Although she had trained at the Academie Julian, Paris, Annie Swynnerton reportedly credited an acquaintance from her birthplace. Manchester, the writer Elizabeth Gaskell, with having had the greatest influence upon her by introducing her to Edward Burne-Jones. And it was in Manchester that Swynnerton combined her art with her political convictions to powerful effect as a campaigner for women's suffrage.
Swynnerton painted from an early age. One of seven daughters, her watercolors augmented the family finances. She painted portraits (becoming a member of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1891}, figure studies, often of women or children with some symbolical or allegorical meaning, and landscapes- Discrimination against women artists in her home city led Swynnerton and some colleagues to found the Manchester Society of Women Painters in 1879, offering unprecedented opportunities for women artists to draw from the life model, and to exhibit.
The president of the society, Susan Isabel Dacre, was painted by Swynnerton, who gave the portrait to the sitter. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1880, it is now in the collection of Manchester City Art Gallery. As Deborah Cherry discussed in Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London and New York 1993) Dacre is not represented as fashionable or conventionally beautiful in Swynnerton's painting. The artist rejected the function of many late nineteenth century portraits of women. Instead the painting worked as a sign of friendship, and can be understood in the context of the groups of women forging careers as artists and forming networks during the period. The Manchester Society of Women Painters held three exhibitions in the early 1880s. Their presence in the city, and the fact that a member such as Swynnerton was showing work at London's Royal Academy, is likely to have influenced the decision of the Manchester Academy of Fine Art finally to admit women to full membership in 1884. Swynnerton was also a member of the Society of Lady Artists, and she and Dacre were among the artist signatories of the Declaration in Favor of Women's Suffrage in 1889. Four years later, Swynnerton painted Florence Nightingale at Scutari Hospital, and two other works depicting women in caring roles, as part of the decoration of the Women's Building at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago (a project shared with Anna Lea Merritt). Among the six Swynnertons in the Tate Collection is a portrait of Dame Millicent Fawcett in academic robes. Founder of one of the earliest university institutions for women, Newnham College, Cambridge, Fawcett became the first president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in 1897. She was a member of the Garrett family, whose female members were noted political activists, a number of whom were painted by Swynnerton and owned work by her.
Swynnerton's standing in the Manchester art world was recognized in a solo exhibition at the city's art gallery in 1923. It included Mater Triumphalis (1892), a female nude previously exhibited in Paris at the 1905 Salon des Beaux-Arts {now in the Musee d'Orsay). In common with Anna Lea Merritt, Swynnerton had painted Henry James. Although the location of the portrait is unknown, a photograph survives of a Swynnerton painting of the writer, which is likely to be that exhibited at Manchester in 1923, in which he is portrayed with a guarded, watchful expression. Portraits of Manchester sitters were also on show, including the Reverend William Gaskell, Unitarian Minister and husband of the novelist (1879, Manchester City Art Gallery). The first painting listed in the catalogue, Evelyn, Daughter of Vernon Bellhouse (1911, untraced), had been praised by the critic of the Observer on its former exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1912: 'The picture is so original in conception, so firm in construction, so daring in treatment, so uncompromising in its rejection of easy expedients to obtain pretty effects, that it may be said to stand alone among the portraits in Burlington House.'
The portrait painter John Singer Sargent was among the private collectors who lent works to Swynnerton's Manchester City Art Gallery exhibition. His studio at Tite Street, Chelsea was hung with his collection of art, including paintings by Swynnerton. The painting of Capri he loaned was one of a number of landscapes shown at Manchester. Swynnerton had lived mainly in Italy for nearly three decades following her marriage to the sculptor, Joseph William Swynnerton in 1883, and she painted both her surroundings and subjects from classical mythology. Sargent presented another Swynnerton from his collection, Oreads, a painting of sea nymphs, to the Tate. His own double portrait of Swynnerton with their mutual patron, Mrs. Charles Hunter (sister of the composer Ethel Smyth) was shown alongside Swynnerton's work in 1923. |
