Wednesday 13th December - Emma Squire 1836-1932

Today's lady is a bit of a gamble as I could have chosen her marginally better-known sister, yet I found one solitary image by this woman and loved it so much that I had to pursue her.  That's right, there is only one image by her available online so if you know of any others, give me a shout.  Say hello to Emma Squire...

Who? Well, exactly, and yet look at her dates! She lived to 96 and was a busy and reasonably popular artist ('reasonably' is doing a lot of heavy lifting here) so why has she vanished? I will tell you what I know about her and we'll see if we can make Emma Squire popular again! Come on now, I'm feeling optimistic, humour me.

So, Emma Squire was born on 13 February 1836 to George (1805-1870) and Catherine (1810-1895).  George was a baker who made his way up to 'Master Baker' with his own company of people and I'm guessing he did very well for himself financially which was handy as the couple went on to have an unfeasibly large number of daughters and one son.  Starting nine month after their marriage (well done) in the autumn of 1833, they had daughter Kate (1834-1900), followed by Emma, followed by Elizabeth (1837-1931), then George jnr (1839-1931), then Alice (1840-1936), Clara (1842-1929), Julia (1846-1934), and finally Laura (1853-1921). I know eight children is not unusual for his Blogvent but I was astonished by how long most of them lived, seemingly being killed off wholesale by the 1930s. Well done Squire family, that's very impressive.

What is also quite interesting is that not many of the siblings got married. Kate married in 1872, and George married in 1875 (his son was John Herrman Squire, who did very well out of the 1930s due to being the only child in the family), but the rest of the girls remained single and for the most part, all living together in 28 Tavistock Road, Westbourne Gardens, London.

I decided to see if I could pick a random woman from a copy of the 1890 Royal Academy catalogue and see how well/badly she had faired, and I landed on Emma.  I have been using the RA catalogues, as you know, to track addresses, and I was astonished that Emma stayed put in the same address from 1877 to 1916.  Not only that, all her sisters lived there too.  If you look at Tavistock Road on Google Earth you will be relieved to see that it is reassuringly massive.  If you have a spare £6M I'm sure you can live there too - I go excited when I saw a place on Tavistock Road was up for a mere £1M but then realised that was a flat...

I'm getting ahead of myself and we've yet to reach Emma's one and only image. In the 1851 census, the Squire family are living on Jermyn Street in London - they are at 78 and around 30 years later, Fanny Cornforth would be at 97 running the Rose Inn, such a small world. George Snr was a baker who employed one person and it might be Charles Halse who also lives with them and is a journeyman baker (which means a baker qualified to work in the employment of others). They are still there in 1861 and none of the girls have any occupation listed but George Snr now has 6 people working for him in his bakery.

Sadly, George died in 1870 leaving Catherine and George jnr (now a bookseller) under £6000, which isn't bad but I wonder how far it stretched among that many unmarried women? Kate and George moved from the family home but that still left Catherine, Elizabeth, Emma, Alice, Julia, Clara and Laura at home. Despite a few books giving her first exhibition at the RA as 1862, Emma started her Royal Academy journey in 1872 with Hoping for the "Yes" Word, which I wondered was inspired by her sister Kate's marriage.  Her address given in the catalogue was 35 Clarendon Road in Notting-Hill which had become 28 Tavistock Road (less than a mile away) by 1877 when Emma and Alice appeared again at the Royal Academy. Emma's picture was Meeting an Old Friend, the only one of her pictures I can find on the internet, so make the most of it...

Meeting an Old Friend (1877/1893) Emma Squire

Now, this painting lives in New Zealand at the Christchurch Art Gallery and as you will see on the bottom left-hand corner, it is dated '93'.  However, as we will see, Emma tended to do the same piece over and over again so I'm guessing it is very similar to her 1877 piece and honestly, it's all we have. I really liked this painting when I saw it - the glee in finding an old book, the ridiculousness of the umbrella - it reminded me of Walter Dendy Sadler.

Child Holding a Cat (1880) Alice Squire

A quick word about Alice - you can find any number of Alice Squire's paintings online as they seem to come up for auction regularly.  They all look like this, which is madly unfair of me but it's all quite Helen-Allingham-watercoloured-cottagecore stuff and it's not for me. I have to thank Alice because her dates were available online and she led me to Emma's dates and family tree. The proliferation of Alice's pastel-rural images makes me weep for the fact that I can't see Emma's paintings which (no offence, Alice) sound infinitely more interesting.

There was no RA for the sisters in 1878, but they did appear in the Norfolk Fine Arts Exhibition, where it was reported that 'the pen and ink drawings of Miss Alice and Miss Emma Squires have been deservedly admired.'

Emma and Alice returned in 1879 to the RA, this time Emma exhibited Poor Folk. This might have been the same picture she displayed at the Dudley Gallery in the same year, which was described as 'a study, full of devotional feeling, of an old man with head bent down in prayer.'

