I had a moment of foolishness the other day. I was idly leafing (digitally) through the Royal Academy catalogue for 1900, looking for names of artists to have a look into and I came across Dorothy Stanley and her painting The Fallen Nymph. Well, that sounds up my street, and so I took to the researching machine and immediately found out that not only did I know her, she also had a very complicated husband. Say hello to Dorothy Tennant...
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| Dorothy Tennant (1891) Eveleen Myers (nee Tennant) |
Now, I don't need to tell you that the Tennants were a fairly well-known family from the 1800s and early 20th century, until the First World War wiped them all out, but I was a little unsure which part of the family was which. I was more familiar with Margot Tennant of The Souls, but she is from a separate part, hailing from Scotland. Dorothy, her photographer sister Eveleen and other siblings were descended from Charles Tennant, MP who supported emigration to the colonies and didn't marry until he was 51. When he did wed, it was to Irish society hostess Gertrude Collier, and they had six children. Two, Blanche and Gertrude jnr, didn't survive childhood, but Alice, Charles, Eveleen and Dorothy (or Dolly as she was known to her family) led remarkable lives.
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| Miss Dorothy Tennant (1888) Émile Friant |
Dolly was born in 1855, their fourth child, born the year her sister Blanche died. It was written that Dolly was so beautiful that when she was young, she never went out without a large footman accompanying her for imposing protection. The family were comfortably off to say the least and after a private education, Dorothy attended the Slade School of Art, studying under Edward Poynter. From there she went to Paris to study with Jean-Jacques Henner and through herself into the French artistic scene. Her first brush with the Royal Academy was as a model, which I feel may be the fate of many female artists at this time. She posed for John Everett Millais' Yes or No in 1871...
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| Yes or No (1871) John Everett Millais |
When she appeared again it was as the subject of a 1877 portrait by G F Watts, the Leeds Mercury was moved to call the piece 'charming', 'but even these public appearances, it may be observed in passing, do not entitle people in general society to speak of this young lady by a familiar pet name' after the York Herald and Liverpool Daily Post both insisted on referring to the painting as a portrait of 'Dolly Tennant.' How familiar!
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| Dorothy Tennant (1877) G F Watts |
The full title for this piece is Miss Dorothy Tennant, second daughter of the late Charles Tennant Esq, of Cadoxton Lodge, Neath, Glamorganshire, which is a bit long to pop on a frame, but you get the gist. Also, I find it a bit jarring that Dolly is described as the 'second' daughter when she is actually the third, but one died. I'm not sure the significance of the squirrel. Is Watts inferring that Dolly was thrifty and hardworking? Did she hide nuts for the winter? It has a more 'renaissance-y' feel than the portrait Watts did of Eveleen a couple of years later -
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| Eveleen Tennant Myers (1880) G F Watts |
Eveleen's portrait feels far more contemporary than Dolly's and it could be read as a comment on their chosen art forms, with Eveleen choosing the modern art of photography, with Dolly choosing painting. I wonder if the difference might be to do with their life paths, as the 1880 portrait of Eveleen coincided with her marriage to psychical researcher Frederic William Henry Myers (1843-1901). There is a fabulous biography of Gertrude Tennant by David Waller and in it the author suggests that Mrs Tennant might have encourage Dolly's career in lieu of finding her a husband as she didn't want to lose Dolly as she had Eveleen. Gertrude reminds me of Sara Prinsep's salon, and interestingly Mrs Tennant started hosting her own gatherings around the time that Sara and Thoby Prinsep moved to the Isle of Wight and obviously the two families had Watts in common.
Dorothy wasted no time in cultivating her artistic career and appeared as an artist at the Royal Academy in 1886 with An Arab Dance but at the same time had three paintings at the Grosvenor Gallery, including The Emigrants, sadly lost during the Second World War. However, by this time Dolly had become famous for her pictures of little children, ragamuffins and street urchins that endeared her to a book and art public. Her illustrated book The London Ragamuffin received delighted reviews, although the Manchester Courier wrote of her plight to get the small boys to sit still in her studio, implying that they were somewhat ungrateful to not appreciate the warmth, food and playthings she provided.
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| The Dead Mer-baby (1879) |
A lesser-known work of Dolly's which proved inspirational for others was the rather odd The Dead Mer-baby from 1879 which appeared at the Dudley Gallery and was declared a 'graceful little fancy' in the newspaper. It divided opinion when it was once more shown again at the New Art Gallery in 1888, where some newspapers admitted they did not care for it but the Manchester Courier gave a rather fulsome description of the piece:
'The infant of some naughty mermaid has been abandoned by its mother on the sands, or has been cast up by them, for there it lies, half fish and half human child, so pathetic in its helplessness, so odd in its mixed nature, that one quite pities it. It seems to have suffered, and yet to be now in blissful peace. Had it a soul, and is the soul smiling upon the poor damp frame of the little sea urchin it once inhabited, from the morning clouds above which are rolling in after what has been a stormy night at sea? A very human little child stands all naked, wondering at the queer little corpse the sea has cast up. Nothing can be more original, and this little gem is destined, I think, to make a sensation.'
