page_title: Bertha Newcombe
section_title: Paris
hierarchical_section_title: Bertha Newcombe / Paris
caption_attribution_description: English: Newcombe Colarrossi women sketching life model in 1894 by Bertha Newcombe
context_page_description: Bertha Newcombe was the fourth of seven children of an entrepreneurial father with an interest in education and art, and grew up mainly in Surrey. Aged 19 she entered the Slade School of Art in London, and later is believed to have studied at the Académie Colarossi in Paris. 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 she 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 for a while. At this time the family home – where she had a studio – was in Chelsea, and she became a more-or-less full-time illustrator for publishers of magazines and novels. By the time of the resurgence of the women's suffrage movement in the early years of the twentieth century she had almost completely stopped working as an artist, but campaigned for the suffragist movement in various capacities. When their father died, in 1912, Bertha and her sister Mabel inherited a sizeable estate. They moved to Hampshire and largely withdrew from public life.
context_section_description: A bold but logical step for Bertha Newcombe after the Slade was to move to Paris. Luke Herrmann notes that '[Legros] encouraged his abler students to go to Paris, and thus in several ways the Slade acted as a link between London and Paris, and enabled British students to make contact with the much more liberal teaching methods and atmosphere of the French capital.' The extent and nature of Bertha Newcombe’s visits to Paris are not known, but she and Alice Stronach collaborated on an article entitled 'Paris Art Schools' for The Sketch, and this too seems to draw on Newcombe’s personal experience. Reference is made to 'a small band of English girl artists' who pursued their quest of 'an academy where men and women might work side by side under exactly the same conditions'. Eventually 'fate, or the natural course of events, guided the footsteps of the pioneers to the Académie Colarossi', where 'To Angelo [who ran the Académie] it mattered not whether the ladies did or did not study in the same room with the men students.' Newcombe’s exposure to French culture in the broadest sense and to the 'Paris art scene' in particular would have been an immensely transformative experience for her. She would soon be described by critics as an artist working in the 'French manner'.
caption: The model, Corinne, in the life class at the Académie Colarossi. This illustration accompanied the article 'Paris Art Schools' in The Sketch magazine on 2 May 1894.
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