Dr Anna Maria Barry is a Museum Research Assistant at the Royal College of Music Museum. She tweets @DrAnnaBarry
As a Victorianist who works on music, I couldn’t think of a better place to work than the Royal College of Music Museum. The collections are stuffed full of paintings, letters, diaries and instruments that document innumerable fascinating connections between musicians, writers and artists in nineteenth-century Britain. There is no shortage of new research projects here, but my attention has recently turned to one that I’m especially excited about as it concerns a forgotten female artist. International Women’s Day seems an ideal time to share it…
A portrait of Edith Hipkins
Edith Hipkins (1854–1945) was the daughter of eminent musicologist Alfred James Hipkins (1826–1903). He was the first honorary curator of the Museum and bequeathed various musical instruments to the RCM in his will. Because of this connection with the College, Edith later donated two huge albums she had compiled about her father and his work. They contain newspaper articles about him, proofs of his essays and all sorts of manuscripts. But her father isn’t what interests me. Edith herself was an eminent artist who exhibited at the Royal Academy several times. Her paintings survive in collections including the National Portrait Gallery, and the albums she donated to the College contain many fascinating insights into her work.
The Hipkins family lived in West London and were part of a social set that included painters, writers and musicians. The artist Laurence Alma-Tadema and his family were particularly close to Edith and her father, and the two families spent much time together. Others in the circle included Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and George Frederic Watts. The Hipkins family also corresponded extensively with many of the great artists of the day, both within and beyond their circle. Many praised Edith’s artistic skill – Burne-Jones even offered to mentor her.
The examples of Edith’s work contained in the albums demonstrate that Burne-Jones’s praise was not unfounded. These include several sketches, reproductions of her paintings and prints, and notes about some of her works that were apparently destroyed in the war. Edith’s subjects were very diverse – they range from sketches of family pets and book illustrations to cartoons and detailed drawings of Alma-Tadema’s famous studio-home. The albums also contain reproductions of paintings for which Alma-Tadema used Edith and her father as models.
The fascinating thing about the albums that Edith left to the RCM is the way in which they document this social circle – they include sketches by Alma-Tadema, drawings of famous musicians’ houses, invitations to exhibitions and even the order of service for Robert Browning’s funeral. Edith’s surviving letters also shed much light on the relationships between the members of her artistic set – and especially its women. Edith corresponded with the wives and daughters of various Pre-Raphaelite artists, and it’s clear from their warm letters that they collaborated and helped each other in numerous interesting ways well into the twentieth century.
Edith’s post-mortem drawing of her mother
Edith’s albums also function as a touching record of family life in the Hipkins household, as she has pasted in numerous portraits of her parents. Most movingly, several pages document the life of Edith’s mother. They begin with a portrait of her as a beautiful young woman, before we get to photos that are captioned ‘mortally ill’. Turning the page, we find a post-mortem drawing of her by Edith.
Edith’s brother, John A. Hipkins
John Alfred Hipkins (1851–1933), Edith’s brother, was an artist too. A few of his drawings feature in the albums. Profoundly deaf from birth, he was a peripheral member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle and sketched its members extensively. When he died, Edith deposited albums of his work in Edinburgh. This collection is the subject of an excellent article by Matthew C. Potter that can be freely accessed via JSTOR.
At the Museum, we’re currently working with volunteers to catalogue the material in these incredible albums. We’re also thinking about the best way to make them digitally available to everyone – it isn’t as straightforward as scanning them, as there are so many overlapping and loose pieces of paper. As for me, I plan to turn my research on Edith Hipkins into an article, but I also see it as part of a larger project that I’d like to develop on the relationship between music and art in nineteenth-century Britain. The Royal College of Music Collections contain a wealth of material which reveals all sorts of surprising connections and collaborations between painters, composers and performers. Watch this space for more!
—
Also by Anna Maria Barry:
The Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates 