Two hundred years of women benefactors at the National Gallery: an exercise in mapping uncharted territory

1. Introduction: contextualising the project

It is a commonplace belief that the holdings of institutions such as the National Gallery, London are built on donations from men; in fact, woman have played a far larger part than people might realise. The subject of female donors of the National Gallery has never been treated in a sustained way before and has not been considered in the standard institutional histories of the Gallery.¹ In the light of this, the following account of work-in-progress seeks to outline what has been pieced together so far in relation to a history of women who have acted as benefactors of the National Gallery over its two-century history. The principal ambition is to record for the first time in one place the names of the Gallery’s female benefactors, linking those names with paintings and other acts of generosity. Many of the women featured have not been mentioned in previous publications devoted to collecting and benefaction and in a survey article of this kind they can only be given cursory treatment. A second aim is to discern the patterns which the data uncovers and start to interrogate what those patterns can tell us about the way the national collection has developed over its history. It is hoped that the facts and preliminary analysis brought together here in relation to the National Gallery will amplify the picture concerning the place of women donors and collectors in art institutions more generally, a topic in which academic interest is now growing.²

In this connection we should spotlight the focus on women at the National Trust in 2018;³ the special issue dedicated to the theme of women and cultural philanthropy, edited by Tom Stammers, for 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (issue 30, 2020);⁴ and Stammers’ newly-published research concerning nineteenth-century women in France who gave generously to French museums or who took the lead in setting up museums across Europe.⁵ In particular, we are building on the work of Kate Hill, who has looked at women’s collecting and donating patterns at English regional museums in the period 1880–1920,⁶ on Lara Perry’s work on women associated with the National Portrait Gallery, London,⁷ and on Suzanne Higgott’s research concerning Lady Wallace, a rare example of a female donor of a museum-quality collection to Britain,⁸ who bequeathed the art collection of her late husband Sir Richard Wallace to the British nation in 1897. At the same time, scholars from a range of fields have begun to explore women’s reaction to paintings in the National Gallery,⁹ as part of a bigger inquiry into female connoisseurship.¹⁰ Beyond the field of art history, Caroline Criado Perez’s thought-provoking new book, Invisible Women (exposing data bias) in a world designed for men (2020) encouraged us to compile an appendix which sets out our core data in a visible and easy-to-access manner.

Many, if not most, of the women in Britain who have been serious collectors in their own right from the eighteenth century up to the present have shown less interest in collecting historical painting than in patronising the work of living artists,¹¹ craftsmen¹² and architects.¹³ For instance, both Queen Charlotte (1708–1725)¹⁴ and Queen Victoria (1819–1901)¹⁵ generously supported certain living painters during their reigns, while in the early twentieth century, an important female figure in the London art world was Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873–1938), whose principal interest was once again as a patron of living painters – in her case those associated with the Slade School, like Stanley Spencer. In terms of collecting older art, it has been in the decorative arts and in works on paper – prints, drawings and pastels – that women have been notably active since the Victorian era.¹⁶ Thus among the most prominent names of Victorian-era female collectors is that of Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–1895), who gave her pioneering collection of British ceramics to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and two other significant collections of fans and playing cards to the British Museum.¹⁷ Among today’s most discerning women collectors is Katrin Bellinger Henkel (b. 1958), a National Gallery trustee since 2016, but again her focus lies elsewhere than on historical painting: she collects old master drawings.¹⁸

Given that the collecting remit of the National Gallery has never focussed on works on paper, especially not works on paper by modern or contemporary artists, the full generosity of women benefactors to the institution is easy to forget because many of their intended gifts of this kind of artistic production have ended up in other national collections, such as the British Museum or Tate, which have made a point of collecting works on paper. For instance, Julia Emily Gordon (1810–1896), an amateur artist, whose parents were patrons of J.M.W. Turner and David Wilkie, intended bequeathing to the National Gallery works by David Cox and David Wilkie, including portraits of her, but as they were pastels, watercolours or oil sketches, they were mostly transferred to Tate.¹⁹ Another instance of this practice occurred when the Gallery in 1908 retained an oil painting by Henri-Joseph Harpignies (NG2256) from a gift by Evelyn Ponsonby McGhee (1845–1932), but passed on to Tate a group of four drawings by the British landscape painter Albert Goodwin and a fifth drawing by Muirhead Bone as well as a second work by Harpignies, a watercolour, which is now in the collection of the British Museum.²⁰ It is doubtless for similar reasons that a bronze statue of Lycidas by J. Havard Thomas, which the National Art Collections Fund (from 2006 NACF, now Art Fund) offered to present in the name of Mr and Mrs M.E. Sadler was rejected by the Gallery, namely, that it had no developed tradition of acquiring sculpture.²¹

In relation to important finished oil paintings of the pre-modern era – the type of art collected most abundantly by the National Gallery – it appears that many of the principal women collectors in the field who amassed collections that rivalled in quality and quantity those of male counterparts were active outside Britain and in an earlier period,²² such as Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia (1729–1796), who in 1779 purchased the collection of Sir Robert Walpole from Houghton Hall, Norfolk en bloc for £40,550. Certainly, the names of several key women collectors in Europe before the eighteenth century appear as one-time owners in the provenance listings of paintings now in the National Gallery’s permanent collection. For instance, Archduchess Margaret of Austria (1480–1530), the first female regent of the Netherlands of whom the Gallery has a portrait by Pieter van Coninxloo (NG2613.2), was a very significant art patron and collector who once owned the Arnolfini Portrait (NG186).²³ A second example is Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689),²⁴ who owned important paintings that passed, via the famous Orléans collection sales in London of the 1790s, into British private ownership, before ending up, by various means, in the National Gallery. For instance, NG7 – after Correggio, Group of Heads and its companion NG37 – formerly in her possession and then in the Orléans collection were acquired as part of the Gallery’s nucleus when Lord Liverpool’s government bought thirty-eight pictures from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein. In the case of NG41 – The Death of Saint Peter Martyr probably by Bernardino da Asola – another work formerly in the collections of Queen Christina and the ducs d’Orléans, it entered the national collection, in 1831, via the Holwell Carr bequest.

In terms of the women under review in this article, we likewise find cases of their names appearing in earlier provenances of pictures which they themselves did not donate to the National Gallery. By way of example, Yolande Lyne Stephens had intended giving the full-length portrait of Cardinal de Richelieu by Philippe de Champaigne (NG1449; fig. 1) as part of a generous bequest of all her pictures, but having changed her mind and cancelling her bequest to the British nation, it ended up with another collector, Charles Butler, who presented it in 1895. Meanwhile Adam-François van der Meulen’s Philippe-François d’Arenberg saluted by the Leader of a Troop of Horsemen (NG1447) is another National Gallery painting with a Lyne Stephens provenance, which was purchased in 1895 (there are others too). And more recently, in 1976, the Gallery purchased a pastel portrait by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (NG6435), a renowned specialist in the medium in eighteenth-century France, which had once been in the collection of Mozelle Sassoon, whose art collection, as we shall see, was dominated by French eighteenth-century paintings and porcelain.

Figure 1 Philipe de Champaigne, Cardinal de Richelieu, 1633–40. National Gallery, London (NG1449). Presented by Charles Butler, 1895; formerly in the collection of Yolande Lyne Stephens.

In terms of British women in the past who have been interested in what have traditionally been called the old masters, examples are comparatively few; it is rare to find women who were both wealthy and interested enough to enter the field in their own right or even in tandem with a spouse.²⁵ A rare and early case is Elizabeth Murray, successively Lady Tollemache, Countess of Dysart and Duchess of Lauderdale (c.1626–1698), who inherited Ham House and its art collections from her father. There she focussed her interest in the fine arts and painting in particular; while the works that she inherited from her father she displayed in the more public setting of the Green Closet, she kept in her new Private Closet pieces she particularly valued and some of which she was responsible for acquiring. These comprised old masters, or copies of old masters, as well as small portraits including drawings after Raphael, Titian and Andrea del Sarto and two paintings attributed to Leonardo da Vinci (‘Leonard Davinshaw’).²⁶

A more typical pattern of engagement is that of British women collectors who made names for themselves in another area of collecting, demonstrating a comparatively peripheral interest in the fine arts. One such early example is Aletheia Talbot Howard, Countess of Arundel (1584–1654), whose husband was the celebrated collector, the Earl of Arundel. She built up a fine art collection at her semi-rural villa retreat, Tart Hall, where the ‘Angel Room’, for instance, included paintings by Jacopo Bassano, Bartolomeo Passarotti and Lucas Cranach.²⁷ Mention should also be made of Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (1715–1785), an eighteenth-century bluestocking and one of the ‘Ladies of Distinction’ instrumental in the establishment of London’s Foundling Hospital, who built up the largest natural history collection in Britain in her day. Having said that, she did own the celebrated Portland Vase, purchased from Sir William Hamilton, and among her pictures was a fine copy of Michelangelo’s The Madonna of Silence, Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of the 1st Earl of Strafford and equestrian studies by George Stubbs.²⁸

A contemporary of hers was Elizabeth Seymour Percy, 2nd Countess and later 1st Duchess of Northumberland (1716–1776), who created a famous museum at Northumberland House, London. It included, alongside her pre-eminent holdings of coins and medals (she augmented the collection built up by her father) and her ethnographical and naturalia collections, pictures and prints but, once again, they were comparatively few in number and less highly valued at the time than other parts of her collection.²⁹

By the early nineteenth century, the collecting-cum-study of old master paintings or other works of ancient art was largely associated with the male-dominated field of connoisseurship, the increasingly important scholarly discipline of art history, the emerging professionalized museum world and an increasingly competitive art market, all areas which remained largely inaccessible to women for over a century.³⁰ There was also the issue that until the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, which allowed married women to be the legal owners of the money they earned and to inherit property, married British women were not allowed to be responsible for their own finances and usually had less disposable income than their spouses, factors which went against them acquiring expensive old masters. Yet linked to women’s conventional roles in society as supporters and carers, they were expected to engage in charitable or philanthropic activity, and it is here that they started to interact in exciting new ways with emerging public art institutions. In addition to their early focus on supporting philanthropic initiatives for education, poverty relief and health care,³¹ many women became increasingly self-confident, anti-commercial and disinterested patrons of the arts in the public sphere (alongside their more well-established roles as private patrons of living artists).

The aim of this article is, in the light of these introductory observations, to draw fresh attention to the names of the women responsible for building up the National Gallery’s collection since its foundation in 1824 up to the time of writing in 2020. To do justice to the breadth of their generosity and to demonstrate how women’s contributions have developed over time, their donations of paintings will not be our sole focus even if most space will be dedicated to that aspect of their philanthropy. Attention will also be drawn to their financial contributions which have assisted the Gallery in acquiring certain very costly paintings as well as frames and scientific equipment; their contribution towards capital building projects at the Gallery; their sponsoring of key positions in various departments; and their support of pioneering publications and of specialist and wider public engagement programmes. Representative case studies and some basic ‘number crunching’ will be employed to help articulate answers to certain core questions: Who were these women donors? Which paintings did they give and in what other ways have they been generous to the Gallery? What patterns within their donating can be discerned? What were their motivations for their generosity? Why have their donations been easy to lose sight of? What is the Gallery doing now, ahead of its 200th anniversary in 2024, to draw attention to the significant contributions of its women donors past and present?

It is hoped that the mass of empirical data presented in the text and the accompanying footnotes and appendix, the preliminary conclusions drawn about women donors in relation to benefaction at the National Gallery, and the contextualising of this study within existing work in cognate fields and periods, may be a first step towards showing the contours of the topic, furnish a useful point of comparison, and even inspire new work in relation to other museum collections – whether national, municipal, university or independent – when others come to probe their provenance records from the same angle. It is also hoped that further relevant information about the National Gallery’s collecting history as it pertains to women benefactors may surface as a result of the publication of this article, which can, usefully, be added to what is presented here.

2. Who were the women donors?

It is clear that the amount of information and its visibility is dependent on how prominent the woman in question – or someone associated with her – was in the public domain. Although, in researching this article, data of some kind concerning about two thirds of the women donors who feature in the National Gallery’s credit lines has been found, a third of them remain just a name. Even for those who have paintings named after them, such as ‘Mrs Eva Mackintosh’, who presented The Madonna and Child (The Mackintosh Madonna; NG2069; fig. 2) by Raphael in 1906, we have relatively little information.³²

Figure 2 Raphael, The Madonna and Child (The Mackintosh Madonna), about 1509–11 National Gallery, London (NG2069). Presented by Mrs Eva Mackintosh, 1906.

Among the Gallery’s female donors, members of the royal family have not featured largely. Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester (1773–1844), great-granddaughter of George II and niece of George III, bequeathed The Philosophers’ Wood, a work now catalogued as after Salvator Rosa (NG1892).³³ In the case of Queen Victoria (1819–1901), she gave twenty-five early Italian and Netherlandish paintings to fulfil the desire of her recently deceased spouse, Prince Albert. To bring things up to date, mention may be made of the works currently on long loan from Queen Elizabeth II (b. 1926), which interestingly, like Queen Victoria’s offerings, are dominated by examples of early Italian art, and are, in fact, for the most part in the royal collection as a result of Prince Albert’s activities as a collector: Saints Mamas and James from the Pistoia Santa Trinità Altarpiece (L15), Gentile da Fabriano’s Quaratesi Madonna (L37) and Fra Angelico’s Blessing Redeemer of about 1423 (L10). The fourth and final current loan from the royal collection is Frederic Leighton’s Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna is carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence (L275; fig. 3), which Victoria purchased from the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition in 1855 because Albert had been enchanted with it. Presumably, he valued its association with early Italian art – his favourite type of painting – as well as its highly finished surface and extraordinary attention to detail, qualities in art greatly admired by most Victorian art-lovers.

Figure 3 Frederic, Lord Leighton, Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna is carried in Procession through the Streets of Florence, 1853-5. On loan to the National Gallery from Her Majesty the Queen (L275).

A good proportion of the Gallery’s women donors have come from the British aristocracy, often also marrying within its ranks. Lady Elizabeth Leveson Gower (1797–1891), who gave in 1870 Carlo Crivelli’s The Virgin and Child with Saints Francis and Sebastian (NG807), was the younger daughter of 1st Duke of Sutherland and married the man who became 2nd Marquess of Westminster. Other titled women donors of the Victorian era include Adelaide Chetwynd-Talbot, Countess Brownlow (1844–1917), daughter of 18th Earl of Shrewsbury and the wife of 3rd Earl Brownlow;³⁴ and Lady Taunton (1823–1892), daughter of the Earl of Carlisle and wife of Henry Labouchere, 1st Baron Taunton. Moving into the twentieth century, we find that a very generous donor was the colourful Mary Venetia James (née Cavendish-Bentinck; 1861–1948),³⁵ a society hostess and a racehorse breeder, who was related to the Dukes of Portland; she was also a close friend of Edward VII and a relative and godmother of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the future wife of George VI. Her contemporary was Margaret Watney (1860–1943), the daughter of 5th Earl of Portsmouth,³⁶ who, in her case, married a non-titled, highly successful businessman, from the brewing dynasty of Watney. They built up an old master collection at their home, Cornbury Park, Charlbury, near Oxford, thirty-nine paintings from which were sold at Christie’s, London, in June 1967, including Botticelli’s The Wedding Feast of Nastagio degli Onesti and the Daughter of Paolo Trave, which was purchased for the large sum of 100,000 gns.³⁷ 

Other women’s wealth, especially towards the end of the nineteenth century, derived largely from the businesses managed by their husbands. Into this category of wives of very rich industrialists, we may also place the former ballerina, Yolande Lyne Stephens (1812–1894),³⁸ whose wealth came from her spouse, Stephens Lyne Stephens, an English Tory MP, who, on inheriting a family fortune from glass manufacture in Portugal, reputedly became the richest commoner in England. During her marriage but especially during her thirty-four-year widowhood, Yolande spent some of that fortune in assembling a large collection of furniture, china, objets d’art and pictures, the latter which encompassed Dutch, Spanish, French and Italian old masters from a range of periods. According to her English will, dated 8 March 1887, Yolande planned on leaving forty-eight of her pictures to the National Gallery, with the condition that the gift should be referred to as the ‘Lyne Stephens Collection’. However, for reasons which remain unclear, she changed her mind stating that the paintings should be sold at auction. Ultimately, however, her lawyer, trustee and friend Horatio Noble Pym, became her chief beneficiary. Pym, who ultimately received £92,000 and was himself interested in art and literature, immediately offered the Gallery three paintings in her name, two of which were accepted in 1895: a Gerard David (NG1432) and a painting by the workshop of Rogier van der Weyden (NG1433). The intriguing episode explains why the Gallery’s credit lines for these two pictures bear Yolande Lyne Stephens’ name not Pym’s even though, technically, it was he not she who was the donor.³⁹ A second wealthy widow was ‘Mrs Alexander Lang Elder’. She is probably Mary Eliza Austin, a daughter of the Revd John Baptist Austin of South Australia, who married a Scottish Australian businessman and politician in colonial South Australia. When he died in London in 1885, he left an estate in South Australia worth £317,000.⁴⁰ On her death, despite the fact that she had ten children to consider, she remembered the National Gallery through her bequest of a religious painting by Gregorio Preti (NG1676). Little so far is known about how this work fitted into any art collection the couple may have had. Bringing things up to date, into this category we may place Mrs Drue Heinz (1915–2018), a professional actress, who, as the wife of an heir of the Heinz foods empire, became a truly significant cultural philanthropist. Although, her deepest passion was for literature – she supported countless writers, publications and literary institutions – she also supported museums and galleries in the United States and Britain, including the Heinz Architectural Centre at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, and the Heinz Archive and Library at the National Portrait Gallery, London. The National Gallery received Cranach’s Venus and Cupid (NG6680) from her charitable trust the year she died.⁴¹

One subgroup of wealthy women donors are American heiresses who became united through marriage to members of the ruling political classes of Britain in the age of Empire. Both parties stood to gain: firstborn English noblemen who, by primogeniture, inherited family estates in trust which could not be broken up, welcomed wealthy American ‘Dollar Princesses’ as sources to provide the necessary income to keep their cash-guzzling estates afloat. On the other hand, the American women gained prestige through acquiring aristocratic titles, ancient houses and large estates across Britain. Some research has already been conducted into the most powerful US family dynasties: the Jeromes, Leiters, Martins and Vanderbilts. From searching the National Gallery’s records, names have emerged from these as well as lesser-known American families. We found that a portrait by Gerrit van Honthorst and two works associated with Anthony van Dyck (NG6362; fig. 4; and NG6363–4) were given by Cornelia Martin (1877–1961), the only daughter of the socially ambitious and wealthy New York banker, Bradley Martin, whose wife coordinated the Bradley-Martin Ball in New York in 1897, famed for its excessive consumption and now recognised as a marker of the end of the so-called ‘Gilded Age’. It was as a result of her parents renting a Scottish highland estate that Cornelia met her future husband William, 4th Earl of Craven. When she married him, aged just sixteen, her $75,000 annual allowance enabled the Earl to buy a property in Mayfair, pay for the renovation of Coombe Abbey (his family estate in Warwickshire), and underwrite a lavish lifestyle which included art collecting.⁴²

Figure 4 Gerrit van Honthorst, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, 1642. National Gallery, London (NG6362). Bequeathed by Cornelia, Countess of Craven, 1965.

Another similar story is that of Emilie Yznaga (?1859–1944). Born in New York, she accompanied one of her sisters, Consuelo (?1853–1909), to England when the latter married the future Duke of Manchester and became part of the Prince of Wales's ‘Marlborough House set’, thereafter using her social leverage to act as an Anglo-American marriage broker to younger generations. For her part, Emilie moved to Paris, and having fled on the approach of the Germans during World War II, returned to the city permanently in 1942. She became a noted Parisian society hostess, her social prominence earning her a mention in Proust’s great sequence of novels, À la Recherche du temps perdu (Consuelo also appeared in Proust’s work). Emilie became very rich in 1909 through inheriting from her father some $3.3 million in today’s money – wealth largely accumulated from a plantation with 145 enslaved people in Louisiana – and just a few months later through being bequeathed an annuity by Consuelo worth some £96,000 a year in today’s money. This extraordinary wealth Emilie spent partly on building up a fine art collection.

A significant group of women donors, often overlapping with the wealthy social elite discussed above, are Jewish benefactors or benefactors of Jewish descent. For instance, Caroline Blanche Elizabeth (née Fitzroy) who became Lady Lindsay (1844–1912) was Jewish through her mother Hannah Mayer Rothschild Fitzroy and was the granddaughter of the great financier Nathan Meyer Rothschild. Other members of the Rothschild dynasty include Constance, Lady Battersea (1843–1931),⁴³ the daughter of Baron Anthony and Louise (née Montefiore) de Rothschild, in whose memory a painting was given to the Gallery; and Sybil, Marchioness of Cholmondeley (1894–1989),⁴⁴ whose mother was Baroness Aline Caroline de Rothschild, while her father, Sir Edward Albert Sassoon, was from another major Jewish dynasty. Other Jewish women benefactors with Rothschild family links are the sisters Anna Louisa Cohen (1835–1902) and Lucy Cohen (1839–1906), who were the aunts of the Hannah de Rothschild who became the wife of the Earl of Rosebery.⁴⁵ They enter the story being nieces of the important art collector John Samuel, a Jewish merchant and banker who, having established his residence in London in the late 1850s, began assembling a collection in the 1860s with advice from the Italian connoisseur Giovanni Morelli. It ultimately comprised Italian paintings ranging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, including works by Giovanni Battista Moroni, Moretto da Brescia, Francesco Guardi and Michele Marieschi.

Another important woman philanthropist from the Sassoon dynasty was Mrs Mozelle Sassoon, who donated a substantial sum towards the Gallery’s acquisition of Leonardo’s Burlington House Cartoon (NG6337) in 1962. Equally striking, given the building’s Christian heritage, was her hefty financial donation toward the repair of St Paul’s Cathedral after World War II. As with other women benefactors, Mrs Sassoon’s largesse towards art and culture was part of a larger philanthropy, her most significant financial support going to underwrite a new library for the British Institute in Paris in 1928; low-cost housing in the form of R.E. Sassoon House, Peckham (named after her son Reginald), which opened in 1934; £15,000 to found in 1936 the Mozelle Sassoon High Voltage X-Ray Therapy Department at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London; and other financial donations in 1938 to support German Jewry. In fact, as former National Gallery curator Humphrey Wine discovered, ‘Mozelle Sassoon supported both arts and other charities through her art collection. In aid of the Royal Northern Hospital, she opened her London home to the public for three days to show her collection; she donated a terracotta bust of a child by Houdon for Christie’s sale on 24–25 May 1939 in aid of Lord Baldwin’s Fund for Refugees (bought by Agnew's for £441, the sale’s highest price), and for the same event a small painting by Francesco Guardi (lot 243, £30, to Gubbay).’⁴⁶ Her penchant was for French eighteenth-century art and artefacts as the Houdon sculpture and items in various posthumous sales clearly demonstrate.

Yet another interesting case study of a Jewish woman benefactor of the National Gallery is Frieda Warburg (née Schiff, 1876–1958). With her husband, a German-born American banker from the Warburg banking family of Hamburg, she presented through the NACF in 1937 four works by Fra Filippo Lippi and his workshop, all panels from the predella of the dismembered mid-fifteenth-century Pistoia Santa Trinità Altarpiece (NG4868.1–4). Frieda Warburg was very fond of the group as in a letter to one of the Gallery’s trustees, Sir Robert Witt, dated 28 June 1929, her husband Felix observed: ‘I perfectly understand that from the standpoint of the Gallery, and even from the standpoint of an interested collector, it is desirable and important to acquire our four predella pieces. You have seen for yourself, however, how attached to these paintings and what a wrench it would be for Mrs. Warburg to separate herself from them’.⁴⁷ At first glance it may seem strange that a Jewish couple should collect works of art like this of overtly Christian subject matter, especially art that had been commissioned to hang in an ecclesiastical space. However, this is but one of many instances of Jewish collectors acquiring works of art depicting Christian subject matter in the National Gallery’s history,⁴⁸ a fact that reflects the larger European picture.⁴⁹ It seems that what really mattered, over and above subject matter per se, was an ability to appreciate good-quality works of art from all traditions (as well as the other liberal arts like music and literature) and thereby demonstrate ‘Bildung’, the hard-to-define but very important German concept of a ‘rounded education’.⁵⁰ As important was the ability to show beneficence through public acts of generosity for the greater good. Indeed, on investigating the Warburgs’ philanthropy further, it appears that their largesse in relation to the National Gallery was but one part of a far bigger whole. While Felix Warburg, for his part, helped relieve poverty among Jewish communities at various periods of economic hardship and assisted with funding tertiary education with a Jewish slant, Frieda became known for her intervention in the field of the arts. She donated in 1944, a few years after her husband’s death, the family mansion to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York as a permanent home for its museum, which then opened as 'The Jewish Museum' in May 1947 – the first Jewish museum in the United States and one of the oldest existing Jewish museums in the world. Nor was the National Gallery the only established art gallery to benefit from Frieda’s generosity. In 1941, she gave another group of early Italian paintings of Christian subject matter, inherited from her husband, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington: a triptych showing The Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels by the Sienese fourteenth-century painter Pietro Lorenzetti and one by the Emilian fifteenth-century master Agnolo degli Erri, showing A Dominican Preaching.⁵¹

Another pattern discernible among certain women donors of paintings to the National Gallery is that they had connections with either the painter or the sitter in a portrait. Given that the National Gallery was never the national ‘Walhalla’ in the way that the adjacent National Portrait Gallery was conceived of as being from its foundation, it was probably on the grounds of aesthetic quality as much as for historical interest that the women donors under review decided to donate portraits of family members to the National Gallery. In this category we can place the Jens Juel portrait of Joseph Greenway of 1788 (NG6341), presented in 1963 according to the wish of Mrs Maud M. Greenway (c.1866–?), presumably a relative of the sitter, and why Henrietta Charlotte Tarleton (1864–1951) chose to bequeath a portrait by Joshua Reynolds of her ancestor Colonel Tarleton (NG5985; fig. 5), which shows the soldier, aged twenty-seven, in action as commandant of the British Legion cavalry in the War of American Independence.⁵²

Figure 5 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Colonel Tarleton, 1782. National Gallery, London (NG5985). Bequeathed by Mrs Henrietta Charlotte Tarleton, 1951.

In this group we may mention Ellen Hollond (1822–1884), a well-known traveller and philanthropist, who founded the first crèche in London and English nurses’ homes in Paris and Nice.⁵³ In relation to things artistic, she not only gave a Boucher to the National Gallery in 1880 (NG1090) but she also appeared in two works by Ary Scheffer, which reached the Gallery in 1885 through a bequest from her husband, after a life-interest to her.⁵⁴ She had met Scheffer in Paris, where, after her marriage in 1840 to Robert Hollond, a pioneering balloonist and MP for Hastings, she spent part of each year, creating a salon in the French capital that attracted leading liberals as well as painters like Scheffer. In that painter’s intimate portrait of her of 1851 (NG1169), her status as a society figure is played down, however, in favour of presentation as a Roman matron/ Biblical heroine, and it was as a saintly figure that she modelled for another painting by Scheffer of Saints Augustine and Monica (NG1170).

Also worth mentioning at this point is Lady Amelia Catherine Fitzgerald (d. 1947), daughter of a prominent Dutch financier, Henry Louis Bischoffsheim, who grew up at the centre of a wealthy and cosmopolitan social circle at Bute House in South Audley Street, London (now the Egyptian Embassy), and who married Sir Maurice FitzGerald, 2nd Bt. and 20th Knight of Kerry and equerry to the Duke of Connaught. The couple collected art and among the portraits they amassed were not only examples by Reynolds and Gainsborough but also likenesses of some of her female relatives. In 1944, she donated to the Gallery two family portraits, one of her mother Mrs Bischoffsheim by John Everett Millais (now Tate) and the other of her older sister Ellen Odette (1857–1933), as a young teenager, by Louis-Gustave Ricard (NG5573).⁵⁵

Another discernible group are women who had significant connections with the London art world, either as artistic movers and shakers themselves or who enjoyed close association with prominent male collectors, dealers, artists or writers. Among the women benefactors to the National Gallery who were prominent figures within the cultural world of their day was Lady Lindsay, mentioned above, who, with her husband, Sir Coutts Lindsay, founded the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 (she provided much of the funding), which became London’s leading, independent art gallery and hub of the Aesthetic Movement in the early 1880s.⁵⁶ After the couple’s separation in 1882, although Lady Lindsay turned to literature, published various novels, and used her homes in London and the country to host literary figures such as Robert Browning and Bret Harte, her house guests also included the painters George Frederic Watts, Millais, Leighton and Edward Burne-Jones.

Among the grouping of female relatives of serious collectors, we can place Sarah Solly (d. c.1879) whose father, Edward Solly, had built up a collection which had been auctioned at Christie’s, London, in May 1847. According to Nicholas Penny, former director of the National Gallery, Sarah and her sister Lavinia (who died in 1874) seem to have ‘tried to reassemble some of their father’s collection out of veneration for his memory and a conviction that his pictures were destined for, and ought to have been acquired by the National Gallery.’⁵⁷ In Sarah Solly’s correspondence with the Gallery, she noted that although the majority of the pictures had been sold to Berlin, she and her sister had managed to ‘save’ five works – three Italian sixteenth-century and two Dutch seventeenth-century pieces – for the nation by buying them back with their own inheritance.

Another pair of Gallery donors who were sisters were Rachel F. Alexander (b. 1875) and Jean I. Alexander (b. 1877), who gave over a dozen old masters, largely Dutch seventeenth-century works.⁵⁸ They were two of the children (they had three brothers and five other sisters) of the collector William Cleverley Alexander, who was a member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club, a founding member of the NACF, and associated with the Aesthetic Movement not least through being a major collector of James McNeill Whistler’s work.

Figure 6 John Constable, Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, erected in the grounds of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire by the late Sir George Beaumont, Bt., 1833–6. National Gallery, London (NG1272). Bequeathed by Miss Isabel Constable as the gift of Maria Louisa, Isabel, and Lionel Bicknell Constable, 1888.

In several instances, the Gallery has received pictures from female relatives of prominent artists. One such case is Isabel Constable (1823–1888), the daughter and eldest child of the British landscape painter John Constable, who in 1888 bequeathed several works by her father including Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds (NG1272; fig. 6).⁵⁹ A second example is Emily Jane Wood, who, by the wish of her uncle Decimus Burton, a foremost Victorian architect, gave two pictures in 1888 (NG1251–2).⁶⁰

In relation to the commercial art world, the widow of the old master dealer Martin Colnaghi in 1908 donated a portrait of him by John Callcott Horsley (NG2286). From the Gallery’s board minutes and related correspondence, it appears that the painting, which had previously been rejected by the National Portrait Gallery, was accepted in recognition of her late husband’s generosity in bequeathing to the National Gallery a handful of paintings as well as an extremely generous financial bequest.⁶¹ A related case is that of Edith Cragg (d. 1925), who bequeathed four French paintings to the Gallery; she was the daughter of John Webb, arguably the most important antiques dealer in England in the mid-nineteenth century with influential links to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Another interesting case study is that of Jane (Jenny Louisa Roberta) Blaker (1869–1947), the sister of Hugh Blaker, who is best remembered as a dealer for his links with Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, pioneer collectors of Impressionist art, who went on to give their impressive art collection to the National Gallery of Wales. Records show that Jane herself had a long association with the Davies sisters from 1895 as their governess, remaining with them throughout her life as their companion, firstly at Plas Dinam and from the early 1920s at Gregynog Hall, near Newtown, Montgomeryshire. Jane Blaker’s connection with the National Gallery came about when, on the death of her brother Hugh, as one of his executors, she was responsible for the sale of his art collection. While over 600 works of art were sold at auction and through exhibitions at London’s Leicester Galleries (in 1937 and 1948), Jane presented, in her brother’s memory, Modigliani's Le Petit Paysan to the Tate Gallery in 1941 and then, when she died six years later, she bequeathed Quinten Massys’ The Ugly Duchess (NG5769; fig. 7) to the National Gallery.

Figure 7 Quinten Massys, An Old Woman ('The Ugly Duchess'), about 1513. National Gallery, London (NG5769). Bequeathed by Miss Jenny Louisa Roberta Blaker, 1947.

That same year, in 1947, the widow of Otto Gutekunst, the dealer who had run the London branch of P. & D. Colnaghi’s successfully from 1894, gave the Portrait of a Woman in Profile, probably by Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis (NG5752) as well as Vincenzo Catena’s Portrait of the Doge, Andrea Gritti (NG5751),⁶² the latter formerly owned by the eminent Victorian art writer and social reformer John Ruskin. In the case of Elizabeth Carstairs (d. c.1952), the widow of the American art dealer Charles Stewart Carstairs, who did much to encourage American clients like the industrial magnate Henry Clay Frick to invest in European old master paintings, she very generously bequeathed eight paintings to the National Gallery in 1952. The final woman donor who falls into this category is Betty Koetser, who, in 1966, gave Titian’s Allegory of Prudence (NG6376) with her husband, the latter who had an art firm in Zurich, and to which city’s Kunsthaus they donated a magnificent collection of Dutch, Flemish and Italian old masters in 1986.

Several pictures in the National Gallery’s collection have come from women associated with well-known male art historians or who were themselves acknowledged specialists in the field. Mrs Evelyn Antal presented the Portrait of a Lady (NG6254) by the eighteenth-century Neapolitan Baroque painter Francesco Solimena in 1955, in memory of her husband, Frederick Antal, a Jewish Hungarian art historian, particularly known for his contributions to the social history of art.⁶³ Likewise, Linda Murray (1913–2004),⁶⁴ presented the Gallery (through the Art Fund) in 1996 with an Italian Landscape (NG6564) by François-Xavier Fabre, a French nineteenth-century painter of historical subjects, in memory of her husband, Peter Murray. In her case, she had made her own name as an art historian of the Italian Renaissance, publishing The High Renaissance and Mannerism (1967), Michelangelo (1980) and Michelangelo: His Life, Work and Times (1984), all of which were written for non-specialists, became widely popular and were translated into many languages. Additionally, she authored several books with her husband, with whom she forged a notable literary partnership throughout forty-five years of marriage. Their co-authored Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists, for instance, is currently in its seventh edition since its original publication in 1959, and she also saw through the press The Oxford Companion to Christian Art and Architecture (1996), on which she had been working with Peter before his death in 1992.

Lady Witt (born Mary Helene Marten)⁶⁵ was another female art historian whose book on The German and Flemish Masters in the National Gallery was published in 1904. She married Sir Robert Witt, who helped to found the National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund) and the Courtauld Institute of Art and was also a trustee of the National, Tate and Watts galleries. Together the Witts developed what became the world's largest collection of over 500,000 photographs and prints of paintings, which was bequeathed on Robert’s death in 1952 to the Courtauld. Previously, the couple had presented two works to the nation: Samuel Hoogstraten’s mid-seventeenth-century Peepshow with Views of the Interior of a Dutch House to the National Gallery in 1924, and Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet’s Children at a Church Door to Tate in 1926, although the latter was transferred to the National Gallery in 1956 (NG3832; fig. 8; and NG4140).⁶⁶

Figure 8 Samuel van Hoogstraten, A Peepshow with Views of the Interior of a Dutch House, about 1655–60. National Gallery, London (NG3832). Presented by Sir Robert and Lady Witt through the Art Fund, 1924.

Another case of a woman art world professional who gave works to the Gallery outside her scholarly orbit is Dame Joan Evans (1893–1977), who was the half-sister Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the classical Greek site of Knossos. An archaeologist and scholar of medieval art in her own right (she wrote on French and British medieval art and life and the history of ornament in western Europe as well as on John Ruskin),⁶⁷ she became the first female President of the British Archaeological Institute and was at one time President of the Society of Antiquaries as well as a member of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Advisory Council which offered advice on acquisitions. Despite the nature of her professional interests, she bequeathed a seventeenth-century Italian picture of Saint John the Baptist (NG6455), formerly attributed to Caravaggio or one of his followers. 

Figure 9 Giovanni Bellini, The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr, about 1505–7. National Gallery, London (NG812). Presented by Lady Eastlake, 1870.

There are quite a few women donors who enjoyed a specific link with the National Gallery through their husbands or another relative past or present. Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (1809–1893), wife of the Gallery’s first and all-important director, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, and an art historian in her own right, gave two paintings: Pisanello’s Virgin and Child with Saints (NG776) in 1867 (soon after her husband’s death and in his memory), followed by Giovanni Bellini’s The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr (NG812; fig. 9) in 1870, essentially as a thank-you offering after the trustees had finally agreed to purchase Eastlake’s private art history library for the Gallery, something she was relieved and delighted to have seen accomplished.⁶⁸ Eastlake’s eponymous nephew, Mr Charles Locke Eastlake, followed in his uncle’s footsteps when he became keeper at the National Gallery in 1878 (he stayed in post until 1898), even though he never realised his ambition to become director. On his death in 1906, he left the Gallery a work by Saftleven the younger, and his widow, Eliza Eastlake, went on the following year to offer two paintings in his memory: although the trustees rejected her offer of a painting by Francesco Bissolo, they did accept an unattributed portrait, now catalogued as an eighteenth-century German work depicting Edzard the Great, Count of East Friesland (NG2209). She followed up this act of generosity with another in 1911, when she donated Pieter Quast’s A Man and a Women in a Stableyard (NG2856).⁶⁹

Several women donors have been relatives of former Gallery trustees. One such was Mrs Samuel Long, who in 1911 gave a replica of a marble bust of her relative Charles Long, 1st Baron Farnborough, by Francis Chantrey (NG2786), the original of which is now in the National Portrait Gallery.⁷⁰ Long, as a Tory MP who had become Paymaster-General in the Treasury, was married to the well-known amateur artist Amelia Hume, and became involved with many of the art institutions of his day. He was a trustee of the British Museum (where he was involved in the purchase of the Parthenon Sculptures) and the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow as well as a founding governor of the British Institution. As the unofficial adviser on artistic matters to the future George IV, he became known as the ‘spectacles to the king’. In relation to the National Gallery, he played a crucial part in its foundation, helping to negotiate the purchase of Angerstein’s collection, which formed the nucleus of the first national collection of paintings when it opened to the public in 1824. Having become a foundation trustee of the nascent institution, he bequeathed fifteen paintings to it. Worth mentioning too, is May Rowley (1880–1965),⁷¹ who bequeathed in 1965 Thomas Lawrence’s fine portrait of her family ancestor, John Julius Angerstein, aged about 55 (NG6370).⁷²

Lady Enid Layard was wife of Sir Austen Henry Layard, who was not only an active Gallery trustee for nearly thirty years until his death in 1894, but also a politician, diplomat and archaeologist associated with the discovery of Nineveh. Although his generous bequest of paintings – mainly works by Italian artists, particularly those of the early Renaissance – reached the Gallery after various delays only in 1912, Lady Layard had already presented in 1900 a fresco fragment showing The Virgin and Child, probably by Bartolomeo Montagna (NG1696). In the case of Rosalind Frances (née Stanley, 1845–1921), the Countess of Carlisle, she ensured that the wishes of her late husband, the 9th Earl, an amateur painter and for more than thirty years an influential trustee (served 1881–1911), were carried out in relation to Gossaert’s Adoration of the Magi (NG2790), when she offered it to the Gallery at a price much below its market value (she still received £40,000 for it.)⁷³ Thereafter, she donated, at different times, no fewer than nine paintings to the Gallery. A fourth case is Mrs Heseltine, who gave a pastel by Jean-Etienne Liotard (NG4460) in 1929 in memory of her husband, the artist and art collector John P. Heseltine, who had served as a National Gallery trustee from 1893 until his death, and who had himself donated four works to the institution during his lifetime.⁷⁴ In the case of Sybil Cholmondeley, the Gallery received Thomas Gainsborough’s Portrait of the Artist with his Wife and Daughter (NG6547) in 1994, in memory of her brother, Sir Philip Sassoon, who had been very involved in Britain’s cultural life, not least at the National Gallery, where he had served on the board three times (served 1921–28, 1929–36, 1936–39), and acted as its chair between 1933 and 1935.

A related point worth making in relation to Jewish women donors is that Alfred de Rothschild, a Gallery trustee (served 1892–1918) and part of their networks, may well have helped to persuade some of them to give paintings to the National Gallery – and indeed, the Gallery to accept them. In the case of Lady Lindsay, Nicholas Penny has suggested that the idea to bequeath the paintings hanging in her drawing room to the National Gallery came from this relative of hers, a fact that may also explain why the then director, Kenneth Clark, accepted what were, in Penny’s opinion, mediocre paintings.⁷⁵ Penny has also suggested that the works from the John Samuel Collection, given by his two unmarried nieces, came to the Gallery through the similar influence of Alfred de Rothschild.⁷⁶

A final subsection of women benefactors of the Gallery who have enjoyed privileged relations with it are those linked to the institution through employment. Several more recent women donors have been either a National Gallery Artist in Residence or an Associate Artist.⁷⁷ Maggi Hambling (b. 1945) was in fact the Gallery’s first ever Artist in Residence and in 1981, the year her residency finished, she gave the Gallery an example of her work. Portrait of Archie MacDonald (H11; fig. 10) was an appropriate choice given that the sitter was a member of the Gallery’s warding staff.

Figure 10 Maggi Hambling, Portrait of Archie MacDonald. National Gallery, London (H11)

It seems that most of the artists, male and female alike, who were subsequently awarded residencies not only were commissioned to create a work by the Gallery but also acted as Hambling had done and presented a work after their residencies. In this way, the Gallery’s ‘Contextual Collection’, where such works sit, has been augmented through gifts by several of the Gallery’s female Artists in Residence, namely June Redfern (b. 1951), Vivien Blackett (b. 1955), Madeline Strindberg (b. 1955) and Paula Rego (b. 1935). Into this category also falls, albeit indirectly, Mrs Eliot Hodgkin, who, with her husband, gave (through the Art Fund) in 1987 Jean-François de Troy’s The Capture of the Golden Fleece (NG6512). Her spouse Eliot Hodgkin was a collector and painter,⁷⁸ and the cousin of the abstract painter Howard Hodgkin (1932–2017), the latter who was a National Gallery Artist in Residence as well as a trustee (served 1974–85).

In the current context we should briefly mention Joyce Plesters (1927–1996) and her donation of two engravings, including one after a painting by Sir Charles Eastlake (H23; in the Gallery’s Contextual Collection), in 1987, the year of her retirement. Plesters is an important figure in the Gallery’s history, having spent her entire working life from 1949 in its Scientific Department. She helped Ian Rawlins, the then Scientific Adviser, with the X-radiography of Gallery paintings – a project he had started in the 1930s – but her most important contribution concerned the analysis of small paint samples through chemical microscopy. Her work on the technical examination of paintings was seminal and its effect was felt throughout the world of art history and paintings conservation. Notably, in 1966 and 1967, she helped to set up laboratories in Venice and Florence for the microchemical study of paintings, following the floods there and the resultant urgent need for much conservation work.⁷⁹

While the clearest discernible patterns in terms of the social and professional profiles of the Gallery’s women benefactors have been outlined above, there are always, happily, exceptions to the rules. It was fascinating to discover among the Gallery’s female donors Mrs Violet Van der Elst (1882–1966), who in 1959 gave Karel Dujardin’s Conversion of Saint Paul (NG6296).⁸⁰ She does not have the profile of a typical Gallery benefactor, coming from a working class background with her father a coal porter and her mother a washerwoman, and she herself working initially as a scullery maid. Van der Elst became a self-made, successful businesswoman after developing cosmetics and ‘Shavex’, the first brush-less shaving cream, although none of her four attempts to be elected an MP were successful. She is best remembered, arguably, for her activities against the death penalty, which found expression in part through her book On the Gallows, published in 1937 (that same year she also published a collection of ghost stories, The Torture Chamber and Other Stories). It transpires that she also once owned the massive historic house, Harlaxton Manor, in Lincolnshire. She certainly owned some old masters; originally, she had intended giving the Gallery, in addition to the Dujardin, three other works: Saint Sebastian by Guido Cagnacci and two works by Luca Giordano, The Rescue of Olindo and Sophronia and The Death of Adonis. The reasons for her change of mind are unclear.

3. What have women donors given to the National Gallery?

An interesting question that arises from this research project is whether knowing the gender of the donor gives us any new insights about the development of the National Gallery’s collections – in other words, has female benefaction influenced how the collection has been shaped in a way that would be different if there were no female donors? It should be pointed out immediately that the Gallery’s records demonstrate that in many cases the paintings given by women benefactors were not actually collected by them. Rather these women came to own and have responsibility for paintings as a result of receiving a bequest from a relative, most commonly from their husbands or parents. What was in their gift in such cases was to decide on the future fate of one or more painting, and in relation to the history of the National Gallery specifically, whether to favour that institution as the final home for works in their care.

In relation to the type of art accessioned into the Gallery’s collection from women donors, two of the biggest donations encompassed an eclectic range of schools and dates. The Mary Venetia James Bequest and the Countess of Carlisle’s donations both include paintings from across the board in terms of schools, but both have a different focus in terms of date: the James Bequest is largely of eighteenth-century pictures,⁸¹ while the Countess of Carlisle’s gifts are mainly of the seventeenth century, ranging from Rubens to the Carracci.⁸² Quite often just two schools of art are in play in the women’s donations and whenever this model is in evidence, the favoured combination is always Dutch seventeenth-century art with French Impressionism; the Bleecker gift is one such case.⁸³

In the majority of cases, where one specific school features very prominently or exclusively in the gift, it is eighteenth-century French painting that is the most significant in terms of quantity and even quality. This may be explained in part by the fact that across Britain, Europe and the US this was regarded as a fashionable area in which to collect at the end of the nineteenth century, when the acquisition of French Rococo furniture and objets d’art was in vogue and when ‘le gout Rothschild’ was considered the height of fashion for interior design in many elite houses.⁸⁴ One thinks, for example, of the collecting undertaken by the French-born artist and collector Joséphine Bowes (1825–1874), who was largely responsible for the creation of the Bowes Museum in County Durham. Interestingly, much literature on this type of art was produced at the end of the nineteenth century by a leading female art historian, Emilia Francis Strong, Lady Dilke (1840–1904), who was also a feminist and trade unionist.⁸⁵ Within this school, portraits and genre scenes predominate; the donation of a Vernet seascape (NG236) by Lady Simpkinson is the major exception to this rule.⁸⁶

Figure 11 Louis-Léopold Boilly, A Girl at a Window, about 1799. National Gallery, London (NG5583). Presented by Emilie Yznaga, 1945.

The most important gift of this kind donated by any woman to the National Gallery came from Emilie Yznaga,⁸⁷ who, in 1937, gave a group of six eighteenth-century French portraits, a few of which she had inherited from her sister Consuelo – Louis-Léopold Boilly’s Girl at a Window (NG5583; fig. 11), Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Portrait of a Lady (Madame de Gléon?) (NG5584), Nicolas de Largilliere’s Portrait of a Man (Jean-Baptiste Rousseau?) (NG5585), Jean-Marc Nattier’s Manon Balletti (NG5586) and the same painter’s Portrait of a Man in Armour (NG5587), The Dauphin, Louis de France after Alexandre Roslin (NG5588), and Louis Tocqué’s Portrait of a Young Woman (NG5590) – together with an ‘odd man out’, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross (NG5589; fig. 12).

Figure 12 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross, probably 1750–60. National Gallery, London (NG5589). Bequeathed by Miss Emilie Yznaga, 1945.

Emilie Yznaga’s collection had caught the attention of the Gallery’s then director, Kenneth Clark, who having visited her in Spring 1936, reported to the trustees in March 1937 that she had ‘signed and deposited in the Gallery a formal Deed of Gift of her collection which […] included several works of a type the Gallery lacked and were, in their kind, of the finest quality. Miss Yznaga would keep the pictures during her lifetime’.⁸⁸ Later, in October 1938, concerned by the possibility of war, she deposited the pictures on loan at Trafalgar Square, and the following month they were put on display. She had planned to add another picture ‘of two young lions’ then attributed to Rubens to her list of gifts to the National Gallery but the war intervened. As this fact suggests, not all of Emilie’s impressive painting collection was acquired by the National Gallery. Another donation that likewise consisted of some highly important French Rococo works was Edith Cragg’s, which included a number of domestic scenes inherited from her father: two outstanding works by Jean-Siméon Chardin, The Young Schoolmistress (NG4077; fig. 13) and House of Cards (NG4078), a Fête Galante by Jean-Baptiste Pater (NG4079) and a fourth work given to Boucher’s studio showing two girls about to open a love letter, The Billet-Doux (NG4080).⁸⁹

Figure 13 Jean-Siméon Chardin, The Young Schoolmistress, about 1737. National Gallery, London (NG4077). Bequeathed by Mrs Edith Cragg, as part of the John Webb Bequest, 1925.

Another characteristic picture of this school, depicting an amorous encounter is Jean-Antoine Watteau’s The Scale of Love (NG2897). It was bequeathed to the Gallery by Sir Julius Wernher in 1912 but it had once belonged to Yolande Lyne Stephens.

Greuze’s Portrait of a Girl with a Lamb (NG1154), another such piece, was bequeathed in 1884 by Madame Mary Elizabeth Mohl (1793–1883),⁹⁰ a friend of the writer George Eliot and the social reformer Florence Nightingale, and herself the author of Madame Récamier, with a Sketch of the History of Society in France (London, 1862), where she discussed the history of women’s rights. She also hosted a salon filled with scholars close to her husband, the Orientalist Julius Mohl, but also writers and intellectuals from across Europe, some of whom she had met when she undertook her art training in Paris, also inheriting some of the guest-list from Madame Recamier's salon. Parthenope Nightingale told the young Louise Mackenzie, the future Lady Ashburnham in 1851: 'She knows a great deal about art, and would tell you all manner of books, and show you artists and help you in every way.’⁹¹

Some French nineteenth-century art has likewise been given by women benefactors, either alone or with a spouse, a substantial proportion of it reaching the Gallery in the 1960s. One group of French Impressionist works, in fact all by Boudin and mostly beach scenes, was bequeathed by the Irish woman Judith Wilson on her death in 1960. She was a cousin of Lord Rothermere and had inherited a large fortune when her parents died. As she was most interested in the theatre, she founded a lectureship at the University of Cambridge to bring together those interested in the academic study of drama and poetry and those who were practitioners in these fields.⁹² Whether she had an extensive art collection beyond the group of Boudins is yet to be determined. Additionally, two couples in the 1960s each gave an important work by a leading Impressionist: a Renoir was given by Lady Hornby and her husband in 1961, and a Pissarro by Viscountess Radcliffe and her husband in 1964. The bequest of Helena and Kenneth Levy of 1990 continued this trend, when they enriched the Gallery with four works which, as a whole, may be seen to offer a mini visual overview of this school of painting: a Barbizon painting by its leading light, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (NG6531); a work by Eugène Boudin (NG6530; fig. 14), who is hailed in the history of art as a bridge to early Impressionism; and two landscapes by the pioneering fathers of the Impressionist movement: Claude Monet’s The Museum at Le Havre (NG6527) an Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Lakeside Landscape (NG6528).⁹³

Figure 14 Eugène Boudin, Brussels Harbour, 1871. National Gallery, London (NG6530). Bequeathed by Helena and Kenneth Levy, 1990.

In terms of numbers, a very substantial grouping of seventeen-century Dutch pictures now at Trafalgar Square came from women benefactors. It is worth noting that a fair few were passed down from collections built up by male relatives. For instance, the Alexander sisters’ gift included eight such inherited works, and Jane Emily Wood, in fulfilment of a wish of her uncle Decimus Burton, gave the Gallery both a portrait by Frans Hals (NG1251) and a still life depicting dead game by Jan Roos (NG1252). A few Dutch seventeenth-century portraits were given in the later nineteenth century, and many landscapes came in the twentieth century. For instance, a Miss E.A. Bennett presented Ferdinand Bol’s An Astronomer in 1862 (NG679; fig. 15), and Miss Pilbrow bequeathed a seventeenth-century male portrait in 1900 (NG1700).⁹⁴

Figure 15 Ferdinand Bol, An Astronomer, 1652. National Gallery, London (NG679). Presented by Miss E.A. Bennett, 1862.

Of the many Dutch landscapes given by women, we should mention, as an instance of early gift-giving, Mrs Hodges’ bequest of 1852 of two pictures, one of which was a River Landscape by Jan van Goyen (NG151), an important pioneer of naturalistic landscape in early seventeenth-century Holland,⁹⁵ and Mrs Jewer Henry Jewer’s bequest of 1873, which comprised a beautiful image of river and woods by Joris van der Haagen (NG901), an artist who was not as concerned as many of his compatriots were with travelling to Italy and suffusing his work with a soft golden Italianate light, but rather wished to capture the cooler, northern light of the Dutch Republic and its native flora and scenery. This early activity was followed by later instances of generosity in the same field such as Susannah Caught’s gift of 1901 which included Abraham van Calraet’s Interior of a Stable (NG1851), Beatrice Mildmay’s bequest of 1953 of a Meindert Hobbema (NG6138; fig. 16),⁹⁶ Esme Cuming Butler’s bequest in 1972 of a river scene by Salomon van Ruysdael (NG6419),⁹⁷ and Mrs Gifford-Scott’s presentation of Jan Weenix’s Scene of an Italian Courtyard (NG6462) in 1980.⁹⁸

Figure 16 Meindert Hobbema, The Haarlem Lock, Amsterdam, about 1663–5. National Gallery, London (NG6138). Bequeathed by Miss Beatrice Mildmay, 1953.

Interestingly, within the seventeenth-century Dutch paintings given by women, landscapes dominate, and there are comparatively few depictions of flowers or children, which are usually associated with female taste and collecting habits: exceptions include a portrait of a girl holding a parrot by an unknown Netherlandish painter (NG6498), given by Lady Colman in 1985,⁹⁹ and a flower piece by Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder (NG6549), given by Sally Speelman and her husband in 1994.

Another popular school of painting in terms of numbers of donations by women is British art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which for much of the Victorian era was held in high esteem in Britain and reached record prices at auction during the first decades of the twentieth century after American collectors entered the field, keen to add social distinction to their mansions through the display of historical British portraits. It is necessary to note, however, that many of these British school gifts have been transferred to Tate, either immediately or at some later date, an action that has led to the original link with Trafalgar Square often being lost sight of, a point to which we will return. Good quality British paintings with interesting tales attached to them are to be found in the Mary Venetia James Bequest, including a portrait by Reynolds of a Black servant, who has been tentatively identified as Francis Barber, a servant of Dr Johnson (N05843).¹⁰⁰ Her bequest also included Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of the dog belonging to his close friend, the musician Karl Friedrich Abel (N05844), and Landscape with Gipsies, which was apparently Gainsborough’s first landscape in which figures of any kind predominate (N05845). The artist’s portrait of himself and his family reached the Gallery in 1994 from the collection of Sybil Cholmondeley.

Something that unites the majority of the gifts by women from the French, Dutch and British schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is their size and subject matter. They tend of be of modest to mid-scale in dimension and are mostly of unpretentious themes such as portraits (many of women – mostly young and beautiful at that – with a fair few depicting members of British and foreign royal families including queens and female regents),¹⁰¹ landscapes, genre scenes and domestic subjects, all types of pictures traditionally considered most suitable to adorn intimate spaces of retirement, originally semi-private rooms and cabinets and more recently bedrooms and private sitting rooms. It is, by contrast, rare to find among the pictures given by women lowlife scenes, or larger history pictures (including battle scenes) or marine paintings of the kind typically paraded in public rooms, or huge altarpieces of complex or harrowing religious iconography hailing from ecclesiastical settings. Where the picture donated is religious in subject matter more often than not it shows the Virgin and Child. For instance, three of the ten pictures donated in 1912 by Lady Lindsay depict the Madonna holding the Christ child. Among the few scenes of Christ’s life, iconography of his nativity dominates. There are relatively few images depicting episodes from Christ’s adult life, a rare instance being The Raising of Lazarus possibly by Simon de Vos (NG6384) bequeathed by Marion Smith in 1967, while Mary Wood’s gift in 1901 of Paris Bordone’s Christ as 'The Light of the World'' (NG1845) is the only portrayal of Christ without attendant figures given by a woman patron.¹⁰²

In addition to these mainstream areas of collecting, certain other fields traditionally regarded as rather niche, have also been added to by women donors, especially in the fields of early Italian, Netherlandish and German art. In two important instances, the women donors turn out not to have been the collectors but rather the last ‘curators’ of the collection in the private sphere, who made the decision to pass on pictures which had come into their possession from a male relative to a public institution for future safekeeping. There is the case of Queen Victoria regarding works from the Oettingen-Wallerstein Collection, which her late husband had received from a penurious distant cousin (the outcome of Albert having acted as the guarantor of a loan which his relative was not able to repay) and which he had attempted (unsuccessfully) to sell to the National Gallery on more than one occasion, before deciding to offer it en-bloc as a gift. This wish was taken forward by his widow in 1862, even though the Gallery ultimately accepted only a part of the collection – it accepted some twenty-five works out of a total of seventy-seven. A second similar case is the donation of Mrs Anne Eliza Green, widow of Joseph Henry, a surgeon and the literary executor of the English poet-critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who offered the Gallery all the pictures by early northern European artists that her husband had collected.¹⁰³ A selection of twelve pictures was accepted in 1880, including two works by Gerard David showing scenes from the life of Christ. Three more early works were gifted by female donors at the end of the nineteenth century, namely Carlo Crivelli’s The Virgin and Child with Saints Francis and Sebastian, presented by Elizabeth Mary, widow of the second Marquess of Westminster, in 1870 (NG807); a work donated as by Mantegna but now catalogued as by an imitator depicting The Three Maries at the Tomb that Lady Taunton bequeathed in 1892 (NG1381);¹⁰⁴ and a portrait dated 1543 of Anna van Spangen (NG1652), now given to a follower of Joos van Cleve but in 1897, when Martha Brown bequeathed it, believed to represent Catherine Parr and to be the work of an English artist.¹⁰⁵ A splendid early Netherlandish painting was accessioned at this time: Gerard David’s magnificent Virgin and Child with Saints and Donors bequeathed in 1895 in Yolande Lyne Stephen’s name (NG1432; fig. 17).

Figure 17 Gerard David, The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor, probably 1510. National Gallery, London (NG1432). Bequeathed by Mrs Lyne Stephens, 1895.

It depicts the holy mother and child in walled garden surrounded by three female saints: Saint Mary Magdalene, holding the pot of oil with which she would anoint the adult Christ’s feet; Saint Barbara, with a headdress showing a tower depicting the building in which she would be imprisoned by her father for being a Christian; and Saint Catherine, dressed as a princess, who is receiving the ring that legend recorded she received from the infant Jesus.¹⁰⁶

From studying available data, it appears that there was a constant trickle of early Italian pictures (often bequests) into the collection of Trafalgar Square from the 1910s to the 1940s. Lady Lindsay’s generous bequest of 1912 included several early Italian works by or associated with Fra Angelico, Bellini, Botticelli and Ghirlandaio; the ‘Misses Lindsay’ (not to be confused with Lady Lindsay), again in 1912, presented a late fifteenth-century cassone (NG3826), and the Countess of Carlisle’s 1913 gift included Barnaba da Modena’s Scenes of the Virgin dated to 1347 (NG2927). An interesting gift was an altarpiece depicting The Virgin and Child with Four Saints and Twelve Devotees (NG4444) dating to the 1490s, which was presented by Lady Margaret Watney in 1929. It is by the so-called Master of the Pala Sforzesca, a painter whose style combines elements of the old Lombard manner of fifteenth-century Milanese artists with that of Leonardo, who arrived in Milan about 1482. Then, in 1930, the same year as the pioneering exhibition of Italian art at London’s Royal Academy, two panels by the Master of the Palazzo Venezia Madonna from the mid fourteenth-century were donated by the Misses Cumming (NG4491–2). In relation to activity in the 1940s, we find that Andrea di Bonaiuto da Firenze’s Virgin and Child with Ten Saints was presented by Mrs Blennerhassett in 1940 (NG5115),¹⁰⁷ and a Giotto and workshop scene of Pentecost (NG5360) came with Mrs Geraldine Emily Coningham’s bequest in 1942.¹⁰⁸

In relation to early Netherlandish work donated by women in the early decades of the twentieth century we may mention a fragmentary Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape from the workshop of Joachim Patinir (NG4826). This painting was bequeathed in 1936 by Clara Eugenie Schnapper, widow of Henry Oppenheimer, the great collector of drawings, and niece of Rodolphe Kann, an important collector of paintings. Two other bequests of such art arrived at Trafalgar Square in 1947: The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels and Saints, probably by Michael Pacher (NG5786), was bequeathed by Miss Anna S.H. Simonson,¹⁰⁹ and it was also in 1947 that The Ugly Duchess by Massys was received, as already noted, as a bequest from Jenny Blaker, a work which had, in fact, been offered by her brother (in vain) as a loan to the Gallery in 1920, 1922 and 1938.