Emma's 1882 RA piece Spinning was also shown at the 1887 Society of Lady Artists exhibition where it was described as a 'small rustic love-making scene.' The Globe went on to report 'Emma Squire has treated a trite subject with great taste and skill. The two figures are well grouped, expressive in gesture, and painted with elaborate completeness.' From now on, I will try to do everything with 'elaborate completeness.'

Interestingly, Emma's 1886 piece was also called Spinning.  I have so many questions and would welcome the input from those that know - could you submit the same painting more than once to the RA? How did people feel about people submitting copies of previous paintings? It's not just Spinning that she submitted more than once. In 1897, 1899 and 1915, Emma submitted paintings entitled 'To be or not to be?' which I think we can assume is a Hamlet piece, or maybe it isn't and is just a general ponder about mortality taking the Hamlet quote as the frame. She also showed Singing the Psalms of David in both 1891 and a decade later.  It also was the colour plate in the magazine Quiver in January 1892. Emma's painting Wanderers made two appearances, once in 1898's RA and the other in 1911's RA. I would be fascinated to know how submitting a painting works in regard to repeat performances.

Maybe, of course, they are completely different paintings and she just liked the titles, felt they were lucky, and so used them again.  The problem is, with no illustrations we have no idea.  This brings me on to my gripe about the Royal Academy illustrated catalogues which remained determinedly male even as the exhibitions themselves fill with lady artists. I am now frankly astonished if I find one of our paintings in the books, and for an awful lot of the women we will meet this Blogvent, they never got a sniff of a black and white plate.  That again affects how we see them; the bias of the past, consciously or not, affects the thinking now.  Either we are left frustrated, not knowing if the two 'To be or not to be?' paintings are the same, so we move on to someone who has images we can talk about, or we are left subconsciously feeling that if you don't get an image, you are not important, therefore we move on once more.  Either way, the majority of the time, it will be women we move on from, unable to garner the information we need.

Actually, brace yourself, I have a little information on 'To be or not to be?' which was mentioned in The Athenaeum in 1915 (after its appearance in that RA) - 'this is also the place to notice Miss Emma Squire's little costume piece "To be or not to be?" which seems to date from the period when Baron Leys ruled in his atelier - with possible slight influence of Stevens.' I think they are referring to the Belgian artists Jan August Henrik Leys (1815-1869) and Alfred Stevens (1823-1906) which is an interesting combination.  Sorry, that really doesn't tell us anything about the subject, other than it is a 'costume piece' - do they mean Shakesperean? So many questions.

Emma seems to have finally retired in 1916. Her final piece at the Royal Academy, aged 80, was An Old Man's Rest. Her paintings seemed to cause a bit of a stir in the Gentlewoman magazine who reviewed it thus: 

'"An Old Man's Rest" by Emma Squire, really belongs to the great school of Pinwell, Walker, Millais, which we see with delight reviving in the works of our ultra-modern women ... Just now the admirable painting and admirable sentiment of this little canvas bridges a gulf between a great past and an adventurous present and makes, to our eyes, which have learned to value beauty of balanced patterning and tenderness of colour harmony, the suggestion of the eternal quality of unforced sentiment: all the more acceptable because it is a model of craftsmanship.'

For an artist that was admired so much, who had dedicated her life, into her 80s, to creating art, having only one image available on all of the internet seems a bit mean.  There might be more but not discoverable - none of her watercolours have made it to ArtUK (expanded from merely oil paintings now) so I don't know if any are even in public collections in this country.

The first of the siblings to die was the eldest Kate in 1900, then Julia and Clara in the 1920s, followed by everyone else in the 1930s at very grand old ages. Emma went on Halloween 1932 and left her only nephew, John Herrman Squire, now an architect, over £32K. That is an impressive amount for a lady-artist who is barely remembered.  All the siblings seem to have left vast amounts that they don't seem to have received from their parents (George Snr left under £6K and Catherine left around £900). The first sibling, Kate's probate was £84K which is incredible, mind you she had inherited £75K off her late husband.  Maybe they were all really good at investments?  However they managed it, I think that is the most impressive wealth we are likely to see this Blogvent. And they all were buried in Brompton, near Alexa Wilding, which is rapidly becoming compulsory.

Unlike many, especially later, women we will meet this month, the Squire sisters do not appear to have been formally trained, nor moved seamlessly from art school to the Royal Academy.  I'm guessing Emma exhibited at other venues before she hit the RA but they don't have the same pull for the press as that big May exhibition, and even if the press are at the Society of Lady Artists exhibition, the column inches are less, so the chances a young, unknown artist is going to get a mention is less likely. Again, we are left with the impression that Emma is not important in the history of art, but everyone who makes a contribution has a place in the story of art.  I wonder if we need to start looking at the categories and movements within art, because although I am delighted how excited people are about Pre-Raphaelite art, we need more groupings, more descriptions, in order to speak about the other influences, the other paths that artists took.  We also need to love watercolour more.  Maybe then artists like Emma wouldn't get left behind.