28/11/2024
Sylvia Pankhurst (British painter and poet) 1882 - 1960
On a Pot Bank: Finishing Off the Edges of the Unbaked Plates on a Whirler, 1907
gouache on paper
43.0 x 26.5 cm. (16.93 x 10.43 in.)
Tate Britain, London, United Kingdom
© photo Tate Britain
Four watercolours of working women by the suffragette and human rights campaigner Sylvia Pankhurst have been acquired by Tate using funds from the billionaire Denise Coates.
The paintings show women at work in the cotton mills of Glasgow and the potteries of Staffordshire, and are part of a series that Pankhurst made as she toured industrial working environments in 1907.
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Born in Manchester, the second of the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst's (1858-1928) three daughters, Sylvia Pankhurst won a scholarship to the Manchester Municipal School of Art. Here she won several prizes, including the Procter Memorial Travelling Scholarship, which enabled her to visit Florence and Venice in 1902 specifically to view mosaics. In the spring of 1903 she returned home to execute a commission (organised by her mother) for murals for Pankhurst Hall, Salford, which had been built by the Independent Labour Party to honour her father, Richard Marsden Pankhurst (1835-98). Later that year Sylvia came first in a national competition for a scholarship to the Royal College of Art and so moved to London.
In 1904 she joined in her first political demonstration, at the Albert Hall, and spent her Christmas holidays back home in Manchester painting banners which read 'Votes for Women', in readiness for the General Election of 1906. Whilst studying she continued to be active in London's East End branch of the Women's Social and Political Union, a suffrage organisation that had been jointly founded by her mother and elder sister Christabel (1880-1958). She designed the members' card for the organisation and in 1906 was imprisoned for the first time for her part in a WSPU protest. This drawing can possibly be dated from that time, as she appears to be wearing prison clothing. It is also known that on her release Sylvia gave the press sketches she had made 'inside' in order to expose the dire conditions. She was later imprisoned many times and went on hunger strikes. In 1913 she left the WSPU and the following year her objections to World War I stood in sharp contrast to the supporting views of Emmeline and Christabel. Her publications include The Suffragette (1911), Writ on a Cold Slate, a collection of poems (1922), The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideas (1931), The Home Front (1932), The Life of Emmeline Pankhurst: The Suffragette Struggle for Women's Citizenship and Myself When Young (1938). Her campaign for independence for Ethiopia was championed in her book Ethiopia: A Cultural History (1955). Sylvia's art was subsumed by her political life (see pp.20-21) but in 1908 she did produce a set of paintings that were reproduced in the London Magazine under the heading Women Workers of England, depicting shoemakers, Scottish fishwives, cotton workers and 'pit-brow lasses'.
Source: Wikipedia