It may be worth noting that in two instances, ‘primitives’ (the term commonly used at this time to describe European painting before the High Renaissance) were inherited by women from their mothers: the Netherlandish Woman with Prayer Beads (NG1860) had been passed to Julia Gordon (1810–1896) from her mother.¹¹⁰ One of her ancestors, Levinus Munck, had come to London from Ghent and it is just possible that the small and not particularly accomplished portrait, probably painted in the 1540s, may represent an ancestor of Levinus’s – and therefore also of the donor. In the case of the Andrea di Bonaiuto da Firenze, it had been in the collection of Mrs Blennerhassett’s mother, Mrs F.W.H. Myers (born Tennant, 1856–1937), who was a photographer and who moved in the artistic circle of Watts and Millais.¹¹¹

A final observation about the artists from the past whose works form part of the National Gallery’s permanent collection thanks to 200-years of female benefactors is that they are all by male artists except for two works. In 1934 Mrs D.E. Knollys presented the Portrait of a Woman of 1551 by Catharina van Hemessen (NG4732), who was the daughter of an Antwerp painter Jan van Hemessen, and who was apparently in Spain with Mary of Hungary in 1556; most of her signed pictures are small female portraits. As recently as 2018, the Gallery acquired the Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (NG6671; fig. 18) by Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1654 or later), the most famous female painter in seventeenth-century Europe, a purchase made possible through the generosity of many people including a number of women. Institutional records prove that as part of Mary James Mathews Gift in 1944 the Gallery received a picture called Evening of the 1880s by the French female painter, engraver and sculptor, Marie Cazin (1845–1924).¹¹² Although accepted, the picture was immediately transferred to Tate, where it remains today.¹¹³

Figure 18 Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1615–17. National Gallery, London (NG6671). Bought with the support of the American Friends of the National Gallery, the National Gallery Trust, Art Fund (through the legacy of Sir Denis Mahon), Lord and Lady Sassoon, Lady Getty, Hannah Rothschild CBE, Mrs Mollie W. Vickers, the Hon. Mrs Ashley Dawson-Damer, The Society of Dilettanti Charitable Trust Fund, Mr Andrew Green QC and Ms Hirschl, Mr Matthew Santos and Mrs Mary Kuusisto, Mr Peter Scott CBE QC and Dr Richard Ballantine, the Diane Apostolos-Cappadona Trust, Mr Stephen Allcock, Mr James and Lady Emma Barnard, Miss Maxine White and Mr James Mortimer, Michael and Felicia Crystal, The W T J Griffin Charitable Settlement and other donors including those who wish to remain anonymous, 2018.

In other cases, the Gallery has turned down the chance to acquire examples of the work of certain female artists. For instance, a letter in the archives dated 1884 reveals that the trustees declined, as part of Mary Mohl’s bequest, a portrait by the British nineteenth-century woman painter Mary Smirke (active 1797–1821). Smirke had been employed as a painter and copyist by both Nathaniel Dance-Holland and Thomas Lawrence and became a well-regarded landscape painter, six of her paintings being chosen for display at the Royal Academy.¹¹⁴

Figure 19 Hans Holbein the Younger, Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, 1538. National Gallery, London (NG2475). Presented by the Art Fund with the aid of an anonymous donation, 1909.

So far, we have considered women’s benefaction in terms of ‘whole’ paintings. But to complete any historical overview, we need to include their generosity in terms of financial donations which have made the acquisition of very expensive paintings possible.¹¹⁵ The first time that this method of fund raising came into play was well over a century ago, in 1906, when the newly founded NACF¹¹⁶ organised its first ever public appeal in connection with an attempt to save Diego Velazquez’s The Toilet of Venus (‘The Rokeby Venus’; NG2057) for the nation. Geraldine Stern, Lady Michelham, with her banker husband, anonymously gave £8,000 – a sum sufficiently generous to make a significant difference to the success of the appeal.¹¹⁷ Unsurprisingly, given that the early twentieth century was a time when the great American collectors were keen to secure star works from Britain, the NACF had to organise a second public appeal to save Hans Holbein the Younger’s Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan (NG2475; fig. 19), which was threatened with export across the Atlantic, when its owner, the Duke of Norfolk, decided to put the painting up for sale in 1909. On this occasion, it was an anonymous donation by a woman donor that quite literally saved the day. There has been much speculation about the identity of the woman who gave £40,000 anonymously at the eleventh hour to secure the acquisition. Among the various suggestions, the most persuasive is Andrea Poole’s of ‘a Miss Tupper of Romford’ given that Tupper had already donated (unusually for women donors) a marine painting by Charles Brooking to the Gallery (now at Tate); was a generous and regular donor of the NACF; and had already responded to the appeal in question twice in previous weeks, first, by immediately giving £50, and then giving another £3,000, the latter which was the largest donation to date, and, on both occasions, requesting strict anonymity.¹¹⁸ Another important point of this particular story is that a third of the money came from women donors, many of whom were middle-class women, happily willing to demonstrate an interest in and keen to have an influence on the artistic life of the nation through paying the affordable annual subscription fee of one guinea to the NACF, thereby making a difference in the artistic sphere in a way that was blocked to them in the political sphere given that, at this time, they did not have the vote.¹¹⁹

Since the early 1900s, other public appeals have continued to attract the support of countless women, from diverse socio-economic backgrounds. A third case of a public appeal organised by NACF took place in 1962 to secure Leonardo’s Burlington House Cartoon (NG6337). As noted above, the fact that the drawing depicted the Virgin, her mother Saint Anne, the Christ child and his cousin, the infant St John the Baptist did not put off the Jewish benefactor Mozelle Sassoon from donating £250 to the appeal.

A fourth great public appeal of the twentieth century which received many donations from women concerned Titian’s late masterpiece, The Death of Actaeon (NG6420). After the J. Paul Getty Museum had paid the Earl of Harwood for it in June 1971, the Government agreed to place an export stop on the work for a year, in which time the Gallery had to raise £1,763,000 to match the sum paid by the American museum. The Gallery pledged one million pounds from its own current and future purchase grants. After the Government, in response, had promised to match any public donations pound for pound, the Gallery felt emboldened to launch its first ever public appeal in December 1971 – on this occasion, it did not rely on the NACF to manage the appeal as we have noted was the case in our three earlier case studies. The Gallery’s strategy, which focused on a media campaign in the press, on radio and on television, included printing announcements in The Times of the names of particularly generous donors. The Titian was secured for the nation by 6 July 1972. Given that the picture’s credit line supplies only basic information – ‘Bought with a special grant and contributions from the Art Fund, The Pilgrim Trust and through public appeal, 1972’ – the two published listings in The Times are critical documents for the historical record as they list at least some of the women donors (those who gave over £100) as well as the extent of their generosity. While names appear which are familiar from the current discussion, such as the Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley and Lady Witt (with her husband Sir John), who both gave £100, the vast majority are fresh names in the Gallery’s annals because they are not associated with other picture donations, among which is the intriguing mention of ‘Mrs Ivy Howard’s Art Class’ which donated £222.05.¹²⁰

This type of activity has experienced another peak since 2000 and will remain a purchasing strategy favoured by government and trustees at the Gallery in light of the current dwindling public funding available for museums and galleries as well as the huge asking prices now associated with the type of paintings the Gallery is interested in acquiring, which are more than any individual donor is likely to be able to afford on their own. This modus operandi has been adopted recently in relation to several Gallery purchases and, among the individual and corporate benefactors, women have featured prominently. Perhaps in some cases this is because the works in question, having links with historical women, have struck a chord. One of the Gallery’s most recent acquisitions is Orazio Gentileschi’s The Finding of Moses (NG6684), acquired at the start of 2020, which was commissioned as a gift for Queen Henrietta Maria by her husband Charles I ‘almost certainly to celebrate the birth of their son and heir, the future Charles II’ and which ‘originally hung in the Queen’s House at Greenwich, on the banks of the River Thames.’¹²¹ A slightly earlier purchase, of 2018, was the Self Portrait by Gentileschi’s daughter, Artemisia, who had briefly visited London in 1639, perhaps to assist her ailing father with the ceiling painting of the Queen’s House in Greenwich.

For similar reasons, since the Millennium, the Gallery has used financial gifts in wills to help purchase certain works of art, a fact that has been recognised in the wording of its credit lines. For instance, the website’s ‘Key Facts’ as well as the wall label for Rosso Fiorentino’s Portrait of a Young Man holding a Letter (NG6584) states that the work was ‘Bought, with the generous support of the George Beaumont Group and a number of gifts in wills including a legacy from Mrs Olive Brazdzionis, 2000’, and in the same vein the public is made aware that Adolph Menzel’s Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens (NG6604) was bought in 2006 in part through ‘a number of gifts in wills, including a legacy from Mrs Martha Doris Bailey in memory of her husband Mr Richard Hillman Bailey’. In the case of Wilkie’s A Young Woman Kneeling at a Prayer Desk (NG6650), it was bought in 2014 with the support of a generous legacy from Miss Marcia Lay, a Birmingham art teacher, who had taught at Lordswood Girls’ School, Harborne, for more than twenty years – again a rather different type of socio-economic profile from the majority of those discussed above. The Culture Minister of the day, Ed Vaizey, said of the acquisition: ‘This is a fantastic example of legacy giving and one that I hope will inspire others to do the same. Thanks to the wonderful generosity of Marcia Lay, this beautiful painting will be seen and enjoyed by a huge audience for the first time, so helping to ensure that her name – and her gesture – is celebrated for generations to come.’¹²²

Female benefactors’ assistance to the National Gallery beyond paintings

When researching the various ways in which women have acted generously towards the National Gallery over its 200-year history, it quickly became apparent that their benefaction has extended well beyond the donation of paintings – just as it has done in the case of male philanthropists.

Gallery records reveal that female benefaction has extended to encompass other types of works of art that adorn the Gallery’s buildings, including the mosaics on its floors. Between 1928 and 1933, the National Gallery commissioned the Russian-born artist Boris Anrep to lay mosaic pavements in the vestibule of its main hall (the artist’s mosaic floor for the octagonal Blake Room at the Tate Gallery, now Tate Britain, had been completed in 1923). Anrep chose to illustrate among other things ‘The Labours of Life’ and ‘The Pleasures of Life’. After the end of the Second World War, in 1952, the same artist laid a fifth and final pavement depicting his interpretation of ‘The Modern Virtues’, which, as the earlier floors had done, included the likenesses of people he knew in Britain and Russia, and well-known public figures such as Winston Churchill. Among the portraits was that of Maud Russell (1891–1982), the daughter of German Jewish immigrants who had settled in London in the 1880s. An important patron and collector of modern art, she was also portrayed by Henri Matisse, William Nicholson and Cecil Beaton. Marriage to Gilbert Russell, a cousin of the Duke of Bedford, brought her into contact with the leading writers, artists, musicians and politicians of the day, many of whom stayed at Mottisfont Abbey, her country estate in Hampshire. Living through both World Wars, she suffered anti-German sentiment during the Great War and then helped her Jewish relations to escape from Germany in the late 1930s. From 1943 to 1945 she worked on secret propaganda activities at the Admiralty. After her husband died, Maud formed a relationship with Anrep, which largely explains her financing of his final mosaic floor for the National Gallery and why a likeness of her was included in it.¹²³ In terms of similarly significant interventions within the interiors of the Gallery, we must record both Crivelli’s Garden by Paula Rego, a huge mural she produced for the Dining Room of the Sainsbury Wing, and a second, more recent mural commission, Messengers by Bridget Riley (herself a former Gallery trustee), which was installed in the Annenberg Court in 2019. Equally, costs associated with the refurbishment of certain galleries have been underwritten by women benefactors including Julia Rausing, who, together with her husband Hans K. Rausing, supported the splendid recent refurbishment of Room 32 in 2019. Currently, the Gallery has a capital building project underway to create a ‘One Gallery Accommodation Hub’ – a new tower of offices which will accommodate the majority of its staff in one place – which has received financial assistance from a number of women: Debby Brice, Elizabeth Cayzer, Katrin Bellinger Henkel, Catherine Stevenson and Jayne Wrightsman.

Certain women down the years have shown a particular interest in picture frames or their generosity has been used to assist with work by staff in the National Gallery Framing Department. For instance, Isabel Constable, who, as noted, gave her father’s Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, informed the trustees of her desire to pay additionally for a frame for it and that she wished it to be ‘a copy of the frame of “The Cornfield” by J. Constable, RA’.¹²⁴ During the twentieth century, a handful of women have assisted financially towards the purchase or repair of frames, a peak period of activity occurring during Philip Hendy’s directorship from 1946 to 1967. Most notably, Miss Ellen Lucy Barber left a bequest for framing in 1947, which enabled the Gallery to re-frame over seventy pictures between 1947 and 1959. Then, in 1961, Miss Ida M.E. Hitchcock left the Gallery £560, a trust fund which was used specifically to purchase frames. Given that the average cost of a new frame at the time was £116, Hitchcock’s donation helped to improve the appearance of a good number of frames in the collection. A next chapter started during the 1990s. For instance, it was in 1992 that Mrs Jean Muir, CBE helped pay for a frame for David Teniers the younger’s The Four Seasons (NG857). Dr and Mrs Alan Horan have purchased several frames, the first being one in 1994 for Bassano’s Good Samaritan, the second in 2000 for Velázquez’s The Rokeby Venus and a third in 2003 for Cézanne’s The Painter’s Father. More recently, Clare Kirkman and her husband James have supported the work of the Framing Department.

In addition to pictures and frames, women have presented books to the Gallery’s Research Centre, whose bibliographical holdings focus on material that illuminates aspects of the making, meaning and past ownership of paintings in the Gallery’s collection. Its historical core is the pioneering private art history library amassed during the first half of the nineteenth century by Sir Charles Eastlake, which, as noted, the trustees purchased from the widowed Lady Eastlake in 1870. That nucleus has been built on ever since. For instance, in 1949 the Library received a handful of largely antiquarian volumes from Mary Raine Harrop and Edith Katherine Lee Harrop,¹²⁵ and other rare books have been given by Georgina Craufurd and Alison Marsay. Furthermore, Diane Apostolos-Cappadona has made plans to bequeath her collection of books on women artists and women writers on art. Library cataloguing projects have likewise been supported by female friends of the Gallery; in this connection, we may mention both the project to catalogue the rare books, which took place during the mid-2010s thanks to the generosity of Gillian Berg and her late husband Robert, and the retrospective conversion work on the Gallery’s Library catalogue which was enabled through financial assistance from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation in 2017.

In a similar fashion, other Gallery departments have received financial support in recent years from women benefactors. The late Jane Wrightsman supported the publication of the Gallery’s cutting-edge annual scientific publication, The Technical Bulletin, while Beatrice Santo Domingo is currently helping to support the work of the Conservation staff as is Lady Gavron, who is funding a Conservation Fellowship in memory of her husband, Bob, Lord Gavron, a printer, publisher, philanthropist and Labour life peer as well as a former trustee of the National Gallery (served 1994–2001). Two trustees, Hannah Rothschild (former – and first female – Chair of the Board) and Katrin Bellinger Henkel,¹²⁶ are helping too; the latter, for instance, assisting with the costs associated with the conservation of Parmigianino’s Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Jerome (NG33).

In terms of Gallery’s Learning activities, its Young People’s programme is supported by Dr Anita Klesch, via The Klesch Collection, and its access programmes for adults and special needs provision by The Lord Leonard and Lady Estelle Wolfson Foundation. Among the key women donors who have supported novel public programmes at the National Gallery is Dasha Shenkman, OBE, whose name is inextricably linked with the Gallery’s musical performances. She and her brother established the Belle Shenkman Music Programme in 1996 in memory of their mother, a great supporter of the Arts. This was a pioneering initiative given that there was no music played on a regular basis in any UK museum or Gallery when it was launched. The programme evolved into an exciting form where the musicians were given a free hand to choose music inspired by Gallery pictures. As with other female donors, Dasha Shenkman has been generous in more than one way; in her case, she also has given major gifts towards the Gallery’s contemporary exhibitions and displays, for instance supporting those which showcased the still life paintings of Tacita Dean in 2018 and the seascapes of Sean Scully the following year.¹²⁷

Perhaps the department which has received most financial support over the years from women benefactors is the Curatorial Department. Certain curatorial positions are named after sponsors including The James and Sarah Sassoon Curator of Later Italian, Spanish, and French 17th-century Paintings, while Roberta Ahmanson, with her husband Howard, have supported The Ahmanson Fellowship in Art and Religion since 2012 and The Ahmanson Curatorship in Art and Religion since 2014. In terms of in-depth scholarship into the National Gallery’s permanent collection, the Arthur and Holly Magill Foundation has most generously funded the publication of a world-leading series of painting catalogues since 1999, the most recent volume published in 2020 focusing on French nineteenth-century landscape by National Gallery curator Sarah Herring.¹²⁸ The Gallery’s annual series of Research Seminars is made possible through the generosity of Elizabeth Cayzer, who also supports the Study Days associated with the Gallery’s exhibition programme. The research needs of the Gallery’s doctoral students are currently supported by Rosamund Horwood-Smart, QC, via the RIP Charitable Trust, while Diane Apostolos-Cappadona established ‘The Erika Langmuir Fund’ to assist the Gallery’s curators, postgraduate students and invited speakers with costs associated with travel for research or for participating in research events. Furthermore, in 2019, Diane set up both ‘The Stacia Apostolos Fund’, in honour of her mother, which will enable the Gallery to support programmes of events at or organized by the National Gallery relating to women artists and writers, and ‘The Anna Jameson Annual Lecture’,¹²⁹ through which funding stream a lecture will be dedicated each year to a topic likewise concerning women in the arts. Women have also generously assisted with the costs associated with putting on exhibitions with major international loans,¹³⁰ or with costs arising from touring Gallery paintings round the country, as happened in a pioneering way in 2019, when Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self Portrait left its new home in central London to visit a series of unusual and unexpected locations throughout the UK, including a school in Newcastle, a GP’s surgery in Pocklington, Yorkshire, and a women’s prison in Surrey.¹³¹ Likewise, to celebrate its acquisition and to reflect the National Gallery’s commitment to ensuring its collection is shared and enjoyed throughout the UK, the Gallery’s recent purchase of Bernardo Bellotto’s The Fortress of Königstein from the North – another acquisition generously supported by a number of women – accompanied by five other National Gallery paintings featuring castles and fortresses, will be shown in exhibitions and displays in venues around the UK in 2020 and early 2021, a tour supported by Art Fund (NG6668; fig. 20).¹³²

^{Figure 20 Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8. National Gallery, London (NG6668). Bought with the support of the American Friends of the National Gallery, The National Gallery Trust, the Estate of Mrs Madeline Swallow, Art Fund (with a contribution from The Wolfson Foundation), Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, The Deborah Loeb Brice Foundation, Mrs Mollie W. Vickers, The Manny and Brigitta Davidson Charitable Foundation, The Sackler Trust and through private appeal, 2017.}

4. What are the motivations for women’s generosity towards the National Gallery?

Answers are not always easily forthcoming to explain the motivation for female benefaction towards the National Gallery, especially if the women in question left no illuminating records or if records that were once created no longer exist. In general terms, it appears that many women benefactors have been motivated to a large extent by a philanthropic impulse, such that their patronage of the National Gallery can be seen as a facet of their generous action in relation to other spheres. Put another way, benefaction to the National Gallery in virtually every instance turns out to be just one episode within a story of many other acts of charity, whether big or small, whether aimed at individuals or institutions, whether secular or sacred in nature,¹³³ though not infrequently to do with educational establishments and hospitals. Very often too, their donation of one or more paintings to the National Gallery, especially if expressed as a bequest, was the conclusion to an established interest in the arts which might include previous acts of generosity of a more temporary nature such as the loan of paintings to temporary exhibitions. An early case in point is Eva Mackintosh, who, before giving Raphael’s Virgin and Child (NG2069), which now bears her name, to the Gallery in 1906, had lent it to the Royal Academy’s Winter Exhibition in 1902 (a male relative had previously lent it to the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition in 1857).¹³⁴

In specific cases, we learn that the donor was acting on behalf of another. For instance, as noted above, the donations of both Queen Victoria and Mrs Green were intended to fulfil the wishes of their recently deceased spouses. The same thing happened in the case of Joyce Newton Wethered, Lady Amory (1901–1997), a champion golfer, who passed on to the National Gallery two pictures, including Nicolas Lancret’s charming painting of A Lady in a Garden having Coffee with Children (NG6422; fig. 21), both of which her husband, Sir John Heathcoat Amory, had bequeathed to the Gallery, with a life-interest to her.¹³⁵ Indeed quite a number of other works have passed into the ownership of the Gallery after a life interest commitment to a female relative has been fulfilled.¹³⁶

^{Figure 21 Nicolas Lancret, A Lady in a Garden having Coffee with Children, probably 1742. National Gallery, London (NG6422). Bequeathed by Sir John Heathcoat Amory, with life interest to Lady Amory by whom presented, 1973.}

Extant evidence in the National Gallery’s archive reveals that the most commonly stated motivation for gift-giving is commemoration,¹³⁷ an act often associated with a male relative. Within this category, most of the commemorating was done on behalf of husbands.¹³⁸ Other male family members who have been remembered through gift-giving include fathers,¹³⁹ sons¹⁴⁰ and brothers,¹⁴¹ and in one case, an uncle.¹⁴² By way of example, Edith Cragg’s acquisition file records that she had turned down the offer of a large sum from a private individual for her two Chardins in favour of leaving them to the national collection because she was keen for them to act in perpetuity as a public memorial to her father. By comparison, relatively few pictures donated by women have commemorated a female relative – in one case, a mother has been commemorated;¹⁴³ in another, a sister.¹⁴⁴

Here it seems not inappropriate to mention a relatively new element in the mix: pictures given by men in memory of women since had it not been for these women those pictures may never have become part of the collection at Trafalgar Square. We found that a few pictures were given in memory of a wife, including the group of five works given to commemorate Lady Howorth in 1922 by her spouse Sir Henry Howorth,¹⁴⁵ and that The Raising of Tabitha, attributed to the Brunswick Monogrammist (NG4573), was presented by Sir Michael Sadler, through the Art Fund, in memory of Lady Sadler, in 1931.¹⁴⁶ In this connection, it seems fitting to recall Esmée Fairbairn (1887–1944), who played a prominent role in developing the Women's Royal Voluntary Service and the Citizens Advice Bureau before being killed in an air raid towards the end of the Second World War. Her husband, Ian Fairbairn, set up the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation as a memorial to his wife and funding from that source helped towards the purchase of Nicolas Poussin’s The Finding of Moses (NG6519) in 1988. In a related episode, we have on record Sir Claude Phillips giving a Christ Blessing painted by Benedetto Diana (NG2725) in memory of his sister Eugénie in 1910.¹⁴⁷ It was in memory of a mother (and father) that the Gallery received Pieter de Hooch’s A Man with Dead Birds, and other Figures, in a Stable (NG3881) in 1924 from F.N. and O.S. Ashcroft.¹⁴⁸ In the case of Mr Herman Shickman, in 1991, he gave Gerbrand van den Eeckhout’s Rebekah and Eliezer at the Well (NG6535) ‘in gratitude for hospitality shown to his mother, a refugee from Germany by the British people during World War II’.¹⁴⁹ It is worth noting at this point in our survey that one of the Gallery pictures was given in memory of Constance, Lady Battersea – Anthony van Dyck’s Abbé Scaglia Adoring the Virgin and Child (NG4889), which had been a wedding present in 1840 to her parents, Sir Anthony and Lady de Rothschild from her uncle, Sir Moses Montefiore. Constance and her sister Anne York jointly inherited it in 1910 and having been sold from Constance’s estate through Agnew’s to Anthony Gustav de Rothschild in 1937, the latter presented it that same year in her memory and that of Louisa, Lady de Rothschild. In the case of Peter Hecht, he gave Vilhelm Petersen’s Oetzthal (NG6662) in memory of Erika Langmuir (1931–2015), a former Head of Education at the National Gallery.¹⁵⁰ There is still more work to be done in this area of gift giving.¹⁵¹

Figure 22 Francesco Pesellino and Fra Filippo Lippi and workshop, The Pistoia Santa Trinità Altarpiece, 1455–60. The National Gallery (L15: On loan from Her Majesty the Queen; NG727: Bought, 1863; NG3162: Bequeathed by Countess Brownlow, 1917; NG3230: Bought, 1917; NG4428: Presented by the Art Fund in association with and by the generosity of Sir Joseph Duveen, Bt, 1929; NG4868.1-NG4868.4 Presented by Mr and Mrs Felix M. Warburg through the Art Fund, 1937).

On one occasion at least it seems likely that a gift was given because of its intimate connection with other works already in the national collection. The reassembly of the mid fifteenth-century Pistoia Santa Trinità Altarpiece (fig. 22) was made possible through the generosity of no fewer than three female donors featured in this article: through a long loan of Queen Elizabeth II and through the Warburg gift, both mentioned earlier, as well as through a bequest of Countess Brownlow in 1917 (NG3162), the latter which reunited a vital missing piece of the jigsaw – the right-hand angel. A more recent example is the generous and thoughtful gift by Caroline Gibbons in 2016 of an album containing about 200 drawings by Lady Eastlake, a gifted amateur artist, which includes sketches she made of some old master paintings which she saw when travelling abroad with her husband on his annual research trips to hunt down masterpieces for the national collection, and to which he referred in his travel notebooks, preserved in the Gallery’s archive, with comments like ‘see sketch by E[lizabeth].’¹⁵²

Figure 23 Paul Cézanne, The Stove in the Studio, about 1865. National Gallery, London (NG6509). Acquired from the estate of Mrs Helen Chester Beatty under the acceptance-in-lieu procedure, 1992.

Alongside the motivations of familial duty, civic pride and even art historical concerns, financial considerations have been a deciding factor for certain women, especially once property laws in Britain had been reformed through the two Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, which enabled married women to own and control property in their own right, making it easier for them to become more active and visible as consumers and distributers of works of art and other luxury items.¹⁵³ In the case of Emilie Yznaga, information in the Gallery’s board minutes records that the point of her making a lifetime gift rather than a bequest was to avoid the French death duties she feared might arise and which the Gallery would have to pay. In the case of Lyne Stephens, a journalist in The Times in May 1895 surmised that one reason why she changed an earlier will (in 1887 she had stated her wish to leave forty-five pictures to the National Gallery) such that the National Gallery ultimately got just two works was ‘in consequence of Sir William Harcourt’s Budget of last year’, a reference to the Finance Act of 1894 which had introduced state Duty – with a rate of 8 per cent on estates worth over £1,000,000. It has been convincingly argued that the subsequent Finance Act of 1896 which gave some relief from this provision in respect of works of art may have been implemented to avoid any further misfortunes of this kind.¹⁵⁴ Since the establishment of the acceptance-in-lieu procedure, the Gallery has received several paintings formerly owned by women: Paul Cezanne’s The Stove in the Studio (NG6509; fig. 23) was acquired from the estate of Mrs Helen Chester Beatty under this tax-relieving scheme in 1992, and Gainsborough’s Portrait of the Artist with his Wife and Daughter was acquired through the same channel, at the wish of Sybil Cholmondeley, in 1994.

5. What patterns emerge about women’s donations to the National Gallery?

When thinking about the manner in which women benefactors have given paintings to the national collection, a number of patterns emerge. First, to recap key findings from this study discussed in detail above: the Gallery’s records reveal that the majority of women donors were from affluent backgrounds, and that many were motivated to give as an act of commemoration towards a family member, often a male one. In terms of what they collected, it has emerged that art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, especially works by French and British artists, were what they donated most frequently, and in terms of impact on the collection, arguably their contribution has been most powerfully felt in relation to eighteenth-century French painting, an area in which the National Gallery was traditionally never particularly strong.

Our new data also tells us something about the size of their benefaction. Women donors tend to give the National Gallery comparatively small numbers of works, usually one or two pictures. From investigating the rest of their collections, it is also clear that in most cases their gifts to the Gallery do not represent the full extent of the paintings owned by them. There are half a dozen women who gave in bigger quantities, the three most generous giving between fifteen and twenty-five paintings each, and all from a larger collection amassed by a male relative:¹⁵⁵ Louisa and Lucy Cohen gave twenty-six pictures in 1906 as part of the collection of their uncle John Samuel,¹⁵⁶ Queen Victoria donated twenty five works out of a total of over seventy from the Oettingen-Wallerstein collection at the Prince Consort’s wish in 1863,¹⁵⁷ and the sixteen pictures bequeathed by Mrs Joseph H. Green in 1880 were from a yet more substantial collection that had been built up by her husband.¹⁵⁸

Another pattern to emerge from analysing the dates of the gifts is that, in several instances, women made repeat donations or, put another way, they followed up one act of generosity with a second similar action, usually within a relatively short space of time. For instance, the Witts gave works in 1924 and again in 1926; Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle gave paintings over three consecutive years; and Jenny Blaker followed up her donation to the Tate Gallery in 1941 with her bequest to the National Gallery in 1947.

A third point to note is that about half the Gallery’s women donors of old master paintings have acted alone, while the rest have acted with another individual. In the latter grouping, the majority of cases have involved a spouse,¹⁵⁹ although occasionally other family members such as siblings or a parent/child duo are recorded.¹⁶⁰ For instance, correspondence from the executors of Isabel Constable specify that the gift she arranged was to be noted as having come not only from her but also from her siblings, Maria Louisa and Lionel Bicknell Constable.

In a number of cases, paintings¹⁶¹ offered as gifts by women benefactors have been declined by the National Gallery – something which has affected male donors too – a decision that necessarily lessens the potential visibility and therefore impact of the intended gift. In addition to what has been said about the Gallery accepting only part of the large groups of pictures offered by Queen Victoria and Mrs Green, we may add the following examples: the ‘Miss Philips’ who bequeathed Bol’s Lady with a Fan (NG5656) had also intended leaving the nation a painting described as by Cuyp of a ‘Child with the basket of Cherries', but once it had been inspected by Gallery officials, it was turned down.¹⁶² In the case of Anna Simonson (born c.1862), she had been in touch with the Gallery about offering certain paintings from a group she had inherited from her brother; although she had intended bequeathing six works, in the end just one early German painting was accepted.¹⁶³ Looking at the file on ‘Mrs Hodges’, we realize that the Gallery took two works but rejected a third,¹⁶⁴ and looking at the file on Mary Mohl, it emerges that the Gallery accepted a portrait by Greuze but did not accept two other works.¹⁶⁵ An even larger proportion of offered pictures was declined in the cases of Lady Lindsay, Mary Venetia James and May Rowley; in the former case, Lindsay’s executors originally offered nineteen pictures but only twelve were accepted,¹⁶⁶ in James’ case only twelve out of a group of thirty-five pictures were accepted; and in Rowley’s case, only two out of ten were accepted.