It made not only a sensation but inspired Violet Fane to write a lengthy poem too...
Meanwhile, in 1886, Henry Morton Stanley proposed, although Dolly refused at first. Stanley remains a complicated character for reasons I'll get on to, but he was an iconic figure of late Victorian explorer/colonialism. He had already lived quite the patchwork life up to that romantic gesture. Born John Rowlands in Wales in 1841, his mother abandoned him as a child and his father allegedly died just after his birth (there is some uncertainty, arguably purposefully so because of the nature and taint of illegitimacy at that time.) He grew up in a workhouse after no members of the family were able to take him in, where it is now alleged he was horribly abused by bother fellow pupils and staff. This would become very relevant later in life. He travelled to America aged 18 and (depending on whose account you believe) either was taken in by a wealthy man called Henry Stanley, whose name he adopted in tribute to his adopted father, or else just styled himself after Stanley because he admired him. He fought in the American Civil War, including the Battle of Shiloh (which even I know was very unpleasant indeed, despite its name meaning 'place of peace'). After all that, he became a journalist, then organised his first expeditions in the late 1860s. He is probably best known for the 1871 expedition to find David Livingstone, apparently greeting him with 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' when they met. He traversed Africa many times until Dolly wrote and said she changed her mind, she would marry him after all.
It's a bit of an understatement to say that Stanley does not seem to be brilliant with romance and women. He had a reputation as a bit of a man's man for many years, but he did apparently have some female friends, some close enough for Dolly to allegedly delete them from his memoirs. He complained to a friend when Dolly was a little uncertain about marriage 'that woman entrapped me with her gush...and her fulsome adulations, her knicknacks inscribed with 'Remember Me,' her sweet scented notes...' I hope I never entrap anyone with my 'gush,' thank you very much. To be fair, Dolly still slept in the same room as her mother and addressed her diary to her dead father and so I think she had her own problems.
The couple's engagement was announced to a gossip-hungry nation. The Richmond and Ripon Chronicle announced 'All the drawing-rooms of Belgravia and Mayfair were vastly excited when the announcement came like a bolt out of the blue that Mr Stanley was going to be married,' although the official line they were taking was that Stanley had proposed just before his last expedition and everyone was sworn to secrecy about the marriage until he returned. Accounts of Stanley unwaveringly reference how heroic he was, although Dolly was seen as both a society beauty, the model for Millais and also able to converse on political topics of the day. Rather than describe her as the Royal Academy artist, one newspaper said 'her peculiar forte lies in pen and ink drawings of the gamins of London.' Quite.
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| Street Arabs at Play (1890) |
The same year as her marriage, Dolly sold her painting Street Arabs at Play to the Lever Bros to use in their advertising campaigns. The Aberdeen People's Journal wrote how she, unlike some of her fellow artists, had no qualms about her art being turned into advertising, although she remarked 'I don't see how the boys turning 'Heads over Tails,' as I meant to call it, can be turned into a sunlight soap advertisement, but ingenuity can do a great deal.' So concerned with the plight of some of her young models, Dolly adopted them, giving them a home, clothes and food, but the story goes that each little urchin ran away after a week when the boots pinched and the few rules imposed on them were too restrictive.
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| Herbert Morton Stanley (1893) |
The invitations for the wedding were distributed, some white, some pink, inviting the great and the good to Westminster Abbey on the 12th July 1890 at 2pm. The newspaper's ran stories of Stanley's romantic life in stark contrast to his manly expeditions, however they were an odd collection of stories. He told how he had been refused eleven times by numerous ladies before he could find a woman willing to take him on, and as one newspaper reported 'Miss Tennant has been content to secure the lion of the season' which is all a bit too Bridgerton. As a wedding gift, the Queen gave Dorothy a miniature of herself in a lock surrounded by diamonds, Thomas Edison sent a phonographic machine and King Leopold send Count d'Aarche, who was definitely not on the gift list and I hope he also sent the receipt. Stanley was far from being a lion on the day as he was very ill with gastritis and needed a chair to sit in for most of the ceremony. He was unable to leave the ceremony on foot with Dolly, who was led to her bridal carriage by John Everett Millais. As the crowd's cheered the couple, Millais shouted back 'I'm not Stanley, I wish I were! Lucky dog! Lucky dog!'
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| Dorothy and Henry Morten Stanley (1890) Eveleen Myers |
After the marriage, the newspapers were keen to lay out the couple's itinerary, including a tour of Scotland, Switzerland and Paris, then returning to Stanley's native Wales where he received the freedom of Cardiff and Swansea. Considering that the groom was too ill to stand during the wedding, this all seems like a lot, but possibly some of it was intended to be for his health, thinking especially of the portion in Switzerland. Seemingly with no break, by November, the Stanleys were off again, this time sailing to New York complete with her mother and met by her brother. The Tennants had Mr Stanley surrounded but possibly he liked that. I read in a biography of his that it is assumed that the marriage remained unconsummated either because he was too ill/uninterested or she was not that bothered either, but one thing is certain, the Stanleys became a formidable team.
