, and, modest in its dimensions, it is a most successful study.’[32] In the following year The Thames and The Float, Bristol were exhibited in London with the SLA, and in 1890 Summer and November and Back of the Old Home (perhaps a view of Sneyd Park Villa) were shown at the Royal Academy.

That was also the year of a joint exhibition with the landscape painter Edward Wilkins Waite at Messrs Frost and Reed in Queens Road, Bristol.

[33] In the census of 1891 Blanche, 47, gave her profession as ‘artist – landscape painting and teacher’[34] One might assume that the settlement of William Baker's estate would have left the members of his family ‘comfortably well off’, so it is somewhat surprising that Blanche's sisters Rosa and Mabel Baker (writing in 1906) reflected on 1889 as beginning as a year ‘of gloom and sadness to us … Misfortunes had come to us, as they come to so many, unforeseen and unsuspected, none the less hard to bear because they were not the first we had experienced.’ They make it clear that a significant aspect of their distress was through ‘money losses’.

[36] These ‘maiden ladies’ were initially Rosa and Mabel Baker – Blanche's older sister and a younger sister, although the reference to ‘three maiden ladies’ indicates that from the outset Blanche was to be part of the ‘arrangement’, brought about by a mutual friend, and by the time of the following year's Royal Academy Summer Exhibition she too was living at 64 Avenue Road, NW.

[39] This is a warm portrait of Spencer, and also gives an insight into the relationship between the sisters: [Blanche] had not seen us since our instalment in Avenue Road, and she was evidently surprised at the unexpected subjects that had already begun to interest us.

It is called The Home Fields and it is carefully worked, almost too careful; but very sunny and full of light.’[42] Blanche was elected an Associate of the Society of Lady Artists in 1894,[43] and there was a further Bristol exhibition in 1896: ‘An attractive collection of watercolour drawings by Miss Blanche Baker, a Bristol lady, is on view at Messrs Frost and Reed Gallery, 47 Queens Road.’[44] Around 1894 Spencer, who was spending an increasing amount of time away from London, gave warning that he was planning to terminate the arrangement at 64 Avenue Road, but wrote warmly, ‘The remembrance of times spent with you and your sisters during 1889, ’90, ’91 and ’92 will always will always be pleasant to me.’[45] Despite this warning, however, Spencer did not act to evict the sisters until 1897, and by then he took a more negative view of their relationship.

There were disagreements about expenses, and he complained that ‘the house is occupied by the [Baker] family, yourselves and relatives; and when I am home the social intercourse and the administration give the impression that 64, Avenue Road is the residence of the Misses [Baker] where Mr. Spencer resides when he is in town.’[46] At some point after the sisters left Avenue Road in 1897 they moved to the northern outskirts of London, to Sneed Cottage, an eight-room house in Totteridge Lane, Whetstone, near Barnet.

Towards the end of the century Blanche broadened the subjects of her work as she travelled to Europe – France, Germany, Switzerland, northern Italy and Spain.