I have been trying to find out a bit more about Annie Swynnerton who seems to me worthy of record.   There is almost no information in the archive except a little note from her to George Clausen in 1922 ‘anxious for news’.   She was described as ‘a talented artist and an accomplished woman, though scarcely one of whom it could be said she possessed a charm of manner.   Indeed, by maintaining the courage of her convictions she was at times embarrassingly outspoken’.   She lived in Rome after her marriage to Frank Swynnerton in 1880 till his death in 1910.   Interestingly, she painted Henry James in 1922.   It was Sargent’s portrait of Henry James which had been slashed in the Summer Exhibition of 1914.   Laura Knight met her at the end of her life on Hayling Island.   She died in 1933.

There is an intriguing and wide-ranging article in this week’s LRB which refers amongst other things to the author’s great-grandmother, Annie Swynnerton, as the first woman to be elected to the RA.   She was born in Manchester, educated at the Manchester School of Art and the Académie Julian and then studied in Rome.   In 1879, she and a fellow student, Susan Dacre, founded the Manchester Society of Women Painters and in 1889 she signed the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ Declaration in Favour of Women’s Suffrage.   Much admired by, amongst others, Watts and Sargent, she was elected an ARA in 1922.   Laura Knight is remembered as the first female full RA, elected not until in 1936, so it is a relief to discover that she was not quite the first to be elected after Moser and Kauffman.