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| Three Children Playing (undated) |
Being Mrs Stanley seems to have taken up a lot of Dolly's life, especially when the couple adopted their son Denzil, a child of one of Stanley's relatives, whose origins were rather discretely veiled. Denzil wasn't the first child that Stanley adopted, after he 'adopted' a slave, Ndugu M'hali or Kalulu Stanley, who he freed and kept as a companion after the Livingstone expedition and even wrote a story about. Kalulu drowned in 1877 and became fundamental in Stanley's anti-slavery crusade. Stanley became a Liberal Unionist MP in 1895 and was knighted in 1897, and with so much fame, he turned his attention to writing his memoirs. By 1901, the whole family was living in 2 Richmond Terrace, along with Mrs Tennant and Alice, Dolly's unmarried sister, and the family had eight servants which included two indoor servants and a 'useful maid' which is a new one on me.
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| Two Children Playing by a Gutter (1886) |
The first decade of the twentieth century was eventful for Dolly. She had her identity stolen by a 43 year old woman called Gertrude Cunningham who pretended to be Lady Stanley in order to buy clothes. Also around this time, Dolly started to write more in addition to her art. As well as her illustrated books on street children, I am rather keen to read this book from 1918...
Miss Pim gets sunstroke while gardening and gains the power of invisibility. She becomes a secret agent during the Great War and gets information behind enemy lines, then tackles the Kaiser. Blimey, that sounds amazing! But that isn't the book she is best known for...
Sir Henry Morton Stanley died in 1904 aged only 63. Dorothy was only 49 and found a task for herself in editing her husband's memoirs for publication in 1909. The memoirs remain extremely contentious, and were viewed as such shortly after their appearance. For starters, Dorothy cut mention of any other women out, which reminds me of Georgiana Burne-Jones' editing out of Maria Zambaco in her husband's biography. The thing that really put Stanley on the wrong side of history is his description of his treatment of the people he met on his travels, the 'natives'. He describes acts of cruelty towards the 'savages,' his hatred of people of mixed race, and general brutality and atrocity, backed up by accounts of her fellow colonial problematic men. I have no wish to become an apologist for the sort of man we now rip down statues of, but there is an interesting thread of research that challenges a great number of not only Stanley's claims but also those made by other explorers. With regard to the latter, Stanley had the habit of rubbing his peers up the wrong way and in one case disproving their 'scientific' theories about the source of the Nile. Stanley was a famous man and that sort of thing made people jealous. Not only that, Stanley's actions seem to contradict his words and he was anti-slavery and the claims of his brutality can be challenged, so why did he claim it? Apparently when acting as a journalist in America, his editor encouraged him to bedazzle and enlarge the accounts of deaths and violence to make good copy. Also, going right back to his childhood, it is suggested that in order to survive the workhouse, he had to be the biggest, baddest and nastiest, and that all stuck. Either way, the perils of biography in the case of Stanley are very much a cautionary tale which I find fascinating.
In the meantime, Lady Stanley quietly remarried in 1907 to Henry Curtis, a surgeon. In some of the reports, it was said that Dolly would have been a very successful artist had she not married, which is a surprisingly feminist line for the Leicester Daily Post to take. By the 1911 census, the family are living in Whitehall Court, but Dolly is still Lady Stanley, despite her surgeon husband. Annoyingly, she has no occupation listed, which always infuriates me, despite the fact that she was continuing to write and paint. She provided illustrations for the 1925 collection of stories Rosemary, Miss Pim was out in 1918, Ragamuffins was out in the 1920s and her painting His First Offence from 1896 found new audiences as a print in magazines. However, by the 1920s, Dolly found her art style being left behind. Her painting River Lily Bud from the Royal Academy in 1924 was mentioned in the magazine Vote as being 'refined, but very conventional of its school.'
By her death in 1926, the family were living back at 2 Richmond Terrace, where they had been since the 1921 census (where Dolly was the head of the household, despite her husband working as a consultant surgeon). Really irritatingly, her obituaries mentioned all the important men in her life, Stanley, Curtis, her brother who had become an MP. Portsmouth Evening News actually called it - 'It is a matter of remark how some women, distinguished in themselves, lose their individuality if they marry.' Dorothy Tennant should have been a household name for her art - her pictures of the street children in London were well-known enough for her to be acknowledged but she had the misfortune to be related to and marry well-known men and therefore was eclipsed. Also to her detriment, she altered her surname and so there is no continuation of 'Dorothy Tennant' but a change to 'Dorothy Stanley' who might well be two different people to the uninformed eye. This was a peril for a lot of female artists, Henrietta Rae often had her married name in brackets, but at least she was tagged by her professional, unmarried name as well.
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| Dorothy Stanley (1896) |
If Dolly tells us anything, it is how women were consumed by history and it is our job to put the pieces back together.
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