A related point which has also affected our sense of the generosity of the woman donors under review – and one that has been touched on earlier – is that very often their generosity towards the National Gallery represented only a part of their overall benefaction to public art institutions, something which is often the result of their having collected more than one type of art object or their wish to support more than one arts organization or to support living artists as well as deceased painters. Just to give a few examples: when Mary Venetia James died without issue in 1948, she gave generously to several individuals and institutions, including a bequest of silver, furniture and objets d’art to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) while her goddaughter, Queen Elizabeth, by then the Queen Mother, received not only her jewellery but also paintings by Titian, Reynolds and Gainsborough. In the case of Edith Cragg, she gave an extensive group of decorative arts to the V&A,¹⁶⁷ Yolande Lyne Stephens bequeathed a beautiful French late nineteenth-century sofa to the V&A,¹⁶⁸ Sybil Cholmondeley gave the V&A a number of garments of haute couture,¹⁶⁹ Mrs Rawlinson gave a Turkish tapestry panel of the1800s to the V&A¹⁷⁰ (as well as a watercolour by Claude Muncaster to Rye Art Gallery)¹⁷¹ and Joan Evans gave her superlative historical gem and jewellery collection, built up as an off-shoot of her academic specialisms, to the V&A through a series of gifts, beginning in 1960.¹⁷² Emilie Yznaga, as a patron of living artists as well as of the old masters, was particularly supportive of Jean Béraud, a contemporary painter of Parisian life and high society portraits during the Belle Époque era. It turns out that she gave one example of his work to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, three to the Musée Carnavalet, Paris in 1934, and one, After the Misdeed, to the Tate Gallery (now on long-term loan to the National Gallery, L688). In the case of the Alexander sisters, having sold off their father’s extensive and important Chinese ceramics at Sotheby’s, a substantial group of his pictures were distributed through the NACF, to museums and galleries throughout Great Britain. Certain regional galleries benefitted including Southampton City Art Gallery which received a small Corot landscape. It is also well known that Isabel Constable was very generous to other London art institutions in addition to the National Gallery: for instance, she gave 95 of her father’s oil paintings and sketches, 297 of his drawings and watercolours and three sketchbooks to the V&A (then known as the South Kensington Museum), and to the Royal Academy she gave Constable’s palette and a cast of his death mask.¹⁷³

6. Why have women's donations sometimes been overlooked in the past?

One fundamental reason why a number of the women donors investigated in this survey are generally not as well-known as they might be is that many of their gifts are in store rather than being on display at the National Gallery, and of those works hanging on the walls over half are in a lower floor gallery rather than being hung in the more prestigious main floor rooms: being out of sight they are also ‘out of mind’. This has much to do with the lack of space at Trafalgar Square, which does not allow the entire collection to be put on display at any one time. However, the decision regarding whether to hang and where to hang pictures also has much to do with the perceived quality of the donations – an assessment of course which applies just as much to pictures donated by men and which also concerns tastes and artistic canons, matters which have been influenced by gender. In terms of women donors whose pictures have regularly been displayed and remain on show today we can underscore the gifts of the Countess of Carlisle and some of Emilie Yznaga’s collection. In other cases, pictures that were once rated quite highly, have suffered some reversals in fortune, now considered at best ‘probably by’, ‘after’, from the ‘workshop of’, or by an ‘imitator of’ some more highly rated master. Lady Linday’s bequest of 1912 is a case in point with the Two caprices of Ancient Ruins now given to a nineteenth-century ‘Imitator of Francesco Guardi’ (NG2904 and NG2905); the Virgin and Child with a Pomegranate now no longer considered to be by Botticelli but rather by his workshop (NG2906); and the copy of Tintoretto’s The Miracle of Saint Mark (NG2900) even suggested by Nicholas Penny to be a nineteenth-century copy by the donor herself (she was an amateur artist). Other instances of ‘downgrading’ among the many we might cite include The Seaport given by Isabel Tarratt as by Claude-Joseph Vernet but which is now catalogued as by the little-known painter Charles-François de Lacroix (NG1393);¹⁷⁴ a Mountainous Landscape with Figures accepted in a bequest from Mrs F.L. Ricketts as by Salvator Rosa, but now catalogued as by a late seventeenth-century imitator (NG1206); and Saint Jerome in a Landscape bequeathed by Mrs Oppenheimer as a Joachim Patinir but which is now catalogued as a workshop piece (NG4826).

A second reason is that in certain instances, paintings gifted by women to Trafalgar Square are no longer there, having been transferred to another institution (here again we can trace the same fate in relation to certain gifts by male donors but because of the types of works collected and/or given by women, this fate has befallen female gifts comparatively more frequently). Into this category fall the significant number of British School paintings now in the collection of Tate, not least Isobel Constable’s gift which is now divided between the National Gallery and Tate Britain: while the National Gallery retains Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Tate has the other four Constables that she gifted to the National Gallery: Flatford Mill (N01273), The Glebe Farm (N01274), Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow (N01275) and Harwich Lighthouse (N01276). Again, within the 1966 bequest of May Rowley, a pencil drawing by Sir Thomas Lawrence depicting Angerstein family’s Russian nursemaid was alone transferred to Tate Britain (T00768), a decision that led to a loss of connection between it and Rowley’s other accepted gift of Lawrence’s oil painting of John Julius Angerstein (NG6370) which remains at Trafalgar Square.¹⁷⁵ A similarly disruptive split has taken place in relation to two portraits donated by Lady Fitzgerald (d. 1947), one of her mother and the other of her sister. According to extant correspondence in the relevant acquisition files, it seems that, on offering both works to the National Gallery, she was persuaded that both pictures might go to the Tate to form part of a representative gallery of British Art, and although both works entered the Tate at Millbank after the war, the portrait of her sister by Ricard was transferred to Trafalgar Square in 1956.¹⁷⁶ Such stories can be multiplied many times over due to the way that the British and ‘modern foreign’ schools historically have been divided between the National Gallery and Tate. Thus, one picture – an Alphonse Legros of 1777 – from the Countess of Carlisle’s seven gifts has been separated from the rest and is now in Tate’s collection. Likewise, Emily Commeline’s bequest of 1960 was split up; while a male portrait by the eighteenth-century Italian painter Pompeo Batoni (NG6308) was retained at Trafalgar Square, a female portrait by the eighteenth-century British painter Thomas Hudson was transferred to Millbank in 1971. Similarly, the British Museum benefitted when a drawing by Carmontelle of the young Mozart, one of the Lindsay Bequest pictures, was separated from the rest of that bequest and transferred to the British Museum in 1994.

At this point it is only fair to record that, albeit very occasionally, some of the works transferred to other institutions have been lent back to Trafalgar Square, thus reuniting, for a time at least, works of art that had been intended by their donors to remain together once they had entered the public sphere. A case in point is the display history of some pictures by Fantin-Latour, the most celebrated nineteenth-century French painter of flower still lives. Today, the National Gallery has in its permanent collection two examples given by women, one being A Basket of Roses (NG3726), which was bequeathed by Mrs M.J. Yates, in 1923. Another, The Rosy Wealth of June (NG1686), was presented by Ruth Edwards (c.1833–1907), in 1899, who was a very important patron of the painter together with her husband, Edwin Edwards, a landscape painter and wealthy art collector. Indeed, the couple were personal friends of the painter, helping to promote his work in Britain, a fact that helps to contextualise Ruth Edward’s later donation in 1904 of another work by the same artist – a splendid double portrait of the couple¹⁷⁷ – which followed her earliest donation, in 1895, of a Bonvin painting (NG1448). The double portrait was transferred to Tate, but is currently on long loan at Trafalgar Square, as are two still lives which, according to Tate’s website, were bequeathed by Mrs Edwards in 1907. It was that same year that she bequeathed to the National Gallery Corot’s The Marsh at Arleux (NG2135), the first Corot to enter the collection.¹⁷⁸

A third reason why women donors’ names have sometimes been separated from their gifts or that pictures from one donation have got separated from each other is due to the fact that the Gallery has always elected to hang paintings by date and school and not in groups by donor. For instance, Edith Cragg made her 1925 bequest to the Gallery ‘on the condition that the said four pictures are exhibited together and that each picture is to be marked as “The John Webb Bequest”’.¹⁷⁹ However, her request could not be adhered to because it was not in keeping with the arrangements of the rest of the collection. Even when a female donor’s name does appear within the core information provided on the National Gallery’s website, sometimes, confusingly, different versions of it appear in entries for different paintings which makes it harder, if not impossible, to link multiple donations to the same donor name. A related point is that the impact of some of the gift giving tends to be lost if the gifts ranged across different schools of painting, because a donor’s name will be indexed fewer times in any one school catalogue and specialists in that area may inadvertently overlook donations given in other areas of the collection. A case in point is Humphrey Wine’s recent National Gallery French School Catalogue, which contains, as an online appendix, detailed and very useful biographies of donors. Under the section for ‘Mary Venetia James’ we find only ‘Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, The Necromancer (NG5848)’ listed at the top of the article but none of her other nine Italian, British or Dutch pictures now at Trafalgar Square; they are, however, mentioned in the body of the article.

7. What may be done to draw attention to these benefactors?

In the last few years, in line with moves in many disciplines including art history as well as in other spheres, the National Gallery has started to focus increasingly on topics associated with women and the arts. In relation, first, to women old master painters, after the recent acquisition of the self-portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi, a pioneering tour for it was organised (partly sponsored, as we have seen, by a female benefactor) round the UK to a host of unusual locations and an exhibition was mounted in Autumn 2020 at Trafalgar Square (the Gallery’s first monographic show dedicated to a female painter). A second area the Gallery has been investing in is women writers on the old masters. It has enjoyed a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with Birkbeck, University of London on that topic, which resulted, in addition to the research and writing of a doctoral thesis, in two public-facing outputs: a conference on the theme in 2018 and the publication of an associated landmark special issue on ‘Old Masters, Modern Women’ in Birkbeck’s online journal, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century in Spring 2019.¹⁸⁰

Looking ahead, the Gallery will continue to dedicate more space in its research, public programme and website to women collectors and benefactors of the old masters, including the women focused on in this article. As noted, 2020 has seen the launch of two related annual initiatives with a remit to focus public attention on the contribution of women in the arts down the ages: the ‘Women in the Arts Forum’ event and ‘The Anna Jameson Annual Lecture’. The Collection Information team has been working hard to ensure that all the picture labels and credit line information on the Gallery’s website now carry the women donors’ full names in a consistent format – one very positive outcome of the research undertaken for this article.¹⁸¹

As a result of this project, the Gallery has also recognised the need to be more explicit about gender in its internal and externally-facing records; in the future, therefore, the existing gender field in its ‘people’ records will be completed and individual names will also be attached to acquisitions, the names of donors being a starting point to which in the future the names of funders and dedicatees and so on may be added. Furthermore, the Gallery will start drawing up biographies for its donors in order that it is in a position to publish the links and the biographies online as part of its digital dossier offering. Another way of promoting online visibility might be to disseminate more features in the ‘Stories of legacy giving’ series.¹⁸² In order to make manifest the true extent of their generosity, links between different works of art donated by the same women benefactors within the Gallery’s own collection could be made, while further links to their other gifts now scattered in other collections across the globe could be made through a digital mapping exercise.¹⁸³

It would also be exciting to bring hitherto overlooked names into play. A good place to start would be recovering the women behind or at least involved with some of bequests or donations which currently carry the name of a single man; such an exercise would reveal the more complex and collaborative process that often went into the assembly of important collections. To take just one example: the National Gallery received forty-two paintings in 1909 through the Ludwig Mond bequest, a collection which was far from being the result of Mond’s efforts alone; in reality, it was created by five different people, including Mond’s wife Frida and her close friend, the art historian Louise Richter.¹⁸⁴ By digging deeper into the Gallery’s institutional records we would also be enabled to find out more about the women behind trusts, about the women subscribers to appeals, and about women hidden within gifts named as coming from a particular family.¹⁸⁵

A pragmatic identification of tasks and collaborations for the National Gallery to keep momentum going in this nascent area of research is but one important outcome of the empirical data published here. It is also important to stress the intellectual and moral gain already achieved of having undertaken this kind of work. For the institution itself, it is right and proper that we can finally put pictures to people and faces to those names so that women’s contributions to the National Gallery and its collections are correctly recorded internally and duly acknowledged externally. Putting women’s voices back into the narrative of the institution’s history will henceforth affect, we hope in positive ways, how we and others think and talk about the evolution of the National Gallery and its relationship to wider cultural trends of the past and present.

8. Postscript: an overview of women benefactors at the National Gallery from 2020 to 2024

Susanna Avery-Quash

This is a postscript to the earlier article, originally published in the Journal of Art Historiography, no. 20 (December 2020)¹⁸⁶ and reproduced here for the Gallery's bicentenary, which considered women benefactors of the National Gallery, London since the institution’s foundation in 1824 up until 2020. In what follows, the last four years of female benefaction is discussed – gifts of various kinds received from 2020 to 2024 – so that a full picture of 200 years of women donors at the National Gallery may be offered during its bicentenary year.

One of the questions considered in the first article was: Who were the women donors? About many of the individuals who have become Gallery benefactors most recently, we do not know much. This is because most of the gifts the Gallery has received during the period 2020 to 2024 continue to be unexpected gifts in Wills (i.e. they have not been ‘pledged’ in the donor’s lifetime) and so Gallery staff have not had the opportunity to get to know the individuals concerned.¹⁸⁷ Furthermore, many of the Gallery’s most recent donors have left no survivors, which means there is no one to share their stories. That being said, for those people whom the Gallery has got to know or who have left loved ones behind, some fascinating and affecting stories have emerged, a sample of which are included here, with permission from the survivors of those discussed.

In terms of social status, the most recent female donors have not had aristocratic backgrounds. Some of them had professional lives, including Pauline Matthews who enjoyed a distinguished nursing career in Wales,¹⁸⁸ while Martha Bailey spent her working life as a French teacher in Yorkshire and Eileen McAllister was an art teacher who became a special needs teacher. In the case of Jennifer Pinney, she worked for twenty-five years as a senior administrator at the London School of Economics, during which time she was a regular visitor to the National Gallery, its collection proving particularly invaluable when she later studied fifteenth-century Italian art.

With regard to what women donors have given the National Gallery in terms of paintings since 2019/20, Annelie George is unique in having given a painting outright: in 2019 she gave Alvise Vivarini (living 1457; died 1503/5)’s Virgin and Child of about 1483 –5 (NG6682; fig. 24). On her husband’s death, when the painting passed to her, she decided to loan it to the National Gallery, at the same time confirming her intention to bequeath it on her death. Her decision meant that Vivarini’s painting has been enjoyed by visitors to Trafalgar Square since 2013. Interestingly, the work relates to another image by the same painter of the same subject, painted at a similar time, which had been presented to the National Gallery by Charles Loeser in 1898 (NG1872; fig. 25), Consequently, Mrs George’s gift has allowed visitors to study two lyrical examples of a theme which Alvise Vivarini painted many times over, without ever being repetitive. It also added to the Gallery’s renowned collection of Venetian fifteenth-century paintings, which includes works by Giovanni Bellini, the latter whose work influenced the output of Alvise.

Figure 24 Alvise Vivarini, Virgin and Child, about 1483-5. National Gallery, London (NG6682).
Figure 25 Alvise Vivarini, The Virgin and Child, about 1483. National Gallery, London (NG1872).

Worth mentioning in passing at this point is that two paintings have reached the Gallery since 2020 from estates associated with women through the government’s acceptance in lieu of inheritance tax scheme but not because either former owner expressly stated that their paintings should end up at Trafalgar Square. From the estate of Gisela and Evan Stone, in 2021, the Gallery was allocated jointly with the Barber Institute, University of Birmingham, the Portrait of Dr Ferdinand Mainzer of 1899 (NG6691; fig. 26). This acquisition enabled the Gallery to acquire its first work by Lovis Corinth (1858–1925), a key figure of German modernist art.

Figure 26 Lovis Corinth, Portrait of Dr Ferdinand Mainzer, 1899. National Gallery, London (NG6691).

The following year, the Gallery was allocated from the estate of the Rt Hon the Countess of Sutherland a depiction of Christ carrying the Cross, dated to perhaps 1500–5 (NG6693; fig. 27) by Lo Spagna, a contemporary of Perugino and with links to him. In this instance, the acquisition related directly to another work already in the collection by the same artist, Christ at Gethsemane (NG1812; fig. 28), which had been bequeathed over a century before, by Henry Vaughan in 1900. It is likely that both paintings originally formed the wings of a portable altarpiece, depicting episodes from the New Testament concerning the life of Christ (his Passion), perhaps made for Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who became Pope Leo X.

Figure 27 Lo Spagna, Christ carrying the Cross, perhaps 1500-5. National Gallery, London (NG6693).
Figure 28 Lo Spagna, Christ at Gethsemane, perhaps 1500-5. National Gallery, London (NG1812).

In the majority of cases, however, donations from women have taken the form of financial bequests, which the Gallery has gratefully received and regularly utilized to assist with the purchase of particular paintings which it has decided would enhance the national collection.¹⁸⁹ In three recent cases, female donors stated that their money should be used specifically towards picture purchases. Gillian Cleaver left a substantial gift to the Gallery on her death in 2019, under the condition that her funds be put towards acquiring a picture. This has helped to enable the purchase of three paintings, the first of which is Sir Thomas Lawrence’s Portrait of Charles William Lambton in 2021 (NG6692: fig. 29). Although the Gallery already owned a few portraits by Lawrence, the pre-eminent society portraitist of his day, including one of Queen Charlotte and two of John Julius Angerstein (thirty-eight of Angerstein’s paintings were purchased by Lord Liverpool’s government as the nucleus of the National Gallery in 1824), the child portrait is acknowledged as one of Lawrence’s masterpieces. Its enduring public appeal is signalled by the fact that it was first painting ever to be reproduced on a British postage stamp (in 1967).

Figure 29 Sir Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Charles William Lambton (‘The Red Boy’), 1825. National Gallery, London (NG6692).

In the case of Sheila Holmes, she stated that her legacy should be put towards the acquisition of a work by an Impressionist painter, which has enabled the exciting acquisition this year of a painting by the female French Impressionist painter, Eva Gonzalès (see below).

The third female donor who stipulated her bequest should contribute to the purchase of paintings is Martha Bailey, the French teacher from Hutton Rudby, near Stokesley, North Yorkshire, mentioned above. In fact, Martha Bailey has been the Gallery’s most generous benefactor in recent times. Her story has been pieced together largely from her executor John Wilson, with some additional fragments of evidence coming from the Gallery’s own records – she had no children who might have been able to pass on information.¹⁹⁰ Martha Bailey had been introduced to Neil MacGregor during his time as Director of the National Gallery (1987–2002), but otherwise she was not known to the Gallery. When she died aged 92, in 2000, it became known that she had left sixty-five acres of land to be sold with the proceeds going to the National Gallery. One stipulation was that the land could only be sold after planning permission to build houses had been secured, and the other was that her bequest should be used exclusively for picture purchase. In 2002 the Gallery received an initial legacy payment from her estate, which, as noted in the previous article, was used in 2006 to help enable the purchase of Adolph Menzel’s Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens (NG604). The first plot of land was subsequently sold in 2022, enabling the purchase of the Portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt (NG6697; fig. 30), the Gallery’s first painting by the German Modernist painter Max Pechstein (1881–1955) – in fact a first for any UK public collection. The subsequent sale of another plot resulted in the acquisition in 2023 of Abraham Bloemaert’s Lot and his Daughters (NG6701; fig. 31), another first in terms of the artist’s representation within the Gallery’s collection.¹⁹¹ Interestingly, the work, like the Vivarini, had been on long loan to the Gallery, in this instance for the previous four years from a private collection – but not Martha Bailey’s.

Figure 30 Max Pechstein, Portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt, 1910. National Gallery, London (NG6697).

Figure 31 Abraham Bloemaert, Lot and his Daughters, 1624. National Gallery, London (NG6701).

Gifts made possible through Martha Bailey’s bequest have happily continued into the Gallery’s bicentenary. Announced as ‘the first of the Gallery’s Bicentenary year acquisitions’ is Eucharist (NG6700; fig. 32), one of the greatest depictions of the Last Supper, by French seventeenth-century artist Nicolas Poussin (1594–1664), acquired through a hybrid Acceptance in Lieu from the Trustees of the Duke of Rutland’s 2000 Settlement with the support of Martha and Richard Hillman Bailey’s ongoing generous legacy. The picture comes from one of the most important sets of paintings in the history of Western art, the series of the ‘Seven Sacraments' that Poussin painted around 1638‒42 for his major patron, the scholar and collector Cassiano dal Pozzo. Acquiring this work therefore has not only broadened and deepened the Gallery’s representation of the work of Poussin but it also means that one of the pictures from the most beautiful and important series of paintings in the Western canon is now visible at Trafalgar Square.¹⁹²

Figure 32 Nicolas Poussin, Eucharist, about 1637-40. National Gallery, London (NG6700).

A second Gallery bicentenary acquisition made possible in part through Martha Bailey’s bequest is The Full-length Mirror (NG6702; fig. 33), painted by the female painter Eva Gonzalès (1849–1883), an acquisition that helps expand the number of women artists represented. What makes this acquisition a particularly happy one within the history of female benefaction at the National Gallery is the fact that this gift was also enabled through the generosity of two other women legators already mentioned: Gillian Cleaver, whose gift also enabled, as noted, the purchase of Lawrence’s The Red Boy, and Sheila Holmes, whose benefaction helped secure a work by an Impressionist painter.¹⁹³ What is worth noting here is that the Gallery's most recent acquisition at the time of writing (September 2024), Lawrence Alma Tadema's After the Audience, was likewise purchased thanks to the generosity of the same three women whose legacies enabled the acquisition of the Eva Gonzalès. Although Eva Gonzalès was for years rather overlooked as a painter, largely because many of her works were unknown or in private collections, today she is one of the most notable female Impressionists, alongside Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot and Marie Bracquemond. Interestingly, the Gallery already owns a world-famous portrait of Eva Gonzalès, produced by her teacher Edouard Manet (fig. 34)¹⁹⁴ – in fact, it is likely that Gonzalès was painting The Full-length Mirror at the same time that Manet was painting her! While the new acquisition complements Manet’s portrait, it can also be seen to counter and challenge it. Manet’s presentation of Gonzalès as something between serious painter and society beauty would be decisively addressed – and redressed – in this work, which is a calm, self-possessed, visually complex statement of artistic ambition and accomplishment. The work also reveals something about the working practices of women artists at the time. The young woman is Gonzalès’s younger sister Jeanne, her constant model throughout her career, and also an artist in her own right. As opportunities for painting professional models in public spaces could be restricted for women at this period, being able to rely on family members was crucial for such artists as Gonzalès.

Since there is one remaining plot of land to be sold, Martha Bailey’s bequest remains ongoing; it will be interesting to see which other works of art enter the collection through her gift.

Figure 33 Eva Gonzalès, The Full-length Mirror, about 1869-70. National Gallery, London (NG6702).

Figure 34 Edouard Manet, Eva Gonzalès, 1870. National Gallery, London (NG3259).

There have been a few notable exceptions to this pattern of restricted financial gifts pledged for picture acquisition. Two women asked that their financial gifts be put towards other specific areas of Gallery work. The first is Pauline Mary Matthews, who specified that her bequest should go towards the conservation of National Gallery pictures. She had had, as noted, a career as a senior Nursing Officer in Wales. At the same time, she had maintained a great interest in the Gallery and its work to preserve historic paintings, an interest which sprang from a personal connection. Her father, Captain John Sydney Matthews, had been the owner of the slate mine at Manod, near Blaenau Ffestiniog, where the National Gallery’s collection was sent for safe storage during the 1939–45 war. He had welcomed the arrival of the paintings and took a lively interest in the discoveries made by National Gallery staff who were involved with researching the pictures, namely Martin Davies, the Assistant Keeper and future Director of the National Gallery, and Ian Rawlins, the Gallery’s Scientific Advisor, both of whom were accommodated in nearby Pengwern Old Hall, a property owned by Captain Matthews. A teenager at the time, Pauline Matthews occasionally visited the storerooms and conservation studio and learnt more about the pioneering use of X-ray photography from her father, who had heard about it first hand from Rawlins. She gave an interview in 2012 at the request of Suzanne Bosman, a Gallery staff member who had published a book about the National Gallery during the 1939–45 war and whom Miss Matthews had got to know.¹⁹⁵ In the interview, she painted a lively vignette not only of the work undertaken on pictures at Manod but also of the National Gallery characters. Apparently, Martin Davies intrigued the locals by his eccentric attire, which included a strange-looking sou’wester hat suspected of being a cloche-hat bequeathed by an aunt, and plimsolls, which at the time were considered incongruous footwear for a man in his position.¹⁹⁶ Pauline Matthews maintained her interest in the Gallery, and by means of her legacy she was able to commemorate her family’s historic connection with the national collection, specifically in relation to picture conservation.

The second case is that of Mrs Felicity Cynthia June Owen, whose obituary in The Times described her as an ‘unconventional art historian, entrepreneur and fast-food pioneer whose pleasures ranged from hunting to cricket and football.’¹⁹⁷ In addition to being an historian of British art, she ‘became museum correspondent for The Spectator and a regular contributor to Country Life’,¹⁹⁸ and was also a collector and donor to various public art institutions, including the National Gallery. It was through her cousin Sir Francis Beaumont, who gave her access to the family’s collection, that she was able to bring their shared ancestor Sir George Beaumont back into prominence, as the first donor to the National Gallery, who had given a group of important pictures from his own private collection in 1826, including Canaletto’s The Stonemason’s Yard, Rubens’ An Autumn Landscape with a View of Het Steen in the Early Morning and Claude’s Landscape with Hagar and the Angel.¹⁹⁹ She published an important and well received biography of Beaumont in 1988, and that same year – the 160th anniversary of the Beaumont Gift – she co-curated an exhibition at the National Gallery on that topic.²⁰⁰ She had informed the Gallery that her gift would be unrestricted but that she was particularly keen on promoting research opportunities for young curatorial researchers to pursue their study of nineteenth-century art. Through subsequent discussion, it was agreed that her legacy should support more broadly the work of the Gallery’s Research Centre.

In the majority of cases, women have left unrestricted legacies, which have been used to support all kinds of Gallery activity. Interestingly, just over half of the financial legacies which the Gallery has received since 2020 have come from women – 55%. The breakdown is shown in the table below, with further details given in the following footnote.²⁰¹

Bequests:

N.B. Legacies sometimes come in over the course of several years and so are counted more than once, but multiple payments in the same financial year are only counted once.

As was established in the first article, women usually leave legacies to more than one institution. This is the case with the group of donors under discussion here, whose Wills often named the Gallery as one among a number of charitable beneficiaries. Another common factor in these women’s stories is that most of them had already been generous to the Gallery or other public art institutions during their lifetimes. For instance, Felicity Owen during her lifetime had been a regular donor to the British Museum of works on paper created either by her ancestor George Beaumont, for instance donating a drawing by him of a house in Sturmer, Essex, in 1973, or by other eighteenth-century British artists, including three drawings by little-known female artists, which she donated in 1998: a drawing of the ruins of Fountains Abbey by Mrs Mary Hartley (c. 1761–1796), a view of Italy by the amateur etcher and draughtswoman, Charlotte Percy, Countess Ashburnham (1776–1862) and a view of Northcourt at Shorwell, Isle of Wight of 1843 by Julia Mary Gordon.²⁰²

In relation to the National Gallery, often the generosity of female benefactors is first expressed during their lifetimes through the offer of financial assistance to particular public appeals for picture purchase. This was the case with Denise Antenen, who made an in-life gift to the 2008 Titian public appeal and with Pamela Berwyn Davies and Joy Nalpanis, who contributed to the appeal in 2019 which saw the successful purchase of Orazio Gentileschi’s The Finding of Moses. In some cases, the women under review supported the Gallery’s work through joining the National Gallery’s Membership programme. For instance, Valerie May Williams was a former Member, who contributed to the Titian appeal of 2008 and to the subsequent Titian framing appeal of 2014.

In terms of the motivations for women’s generosity towards the National Gallery, despite each case necessarily being unique in its finer points, certain commonalities emerge. One is a sense of gratitude for what the Gallery offers in terms of sharing and illuminating great art with the widest possible publics for free and wishing to help ensure that that offer is maintained. A recent donor (who wished to remain anonymous), while commenting on the many calls on her generosity, noted the following reason as to why she always placed the Gallery ‘very high’ on her list of good causes:

‘Of course it’s impossible to compare with some other causes, such as in emergencies, when people are in trouble. But the National Gallery gives as much to me, if not more, than I give to it. And it’s such a great national asset. I gain a great deal from looking at pictures and I know so many others feel this too. … It’s about preserving it for posterity, for generations to come. It’s about the future, so that everyone can always come and see it, when they want to, just as I have done.’²⁰³

Many of the women were known to have enjoyed memorably happy visits to the Gallery over the course of their lives, often recalling with affection those who had introduced them to the collection, and in turn, made a point of passing on their love of the collection to others. In the case of the same anonymous donor just quoted, she put on record that her love of the National Gallery and its collection was fostered at an early age by a favourite aunt, who wanted her to appreciate the treasure trove that was freely available to her on the north side of Trafalgar Square:

‘She fired me up and became my informal mentor, opening the door to a wide world. … She was a wonderful tutor for me, introducing me to great art when I was so young. … Now if there’s an exhibition I’ve enjoyed, I always tell friends, “do go, do see it, it’s great”. … The National Gallery gives me such a lot, so it’s a privilege to give something back, when I can.’²⁰⁴

Certainly, in the case of Eileen McAllister, her enthusiasm for the National Gallery and its collection rubbed off on her children and grandchildren. As her sons told the Gallery:

‘As a teacher of art and craft, and later of special needs, our mother was a great admirer, and later friend, of the National Gallery for the whole of her life. She welcomed both the academic and practical rigour that went into preserving and restoring the collection and how the Gallery chose to share that knowledge and expertise with the general public. She shared her enthusiasm with her three sons and many grandchildren. When both were small a treat for us all was a trip to the NG shop to buy postcards (3 postcards each for our collections on each visit). We then got to explore the collections, find the paintings, look at them carefully and learn a little about who, how and why they had been painted. They became our paintings which we would visit and revisit as we grew older. Woe betide the time a painting wasn't on display - my mother, with children in tow, would ask to visit the basement to see the painting in storage. In many small ways we owe her our love of art.’²⁰⁵

Another common factor among the most recent female benefactors to the National Gallery, and one that links them to the women reviewed in the article of 2020, is their desire to use their gift to commemorate someone, often a family member. For instance, the Alvise Vivarini painting, discussed above, had been brought to the Gallery’s attention first in 1983 by Annelie George’s late husband, Mr Peter Hayes George, who explained to the then director, Sir Michael Levey, that he wished to bequeath it and that, as part of his intended wishes, he wanted some wording to be attached to signal those who were no longer living but who had made it possible for him to donate the painting.²⁰⁶ Consequently, the credit line on the physical label and on the webpage for the painting commemorates two female relatives and one male relative, as follows: ‘Bequeathed by Peter Hayes George, made possible by his mother Patricia, Lady Cooper, Alice Lady Cooper and Sir William H Cooper BT.’ His wife, Annelie George, of course, as this article has made clear, had played her own part in the family story as a thoughtful custodian of the work, who shepherded it into the public domain, initially as a loan to the National Gallery, and then embedding it, as a gift, into the permanent collection – even if this is something which is not recorded in the credit line.

