Norah Manning Fulcher (1867–1945), was a commercially successful watercolour portrait artist, living and working in London for four decades, between 1898 and 1939.
It was well situated, with privacy and a community provided by the layout – two houses with a single front door containing purpose-built artists' studios with large north-facing windows and three flats.
[3] It was owned and lived in by the oil painter Thomas Liddall Armitage, whose most well known work is The Postman, now in the Postal Museum.
[9] In 1906 she had a solo exhibition of 45 drawings and paintings at the Lyceum Club Gallery, which was well reviewed in The Queen[10] and the London Evening Standard.
It was a place designed for social and professional networking for women, functioning in much the same way as the long established men's clubs.
As Maria Quirk the art historian has observed, "portraiture provided a relatively stable and sustainable livelihood to women with the means and determination to foster their reputations and cultivate client relationships".
Eric changed his surname to Sinclair, and emigrated to Western Australia in 1922, listing his occupation as a farm worker.
The youngest child and Norah's only brother, Frank Sydney Fulcher, emigrated to Hong Kong around 1899, where he worked as an assistant in the China Traders Insurance Company.
She left her jewellery (giving detailed descriptions of the pieces) to a wide circle of women friends including Mollie Thorne (née Stearns), who Norah had painted in 1913.
She also left legacies to her nephew, Eric Harry Sinclair and his wife, and to Edith Emily Mocatta, a friend who was a witness at her sister Margaret's wedding in 1900, 45 years earlier.
She originally made bequests to Edward Liddall Armitage and his family who she had known for many years, but revoked them on the same day giving the reason that they were conscientious objectors.