Christiana Herringham
[3] After a courtship in 1878 and 1879 marked by tension between her independence and his conventional Anglican upbringing, she married the physician Wilmot Herringham in 1880, with whom she had two sons.
[6] Herringham encountered fresco work by William Dyce in All Saints, Margaret Street, a setting significant in her courtship.
[7][5] She experimented with tempera recipes, of pigment mixed with egg yolk, and translated Cennino Cennini's authoritative book on the old techniques.
[10] Her paintings had much in common with what has been called "a late provincial renaissance of Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist art" based in Birmingham, facets of the "Tempera Revival".
[6][15] The death of Jessie Boucherett in 1905, who had founded and given financial support to The Englishwoman's Review, a feminist journal, undermined a publication that had appeared for nearly 40 years, and lasted to 1910.
[6] The latter was designed by Mary Lowndes, and carried in the 1908 procession organised by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, in which 800 banners were seen.
The stitching of the banner was in part the work of Herringham, and its slogan "Alliance not Defiance" implied an appeal for male assistance.
[6][25] Herringham supplied textiles and silk from India for banners: another one on which she worked, carrying the words "Post Laborum Palma", is not known to be extant.
The procession in London on 13 June 1908, from the edge of the city to the Albert Hall, met with criticism: Herringham dealt sharply with Oswald Crawfurd, who complained from Switzerland.
[27] The National Art Collections Fund had a quiet inception in June 1903, when Christiana Herringham recruited Roger Fry, Dugald Sutherland MacColl and Claude Phillips.
[30] At the first General Meeting of the Fund in November, Fry moved a protest amendment, seconded by Herringham, aimed at the exclusion of key early founders from the executive committee.
[31] With these issues barely contained backstage, Heseltine set out to acquire the Rokeby Venus for the National Gallery, London, the purchase that established the Fund in British cultural life.
[36] Ernest Havell and Rothenstein formed the India Society and Herringham joined the committee, the only female member of it at the time.
[37] Sister Nivedita arranged for Nandalal Bose and other pupils of Abanindranath Tagore to assist with the work at Ajanta, which had an influence on mural projects based on Havell's teaching in Calcutta.
[48] Her biographer Mary Lago suggests Christiana Herringham may have been the inspiration for Mrs Moore in E. M. Forster's 1924 novel A Passage to India.