Another mother was commemorated in Gillian Cleaver’s financial donation in 2021, which enabled the purchase of Lawrence’s Portrait of Charles William Lambton. According to Gillian Cleaver, while she herself was fond of the arts, it was her mother, Ethel Marie Cleaver, who truly cared for the National Gallery and had been an artist herself. In fact, one of Gillian's saddest memories was when her mother found out she was going blind and realised that she would never again see our collection. Her story was touched on by her great nephew in a video produced by the Gallery concerning legacies.²⁰⁷

Certain other women’s gifts commemorated particular male relatives, a pattern that was found to be especially prevalent in the women reviewed in the earlier article. Pauline Matthew’s financial gift towards the work of the Gallery’s Conservation Department was made in memory of her father. Martha Bailey’s generous and ongoing gift to the Gallery which, as noted, has so far helped with the acquisition of five paintings, was made in memory of her husband, Richard Hillman Bailey. According to her executor, she had no children but she had about ten godchildren who were remembered in her Will; however, it was her husband whom she wished publicly to remember through her bequest to the National Gallery. Her executor noted: ‘It’s a love story. She wanted to immortalise him by endowing a painting at the National Gallery.’²⁰⁸

The National Gallery now keeps a Memorial Book, which lists the names of those who have given gifts to the Gallery in their Wills since the institution’s foundation in 1824. There are likely to be a few missing names from the earliest years, but it is the most comprehensive and public listing that the Gallery has. Since at least 2008, the physical book has been on public display (it currently sits in a showcase between Rooms 15 and 17) and since 2019 it has also been digitized so that the book can now be accessed both through on an interactive digital screen beside the original document as well as through the Gallery’s website.²⁰⁹ Appendix II lists the names of women donors included in the National Gallery’s Memorial Book.

9. Appendix I

List of key women donors and their gifts of paintings to The National Gallery, 1824–2024

N.B. The list is compiled alphabetically, and then in order of accession number; credit line information has been supplied from the Gallery’s website, where more information is available about the current location of every painting. An accession number which starts ‘N0’ indicates that the picture is now in Tate’s collection but originally formed part of the National Gallery’s collection. New donors and their gifts will be added on a regular basis.

ROBERTA AHMANSON
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2017
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8 (NG6668)

RACHEL F. ALEXANDER (b. 1875) and JEAN I. ALEXANDER (b. 1877)
Presented by the Misses Rachel F. and Jean I. Alexander; entered the Collection, 1972
Emanuel de Witte, The Interior of the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, during a Sermon, about
1660 (NG6402)
Isack van Ostade, The Interior of a Barn with Two Peasants, about 1645 (NG6404)
Aelbert Cuyp, The Maas at Dordrecht in a Storm, about 1645-50 (NG6405)
Jan van de Cappelle, Vessels Moored off a Jetty, probably 1650-60 (NG6406)
Willem van de Velde, Dutch Vessels lying Inshore in a Calm, one Saluting, 1660 (NG6407)
Philips Koninck, An Extensive Landscape with a Town in the Middle Distance, about 1665–8 (NG6408)
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, The Banquet of Cleopatra, 1740s (NG6409)
Pieter Quast, A Standing Man, probably 1630–5 (NG6410)
Frans Hals, Portrait of Jean de la Chambre at the Age of 33, about 1638 (NG6411)
Frans Pourbus the Elder, Portrait of Dom Andreas Boulengier, about 1580 (NG6412)
Dutch, Portrait of a Man and a Woman, probably 1640s (NG6413)
Frans Hals, Portrait of a Woman (Marie Larp?), about 1635–8 (NG6414)
Corneille de Lyon, Portrait of a Man in a Black Biretta, possibly 1538–61 (NG6415)
Follower of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Seascape with Figures on Cliffs, 1890s (NG6416)

JOYCE NEWTON WETHERED, LADY AMORY (1901–1997)
Bequeathed by Sir John Heathcoat Amory, with life interest to Lady Amory by whom presented, 1973
Nicolas Lancret, A Lady in a Garden having Coffee with Children, probably 1742 (NG6422)
Jan van Goyen, An Estuary with Fishing Boats and Two Frigates, about 1650–6 (NG6423)

EVELYN ANTAL
Presented by Mrs E. Antal in memory of Frederick Antal, 1955
Francesco Solimena, Portrait of a Lady, about 1740 (NG6254)

DIANE APOSTOLOS-CAPPADONA
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2018
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1615–17
(NG6671)

MARTHA DORIS BAILEY
Bought with the assistance of the American Friends of the National Gallery, London, the George Beaumont Group and a number of gifts in wills, including a legacy from Mrs Martha Doris Bailey in memory of her husband Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, 2006
Adolph Menzel, Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens, 1867 (NG6604)²¹⁰

Bought thanks to a generous legacy from Mrs Martha Doris and Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, 2022
Max Pechstein, Portrait of Charlotte Cuhrt, 1910 (NG6697)²¹¹

Bought thanks to a generous legacy from Mrs Martha Doris and Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, 2023
Abraham Bloemaert, Lot and his Daughters, 1624 (NG6701)²¹²

Accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government (under a hybrid arrangement) and allocated to the National Gallery, bought with the support of a generous legacy from Mrs Martha Doris and Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, 2023
Nicolas Poussin, Eucharist, about 1637-40 (NG6700)²¹³

Bought thanks to generous legacies from Mrs Martha Doris and Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, Miss Gillian Cleaver, and Ms Sheila Mary Holmes, with support of the National Gallery Trust, 2024
Eva Gonzalès, The Full-length Mirror, about 1869-70 (NG6702)²¹⁴

Bought thanks to generous legacies from Mrs Martha Doris Bailey and Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, Miss Gillian Cleaver, and Ms Sheila Mary Holmes, with the support of the National Gallery Trust, 2024
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, After the Audience, 1879 (NG6703)

LADY EMMA BARNARD DL
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2018
Artemisia Gentileschi,Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1615–17 (NG6671)

Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2020
Orazio Gentileschi,The Finding of Moses, early 1630s (NG6684)

KATRIN BELLINGER HENKEL (b. 1948)
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2017
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8 (NG6668)

E.A. BENNETT
Presented by Miss E.A. Bennett, 1862
Ferdinand Bol, An Astronomer, 1652 (NG679)

VIVIEN BLACKETT (b. 1955)
Presented by Vivien Blackett, 1987
Vivien Blackett, The Three Hills, 1986–7 (H33)

JENNY LOUISA ROBERTA BLAKER (1869–1947)
Bequeathed by Miss Jenny Louisa Roberta Blaker, 1947
Quinten Massys, An Old Woman (‘The Ugly Duchess’), about 1513 (NG5769)

Presented by Miss Jenny Blaker in memory of Hugh Blaker, 1941
Amedeo Modigliani, The Little Peasant, c.1918 (Tate, N05269)

ALICE MARY BLEECKER
Presented by William Edward Brandt, Henry Augustus Brandt, Walter Augustus Brandt and Alice Mary Bleecker in memory of Rudolph Ernst Brandt, 1962
Salomon van Ruysdael, A View of Deventer seen from the North-West, 1657 (NG6338)

Presented by William Edward Brandt, Henry Augustus Brandt, Walter Augustus Brandt and Alice Mary Bleecker in memory of Rudolph Ernst Brandt, 1963
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Dardagny, Morning, 1853 (NG6339)
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, The Wagon ('Souvenir of Saintry'), 1874 (NG6340)

Presented by Mrs Alice Bleecker, 1981
Jan van Goyen, The Mouth of an Estuary with a Gateway, 1649 (NG6464)
Willem van der Velde, Dutch Ships in a Calm, about 1660 (NG6465)
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, The Oak in the Valley, 1871 (NG6466)
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Souvenir of Palluel, 1871 (NG6467)
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, A Man in Black smoking a Pipe, 1854 (NG6468)

MRS BLENNERHASSETT
Presented by Mrs Richard F. P. Blennerhassett, 1940
Andrea di Bonaiuto da Firenze, The Virgin and Child with Ten Saints, about 1365-70 (NG5115)

Presented by Mrs Richard Blennerhassett 1940 (transferred to Tate)
George Frederic Watts, Eveleen Tennant, later Mrs F.W.H. Myers, exhibited 1880 (N05116)

MRS BOOTH-CLIBBORN 
Bought with the support of a generous legacy from Mr David Leslie Medd OBE and with the support of Mr and Mrs Charles Booth-Clibborn, Sir Michael and Lady Heller, Mr Daniel Katz and other donors, 2015
Laurits Andersen Ring, Road in the Village of Baldersbrønde (Winter Day), 1912 (NG6658)

OLIVE BRAZDZIONIS
Bought, with the generous support of the George Beaumont Group and a number of gifts in wills including a legacy from Mrs Olive Brazdzionis, 2000
Rosso Fiorentino, Portrait of a Young Man holding a Letter, 1518 (NG6584)

MARTHA BROWN
Bequeathed by Miss Martha Brown, 1897
Follower of Joos van Cleve, Anna van Spangen, Wife of Adriaen van der Goes, 1543 (NG1652)

ROSALIND FRANCES, COUNTESS OF CARLISLE (née STANLEY; 1845–1921)
Presented by Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, 1912
Alphonse Legros, Le Repas des Pauvres, 1877 (NG2898; transferred to Tate, N02898)

Presented by Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, 1913
Annibale Carracci, The Dead Christ Mourned (‘The Three Maries’), about 1604 (NG2923)
Peter Paul Rubens, A Shepherd with his Flock in a Woody Landscape, probably 1615–22 (NG2924)
Lucas Cranach the Elder, Charity, mid 1530s–1540s (NG2925)
Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, Queen Mariana of Spain in Mourning, 1666 (NG2926)
Barnaba da Modena, The Coronation of the Virgin; The Trinity; The Virgin and Child with Donors; The Crucifixion; The Twelve Apostles, 1374 (NG2927)
Gabriel Revel, Portrait of an Astronomer, about 1670 (NG2929)

Presented by Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, 1914
Peter Paul Rubens, Portrait of Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel, 1629–30 (NG2968)

Paintings with a provenance connection to this female benefactor
Jan Gossaert, The Adoration of the Kings, 1510–15 (Bought with a special grant and contributions from the Art Fund, Lord Glenconner, Lord Iveagh and Alfred de Rothschild, 1911; NG2790)

Transferred to Tate: Presented by Rosalind, Countess of Carlisle, 1913
Thomas Gainsborough, The Housemaid, c.1782–6 (N02928)

ELIZABETH CARSTAIRS
Bequeathed by Mrs Elizabeth Carstairs, 1952
Jan van Goyen, A River Scene, with a Hut on an Island, 1640–5 (NG6154)
Jan van Goyen, Fishermen hauling a Net, 1640–5 (NG6155)
Francesco Guardi, Venice: The Punta della Dogana, 1780s (NG6156)
Francesco Guardi, Venice: The Giudecca with the Zitelle, 1780s (NG6157)
Imitator of Gonzales Coques, Portrait of a Woman, about 1650 (NG6160)
Follower of Marten de Vos, A Little Girl with a Basket of Cherries, probably 1575–80 (NG6161)
John Hamilton Mortimer, George Thompson, his Wife and (?) his Sister-in-Law, c.1766–8 (Tate, N06158)
After Joshua Reynolds, Lady Sarah Bunbury or Lady Beauchamp (Tate, N06159)

SUSANNAH CAUGHT
Bequeathed by Miss Susannah Caught, 1901
Andries Vermeulen, A Scene on the Ice, about 1800 (NG1850)
Abraham van Calraet, The Interior of a Stable, about 1690 (NG1851)

HELEN CHESTER BEATTY
Acquired from the estate of Mrs Helen Chester Beatty under the acceptance-inlieu procedure, 1992
Paul Cézanne, The Stove in the Studio, about 1865 (NG6509)

ALSO: Acquired from the Chester Beatty family under the acceptance-in-lieu procedure, 1990
Paul Cézanne, Avenue at Chantilly, 1888 (NG6525)

LADY ADELAIDE CHETWYND-TALBOT, COUNTESS BROWNLOW (1844–1917)
Bequeathed by Countess Brownlow, 1917
Francesco Pesellino and Fra Filippo Lippi and workshop, Angel (right hand) from The Pistoia Santa Trinità Altarpiece, 1455–60 (NG1362)

SYBIL, MARCHIONESS OF CHOLMONDELEY (1894–1989)
Acquired under the acceptance-in-lieu scheme at the wish of Sybil, Marchioness of Cholmondeley, in memory of her brother, Sir Philip Sassoon, 1994
Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of the Artist with his Wife and Daughter, about 1748 (NG6547)

VIOLET CHURCHMAN
Presented by Miss V. Churchman in memory of her sister I.N. Churchman, 1988
Jan van Os, Fruit and Flowers in a Terracotta Vase, 1777–8 (NG6520)

MRS NORMAN CLARK NEILL
Presented by Mrs N. Clark Neill in memory of her husband, 1936
The Le Nain Brothers, Three Men and a Boy, about 1647–8 (NG4857)

MISS JANE CLARKE (c.1794–1858) Bequeathed by Miss J. Clarke, 1859
Josephus Laurentius Dyckmans, The Blind Beggar, 1853 (NG600)

MISS GILLIAN CLEAVER (died 2019)
Bought with the support of the American Friends of the National Gallery, the Estate of Miss Gillian Cleaver, Art Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation), The Al Thani Collection Foundation, The Manny and Brigitta Davidson Charitable Foundation, Mr William Sharpe, and The Society of Dilettanti Charitable Trust, 2021
Sir Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Charles William Lambton (‘The Red Boy’), 1825 (NG6692)²¹⁵

Bought thanks to generous legacies from Mrs Martha Doris and Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, Miss Gillian Cleaver, and Ms Sheila Mary Holmes, with support of the National Gallery Trust, 2024
Eva Gonzalès, The Full-length Mirror, about 1869-70 (NG6702)

Bought thanks to generous legacies from Mrs Martha Doris Bailey and Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, Miss Gillian Cleaver, and Ms Sheila Mary Holmes, with the support of the National Gallery Trust, 2024
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, After the Audience, 1879 (NG6703)

ANNA LOUISA (1835–1902) and LUCY COHEN (1839–1906)
Bequeathed by the Misses Cohen as part of the John Samuel collection, 1906
Follower of Sandro Botticelli, A Lady in Profile, about 1490 (NG2082)
Lorenzo Costa, Portrait (supposed to be of Battista Fiera), about 1490–5 (NG2083)
Italian, Portrait of a Young Man, 19th century (NG2084)
Follower of Bronzino, Portrait of a Lady, probably 1575–85 (NG2085)
Giuseppe Zais, Landscape with a Ruined Tower, probably 1760–80 (NG2086)
Francesco Zuccarelli, Landscape with Cattle and Figures, about 1750–70 (NG2087)
After Bernardino Luini, Christ, probably after 1530 (NG2088)
Italian, Milanese, The Virgin and Child, perhaps about 1500-25 (NG2089)
Moretto da Brescia, An Adoring Angel (Shutters from a Triptych), about 1540 (NG2090)
Moretto da Brescia, An Adoring Angel (Shutters from a Triptych), about 1540 (NG2091)
Moretto da Brescia, Saint Joseph (Shutters from a Triptych), about 1540 (NG2092)
Moretto da Brescia, Saint Jerome (Shutters from a Triptych), about 1540 (NG2093)
Giovanni Battista Moroni, Portrait of a Left-Handed Gentleman with Two Quartos and a Letter ('Il Gentile Cavaliere'), about 1564–5 (NG2094)
Italian, Venetian, A Man in Black, about 1500 (NG2095)
Callisto Piazza, Portrait of a Man, about 1528 (NG2096)
After Paris Bordone, Portrait of a Young Woman, probably 17th century (NG2097)
Francesco Guardi, Venice: The Punta della Dogana with S. Maria della Salute (Two Views of Venice), about 1770 (NG2098)
Francesco Guardi, Venice: The Doge's Palace and the Molo from the Basin of San Marco (Two Views of Venice), about 1770 (NG2099)
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Marriage of Frederick Barbarossa and Beatrice of Burgundy, about 1752–3 (NG2100)
Sebastiano Ricci, Esther before Ahasuerus, probably 1730–4 (NG2101)
Michele Marieschi, Buildings and Figures near a River with Shipping (Two Fanciful Scenes), 1735–43 (NG2102)
Michele Marieschi, Buildings and Figures near a River with Rapids (Two Fanciful Scenes), 1735–43 (NG2103)
Flemish, Portrait of a Man, 1630–70 (NG2104)
Italian, Bust of a Bearded Man, 17th Century (NG2105)
Italian, Emilian, Portrait of a Painter, about 1650 (NG2106)
After Salvator Rosa, An Angel appears to Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert, 17th Century (NG2107)

NONA ANN, LADY COLMAN
Bequeathed by Lady Colman, 1985
Netherlandish, Portrait of a Girl with a Parrot, about 1640 (NG6498)

MRS MARTIN H. COLNAGHI
Presented by Mrs Martin H. Colnaghi, 1908
John Callcott Horsley, Portrait of Martin Colnaghi, 1889 (NG2286)

MRS COMMELINE
Bequeathed by Mrs E.M.E. Commeline in memory of her husband Col. C.E. Commeline, RE, 1960
Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, Portrait of John Scott (?) of Banks Fee, 1774 (NG6308)

Bequeathed by Mrs E.M.E. Commeline to the National Gallery 1960 (transferred to the Tate Gallery, 1971)
Thomas Hudson, Mrs Sarah Ingram, c.1750–5 (T00401)

EMILY CONINGHAM
Bequeathed by Geraldine Emily Coningham in memory of her husband, Major Henry Coningham, and of Mrs Coningham of Brighton, 1942
Giotto and Workshop, Pentecost, probably about 1310–18 (NG5360)

ISABEL CONSTABLE (1823–1888)
Bequeathed by Miss Isabel Constable as the gift of Maria Louisa, Isabel and Lionel Bicknell Constable, 1888
John Constable, Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, erected in the grounds of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire by the late Sir George Beaumont, Bt., 1833–36 (NG1272)
John Constable, Flatford Mill (Tate, N01273)
John Constable, The Glebe Farm (Tate, N01274)
John Constable, Hampstead Heath with a Rainbow (Tate, N01275)
John Constable, Harwich Lighthouse (Tate, N01276)

EDITH CRAGG (d. 1925)
Bequeathed by Mrs Edith Cragg, as part of the John Webb Bequest, 1925
Jean-Baptiste Pater, Fête Galante, probably about 1721–25 (NG4079)
Jean-Siméon Chardin, The Young Schoolmistress, about 1737 (NG4077)
Jean-Siméon Chardin, The House of Cards, (Portrait of Jean-Alexandre Le Noir), about
1740–41 (NG4078)
Studio of François Boucher, The Billet-Doux, 1754 (NG4080)

CORNELIA (née MARTIN), COUNTESS OF CRAVEN (1877–1961)
Bequeathed by Cornelia, Countess of Craven, 1965
Gerrit van Honthorst, Elizabeth Stuart, Queen of Bohemia, 1642 (NG6362)
Studio of Anthony van Dyck, Prince Rupert, Count Palatine, about 1637 (NG6363)
Studio of Anthony van Dyck, Prince Charles Louis, Count Palatine, about 1637 (NG6364)

FELICIA CRYSTAL
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2018
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1615–17 (NG6671)

ESME CUMING BUTLER
Bequeathed by Miss I.E.H. Cuming Butler, 1972
Salomon van Ruysdael, River Scene, 1632 (NG6419)

MISSES CUMMING
Presented by the Misses Cumming in memory of their father, Charles D. Cumming, 1930
Master of the Palazzo Venezia Madonna, Saint Mary Magdalene, about 1350 (?) (NG4491)
Master of the Palazzo Venezia Madonna, Saint Peter, about 1350 (?) (NG4492)

BRIGITTA DAVIDSON (The Manny and Brigitta Davidson Charitable Foundation)
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2017
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8 (NG6668)

Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2020
Orazio Gentileschi, The Finding of Moses, early 1630s (NG6684)

Bought with the support of the American Friends of the National Gallery, the Estate of Miss Gillian Cleaver, Art Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation), The Al Thani Collection Foundation, The Manny and Brigitta Davidson Charitable Foundation, Mr William Sharpe, and The Society of Dilettanti Charitable Trust, 2021
Sir Thomas Lawrence, Portrait of Charles William Lambton (‘The Red Boy’), 1825 (NG6692)

THE HON. MRS ASHLEY DAWSON-DAMER AM
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2018
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1615–17 (NG6671)

MRS R.M. DUNLOP
Presented by Mrs R.M. Dunlop to the Tate Gallery, 1927; transferred, 1956
Jacob Maris, A Beach, probably late 1870s or 1880s (NG4262)
Eugène Carrière, Winding Wool, 1887 (Tate N04261)

ELIZA EASTLAKE
Presented by Mrs C.L. Eastlake in memory of her husband, Keeper of the National Gallery, 1907
German, Edzard the Great, Count of East Friesland, 18th century (NG2209)

Bequeathed by Mrs Charles Locke Eastlake, 1911
Pieter Quast, A Man and a Women in a Stableyard, probably 1630s (NG2856)

ELIZABETH, LADY EASTLAKE (1809–1893)
Presented by Lady Eastlake in memory of Sir Charles Eastlake, 1867
Pisanello, The Virgin and Child with Saints Anthony Abbot and George, about 1435–41 (NG776)

Presented by Lady Eastlake, 1870
Giovanni Bellini, The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr, about 1505–7 (NG812)

Former owner of paintings now in the National Gallery’s collection
Fra Filippo Lippi, The Annunciation, about 1450-3 (NG666)
Domenico Veneziano, Head of a Tonsured, Beardless Saint, about 1440–4 (NG766)
Domenico Veneziano, Head of a Tonsured, Bearded Saint, about 1440–4 (NG767)
Antonio Vivarini; Giovanni d'Alemagna, Saints Peter and Jerome, about 1440-6 (NG768)
Piero della Francesca, Saint Michael, completed 1469 (NG769)
Giovanni da Oriolo, Leonello d'Este, probably about 1447 (NG770)
Bono da Ferrara, Saint Jerome in a Landscape, about 1440 (NG771)
Cosimo Tura, The Virgin and Child Enthroned, mid-1470s (NG772)
Cosimo Tura, Saint Jerome, probably about 1470 (NG773)
Workshop of Dirk Bouts, The Virgin and Child with Saint Peter and Saint Paul, probably 1460s (NG774)
Rembrandt, Portrait of Aechje Claesdr., 1634 (NG775)
Rogier van der Weyden and workshop, The Exhumation of Saint Hubert, late 1430s (NG783)
Gerard ter Borch, Portrait of a Young Man, about 1663 (NG1399)
Rembrandt, Ecce Homo, 1634 (NG1400)
Ambrogio Bergognone, The Virgin and Child, about 1488-90 (NG1410)
Ercole de' Roberti, The Este Diptych, about 1490 (NG1411.1–2)
Filippino Lippi, The Virgin and Child with Saint John, about 1480 (NG1412)
Gentile Bellini, The Virgin and Child Enthroned, about 1475-85 (NG3911)
Giovanni Bellini, The Virgin and Child, probably 1480-1500 (NG3913)
Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio, Portrait of a Man in Profile, probably about 1500 (NG3916)
Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Virgin and Child, probably about 1480-90 (NG3937)
Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano, Saint Mark (?), about 1500 (NG4945)
Giovanni Battista Cima da Conegliano, Saint Sebastian, about 1500 (NG4946)

RUTH EDWARDS (c.1833–1907)
Presented by Mrs Edwin Edwards, 1895
François Bonvin, The Meadow, 1869 (NG1448)

Presented by Mrs Edwin Edwards, 1899
Ignace-Henri-Théodore Fantin-Latour, The Rosy Wealth of June, 1886 (NG1686)

Bequeathed by Mrs Edwin Edwards, 1907
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, The Marsh at Arleux, 1871 (NG2135)

On loan from Tate: Presented by Mrs E. Edwards, 1904
Ignace-Henri-Théodore Fantin-Latour, Mr and Mrs Edwin Edwards, 1875 (NG1952, currently L702)

On loan from Tate: Bequeathed by Mrs Edwin Edwards, 1907
Ignace-Henri-Théodore Fantin-Latour, Roses, 1864 (N02133, currently L703)
Ignace-Henri-Théodore Fantin-Latour, A Plate of Apples, 1861 (N02134, currently L704)

JOAN EVANS (1893–1977)
Bequeathed by Dame Joan Evans, 1979
Italian, Saint John the Baptist, probably 1640–60 (NG6455)

ESMÉE FAIRBAIRN (1887–1944)
Bought jointly by the National Gallery and Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales with contributions from: J. Paul Getty Jnr (through the American Friends of the National Gallery, London), the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, Mrs Schreiber, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Moorgate Trusts, Sir Denis Mahon and anonymous donors, 1988
Nicolas Poussin, The Finding of Moses, 1651 (NG6519)

LADY AMELIA CATHERINE FITZGERALD (née BISCHOFFSHEIM) (d. 1947)
Presented by the sitter's sister, Lady Fitzgerald, to the Tate Gallery, 1944; transferred, 1956
Louis-Gustave Ricard, The Countess of Desart as a Child, probably 1870–1 (NG5573)

Presented by Lady Fitzgerald 1944
Sir John Everett Millais, Mrs Bischoffsheim, 1873 (N05572)

LUCIANA FORTI
Presented in memory of Beniamino Forti by his daughter Luciana, 2008
Telemaco Signorini, Sketch for Straw Weavers at Settignano, about 1880 (NG6610)

KATHARINE (née MABERLY) FOX
Presented by Katharine Fox, the widow of General Charles Richard Fox, son of the 3rd Lord Holland, 1874
Studio of Hyacinthe Rigaud, Cardinal Fleury, perhaps 1734 or 1735 (NG903)

LADY GETTY
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2018
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1615–17 (NG6671)

MRS ANNELIE GEORGE
Presented by Mrs Annelie George from the estate of Peter Hayes George, made possible by his mother Patricia Lady Cooper, Alice Lady Cooper and Sir William H Cooper Bt, 2019
Alvise Vivarini, Virgin and Child, about 1483-5 (NG6682)²¹⁶

MRS GIFFORD-SCOTT
Presented by Mrs Gifford-Scott, 1980
Jan Weenix, An Italian Courtyard, probably 1660–5 (NG6462)

JUDITH GOODISON
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2017
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8 (NG6668)

JULIA EMILY GORDON (1810–1896)
Bequeathed by Miss Julia Emily Gordon, 1896
Netherlandish, A Woman with Prayer Beads, 1540s (NG1860)
French, Prince Charles Edward Stuart (The Young Pretender), after 1748 (NG1882)

Bequeathed by Miss Julia Emily Gordon, 1896, transferred to Tate
David Cox, Beckenham Church, Kent, c.1842, watercolour on paper (Tate, N01736)
David Wilkie, Miss Julia Emily Gordon, 1833, graphite and watercolour on paper (Tate N01740)
British School, 6 Portrait Miniatures, 18th century (A00051–A00056)
David Wilkie, After Rembrandt, ink and watercolour on paper (Tate, A01020)
David Wilkie, Archers, graphite and watercolour on paper (Tate, A01021)
David Wilkie, Head and Shoulders of a Woman and Another Head, ink and watercolour on paper (Tate, A01022)
David Wilkie, Head and Shoulders of a Woman, watercolour on paper (Tate, A01023)
David Wilkie, Head and Shoulders of a Woman, 1833, ink and watercolour on paper (Tate, A01025) William Frederick Witherington, The Broken Pitcher, about 1814, oil paint on board (Tate, A01026)
William Frederick Witherington, Going to School, about 1817, oil paint on board (Tate, A01027)
William Frederick Witherington, The Gleaners, oil paint on board (Tate, A01028)
Thomas Lawrence, Mrs Siddons, 1786, pastel on paper (Tate, N02222)
John Downman, Lady Clarges, 1790s, watercolour on paper (Tate, N02233)

ANN ELIZA (née HAMMOND) GREEN (d. 1879)
Bequeathed by Mrs Joseph H. Green, 1880
Gerard David, Lamentation (Two Panels from an altarpiece), 1515-23 (NG1078)
Gerard David, Adoration of the Kings (Two Panels from an altarpiece), about 1515 (NG1079)
Attributed to Jan Mostaert, The Head of Saint John the Baptist, with Mourning Angels, probably 1520s (NG1080)
Workshop of Quinten Massys, A Donor, about 1520 (NG1081)
Workshop of Goossen van der Weyden, The Visitation of the Virgin to Saint Elizabeth, about 1516 (NG1082)
Bouts, Christ crowned with Thorns (Two Panels from an altarpiece), 1515–23 (NG1083)
Workshop of Goossen van der Weyden, The Flight into Egypt (Two Panels from an Altarpiece), about 1516 (NG1084)
Follower of Quinten Massys, The Virgin and Child with Saints and Angels in a Garden, about 1510–20 (NG1085)
Follower of Rogier van der Weyden, Christ appearing to the Virgin, late 15th century (NG1086)
Master of the Bruges Passion Scenes, Christ presented to the People, about 1510 (NG1087)
Workshop of Pieter Coecke van Aalst, The Crucifixion: Central Panel; Donor: Left Hand
Shutter; Donatrix: Right Hand Shutter; The Archangel Gabriel: Reverse of Left Hand Shutter; The Virgin Annunciate: Reverse of Right and Shutter (all 5 parts from The Crucifixion Triptych), probably 1527–30 (NG1088.1–5)
Workshop of Albert Cornelis, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, possibly about 1520 (NG1089)

MAUD M. GREENWAY (b. c.1866)
Presented according to the wish of Mrs Maud M. Greenway, 1963
Jen Juel, Joseph Greenway, 1788 (NG6341)

MRS GUTEKUNST
Presented by Mrs Gutekunst in memory of her husband Otto Gutekunst, 1947
Vincenzo Catena, Portrait of the Doge, Andrea Gritti, 1523–31 (NG5751)
Probably by Giovanni Ambrogio de Predis, Portrait of a Woman in Profile, probably about 1495–9 (NG5752)

MAGGI HAMBLING (b. 1945)
Presented by Maggi Hambling, 1981
Maggi Hambling, Portrait of Archie MacDonald, 1980–1 (H11)

MRS HARTLAND
Presented by the Widow of Ernest Hartland, 1932
Follower of Sodoma, The Nativity with the Infant Baptist and Shepherds, probably about 1540–60 (NG4647)

ISABEL MARY HAWKINS TURNER
Bequeathed by Miss Isabel Mary Hawkins Turner, 1982
Willem Koekkoek, View of Oudewater, about 1867 (NG6472)

LADY HELLER
Bought with the support of a generous legacy from Mr David Leslie Medd OBE
and with the support of Mr and Mrs Charles Booth-Clibborn, Sir Michael and Lady Heller, Mr Daniel Katz and other donors, 2015
Laurits Andersen Ring, Road in the Village of Baldersbrønde (Winter Day), 1912 (NG6658)

Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2017
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8 (NG6668)

DRUE HEINZ (1915–2018)
A gift from the Drue Heinz Charitable Trust, 2018
Lucas Cranach the Elder, Venus and Cupid, 1529 (NG6680)

MRS JOHN P. HESELTINE
Presented by Mrs John P. Heseltine in memory of her husband, 1929
Jean-Etienne Liotard, Portrait of a Grand Vizir, or of a European dressed as one, about 1741 (NG4460)

MS HIRSCHL
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2018
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1615–17 (NG6671)

MONEER HOBART
Presented by Mr and Mrs Tim Hobart, 2012
Sir Charles Eastlake, copy after Titian, Martyrdom of Saint Peter Martyr, 1830 (H201)

MRS SARAH FRANCES HODGES (d. 1852)
Bequeathed by Mrs S.F. Hodges, 1852
Jan van Goyen, A River Landscape, 1645 (NG151)
Heinrich Wilhelm, Schweickhardt, Cattle, 1794 (NG1878)

MRS ELIOT HODGKIN
Presented by Mr and Mrs Eliot Hodgkin through the Art Fund, 1987
Jean-François de Troy, The Capture of the Golden Fleece, 1742–3 (NG6512)

ELLEN JULIA HOLLOND (1822–1884)
Presented by Mrs Robert Hollond, 1880
François Boucher, Pan and Syrinx, 1759 (NG1090)

Bequeathed by Robert Hollond, with a life-interest to his widow; entered the Collection, 1885
Ary Scheffer, Mrs Robert Hollond, 1851 (NG1169)
Ary Scheffer, Saints Augustine and Monica, 1854 (NG1170)

MS SHEILA MARY HOLMES
Bought thanks to generous legacies from Mrs Martha Doris and Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, Miss Gillian Cleaver, and Ms Sheila Mary Holmes, with support of the National Gallery Trust, 2024
Eva Gonzalès, The Full-length Mirror, about 1869-70 (NG6702)

Bought thanks to generous legacies from Mrs Martha Doris Bailey and Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, Miss Gillian Cleaver, and Ms Sheila Mary Holmes, with the support of the National Gallery Trust, 2024
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, After the Audience, 1879 (NG6703)

H.S. HOPE
Bequeathed by Miss H.S. Hope, 1920
George Stubbs, A Gentleman driving a Lady in a Phaeton, 1787 (NG3529)

LADY HORNBY
Presented by Sir Anthony and Lady Hornby, 1961
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, A Bather, probably 1885-90 (NG6319)

MARY VENETIA JAMES (d. 1948)
Bequeathed by Mrs M.V. James from the Arthur James collection, 1948
Pietro Longhi, A Lady receiving a Cavalier, 1745–55 (NG5841)
Salomon van Ruysdael, A River with Fishermen drawing a Net, 1630–5 (NG5846)
Gerard ter Borch, An Officer dictating a Letter, about 1655–8 (NG5847)
Jean-Baptiste Le Prince, The Necromancer, probably 1775 (NG5848)
David Teniers the Younger, Peasants at Archery, about 1645 (NG5851)
Pietro Longhi, A Nobleman kissing a Lady’s Hand, about 1746 (NG5852)

Bequeathed by Mrs Mary James Mathews to the Tate Gallery in memory of her husband, Frank Claughton Mathews, 1944; transferred, 1956
Richard Wilson, Hounslow Heath (Tate, N05842)
Manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds, A Young Black Man (?Francis Barber) (Tate, N05843)
Thomas Gainsborough, Pomeranian Bitch and Puppy, about 1777 (Tate, N05844)
Thomas Gainsborough, Landscape with Gipsies, about 1753–4 (Tate, N05845)
George Morland, Outside an Inn, Winter, about 1795 (Tate, N05849)
George Romney, Tom Hayley as Robin Goodfellow, 1789–92 (Tate, N05850)

MRS JANE JEWER HENRY JEWER (d. 1873)
Bequeathed by Mrs Jewer Henry Jewer, 1873
Joris van der Haagen, A River Landscape, probably about 1650-60 (NG901)

GRY KATZ
Presented by Danny and Gry Katz, 2010
Peder Balke, The Tempest, about 1862 (NG6614)

LADY KESWICK
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2020
Orazio Gentileschi, The Finding of Moses, early 1630s (NG6684)

CLARE KIRKMAN
Bought jointly by the National Gallery and National Galleries of Scotland with contributions from the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund, Art Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation), The Monument Trust, J Paul Getty Jnr Charitable Trust, Mr and Mrs James Kirkman, Sarah and David Kowitz, Chris Rokos, The Rothschild Foundation, Sir Siegmund Warburg's Voluntary Settlement, and through private appeal and bequests, 2012
Titian, Diana and Callisto, 1556-9 (NG6616)

MRS D.E. KNOLLYS
Presented by Mrs D.E. Knollys, 1934
Catharina van Hemessen, Portrait of a Woman, 1551 (NG4732)

BETTY KOETSER
Presented by Betty and David Koetser, 1966
Titian, An Allegory of Prudence, about 1550 (NG6376)

SARAH KOWITZ
Bought jointly by the National Gallery and National Galleries of Scotland with contributions from the National Lottery through the Heritage Lottery Fund, Art Fund (with a contribution from the Wolfson Foundation), The Monument Trust, J Paul Getty Jnr Charitable Trust, Mr and Mrs James Kirkman, Sarah and David Kowitz, Chris Rokos, The Rothschild Foundation, Sir Siegmund Warburg's Voluntary Settlement, and through private appeal and bequests, 2012
Titian, Diana and Callisto, 1556-9 (NG6616)

MARY KUUSISTO
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2018
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1615–17 (NG6671)

MRS ALEXANDER LANG ELDER
Bequeathed by Mrs Alexander Lang Elder, 1899
Gregorio Preti, Christ disputing with the Doctors, 1660s (NG1676)

MARCIA LAY
Bought with the support of a generous legacy from Miss Marcia Lay, 2014
David Wilkie, A Young Woman kneeling at a Prayer Desk, 1813 (NG6650)

ENID, LADY LAYARD
Presented by Lady Layard, 1900
Probably by Bartolomeo Montagna, The Virgin and Child, fresco, probably 1481 (NG1696)

HELENA LEVY
Kenneth and Helena Levy Bequest, 1990
Claude Monet, The Museum at Le Havre, 1873 (NG6527)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Lakeside Landscape, about 1889 (NG6528)
Johan Barthold Jongkind, The Boulevard de Port-Royal, Paris, 1877 (NG6529)
Eugène Boudin, Brussels Harbour, 1871 (NG6530)
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Landscape near Arleux-du-Nord, 1871–74 (NG6531)

CAROLINE BLANCHE ELIZABETH (née FITZROY), LADY LINDSAY (1844–1912)
Bequeathed by Lady Lindsay, 1912
After Jacopo Tintoretto, The Miracle of Saint Mark, probably 19th century (NG2900)
Workshop of Giovanni Bellini, The Virgin and Child, perhaps about 1475 (NG2901)
Domenico Ghirlandaio, A Legend of Saints Justus and Clement of Volterra, probably 1479 (NG2902)
Italian, Venetian, A Concert, mid-1520s (NG2903)
Imitator of Francesco Guardi, A Ruin Caprice (Two Caprices of Ancient Ruins), 19th century (NG2904)
Imitator of Francesco Guardi, A Ruin Caprice (Two Caprices of Ancient Ruins), 19th century (NG2905)
Workshop of Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child with a Pomegranate, probably about 1480–1500 (NG2906)
Italian, North, The Madonna and Child, probably 1525–35 (NG2907)
Probably by Fra Angelico, Saint Romulus: Frame Panel (from the Fiesole San Domenico Altarpiece), about 1423–24 (NG2908)
Hendrik Frans van Lint, A Landscape with an Italian Hill Town, 1700–26 (NG2909)
French, A Struggle in a Desert, 19th century (NG2910)

Transferred to the British Museum, 1994
Louis Carmontelle, Leopold Mozart and his two children, Wolfgang Amadeus and Marie Anne, on paper, 1777 (NG2911; now British Museum, PD 1994-5-14-48)

MISSES LINDSAY
Presented by the Misses Lindsay, 1912
Master of Marradi, The Story of the Schoolmaster of Falerii, late 15th century (NG3826)

LISHAWA FAMILY
Presented by the Lishawa Family in memory of Kate (Lishawa), 2005
Paul Huet, Trees in the Park at Saint-Cloud, probably 1850s (NG6603)

DEBORAH LOEB BRICE (Deborah Loeb Brice Foundation)
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2017
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8 (NG6668)

Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2020
Orazio Gentileschi, The Finding of Moses, early 1630s (NG6684)

MRS SAMUEL LONG
Presented by Mrs Samuel Long, 1911
Sir Francis Legatt Chantrey, Charles Long, 1st Baron Farnborough, 1834 (NG2786)

MRS LOUSADA
Presented by Mr and Mrs J.G. Lousada through the Art Fund to the Tate Gallery, 1921; transferred, 1922
After Wallerant Vaillant, A Boy seated Drawing, probably 18th century (NG3591)

Presented to the Tate Gallery by Mrs Julian Lousada, 1926; transferred, 1956
Théodore Rousseau, Landscape, around 1865 (NG5781)

YOLANDE LYNE STEPHENS (née DUVERNAY; 1812–1894)
Bequeathed by Mrs Lyne Stephens, 1895
Gerard David, The Virgin and Child with Saints and Donor, probably 1510 (NG1432)
Workshop of Rogier van der Weyden, Portrait of a Lady, about 1460 (NG1433)

Former owner of paintings now in the National Gallery’s collection
Philippe de Champaigne, Cardinal de Richelieu, 1633–40 (NG1449; Presented by Charles Butler, 1895)
Adam-François van der Meulen, Philippe-François d’Arenberg saluted by the Leader of a Troop of Horsemen, 1662 (NG1447; Bought, 1895)
Jean-Antoine Watteau, The Scale of Love, probably 1717–8 (NG2897; Bequeathed by Sir Julius Wernher, Bt, 1912)

EVA MACKINTOSH (Presented by Mrs Eva Mackintosh, 1906)
Raphael, The Madonna and Child (‘The Mackintosh Madonna’), 1509–11 (NG2069)

MARY JAMES MATHEWS
Bequeathed by Mrs Mary James Mathews to the Tate Gallery in memory of her husband, Frank Claughton Mathews, 1944; transferred, 1956
Jacob Maris, A Girl seated outside a House, 1867 (NG5568)

Bequeathed by Mrs Mary James Mathews in memory of her husband Frank Claughton Mathews 1944
Marie Cazin, Evening, c.1884-8? (Transferred to Tate, N05571)

MISS BEATRICE MILDMAY
Bequeathed by Miss Beatrice Mildmay, 1953
Meindert Hobbema, The Haarlem Lock, Amsterdam, about 1663–35 (NG6138)

MARY ELIZABETH MOHL (née CLARKE; 1793–1883)
Bequeathed by Mary Mohl, 1884
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, A Girl with a Lamb, before 1775 (NG1154)

LINDA MURRAY (1913–2004)
Presented by Mrs Linda Murray in memory of her husband Peter Murray through the Art Fund, 1996
François-Xavier Fabre, Italian Landscape, 1811 (NG6564)

CLARA EUGENIE OPPENHEIMER (née SCHNAPPER)
Bequeathed by Mrs Henry Oppenheimer, 1936
Workshop of Joachim Patinir, Saint Jerome in a Rocky Landscape, about 1515 (NG4826)

FLAVIA ORMOND
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2017
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8 (NG6668)

MISS A.M. PHILIPS (d. ?1946)
Bequeathed by Miss A.M. Philips, 1946
Ferdinand Bol, A Lady with a Fan, 1643 (NG5656)

MRS UGO PIERUCCI
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2017
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8 (NG6668)

MISS PILBROW
Bequeathed by Miss Pilbrow, 1900
Flemish, Portrait of a Man, probably 1645-55 (NG1700)

JOYCE PLESTERS (1927–1996)
Presented by Joyce Plesters, 1987
After Thomas Uwins, Family carrying Fruit, engraving on paper, early to mid-19th century (H25)
After Sir Charles Eastlake, Greek Fugitives, engraving on paper, 1833 (H23)

EVELYN PONSONBY MCGHEE (1845–1932)
Presented by Miss E. Ponsonby McGhee, 1908
Henri-Joseph Harpignies, A River Scene, about 1850–70 (NG2256)

Acquired by the British Museum, 1975
Henri-Joseph Harpignies, Ilex trees, Villefranche; view through trees to bay, houses below cliffs at centre, watercolour, 1889 (1975,0301.46)

Transferred to Tate
Albert Goodwin, The Gate of the Pass, Maloja (Tate, N02296)
Albert Goodwin, Torre del Greco and Capri, 1900 and 1904, gouache on paper (Tate, N02297)
Albert Goodwin, Folkestone Harbour, 1907 (Tate, N02298)
Albert Goodwin, Ely Cathedral, 1908 (Tate, N02299)
Sir Muirhead Bone, Study for The Great Gantry, Charing Cross Station, 1906 (Tate, N02300)

VISCOUNTESS RADCLIFFE
Presented by Viscount and Viscountess Radcliffe, 1964
Camille Pissarro, Fox Hill, Upper Norwood, 1870 (NG6351)

MRS H.W. RAWLINSON
Presented by Mrs H.W. Rawlinson, 1963
Stanislas-Victor-Edmond Lépine, Nuns and Schoolgirls in the Tuileries Gardens, Paris, 1871–83 (NG6346)

JUNE REDFERN (b. 1951)
Presented by June Redfern, 1986
June Redfern, On the Hill, 1985–8 (H17)

PAULA REGO (b. 1935)
Presented by English Estates, 1991
Paula Rego, Crivelli's Garden (GROUP137: H12.1-5)

MRS F.L. RICKETTS
Bequeathed by Mrs F.L. Ricketts, 1886
Style of Salvator Rosa, Mountainous Landscape with Figures, after 17th century (NG1206)

KATE DE ROTHSCHILD
Presented by Kate de Rothschild, 1999
Jean-Michel Cels, Tree study, about 1840 (NG6578)

HANNAH ROTHSCHILD
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2018
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1615–17 (NG6671)

MAY ROWLEY (1880–1965)
Bequeathed by Miss May Rowley, a descendant of the sitter's daughter, 1965
Sir Thomas Lawrence, John Julius Angerstein, aged about 55, about 1790 (NG6370)

Accepted by Tate
Sir Thomas Lawrence, Isabel Smith, Called Munia, Nurse to the Angerstein Family, about 1800, graphite on paper (Tate, T00768)

MAUD RUSSELL (1891–1982)
Commissioned by the National Gallery, supported by Maud Russell, 1952
Boris Anrep, The Modern Virtues, mosaic pavement in the vestibule of the Main Hall, 1952

CHARLOTTE SANTO DOMINGO
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2020
Orazio Gentileschi, The Finding of Moses, early 1630s (NG6684)

BEATRICE SANTO DOMINGO
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2020
Orazio Gentileschi, The Finding of Moses, early 1630s (NG6684)

MOZELLE SASSOON (1872–1964)
Purchased with a special grant and contributions from the Art Fund, The Pilgrim Trust, and through a public appeal organised by the Art Fund, 1962
Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and the Infant Saint John the Baptist (‘The Burlington House Cartoon’), about 1499-1500 (NG6337): she donated £250 to the public appeal Former owner of a painting now in the National Gallery’s collection
Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Jacques Cazotte, probably 1753 (NG6435; Bought, 1976)

LADY SASSOON
Lord and Lady Sassoon contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2018
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1615–17 (NG6671)

MRS SCHREIBER
Bought jointly by the National Gallery and Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales with contributions from: J. Paul Getty Jnr (through the American Friends of the National Gallery, London), the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, Mrs Schreiber, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, the Moorgate Trusts, Sir Denis Mahon and anonymous donors, 1988
Nicolas Poussin, The Finding of Moses, 1651 (NG6519)

ANNA S.H. SIMONSON (b. c.1862)
Bequeathed by Miss Anna S.H. Simonson, 1947
Probably by Michael Pacher, The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels and Saints, about 1475 (NG5786)

MARY, LADY SIMPKINSON (NÉE GRIFFIN) (1793–1854)
Presented by Mary, Lady Simpkinson, 1853
Claude-Joseph Vernet, A Sporting Contest on the Tiber, 1750 (NG236)

MRS MARION C. SMITH
Bequeathed by Mrs Marion C. Smith, 1967
Possibly by Simon de Vos, The Raising of Lazarus, 1625–76 (NG6384)

MISS SARAH SOLLY (d. c.1879)
Miss Sarah Solly Bequest, 1879
Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of Giovanni della Volta with his Wife and Children, completed 1547 (NG1047)
Ludolf Bakhuizen, Dutch Men-of-war entering a Mediterranean Port, 1681 (NG1050)
Giovanni Battista Bertucci the Elder, The Incredulity of Saint Thomas with a Donor from the Calderoni Family, about 1510–12 (NG1051)
Italian, Portrait of a Young Man, about 1518 (NG1052)
Emanuel de Witte, The Interior of the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, during a Sermon, about 1660 (NG1053)

PRINCESS SOPHIA MATILDA (1773–1844)
Bequeathed by Princess Sophia Matilda, 1845
After Salvator Rosa, The Philosophers' Wood, after 1645 (NG1892)

SALLY SPEELMAN
Bequeathed by Mrs Sally Speelman and Mr Anthony Speelman in memory of Mr Edward Speelman, 1994
Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder, Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1614 (NG6549)

MRS SPOONER
Bought with contributions from The Pilgrim Trust, the Art Fund, Associated Television Ltd, and Mr and Mrs W. W. Spooner, 1960
Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews, about 1750 (NG6301)

CATHERINE STEVENSON
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2017
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8 (NG6668)

GISELA STONE
Accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by HM Government from the estates of Evan and Gisela Stone and allocated jointly to the National Gallery and the Henry Barber Trust, 2021
Lovis Corinth, Portrait of Dr Ferdinand Mainzer, 1899 (NG6691)²¹⁷

MADELINE STRINDBERG (b. 1955)
Presented by Madeline Strindberg
Madeline Strindberg, Soft Cut, 1988–9 (H35)

MARJORIE STURT
Presented by Anthony N. Sturt and his wife Marjorie, 1991
Jan Jansz. Treck, Vanitas Still Life, 1648 (NG6533)

ELIZABETH MILLICENT SUTHERLAND, 24TH COUNTESS OF SUTHERLAND (1963–2019)
Accepted by HM Government in lieu of Inheritance Tax from the Estate of The Rt Hon the Countess of Sutherland and allocated to the National Gallery, 2022
Lo Spagna, Christ carrying the Cross, perhaps 1500-5 (NG6693)²¹⁸

MADELINE SWALLOW
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2017
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8 (NG6668)

HENRIETTA CHARLOTTE TENNYSON D'EYNCOURT TARLETON (1864–1951)
Bequeathed by Mrs Henrietta Charlotte Tarleton, 1951
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Colonel Tarleton, 1782 (NG5985)

ISABEL TARRATT
Presented by Isabel Tarratt, in memory and in accordance with the wishes of her mother, Mrs Caroline Tarratt, 1894
Charles-François de Lacroix, A Seaport, about 1760 (NG1393)

LADY TAUNTON (née LADY MARY HOWARD; 1823–1892)
Bequeathed by Lady Taunton, 1892
Imitator of Andrea Mantegna, Three Scenes of the Passion of Christ, perhaps 1460–1550 (NG1381)

VIOLET VAN DER ELST (1882–1966)
Presented by Mrs Violet Van der Elst, 1959
Karel Dujardin, Conversion of Saint Paul, 1662 (NG6296)

MOLLIE W. VICKERS
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2017
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8 (NG6668)
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2018
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1615–17 (NG6671)

QUEEN VICTORIA (1819–1901)
Presented by Queen Victoria at the Prince Consort's wish, 1863
Giusto de’ Menabuoi, The Coronation of the Virgin, Scenes from the Lives of Joachim and Anna, and from the Life of the Virgin, 1367 (NG701)
Italian, Umbrian or Roman, The Virgin and Child in a Mandorla with Cherubim, about 1480–1500 (NG702)
Pintoricchio, The Virgin and Child, late 15th century (NG703)
After Bronzino, Portrait of Cosimo I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, probably before 1574 (NG704)
Stephan Lochner, Saints Matthew, Catherine of Alexandria and John the Evangelist, about 1450 (NG705)
Master of the Life of the Virgin, The Presentation in the Temple, probably about 1460–75 (NG706)
Master of the Saint Bartholomew Altarpiece, Saints Peter and Dorothy, probably 1505–10 (NG707)
Workshop of Dirk Bouts, Virgin and Child, about 1465 (NG708)
Hans Memling, Virgin and Child, perhaps about 1475 (NG709)
Gerard David, An Augustinian Friar (?) Praying, about 1515 (NG710)
Workshop of Dirk Bouts, diptych of the Mater Dolorosa and Christ crowned with Thorns (NG711 and NG712)
Jan Provoost, The Virgin and Child in a Landscape, early 16th century (NG713)
Bernaert van Orley, The Virgin and Child in a Landscape, about 1525 (NG714)
Quinten Massys, The Crucifixion, about 1515 (NG715)
Workshop of the Master of the Female Half-Lengths, Saint Christopher carrying the Infant Christ, possibly about 1540 (NG716)
Master of the Female Half-Lengths, Saint John on Patmos, about 1540 (NG717)
Associate of Jan de Beer, The Crucifixion, 1520s (NG718)
Workshop of the Master of 1518, The Magdalen, before 1524–6 (NG719)
Master of the Female Half-Lengths, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, about 1540 (NG720)
Master of the Female Half-Lengths, A Female Head, about 1540 (NG721)
Swabian, Portrait of a Woman of the Hofer Family, about 1470 (NG722)
Style of Martin Schongauer, The Virgin and Child in a Landscape, 1469–91 (NG723)
Albert Cornelis and Associates, The Virgin and Child in a Landscape, probably early 1520s (NG1864)

Probably presented by Queen Victoria at the Prince Consort's wish, 1863
After Jan Sanders van Hemessen, A Young Woman Writing, about 1530 (NG622)

MRS M.S. WALZER
Bequeathed by Mrs M.S. Walzer as part of the Richard and Sophie Walzer Bequest, 1979
Claude Monet, Bathers at La Grenouillère, 1869 (NG6456)

Bequeathed by Mrs M.S. Walzer as part of the Richard and Sophie Walzer

Bequest from the Cassirer collection, 1979
Paul Cézanne, Landscape with Poplars, about 1885–7 (NG6457)

FRIEDA WARBURG (née SCHIFF, 1876–1958)
Presented by Mr and Mrs Felix M. Warburg through the Art Fund, 1937
Fra Filippo Lippi and workshop, four panels from the predella of The Pistoia Santa Trinità Altarpiece: Saint Mamas in Prison thrown to the Lions, Beheading of Saint James the Great, Saint Zeno exorcising the Daughter of Gallienus, and Saint Jerome and the Lion, 1455–60 (NG4868.1–4)

(GWENDOLEN) MARGARET WATNEY (née WALLOP) (1860–1943)
Presenfited by Lady Margaret Watney in memory of her husband, Vernon J. Watney, 1929
Master of the Pala Sforzesca, The Virgin and Child with Four Saints and Twelve Devotees, probably about 1490–5 (NG4444)

ELIZABETH MARY GROSVENOR (née LEVESON-GOWER), MARCHIONESS
OF WESTMINSTER (1797–1891)
Presented by Elizabeth Mary, widow of 2nd Marquess of Westminster, 1870
Carlo Crivelli, The Virgin and Child with Saints Francis and Sebastian, 1491 (NG807)

MAXINE WHITE
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2018
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria, about 1615–17 (NG6671)

MRS CHARLES WILMERS
Presented by Mr and Mrs Charles Wilmers, 1991
Hilaire-Germain-Edgar Degas, At the Café de Châteaudun, about 1869–71 (NG6536)

JANE HURLEY WILSON
Bought with funds provided by Michael and Jane Wilson, 2007
Tom Hunter, Murder: Two Men Wanted, Lambda print on paper, 2003 (H199)

JUDITH E. WILSON (d. 1960)
Bequeathed by Miss Judith E. Wilson, 1960
Eugène Boudin, Beach Scene, Trouville, about 1860–70 (NG6309)
Eugène Boudin, Beach Scene, Trouville, 1870–74 (NG6310)
Eugène Boudin, L'Hôpital-Camfrout, Brittany, about 1870–72(NG6311)
Eugène Boudin, Beach Scene, Trouville, 1873 (NG6312)
Eugène Boudin, Laundresses by a Stream, about 1885–90 (NG6313)

MARY, LADY WITT
Presented by Sir Robert and Lady Witt through the Art Fund, 1924
Samuel van Hoogstraten, A Peepshow with Views of the Interior of a Dutch House, about 1655–60 (NG3832)

Presented by Sir Robert and Lady Witt to the Tate Gallery through the Art Fund, 1926; transferred, 1956
Nicolas Toussaint Charlet, Children at a Church Door, about 1817–45 (NG4140)

EMILY JANE WOOD
Presented by Miss Emily Jane Wood by the wish of her uncle, Decimus Burton, 1888
Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man in his Thirties, 1633 (NG1251)
Jan Roos, Still Life of Fruit and Vegetables with Two Monkeys, about 1620 (NG1252)

MARY M. WOOD
Presented by Mrs Mary M. Wood through her brother, the Revd G. Greenwood, 1901
Paris Bordone, Christ as 'The Light of the World', about 1550 (NG1845)

MRS CHARLES WRIGHTSMAN
Contributed funds to the following acquisition, 2017
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein from the North, about 1756–8 (NG6668)

MRS M.J. YATES
Bequeathed by Mrs M.J. Yates, 1923
Ignace-Henri-Théodore Fantin-Latour, A Basket of Roses, 1890 (NG3726)

MRS ALEXANDER YOUNG
Presented by Mrs Alexander Young at her husband’s wish, 1910
Jozef Israëls, Fishermen carrying a Drowned Man, probably 1861 (NG2732)

EMILIE YZNAGA (?1859–1944) and CONSUELO YZNAGA, DUCHESS OF MANCHESTER (?1853–1909)
Presented by Emilie Yznaga, 1945
Louis-Léopold Boilly, A Girl at a Window (NG5583)
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Portrait of a Lady (Madame de Gléon?) (NG5584)
Nicolas de Largillierre, Portrait of a Man (Jean-Baptiste Rousseau?) (NG5585)
Jean-Marc Nattier, Manon Balletti (NG5586)
Jean-Marc Nattier, Portrait of a Man in Armour (NG5587)
After Alexander Roslin, The Dauphin, Louis de France, as Colonel of the Dauphin Dragons (NG5588)
Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Lamentation at the Foot of the Cross (NG5589)
Louis Tocqué, Portrait of a Young Woman (NG5590)

Presented to Tate
Jean Béraud, After the Misdeed (N04867; presented to Tate, 1937)

10. Appendix II

List of names of women donors to The National Gallery, 1824–2024 listed in the Memorial Book, ‘Bequests to The National Gallery’, by their date of death

N.B. The Gallery has not traditionally recorded gender as a category. Consequently, those listed are presumed to be women based on their titles; in case where the Gallery does not know the donors’ titles, their gender is assumed based on their first name. New donors will be added on a regular basis.

Mrs Helen Reid Stewart Hornby Lewis, 1930
Miss Constance Phillott, 1931
Miss Margaret Helen Knapping, 1935
Mr and Mrs Henry Oppenheimer, 1936
Miss Julia Lindley, 1937
Miss Ellen Lucy Barber, 1946
Miss Mary Raine Harrop, 1946
Miss Matilda Charlotte Osborne, 1949
Miss Marguerite Wyatt Waycott, 1952
Mrs Sibyl Mary Monkhouse, 1958
Miss Ida Mary Emily Hitchcock, 1960
Miss Isabella Mellis Massey, 1960
Miss Madge Pulsford, 1960
Miss Florence Fox, 1962
Miss Edith Katherine Lee Harrop, 1962
Mrs Marjorie Spencer, 1964
Miss Marie Uprimny, 1965
Ms Helen Kathleen Morton, 1967
Miss Mabel Kate Davis, 1970
Mrs Caroline Jane Davies, 1972
Mrs Gladys Dorothy Florence Thompson, 1973
Mrs Annie Frances Plannells Granel, 1974
Miss Margaret Penelope Sichel, 1975
Miss Silvie Effie Vincent, 1978
Miss Marjorie Deakin, 1981
Dr Alice Maude Brown, 1983
Mrs Muriel Gwendolen Thurston Askew, 1985
Miss Dorrien Agnes Nicker, 1985
Miss Ruth Mary Powell OBE, 1985
Miss E.S.P. Lucken, 1986
Ms Kathleen Mary Hill, 1989
Miss Moya Cozens (wife of Captain W.R.G. Hutchings), 1990
Ethel Romenuk, 1990
Miss Constance Jennie Walk, 1995
Miss Edith Olive Brazdzionis, 1996
Mrs Rosa Joyce Brommelle (Joyce Plesters), 1996
Beatrice Y. Harrison, 1996
Miss Majorie Ethel Walk, 1996
Miss Dorian Mary Neal, 1997
Miss Gertrude Herrmann, 1998
Miss Shirley Marguerite Kanaar, 1999
Mrs Natalie Peucker, 1999
Mrs Martha Doris Bailey, 2000
Mrs Ursula Monica Casswell, 2000
Miss Muriel Florence Higginson, 2000
Miss Dorothy Iris Strutt, 2000
Mrs Lorna Victoria Gilling, 2001
Miss Mary Elizabeth Jamieson, 2001
Mrs Phyllis Appleby Woodthorpe, 2001
Miss Pamela Cooper, 2002
Miss Stella Rose Vayne, 2002
Mrs Doris Winifred Webster, 2002
Miss Phyllis Mary Small, 2004
Miss Joan Rosemary Adams, 2004
Miss Dorothy Kate Fetherston, 2005
Miss Barbara Yvonne Brown, 2005
Miss Dorothy Jessie Bishop, 2005
Mrs Eileen Eva Birtles, 2005
Miss Patricia Kay Dodds, 2005
Mrs Mary Crowley Medd, 2005
Dr Patricia Margaret Alice Archer, 2006
Mrs Margery Winifred Fripp, 2007
Miss Pamela Jean Oakes, 2007
Miss Stella Elene Turmaine, 2008
Mrs Helen Theresa Mitchell, 2008
Mrs Genevieve Charlotte Cruikshank, 2008
Mrs Renée May Buck, 2009
Miss Peggy Joan Strawson, 2010
Miss Helen Fawcett Hughes, 2010
Lady Mary Barbara Smith, 2010
Maryse Anne Moenner, 2011
Miss Prudence Anne Ursula Davies, 2011
Mrs Joan Evelyn Hall, 2011
Madeleine & Dennis Simms, 2011
Mrs Thelma Barbour, 2012
Jeanne Mary Peach, 2012
Mrs Pamela Bassindale, 2012
Ms Marcia Joan Lay, 2012
Mrs Janette Marion Cartwright, 2013
Miss Margaret Anne Flatman, 2013
Ms Fay Elspeth Langford, 2013
Miss Janet Paula Dunbar Steen, 2013
Ms Sabina R. Sutherland, 2014
Miss Margeret Ann Ryan, 2014
Mrs Wendy Hallas, 2015
Miss Irene E.E. Hyde, 2015
Ms Marigold Ann Chamberlin, 2015
Ms Brenda Margaret Jacob, 2015
Miss Mary P. Bennett, 2016
Ms Muriel Joan Mainstone, 2016
Ms Maureen Ramsay, 2016
Mrs Molly W. Vickers, 2016
Miss Gladys Williams, 2016
Ms Sheila Mary Holmes, 2017
Mrs Madeline Swallow, 2017
Ms Marion Swaine Satterley, 2017
Averell Isla Cecilia Duthie, 2017
Miss Lorna Catherine Latten, 2017,
Miss Kathleen Yates, 2018
Ms Barbara Ann Ackroyd, 2018
Ileana Noella Varela de Hodges, 2018
Miss Jeanne Henbrey, 2018
Miss Ann Margaret Douglas, 2019
Majorie MacVicar, 2019
Pauline Mary Matthews OBE, 2019
Ms Denise Antenan, 2019
Eileen and John McAllister, 2019
Mrs Felicity Cynthia June Owen, 2019
Miss Gillian Cleaver, 2019
Miss Jennifer Ann Pinney, 2020
Mrs Joyce Evelyn Judd, 2020
Ms Anne Marie Goodwin, 2020
Mrs Lorna Rosemary Philips, 2020
Frances Patricia Hill, 2021
Ms Elizabeth Sebok, 2021
Miss Dorothy Kathleen Scruton, 2021
Maureen Margaretta Wilson, 2021
Joanna Christine Warrand, 2021
Ms Sheila McNicol Brownlie, 2021
Pamela Berwyn Davies, 2021
Ms Joy Nalpanis, 2022
Miss Valerie May Williams, 2022

11. About the Authors

Susanna Avery-Quash is Lead Curator at the National Gallery, London.

Christine Riding is Director of Collections and Research at the National Gallery, London.

12. Notes

1 Women’s contribution to the life of the National Gallery is not a topic of discussion in either Jonathan Conlin, The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery, London: Pallas Athene, 2006 or Christopher Whitehead, The Public Art Museum in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Development of the National Gallery, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2005, but see Julie Sheldon, ‘Lady Eastlake and the National Gallery’, in Museums and Biographies: Stories, Objects, Identities, ed. Kate Hill, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012. Nor do women’s contribution feature in other standard histories of sister institutions such as David M. Wilson’s The British Museum: A History, London: British Museum Press, 2002 or Anthony Burton’s Vision and Accident: The Story of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London: V&A Publishing, 1999, but see Lara Perry’s account of the National Portrait Gallery in History's Beauties: Women in the National Portrait Gallery, 1856–1900 (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). All the data in the current article has been pieced together manually; the Gallery had no digitized records in this area.

2 See Kathleen McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; Véronique Long, ‘Les collectionneurs d’oeuvres d’art et la donation au musée à la fin du XIXe siècle: l’exemple du musée du Louvre’, Romantisme, 112, 2001, 49; Dianne Sachko-Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008; Anne Higonnet, A Museum of One’s Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift, Pittsburgh, PA: Periscope, 2009; Andrea Geddes Poole, Philanthropy and the Construction of Victorian Women’s Citizenship: Lady Frederick Cavendish and Miss Emma Cons, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014; Julie Verlaine, Femmes collectionneuses d’art et mécènes de 1880 à nos jours, Paris: Hazan, 2014.

3 See the essays in ‘Women Artists, Collectors and Patrons’, National Trust Historic Houses & Collections Annual, London: National Trust, 2018.

4 See Tom Stammers, ‘Women Collectors and Cultural Philanthropy, c.1850–1920’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (issue 30, 2020) online.

5 Tom Stammers, ‘Women Collectors in France’, Apollo, September 2020, 44–49, esp. 45, 47–48.

6 Kate Hill, Women and Museums 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.

7 Perry, History's Beauties.

8 See Suzanne Higgott, ‘The Most Fortunate Man of His Day': Sir Richard Wallace: Connoisseur, Collector & Philanthropist, London: Pallas Athene, 2018, which includes material about Lady Wallace. There is also the case of Joséphine Bowes (1825–1874), an amateur painter, who was co-founder with her husband of the museum named after them in County Durham in 1869. A later example is Dame Martha Constance Hattie Barber (1869–1933), the wealthy widow of an industrialist, who, in her will of 1932, left the University of Birmingham funds to erect an Institute for ‘the study and encouragement of art and music’ together with Professorships in the Fine Arts and in Music. In addition to the purchase of furniture, some decorative arts, musical instruments and books, pictures were to be purchased of ‘exceptional and outstanding merit’ and of a date not later than the end of the nineteenth century. See Giles Waterfield, ‘Barber Institute’, in Palaces of Art: Art Galleries in Britain, 1790–1990, London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1991, 156; Ann Sumner, ‘Introduction: An Unparalleled Opportunity’, in The Barber Institute of Fine Arts: Foundations of a Collection, ed. Robert Wenley, London: Scala Publishing, 2012. In France, a pioneering female benefactor was the Comtesse d’Héricourt de Valincourt who founded an Old Masters gallery in the town of La Fère in the 1860s; see Stammers, ‘Women Collectors in France’, 46. An American equivalent is Louisine Havemeyer (1855–1929), wife of the New York industrialist and sugar magnate Henry Osborne Havemeyer, who collected old masters; see Louisine Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector, 1961. Louisine, who focused on contemporary art and was a major influence in the establishment of the taste for French Impressionism in America, bequeathed part of her collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

9 For example, see Hilary Fraser, Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; Meaghan Clarke, ‘Women in the Galleries: New Angles on Old Masters in the Late Nineteenth Century’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 28 (2019) doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.823.

10 For example, see ‘Women’s Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseurship’, eds. Meaghan Clark and Francesco Ventrella, special issue of Visual Resources 33: 1–2 (2017).

11 On this topic in general, see Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, London and New York: Routledge, 1995; Beth Fowkes Tobin, ‘Introduction: Consumption as a Gendered Social Practice’, in Material Women: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, 1750-1950, eds. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. See also Susan James, The Feminine Dynamic in English Art, 1485–1603: Women as Consumer, Patrons and Painters, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009; Cynthia Lawrence, ed., Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors and Connoisseurs, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997; Susan Bracken, Andrea M. Gáldy and Adriana Turpin, eds, Women Patrons and Collectors, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012. For other case studies, see Jaynie Anderson, ‘Rewriting the history of art patronage’, Renaissance Studies 10:2, 1996, 129–38 (this issue of the journal is dedicated to the topic of ‘Women patrons of Renaissance art, 1300–1600’).

12 For example, Margaret of York (1446–1503) was a patron of William Caxton, who introduced the art of printing into England. She commissioned many illuminated manuscripts when she was Duchess of Burgundy, one of the most celebrated being The Visions of Tondal, illustrated by Simon Marmion (Getty Museum). See Dagmar Eichberger and Yvonne Bleyerveld, Women of Distinction: Margaret of York, Margaret of Austria, Leuven: Brepols, 2005. See also, in relation to interior decoration, Rosemary Baird, Mistress of the House: Great Ladies and Grand Houses, 1670–1830, London: Phoenix, 2004.

13 On this topic, see, for example, John Dunbar, ‘The building activities of the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale, 1670-82’, Archaeological Journal, 132, 1976, 202–30.

14 See Clarissa Campbell Orr, ‘Queen Charlotte as patron: some intellectual and social contexts,’ Court Historian 6:3, 2001, 183–212; Jane Roberts, ed., George III and Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste, London: Royal Collection Publications, 2004.

15 See Jonathan Marsden, ed., Victoria & Albert: Art & Love, London: Royal Collection Enterprises Ltd, 2010, 96–165 (‘Contemporary Painting and Sculpture’).

16 For women as patrons of pastels, see Ruth Kenny’s online essay, ‘A Craze for Pastel’, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/bp-spotlight-craze-pastel/essay. An interesting (earlier) exception is Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford (1580–1627), who was a rare but notable collector of coins and medals. See Karen Hearn, ‘Question of judgement: Lucy Harington, Countess of Bedford, as art patron and collector’, in Edward Chaney, ed., Evolution of English Collecting: The Reception of Italian Art in the Tudor and Stuart Periods, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003, 221–30.

17 See Ann Eatwell, ‘Private Pleasure, Public Beneficence: Lady Charlotte Schreiber and Ceramic Collecting’ in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell-Orr, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995, 125–45; Dianne Sachko Macleod, ‘Art Collecting as Play: Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–1895)’, Visual Resources 27:1, 2011, 18–31; Jacqueline Yallop, Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves: How the Victorians Collected the World, London: Atlantic Book, 2011, chapter on Lady Schreiber.

18 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katrin_Bellinger (accessed 6 May 2020).

19 According to Tate’s website, ‘Julia Emily Gordon’s parents were important patrons of David Wilkie. In 1834, Wilkie wrote to Sir Willoughby Gordon asking leave to propose marriage to his daughter, Julia Emily, but his request was refused. Julia’s mother, Lady Gordon (née Julia Bennet), was also an amateur artist, best remembered as a pupil and patron of Turner.’ See https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gordon-st-germain-en-laye-t08897 (accessed 6 May 2020). There are two other portraits of Julia by Wilkie, both bequeathed by her in 1896 and both now in Tate: Julia Emily Gordon in a Fez (A01024); and Miss Julia Emily Gordon (N01740). Julia Emily Gordon presented another group of contemporary British watercolours in 1888, which, again, are now part of Tate’s collection: John Frederick Lewis, Spanish Couple riding a Horse (N01729); David Cox, Harlech Castle, Wales(?) (N01734); David Cox, A Harbour (N01735); Manner of John Varley, Dunstanborough Castle (N01737); John Varley, Sea-piece with Fishing Boats in a Calm (N01738); and David Wilkie,?Sir Willoughby Gordon and his Daughter Julia, Cooking on a Griddle at Puckaster, near Niton, Isle of Wight (N01739). Tate purchased examples of Gordon’s work in 1996: attributed to Gordon, A Terrace (T08896); two watercolours of St Germain en Laye, Palace at Nanteuil and Pere Lachaise (T08898, T08897, T08899, T08900, respectively); and Calais, an etching produced with her relative, Harry Percy Gordon (T11639).

20 See National Gallery Archive (hereafter NGA), NG7/340/10: letter from Miss Evelyn McGhee offering to present two works by H. Harpignies, 7 November 1908 (NG2256 and NG2257); NG7/349/10: her letter offering to present drawings by Goodwin and Muirhead Bone, 1 May 1908. See also https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1936-1128-2 (accessed 6 May 2020), where the ‘Curator’s comments’ record for this print by Charles Holroyd: ‘The print was donated by Charles Holroyd to “Miss McGhee”, possibly Evelyn Ponsonby McGhee who donated objects to the BM and the Tate during the first three decades of the Twentieth century.’ Indeed, there are some fifty-five works in the British Museum’s online collection database with the credit line ‘Donated by: Miss E P McGhee.’ They comprise drawings – many again by Albert Goodwin – and prints of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Among the group is one watercolour by Harpignies (1975,0301.46), which is recorded as having been acquired by the British Museum in 1975, having originally been presented by Miss McGhee to the Tate in 1908; see https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1975-0301-46 (accessed 6 May 2020).

21 See NGA, NG7/386/13: letter from the National Art Collections Fund regarding this offer, 9 January 1911. It is now in Tate’s collection (N02763); see https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/thomas-lycidas-n02763 (accessed 6 May 2020).

22 See Charlotte Gere and Marian Vaizey, Great Women Collectors, London and New York: Philip Wilson in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1999.

23 Margaret of Austria was a patron of many artists represented in the National Gallery’s collection, notably Jan Gossaert, Bernaert Van Orley and Jan Cornelisz. Vermeyen. As a collector in her own right, who avidly sought panels by earlier artists, she also owned paintings by other artists represented in the Gallery’s holdings such as Hieronymus Bosch and Jan Mostaert, as well as panels by Juan de Flandes – not the panel in the National Gallery’s permanent collection (NG1280) but The Ascension, currently on loan from the Earl of Yarborough. She also apparently practiced painting herself. See Lorne Campbell, The National Gallery Schools Catalogues: The Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, London: National Gallery Company, 1998, 21, 110-15, 138, 174, 262-5, 309, 342, 350, 570, 580, 600-01, 674. We are grateful to Emma Capron for supplying these details.

24 See Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Queen Christina of Sweden at Rome, 1655–1689, exhib. cat., 1989.

25 It is often difficult to discern what role women may have played in the patronage and collection of their menfolk, more particularly their husbands. Emma Barker has proven that Lady Spencer was heavily involved in all her husband, the 1st Earl Spencer’s projects, and may well have played a major (if not the major) role in commissioning family portraits. See Emma Barker, ‘Georgiana at Althorp: Spencer family portraits 1755–83’ in Placing Faces: The Portrait and the Country House 1650-1850, ed. Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Jordan Vibert and Hannah Lyons, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013, 161–90.

26 See Alastair Laing and Nino Strachey, ‘The Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale’s pictures at Ham House’, Apollo, May 1994, 3–9; Doreen Cripps, Elizabeth of the Sealed Knot: A Biography of Elizabeth Murray, Countess of Dysart, London: Roundwood Press, 1975.

27 See Elizabeth Chew, ‘The Countess of Arundel and Tart Hall’, in Chaney, Evolution of English Collecting, 285–314; David Howarth, ‘The patronage and collecting of Aletheia, Countess of Arundel, 1606–54’, Journal for the History of Collections, 10, 1998, 125–38.

28 See Sally Festing, ‘Rare flowers and fantastic breeds: The 2nd Duchess of Portland and her circle,’ Country Life, 167, 1986: part I, 12 June, 1684–86; part II, 19 June, 1772–74; Stacey Sloboda, ‘Displaying materials: Porcelain and natural history in the Duchess of Portland’s museum’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 43:3, 2010, 455–72; Rebecca Stott, Duchess of Curiosities: The Life of Margaret, Duchess of Portland, Pineapple Press, for the Harley Gallery, 2006.

29 See Adriano Aymonino, ‘The Musaeum of the 1st Duchess of Northumberland (1716–1776) at Northumberland House in London: An Introduction’ in Bracken, Gáldy and Turpin, Women Patrons, 101–20.

30 Tom Stammers has noted that in Gustav Waagen’s three-volume survey of Treasures of Art in Great Britain (1854) only three women collectors were mentioned: Sarah Rogers, the sister of the collector Samuel Rogers; Maria Denman, the sister-in-law of John Flaxman; and Angela Burdett-Coutts; see Stammers, ‘Women Collectors’, online. From the 1856 Samuel Rogers sale, Angela Burdett-Coutts, purchased, according to Henry Crabb Robinson’s account, ‘The Raphael Christ in the Garden, The Paul Veronese Festival’ as well as a Poussin, Guercino and a Murillo; see Susan Lewis, 'The Artistic and Architectural Patronage of Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts’, unpublished PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2 vols, 2012, I, 80.

31 For instance, when Mary Venetia James was widowed in 1917, she paid for the building of a new department at the Hospital of St Cross, Rugby, in the memory of her husband, who had also given generously to the same hospital. On women’s charitable and/or philanthropic involvement as a means of extending their activities into the public sphere, see Frank K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980; Maria Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Birgitta Jordansson and Tinne Vammen, eds, Charitable Women: Philanthropic Welfare, 1780–1930, Odense: Odense University Press, 1998; Sarah A. Curtis, ‘Charitable Ladies: Gender, Class and Religion in Mid Nineteenth-Century Paris’, Past & Present, 177, 2002, 121–56; Ellen Ross, Slum Travelers, Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920, California: University of California Press, 2007; Linda L. Clark, Women and Achievement in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

32 Eva Mackintosh (1843–1935) was the daughter of Robert James Mackintosh, Governor of Antigua, and Mary Appleton. Mackintosh is mentioned in Julia Cartwright's early monograph, Raphael (London: Duckworth; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1905), 142: 'Madonna with the Child standing on a parapet … like the Bridgewater Madonna this picture came to England from the Orleans Gallery, and once belonged to the poet Rogers, at whose sale in 1856, it was bought by Mr Mackintosh, Recorder of Bombay, whose daughter is the present owner. Unfortunately, this once lovely work has suffered terribly from neglect and repaint, but not even the restorer's hand has been able wholly to destroy the exquisite charm and tenderness of Raphael's original design'. We are grateful to Maria Alambritis for sharing this information. As Alambritis points out, Sir James Mackintosh, Recorder of Bombay, had died in 1832, so Cartwright was in fact referring to his son Robert James Mackintosh (1806–1864); see https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/LTZL-BR7/robert-james-mackintosh-esq.-1806- 1864.

33 For further information on Sophia Matilda, see https://www.regencyhistory.net/2013/11/princess-sophia-matilda-of-gloucester.html; for portraits of her by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Richard Cosway in the Royal Collections, see https://www.rct.uk/collection/400937/princess-sophia-matilda-of-gloucester-1773-1844 and https://www.rct.uk/collection/420002/princess-sophia-matilda-of-gloucester-1773-1844, respectively; see also those in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection: https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp66183/princess-sophia-matilda-ofgloucester.

34 Countess Brownlow, the daughter of Henry Chetwynd-Talbot, 18th Earl of Shrewsbury, and the wife of the British soldier, courtier and Conservative politician, Adelbert Wellington Brownlow-Cust, 3rd Earl Brownlow, was painted by Frederic Leighton in 1879–80; by Edith Corbet in 1885; and by Frank Salisbury (all Belton House, Lincolnshire), see: http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/436073, http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/436037, and https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/lady-adelaide-chetwynd-talbot-18441917-countess-brownlow-176394, respectively (webpages all accessed 6 May 2020).

35 Mary Venetia James’ portrait was painted by Luke Fildes in 1895.

36 See https://www.geni.com/people/Margaret-Watney/6000000015876956311 (accessed 6 May 2020).

37 For further details of this auction, see https://www.alamy.com/jun-23-1967-important-oldmasters-from-the-watney-collection-sold-image69429425.html (accessed 6 May 2020).

38 See Campbell, Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 15; Jennifer Roberts, The Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England, Gloucestershire: Amberley Books, 2016.

39 See Laure-Aline Demazure, ‘French Taste in Victorian England: The Collection of Yolande Lyne-Stephens’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (issue 30, 2020); online. Demazure mentions that Yolande Lyne Stephen’s French will, dated 23 June 1888, was not changed after that date and clearly set out her intentions at that point in relation to the National Gallery. It listed three works as bequests which are the very same pictures that Pym went on to offer in her name to the UK national collection.

40 See Fayette Gosse, ‘Elder, Alexander Lang (1815–1885)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1972, 133–34 (accessed 6 May 2020). The Elder Wing at the Art Gallery of South Australia is named after Alexander’s brother, Sir Thomas Elder (1818–1897), a Scottish-Australian pastoralist, businessman, philanthropist, politician, race-horse owner and breeder, and public figure.

41 See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/about-us/press-and-media/press-releases/national-gallery-acquires-new-renaissance-master-painting. See also https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/drue-heinz-died-dead-philanthropist-writers-award-heinz-endowments-a8296441.html. There are two sketches of Drue Heinz by David Hockney in the National Portrait Gallery’s collection (NPG 6674 and NPG 6683); she ‘played host and sitter to Hockney at her home on Lake Como in Italy, which she has transformed into a literary and artistic retreat’ (https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw76167/Drue-Heinz). She also appears in John Goto’s print, The Donors, of 1999-2000 (NPG x88802).

42 The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, ‘Old Titles and New Money: American Heiresses and the British Aristocracy’ (25 November 2014–2 August 2015), featured Cornelia Martin. She was photographed by H. Walter Barnett; see https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw19032/Cornelia-ne-Martin-Countessof-Craven?LinkID=mp18899&role=sit&rNo=0 (accessed 6 May 2020).

43 See Lady Constance Battersea, Reminiscences, London: Macmillan and Company, 1922; Lucy Cohen, Lady De Rothschild and Her Daughters, 1821–1933, London: John Murray, 1935; Richard Davis, The English Rothschilds, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983; Linda Gordon Kuzmack, Woman’s Cause: The Jewish Woman’s Movement in England and the United States, 1881–1933, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1990; https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/rothschild-constance-lady-battersea (accessed 6 May 2020); Tom Stammers, ‘Constance Battersea et la philanthropie artistique des Rothschild d’outre-manche’, INHA: de la sphère privée à la sphère publique, 2020, online.

44 The National Portrait Gallery has three photographs of the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, including one by Janet Stone showing her seated in front of an oil painting of her by John Singer Sargent, as well as a lithograph after Wyndham Lewis; see https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitlist.php?search=sp&sText=Sybil%2C+Marchioness+of+Cholmondeley (accessed 6 May 2020).

45 See William D. Rubinstein et al, eds, The Palgrave Dictionary of Anglo-Jewish History, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 170.

46 Humphrey Wine (https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/research/research-resources/national-gallery-catalogues/former-owners-of-the-eighteenth-century-french-paintings/mrs-mozelle-sassoon (accessed 6 May 2020) records that her sale at Sotheby’s, London, on 3 July 1963, included: Largillierre’s La Belle Strasbourgeoise (now Strasbourg, Musée des Beaux-Arts), Adolf Ulric Wertmüller’s portrait of Jean-Jacques Caffieri (now Boston, Museum of Fine Arts); a portrait now attributed to François de Troy and two small landscapes attributed to Boucher. Wine also records two sales in the 1970s, after the death of Mozelle’s daughter, Mrs Fitzgerald (d. 1970), which included pictures she had inherited from her mother. The first took place in 1972 and included a Nattier female half-length and three works by François Hubert Drouais: his La petite nourrice, a circular self-portrait, and his portrait of his wife. It was at the sale of 1976 that the National Gallery purchased NG6435. Soon afterwards, two paintings by Jean-Baptiste Pater, La Balançoire and a Fête champêtre, were sold by a descendant.

47 NGA, NG14/77/1: acquisition file: letter from Warburg to Sir Robert Witt, 28 June 1929.

48 There are very few subjects derived from the Old Testament/Torah among the pictures donated by Jewish women benefactors to the National Gallery: Sebastiano Ricci’s Esther before Ahaseurus (NG2101) and after Salvator Rosa, An Angel appears to Hagar and Ishmael in the Desert (NG2107) were both works bequeathed by Anna Louisa and Lucy Cohen. Gerbrand van den Eeckhout’s Rebekah and Eliezer at the Well (NG6535) was given by Mr Shickman in memory of his mother (see below).

49 Just to give one example of the many across Europe: (Henri) James Simon (1851–1932) was a German-Jewish entrepreneur, art collector, philanthropist and patron of the arts during the Wilhelmine period. A close associate of Wilhelm von Bode, Simon was a major benefactor of the Berlin State Museums.

50 On this topic, see the interview with the art historian Ernst Gombrich where he talks about the ‘Bildung’ of his parents, their taste in art and so on, as representative of the Viennese middle class of their day: https://gombricharchive.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/showdoc103.pdf.

51 See https://www.nga.gov/collection-searchresult.html?artobj_credit=Gift%20of%20Frieda%20Schiff%20Warburg%20in%20memory%20of%20her%20husband,%20Felix%20M.%20Warburg (accessed 6 May 2020). See also https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/warburg-frieda-schiff.

52 Henrietta Tarleton is buried in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin, Harefield; see https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/144870297/henrietta-charlotte-tarleton (accessed 6 May 2020).

53 Ellen Julia Hollond published A Lady's Journal of Her Travels in Egypt and Nubia (1858–9) in 1864. She has a wikipedia page.

54 See NGA, NG6/10/542: letter to Messrs Prideanse and Son, 4 February 1885, informing them that the Gallery had accepted the pictures by Ary Scheffer, bequeathed to be Gallery by Robert Hollond.

55 For more details, see https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/millais-mrs-bischoffsheim-n05572 (for Mrs Bisschoffsheim) and https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/louis-gustave-ricard-the-countess-of-desart-as-a-child (for Ellen Odette); both webpages accessed 6 May 2020.

56 See Christopher Newall, The Grosvenor Gallery Exhibitions: Change and Continuity in the Victorian Art World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney, The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1996. There are four images of Lady Lindsay in the National Portrait Gallery: by Joseph Middleton Jopling (NPG 5401), by Thomas Buist (NPG x8474), by Walery (NPG x9146) and by Cyril Flower (NPG Ax15711). George Frederick Watts’ Portrait of Lady Lindsay Playing the Violin was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery.

57 Nicholas Penny and Giorgia Mancini, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings: Volume III Bologna and Ferrara, London: National Gallery Company, 2016, 38.

58 See NGA, NG14/256: acquisition file: pictures bequeathed by Misses Rachel F. and Jean I. Alexander from the collection formed by their father, 1972. See also Alistair Smith, ‘Presented by the Misses Rachel F. and Jean I. Alexander: Seventeen Paintings for the National Gallery’, Burlington Magazine, 114: 834 (September 1972), 630–34. See also Roger Fry, ‘Mr. Herbert P. Horne and Mr. William Cleverly Alexander’, Burlington Magazine, 29: 158, May 1916, 81–82, and Gordon Nares, ‘Aubrey House, Kensington, The home of the Misses Alexander’, Country Life, 2 May 1957, 872–75; 9 May 1957, 922–25.

59 See NGA, NG7/96/5: letter from Isabel Constable offering a donation of three pictures and a palette, 18 October 1887; NG7/96/6: letter from Isabel Constable presenting three pictures and a palette, 29 October 1887; NG7/106/4: letter from Messrs Clayton & Co announcing Isabel Constable's bequest, 13 September 1888, containing an extract from her will (NG7/106/4(ii)).

60 See NGA, NG7/103/6: letter from Miss Wood offering two pictures which Decimus Burton had wished to bequeath to the Gallery, 18 May 1888; NG6/13/457: letter to Miss Wood, thanking her and asking if she would like them recorded as a gift from herself or as a bequest from Decimus Burton, 5 June 1888.

61 See Susanna Avery-Quash ‘“The volatile and vivacious connoisseur of the old school”: A portrait of the Victorian art dealer Martin Colnaghi (1821–1908) and his relationship with the National Gallery, London’, Colnaghi Studies Journal, 1, 2017, 86–109. Mrs Martin Colnaghi lent five Spanish paintings to the Exhibition of Modern Spanish Art held at the Grafton Galleries, London, between October and December 1914, in aid of the National Relief Fund; see Nigel Glendinning and Hilary MacCartney, eds, Spanish Art in Britain and Ireland,1750–1920: Studies in Reception, Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2010, 62.

62 See NGA, NG14/127/1: acquisition file on Portrait of a Woman, attributed to de Predis and on Catena, Portrait of the Doge, Andrea Gritti.

63 See NGA, NG14/160/1: acquisition file, 20 November 1954–5 October 1956.

64 See obituaries for Linda Murray in The Times, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/lindamurray-mhv65k00mh0 and The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/nov/24/guardianobituaries.obituaries1 (accessed 6 May 2020).

65 Mary Witt was painted by Glyn Philpot; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_by_Glyn_Philpot (accessed 6 May 2020).

66 Sir Robert Witt also gave works to the National Gallery in his name alone; for example, Correggio’s Head of an Angel (NG4067) was presented by him in 1925. Additionally, Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs William Hallett ('The Morning Walk'; NG6209) was bought with a contribution from The Art Fund (Sir Robert Witt Fund) in 1954.

67 Joan Evans’s publications include: Art in Mediaeval France, 987–1498, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948; English Art, 1307–1461, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949; Cluniac Art of the Romanesque Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950 (co-edited with John Whitehouse); John Ruskin: Diaries, 3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956; The Lamp of Beauty: Writings on Art by John Ruskin, selected and edited by Joan Evans, Oxford: Phaidon, 1959; Monastic Architecture in France from the Renaissance to the Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964; Monastic Iconography in France from the Renaissance to the Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. See also Joan Evans, Prelude and Fugue: An Autobiography, London: Museum Press, 1964; Kenneth Garlick, ‘Evans, Dame Joan (1893–1977)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed., 2004).

68 See Susanna Avery-Quash and Julie Sheldon, Art for the Nation: The Eastlakes and the Victorian Art World, London: National Gallery Company, 2011, 202, 204.

69 See Avery-Quash and Sheldon, Art for the Nation, 221. Eliza Eastlake was painted by Edward Poynter in 1864; the portrait now belongs to the Yale Center for British art (B1984.20.1); see Roy C. Strong, The British Portrait, 1660–1960, Woodbridge: Antique Collectors' Club, 1991, 344–45, pl. 343.

70 See NGA, NG7/392/2: letter from Messrs Johnson Long & Co offering on behalf of Mrs S. Long to present the marble bust, 1 May 1911.

71 May Rowley was the daughter of Admiral Charles John Rowley and Alice Mary Arabella Elwes. She is buried in All Saints Churchyard, Botley, Hampshire; see https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/162823628/may-rowley (accessed 6 May 2020).

72 See NGA, NG14/230/1 for the acquisition file.

73 See NGA, NG7/410/2: letter from Lady Carlisle to the Gallery trustees, 14 August 1912, offering to present Alphonse Legros’ Le repas des pauvres, etc. This followed on from her earlier negotiation; see NGA, NG7/395/2 and NG7/395/14, letters from her, dated 7 August and 27 September 1911, regarding the purchase of the Castle Howard Gossaert (NG2790), often referred to as the ‘Castle Howard Mabuse’ a title derived from the artist sometimes being called Mabuse after his birthplace, Maubeuge.

74 John Postle Heseltine presented Francesco d’Antonio di Bartolomeo’s Virgin and Child with Six Angels and Two Cherubim (NG1456) in 1895; Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Portrait of Johannes Feige (NG1925) in 1903, Jan Siberechts’ A Cowherd passing a Horse and Cart in a Stream (NG2130) in 1907; and Anthonie van Borssum’s A Garden Scene with Waterfowl (NG3314) in 1918.

75 Nicholas Penny, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings: Volume II Venice, 1540-1600, London: National Gallery Company, 2008, 198–9. See also NGA, NG7/410/11–17: correspondence with executors and daughter (Helen Lindsay) relating to the bequest, including a list of pictures, six of which were declined.

76 Nicholas Penny, National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Paintings: Volume I, London: National Gallery Company, 2004, 392. See also NGA, NG7/269/5: The female relatives requested that ‘The whole collection to be entitled the “John Samuel Collection”’. They were responsible for the publication of the Catalogue of pictures by Italian masters of the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries collected by John Samuel (1895), the title page stating that the volume was dedicated to Samuel’s memory ‘by his nieces, Anna Louisa & Lucy Cohen’.

77 There is no space in the current article to assess the contribution of women artists who have been appointed National Gallery Artists in Residence or Associate Artists, but we hope to make this a separate future study. The basic data is as follows: women Artists in Residence up to December 2020: Maggi Hambling (1980–81), June Redfern (1985–86), Vivien Blackett (1986–87), Madeleine Strindberg (1988–89), Rosalind Nashashibi (2020–); women Associate Artists up to December 2020: Paula Rego (1989–1991), Anna Maria Pacheo (1997–2000), Alison Watt (2006–2008).

78 See NGA, NG24/1987/12: press cuttings, October 1987–February 1988. See also https://www.eliothodgkin.com/biography-of-eliot-hodgkin/; Adrian Eeles, Brought to Life: Eliot Hodgkin Rediscovered, London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2019; Brinsley Ford, Eliot Hodgkin: Painter and Collector, exhibition at Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, 1990

79 See https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-joyce-plesters-1311884.html. There is more work to be done on the contribution of women staff members over the years into the functioning and outputs of the National Gallery. Zara Moran, National Gallery Assistant Archivist, has begun collecting references to female appointments – from cleaners to curators – in the Board Minutes; we would like to expand this work in the future to encompass other records.

80 See NGA, NG14/185/1: acquisition file, 16 December 1941–10 May 1961, Deeds of gift, dated 16 December 1941, signed by Violet Van der Elst giving The Conversion of St Paul by Karl Dujardin, Saint Sebastian by Cagnacci and The Rescue of Olindo and Sophronia and The Death of Adonis by Giordano to the Gallery after her death; correspondence with Messrs Christie, Manson & Woods regarding Mrs Van der Elst's intention to sell one of the Giordanos gifted to the Gallery in 1955 and its subsequent withdrawal from auction; correspondence with Treasury Solicitor's Office regarding Mrs Van der Elst's request to be released from her intentions in relation to the Dujardin in 1957; correspondence with Phillips Son & Neale (auctioneers), Messrs Evans Baker and Co (solicitors) and Druitt regarding Mrs Van der Elst's subsequent attempt to sell the Giordanos and Dujardin in 1959 and the Gallery's agreement to relinquish their claim to the Giordanos and Cagnacci in order to receive the Dujardin only. See also letter to Messrs Evans, Baker and Co requesting removal of pictures by Alma Tadema and of the School of Rubens which were handed over with the Dujardin but not accepted by the Board, 13 September 1960. Violet Van der Elst has a Wikipedia page.

81 See NGA, NG14/135/1: acquisition file, 15 January 1918–21 May 1974; correspondence, 1918, with Mary James regarding wartime storage of fifteen of her pictures; correspondence, 1948–1949 with Messrs Bailey, Shaw and Gillett, acting for her executors regarding her bequest of thirty-five pictures to the National Gallery to be known as 'The Arthur James collection bequeathed by his Wife' and the Gallery's selection of twelve works; correspondence with Messrs Bailey, Shaw and Gillett, 1954, seeking the permission of Mrs James' executors to transfer the British School works in the James Bequest to the Tate following the separation of the two galleries; NG24/1949/1, press cuttings of August 1949, ‘Bequests and Gifts’: Mary Venetia James.

82 See NGA, NG14/2/1: acquisition file regarding her pictures, 1918–1921; NG7/446/1: letter from the Countess of Carlisle offering to present her Portrait of Lord Arundel by Rubens (NG2968), 5 April 1914.

83 See NGA, NG14/296/1: acquisition file, 26 November 1980–9 July 1981, including letter from Judith Jeffreys, assistant director of the Tate, to Mrs Bleecker explaining that her proposed gift of pictures should be presented to the National Gallery rather than the Tate. See also NGA, NG24/1961/1, press cuttings for January–December 1961; see also the relevant National Gallery collector’s file.

84 Historical connection between America and France in the eighteenth century (most importantly, when the French came to America’s assistance in the latter’s War of Independence) encouraged a taste in America for the arts of France which extended to later periods; see exhibition catalogue America Collects Eighteenth-Century French Painting, Washington: National Gallery of Art, etc, 2017.

85 In addition to numerous articles in periodicals, Emilia Dilke published, under the surname Pattison: The Renaissance of Art in France, 2 vols (1879); French Painters of the Eighteenth Century (1899); French Architects and Sculptors of the Eighteenth Century (1900); French Furniture and Decoration in the Eighteenth Century (1901); French Engravers and Draftsmen of the XVIIIth Century (1902).

86 See NGA, NG5/97/9: letter from Lady Simpkinson regarding her desire to present to the Vernet, 28 June 1853; NG6/2/153: reply to Lady Simpkinson accepting her gift [June 1853].

87 See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/research/research-resources/national-gallery-catalogues/former-owners-of-the-eighteenth-century-french-paintings-in-the-national-gallery-1/consuelo-yznaga-duchess-of-manchester-1853-1909-and-emilie-yznaga-1859-1944 (accessed 6 May 2020); according to Humphrey Wine, Consuelo, who, at the time of her death, owned a number of French eighteenth-century paintings, mainly portraits, bequeathed five paintings to Emilie: a Nattier portrait (probably the portrait of Manon Balletti) and four landscapes by Pillement; and made her a lifetime gift of the Tocqué, described as ‘a portrait of Mlle. De Coislin’.

88 See NGA, NG1/11: Board Minutes, 9 March 1937, which recorded that Emilie Yznaga had ‘signed and deposited in the Gallery a formal Deed of Gift of her collection’. See also NGA NG16/290/71, 79, 84: correspondence between Clark and Yznaga, 1936, 1938, 1939; S333: desiderata file, 1915–1955; see also correspondence between Yznaga and Clark regarding her pictures in the Clark Papers, Tate (ref 8812.1.4.242). Emilie made a will in English form in 1943 confirming the gift; the Gallery only heard of her death in March 1945 (NGA, NG1/12: Board Minutes, 13 March 1945). See also NG14/122a/1: correspondence with Emilie Yznaga regarding her bequest, which includes deed of gift and notice of probate, 13 November 1929–20 June 1945.

89 See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/research/research-resources/national-gallery-catalogues/former-owners-of-the-eighteenth-century-french-paintings/john-webb-1799-1880- and-edith-cragg-died-1925 (accessed 6 May 2020). Edith Cragg is likely also to have owned J.-B. Perronneau’s Portrait of a Man now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (inv. 65.2652) for, according to a receipt in that museum’s files, the painting was once in the collection of ‘Mrs. Cragg, England’; see https://collections.mfa.org/objects/33941 (accessed 6 May 2020).

90 See NGA, NG6/9/350: letter to Robert F. Martin, confirming the Gallery’s decision to accept the picture by Greuze bequeathed by the late Madame Mary Mohl, 1 November 1883; NG6/10/464: letter to Mr Dolman [the Gallery’s framer], 31 December 1884, providing a new inscription the director wanted added to the picture’s frame so that it would state that it was presented by Madame Helmholtz in accordance with the wishes of Madame Mary Mohl (it is as unclear what precise role Helmholtz played). There is a photogravure by Annan and Swan of Mary Mohl in the National Portrait Gallery; see https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp54646/mary-elizabeth-mohl-nee-clarke (accessed 6 May 2020).

91 Quoted in Elizabeth Jay, British Writers and Paris, 1830–75, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 32–34. We are grateful to Tom Stammers for drawing this publication to our attention.

92 See https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/dramastudio/about-judith-wilson/ (accessed 6 May 2020).

93 See NGA, NG23/1990: press release for 5 July 1990.

94 See NGA, NG7/249/2: letter from Mr C.H. Dyason announcing Miss Pilbrow’s bequest of the portrait; and NG24/1900/1: press cuttings for 31 May–25 August 1900, ‘Bequests and gifts’.

95 See NGA, NG5/346/1: letter from Mr J. Cumberlege, requesting that the two pictures bequeathed by Mrs Hodges should be returned to her family, 21 November 1861 (NG151 and NG1878), a request that was declined.

96 NGA, NGA, NG14/151/1; acquisition file: correspondence with Messrs Markby, Stewart and Wadesons regarding the bequest of Beatrice Mildmay of the Hobbema, 1950–1953; correspondence with A.J.B. Mildmay-White, 1992 regarding exempting the picture from death duties, which he understood was only lent to the Gallery by his late great aunt. See also NGA, NG24/1893/3: press cuttings, 10 May–5 July 1893: ‘Art Market: sale of the Mildmay Collection’.

97 NGA, NG14/257/1: acquisition file, 31 July 1953–9 August 1972: initial letter from Esme Cuming Butler, offering her Ruysdael by deed of gift, 31 July 1953; response from the then director Philip Hendy asking Butler whether the picture could potentially be circulated around regional galleries as part of an Arts Council scheme should the work be accepted; letter from Hendy to Butler stating that the Gallery would like to acquire the picture and explains the difference between a deed of gift and a bequest; correspondence regarding arrangements for the writing of Butler's deed of gift; correspondence with Walker Martineau solicitors following the death of Butler on 29 April 1972; correspondence with Walker Martineau solicitors regarding provenance research on the picture; press releases; original deed of gift dated 7 December 1950.

98 See NGA, NG14/294/1: acquisition file; NG24/1981/9: press cuttings, May-August 1981, ‘Bequests and Gifts’.

99 Another painting of this type is Little Girl with a Basket of Cherries by a follower of Marten de Vos (NG6161), bequeathed by Mrs Elizabeth Carstairs in 1952.

100 See https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/reynolds-a-young-black-man-francis-barber-n05843 (accessed 31 May 2020), where information from a gallery label of February 2010 notes that ‘The sitter is thought to be Francis (Frank) Barber (about 1745–1801), the servant of Dr Johnson. Another possibility is that it is Reynolds’s own black servant.’

101 For example, the Countess of Craven’s gift of three portraits all depict relatives of Charles I of England: his sister Elizabeth Stuart and her two eldest surviving sons (NG6362–4). This interest in royal images is reminiscent of the obsession of numerous American women collectors with owning paintings formerly in royal hands, e.g. Mrs Astor owned Boucher’s Toilet of Venus (now Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and Bath of Venus (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), both of which had once graced Mme de Pompadour’s apartments.

102 See NGA, NG7/257/5: letter on behalf of Mrs Charles Wood regarding her wish to present the picture, 29 April 1901.

103 See Campbell, Netherlandish School, 14–15.

104 See NGA, NG7/154/7: letter announcing Lady Taunton's bequest, 3 November 1892.

105 See NGA, NG7/212/12: letter announcing Martha Brown’s bequest, 18 November 1897.

106 Interestingly, the Gallery trustees refused Lyne Stephens’ picture depicting Christ in Limbo attributed to Carlo Dolci. Had her original intention of leaving forty-eight pictures to the Gallery worked out, the Gallery would have acquired other complex theological images, among them The Triumph of the Eucharist and Saint Joseph and the Standing Infant Christ, both by Murillo.

107 See NGA, NG3/5116/1: copy of a letter from Mrs Blennerhassett to the National Portrait Gallery offering NG5116 as a gift to the NPG and NG5115 as a gift to the National Gallery, 17 May 1940; NG14/88/1: acquisition file.

108 See NGA, NG14/100/1: acquisition file, 18 May–15 July 1942.

109 See NGA, NG14/130/1: acquisition file, 18 May 1932–3 July 1961.

110 See NGA, NG7/195/2: letter announcing the bequest, 21 April 1896; NG7/195/3: list of works accepted and declined from the bequest, 17 June 1896.

111 Myers took up photography in 1888, excelling in images of her family and visitors. The National Portrait Gallery has 203 of her photographic portraits, as well as 30 portraits with Myers as the subject; it also has four portraits of Myers by Watts and another five by Millais.

112 See https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/marie-cazin-875 (accessed 6 May 2020).

113 See https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/cazin-evening-n05571 (accessed 6 May 2020).

114 See NGA, NG7/48/5: letter announcing a bequest by Mme de Mohl of a picture by Greuze and a portrait by Mary Smirke that might be suitable for the National Portrait Gallery, July 1883; NG7/48/6: letter from F.W. Martin stating that he will deliver Madame de Mohl's bequeathed pictures to the Gallery for inspection: Greuze (NG1154) and portrait by Mary Smirke; NG7/48/7: letter from F.W. Burton to C.L. Eastlake, regarding the former’s decision to accept the Greuze, 10 October 1883. See also NG6/9/368: letter to George Scharf, director of the National Portrait Gallery, regarding the portrait by Miss Smirke of Mme de Mohl, 13 November 1883; NG6/9/374: letter to Scharf forwarding letters concerning the Mohl bequests, 15 November 1883; National Gallery collector’s file. See also https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp07573/mary-smirke (accessed 6 May 2020).

115 For a short summary of the following appeals and others, see Alan Crookham, The National Gallery: An Illustrated History, London: National Gallery Company, 2009, 75–91 (‘Paramount Pictures’).

116 For a history of the NACF, which was supported by many women from the start, see Saved! 100 Years of the National Art Collections Fund, ed. Richard Verdi, London: Scala, 2003.

117 A number of other Jewish benefactors also contributed funds to secure the Rokeby Venus: Ludwig Mond gave £2,000 and Sigmund Goetz and Edward Speyer both gave £500.

118 Andrea Poole, Stewards of the Nation's Art: Contested Cultural Authority, 1890–1939, 119–22.

119 Poole, Stewards of the Nation's Art, 122.

120 See ‘National Gallery Titian Appeal: Donations and Promises of £100 or over, at 20 March 1972’, The Times, 23 March 1972, 16, where the following names of women appear (some jointly with their spouse): Mr and the Hon. Mrs Geoffrey Agnew; Sir Colin and Lady Anderson; Lady E.N. Barlow; Miss H. Barlow; Mr and Mrs Stanley H. Burton; Mr and Mrs James Byam-Shaw; the Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley; Miss Marion Clark; Miss Jeanne Courtauld; Mr and Mrs A.I. Crawford; Sir David and Lady Evans-Bevan; Mrs E.D. Gibson; Mr and Mrs J.A.B. Joll; Lady St. John Mildmay; Earl and Countess of Perth; Lord and Lady Robbins; Diane Veronica Wedgwood; Miss H. Ursula Williams; Sir John and Lady Witt; and Mrs Francis Wormald. See also ‘National Gallery Titian Appeal: Donations of £100 and over not included in ‘The Times’ of 23 March, 1971’, The Times, 12 July 1972, 14, which adds the following names of women donors: The Roger and Sarah Bancrot Clark Charitable Trust; Mrs M.M. Gaskell, Mrs Ivy Howard’s Art Class; Mr and Mrs Rodrigo Moynihan; Miss Armide Oppé; Mrs Sonia Orwell; Mr and Mrs Osborne-Hill; Wing Commander H.M. and Mrs M.H. Sinclair Charitable Trust; Mr and Mrs Oscar Weiss. See also: NGA, NG69/1/4: lists of donors, December 1971–June 1973; list of donations received before opening of Titian Appeal; daily list of donors, 1 December 1971–10 June 1972; list of donors through the National Arts Collection Fund to the Titian Appeal Fund 1972; list of donations and promises of £100 and over featured in The Times newspaper 23 March 1972 and 12 July 1972. Lists of donations of £1000 and over, 24 April 1972.

121 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/orazio-gentileschi-the-finding-of-moses (accessed 6 May 2020).

122 See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/about-us/press-and-media/press-releases/art-teacher-s-gift-helps-national-gallery-acquire-rediscovered-wilkie-painting; https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/support-us/legacy-awareness-month-wilkies-young-woman-kneeling-at-a-prayer-desk; and https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/support-us/stories-of-legacy-giving?viewPage=3 (accessed 6 May 2020).

123 See Lois Oliver, Boris Anrep: The National Gallery Mosaics, London: National Gallery Company, 2004. See also NGA, files in the Registry series (NG16): NG16/7/1–2.

124 See NGA, NG3/327/1. The Cornfield had been presented by subscribers, including the poet William Wordsworth, the scientist Michael Faraday and the portraitist Sir William Beechey 1837. The painting is now back in the frame it came in – a typical English nineteenth-century frame (fluted hollow) based on a French model. The painting can be associated with two other frames: (i) a French centre corner frame, which was on the picture before it was put back into the English frame, and (ii) a Carlo Maratta type frame, popular in England during the nineteenth century, which was cut to fit the painting at some unknown date. We are grateful to Isabella Kocum for sharing this information.

125 There is a note in one of the bibliographical records that the Harrops were ‘benefactors of the National Gallery’, but no further details are known.

126 The women trustees of the National Gallery (the first was appointed in 1962), in chronological order, are: Dame Veronica Wedgwood, OM, DBE, DLitt; Dr Mary Woodall, CBE, DLitt, FSA; Heather Renwick Brigstocke; Bridget Riley, CBE; Caryl Hubbard, CBE; The Countess of Airlie, CVO; Lady Elizabeth Monck; Paula Ridley; Lady Juliet Tadgell; Professor Dawn Ades; Lady Patty Hopkins; Lady Nicola Normanby; Victoria Barnsley; Patricia Lankester; Lady Anne Heseltine; Caroline Thomson; Hannah Rothschild, CBE; Anya Hurlbert; Monisha Shah; Lisa Milroy; Katrin Bellinger Henkel; Rosemary Leith; Dame Moya Greene, DBE; Prof. Molly Stevens; Tonya Nelson. It would be fruitful to investigate the contributions of the female trustees to the National Gallery.

127 See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/past/sea-star-sean-scully-at-the-national-gallery, an exhibition that was supported by other women donors in addition to Dasha Shenkman: Alexandra Lalonde (and Cyril) Bouygues, (Christian and) Florence Levett, and Angela (and Yanni) Koulakoglou. See also https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/past/tacita-dean-still-life, which also was supported by Florence Levett (and Christian Levett).

128 The Arthur and Holly Magill Foundation has sponsored the following National Gallery Catalogues: Lorne Campbell, The 15th Century Netherlandish Paintings (1998); Dillian Gordon, The 15th Century Italian Paintings – Volume I (2003); Humphrey Wine, The 17th Century French Paintings – Volume I (2002); Nicholas Penny, The 16th Century Italian Paintings – Volume I: Bergamo, Brescia and Cremona (2004); Nicholas Penny, The 16th Century Italian Paintings – Volume II: Venice 1540-1600 (2008); Dillian Gordon, The Italian Paintings Before 1400 (2011); Lorne Campbell, The 16th Century Netherlandish Paintings with French Paintings before 1600 (2014); Giorgia Mancini and Nicholas Penny, The 16th Century Italian Paintings – Volume III: Bologna and Ferrara (2016); Humphrey Wine, The Eighteenth-Century Paintings (2018). The first two catalogues in the new (larger and more scholarly) format were published before the Foundation became involved.

129 Anna Jameson (1794–1860) is arguably the first female art historian in Britain, who, as a friend of Sir Charles Eastlake, did much to promote the old masters as well as museums and art galleries to new audiences including to women. See Susanna Avery-Quash, ‘Illuminating the Old Masters and Enlightening the British Public: Anna Jameson and the Contribution of British Women to Empirical Art History in the 1840s’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 28, 2019, doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.832 and the many publications on Jameson by Edele Ernstrom including her ‘Anna Jameson: the first professional English art historian’, Art History, 6 (1983), 171–87 (published as Edele Holcomb).

130 For instance, Roberta (and Howard) Ahmanson assisted with the costs associated with Monochrome: Painting in Black and White (2017/18); Debbie Brice helped with Castles: Paintings from the National Gallery, London (2020); Elizabeth Cayzer, reflecting her interest in and knowledge of Spanish art, helped with Bartolomé Bermejo: Master of the Spanish Renaissance (2019); Nicola Coldstream helped with Mantegna and Bellini, Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light (2019), and Artemisia (2020); Terry De Gunzberg helped with Making Colour (2014); Fiona Garland helped with Mantegna and Bellini and Titian: Love, Desire, Death (2020); Lady Getty helped with Artemisia; Katrin Bellinger Henkel (and Christoph Henkel) helped with Mantegna and Bellini, Artemisia and Dürer's Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist (2020); the Thompson Family Charitable Trust helped with Artemisia and Nicolaes Maes: Dutch Master of the Golden Age (2020); Regina (and Gregory) Annenberg Weingarten helped with the Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece (2019/20) and Artemisia exhibitions; Miss Maxine White (and Mr James Mortimer) helped with Artemisia and Castles.

131 Dr Anita Klesch and Mr Gary Klesch sponsored the ‘Artemisia Visits’; see https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/artemisia-visits. The venture received additional support from two other women benefactors, Deborah Finkler and the Diane Apostolos-Cappadona Trust in honour of Stacia Apostolos.

132 See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/about-us/press-and-media/press-releases/saved-for-the-nation-bellotto and https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/about-us/press-and-media/press-releases/castles-paintings-from-the-national-gallery-london (both accessed 31 May 2020).

133 For instance, the devout Roman Catholic patron Lyne Stephens contributed financially to religious foundations in Paris and Roehampton in south-west London, and from 1879 funded the construction of one of the largest Catholic churches in England, the Church of Our Lady and the English Martyrs in Cambridge, UK.

134 See NGA, NG7/261/23: letter from Eva Mackintosh to the then director Edward Poynter, regarding her intention to present her painting by Raphael, 5 January 1902; NG7/311/12: letter from Eva Mackintosh offering to present her Raphael, 7 June 1906; NG24/1906/7: press cuttings, 13 June–8 August 1906; NGA1/10/20: notes on the Mackintosh Madonna [c.1866–1874]. See also Cecil Gould, The National Gallery Catalogues: The Sixteenth Century Italian Schools, London: National Gallery Publications, 1975, 218-20, who notes that Eva Mackintosh had lent the picture to the Royal Academy in 1902, a point made earlier in ‘The National Gallery’, Athenaeum, 11 August 1906, 164–5.

135 The other picture the Gallery received in 1973, as part of the bequest of Sir John Heathcoat Amory, is Jan van Goyen, An Estuary with Fishing Boats and Two Frigates (NG6423). See NGA NG14/260/1: acquisition file: correspondence (27 March 1946-28 September 1973) between Sir John Heathcoat Amory and Philip Hendy, discussing Heathcoat Amory’s decision to bequeath works to the Gallery. Lady Heathcoat Amory was left a life interest in the pictures but agreed to send them to the Gallery for security reasons as the works were not insured and the house and grounds were to be given to the National Trust. Sir John died in 1972 and he bequeathed Knightshayes Court to the National Trust. Some of the paintings at Knightshayes passed to the Trust at that point; others were bequeathed on the death of Lady Amory in 1997; see https://landedfamilies.blogspot.com/2014/05/123-heathcoat-amory-ofknightshayes.html?m=0 and http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/results?SearchTerms=Knightshayes+Court&Cate gories=7456ee20fffffe0702132e04e5764fd3. For a portrait of Lady Amory by Mary Eastman, see http://www.nationaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/541069. Another parallel case is that of Mrs Alexander Young, who presented Jozef Israëls’ Fishermen carrying a Drowned Man in 1910 at her husband's wish.

136 For instance: Follower of Anthonis Mor, Portrait of a Bearded Man (NG2295) was bequeathed by George Fielder and received on the death of his widow, 1908; Salomon van Ruysdael, A View of Rhenen seen from the West (NG6348) was bequeathed by Nicholas A. Argenti with a life interest to Mrs Argenti, 1963; and Justus Sustermans, Portrait of a Man (NG3227) was bequeathed by W.W. Aston, 1917, with a life interest to his widow; acquired, 1919.

137 On the commemorative aspect of donations, see Hill, Women and Museums. In her survey, which encompasses many different types of museum, Hill talks about how women form a minority of donors (although this varied between institutions, and women were especially present as donors within university museums); how although there is no strong pattern between the number of married and unmarried women who donate there is a strong pattern of women donating to honour or enhance the reputation of a father, husband or son (page 68): ‘Women engaged with museums as a way of commemorating and asserting authority over the legacies of their male relations; and in several cases, particularly for the widows of artists, such a private practice enabled them to assert a public role as mediator between the deceased and the public.’

138 Women donors who have given paintings in memory of their husbands: Mrs F. Antal (husband: Prof. Frederick Antal); Martha Doris Bailey (husband: Richard Hillman Bailey); Geraldine Emily Coningham (husband: Major Henry Coningham); E.M.E. Commeline (husband: Col. C.E. Commeline, RE); Eliza Eastlake (husband: Charles Locke Eastlake); Elizabeth Eastlake (husband: Sir Charles Lock Eastlake); Mrs Katharine Fox (husband: General Charles Richard Fox); Mrs Gutekunst (husband: Otto Gutekunst); Mrs Harland (husband: Ernest Hartland); Mrs Heseltine (husband: John P. Heseltine); Mary James Mathews (husband: Frank Claughton Mathews); Linda Murray (husband: Peter Murray); Mrs N. Clark Neill (husband: N. Clark Neill); Margaret Watney (husband: Vernon J. Watney).

139 Women donors who have given paintings in memory of their fathers: Misses Cumming (father: Charles D. Cumming, of Epson); Luciana Forti (father: Beniamino Forti). In the case of the Misses Cumming, the paintings were already on deposit first to Sir Charles Holroyd and then to a Mr Holroyd (Sir Charles’s son?) after Sir Charles’s death; Mr Holroyd gave the paintings to the Gallery on the women’s behalf. It is unknown why the paintings were deposited with the Holroyds.

140 Women donors who have given paintings in memory of their sons: Sally Speelman (son: Edward Speelman).

141 Women donors who have given paintings in memory of their brothers: Sybil Cholmondeley (brother: Sir Philip Sassoon).

142 Alice Mary Bleecker, together with a male relative, in memory of her uncle Rudolph Ernst Brandt, gave one painting to the National Gallery in 1962 and two others in 1963.

143 Women donors who have given paintings in memory of their mothers: Geraldine Emily Coningham (? mother: ‘Mrs Coningham of Brighton’) and Isabel Tarratt (mother: Mrs Caroline Tarratt).

144 A women donor who has given paintings in memory of her sister is Miss V. Churchman (sister: I.N. Churchman). See NGA, NG24/1989/12, press cuttings.

145 The five works ‘Presented by Sir Henry Howorth through the Art Fund, in memory of Lady Howorth, 1922’ are: Follower of Jacopo Tintoretto, The Nativity (NG3647); Master of the Castello Nativity, The Nativity (NG3648); Probably by Jacob van Oost the Elder, Two Boys before an Easel (NG3649); Follower of Jan Rombouts, Birth of the Virgin (NG3650); and circle of the Master of the Saint Ursula Legend (Cologne), Saint Lawrence before the Prefect (NG3665). See NGA, NG14/46/1: acquisition file. Henry Howorth had already donated a painting by a follower of Bartholomeus van Bassen, Interior of a Church (NG924) in 1875; see NGA, NG6/4/114: letter to Henry H. Howorth, accepting this gift (then attributed to Peter Neefs), 8 May 1875. His offer in June 1898 of a painting by Gramorsio was, by contrast, refused: see NGA, NG7/226/5. As a second example, we may note that in 1916 Lord Ribblesdale presented John Singer Sargent’s Lord Ribblesdale (NG3044) in memory of Lady Ribblesdale as well as of two sons.

146 See NGA, NG16/290/49 for correspondence with Sir Michael Sadler relating to this gift; NG14/66/1: acquisition file.

147 Sir Claude Phillips also bequeathed a number of paintings to the National Gallery, together with £200 to be divided between the Gallery warding staff (described in his will as Gallery 'police'); see NGA, NG21/11; and NG24/1924/3. His bequest consisted of: Lamentation over the body of Christ by Dossi (NG4032), Saint Bonaventure by Pordenone (NG4038), Saint Louis of Toulouse by Pordenone (NG4039), The Madonna and Child with the Infant Baptist(?) and Saints Paul and Catherine of Siena by Andrea and Raffaello del Brescianino (NG4028), The Interior of a Gothic Church looking East by Steenwyck the Younger (NG4040), The Toilet of Bathsheba in the style of Luca Giordano (NG4035) and Diana and Callisto by Paul Bril (NG4029).

148 The picture was given by F.N. and O.S. Ashcroft ‘in memory of their parents’. Their other gift was subsequently transferred to Tate: Sir Henry Raeburn, A Young Lady (N03882).

149 See NGA, NG23/1991: press release.

150 See the obituary of Erika Langmuir written by Neil MacGregor in the Burlington Magazine: https://www.burlington.org.uk/media/_file/generic/article-41692.pdf (accessed 6 May 2020).

151 For instance, Henri-Joseph Harpignies’ The Painter's Garden at Saint-Privé, 1886 (NG1358) was presented by H. Arthur Robinson in memory of Mrs R.H. Tripp, 1923; transferred from the Tate, 1956. So far, little is known about either about the woman being commemorated or the donor. A more modest donation of two prints is relevant to this part of our discussion: in 1997 two works on paper were ‘Presented in memory of Miss Celia Marsh’ – in the case of Charles Holroyd’s etching Portrait of Nancy Holroyd (H44), Marsh was the artist's niece; in the case of Alphonse Legros’ pencil Portrait of Sir Charles Holroyd (H46), she was the sitter’s niece. Sir Charles Holroyd was director of the National Gallery between 1906 and 1916.

152 See Susanna Avery-Quash and Julie Sheldon, ‘“The pencil is the child of my heart”: A rediscovered album of drawings by Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake’, The British Art Journal, 14: 2, 2013, 45–64.

153 See Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 118–58; Margot Finn, ‘Women Consumption and Coverture in England, 1760–1860’, The Historical Journal, 39: 3, 1996, 703–22.

154 Humphrey Wine notes: ‘On 24 April 1895, however, she made a codicil, making her bequest in effect conditional on HM Treasury levying no estate duty in respect of the collection. Doubtless this, and the loss to the nation of the English part of the Lyne Stephens bequest, were instrumental in procuring the legislation of 1896 giving relief from duty on works of art’; see https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/research/research-resources/national-gallery-catalogues/former-owners-of-the-eighteenth-century-french-paintings-in-the-national-gallery-1/consuelo-yznaga-duchess-of-manchester-1853-1909-and-emilie-yznaga-1859-1944.

155 Women donors listed in terms of numbers of paintings now in the National Gallery’s collection: Misses Cohen (26); Queen Victoria (24); Mrs Joseph H. Green (16); Lady Lindsay (11); Rachel F. and Jean I. Alexander (15); Emile Yznaga and Elizabeth Carstairs (6); Sarah Solly, Judith Wilson, Mary James, Alice Bleecker and Helena Levy (5); Edith Cragg, Mrs Warburg (4); Cornelia, Countess of Craven (3). All the rest of the women donors have given either one or two pictures.

156 On John Samuel (1812–1887) and his collection, see Penny, National Gallery Catalogues: Volume I, 390-93.

157 Queen Victoria was less responsive when asked to lend paintings to the National Gallery from Hampton Court Palace; see NGA, NGA1/1/27/4: draft petition, requesting that a number of pictures at Hampton Court be deposited on loan, including a list of the pictures desired, February 1869; NGA, NG5/403/1, Lord Chamberlain declining loan of pictures from Hampton Court, 26 February 1869.

158 On Joseph Henry Green (1791–1863), see Phillip P. Sloan’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry (https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11393) and John S Sheldrake, ‘Joseph Henry Green (1791–1863): Surgeon, Philosopher and Coleridgean Transcendentalist’, Journal of Medical Biography, 13: 3, 2005, 136–41, https://doi.org/10.1177/096777200501300306. On Green’s art collection, see Campbell, Fifteenth Century Netherlandish Paintings, 14–15.

159 Joint donations by a wife and husband: Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Mr and Mrs Charles Booth-Clibborn, Manny and Brigitta Davidson, Sir Michael and Lady Heller, Mr and Mrs Eliot Hodgkin, Sir Anthony and Lady Hornby, Danny and Gry Katz, Mr and Mrs James Kirkman, Betty and David Koester, Sarah and David Kowitz, Helena and Kenneth Levy, Mr and Mrs Julian G. Lousada, Viscount and Viscountess Radcliffe, Lord and Lady Sassoon, Mrs Sally and Mr Anthony Speelman, Mr and Mrs W.W. Spooner, Mr Anthony N. and Marjorie Sturt, Sophie and Richard Walzer, and Mr and Mrs Charles Wilmers.

160 Joint donations by siblings including at least one sister: Misses Cohen; Misses Alexander.

161 Documents in the archive reveal that on more than one occasion a sculpture was turned down; see NGA, NG7/363/3: letter from Lady Battersea, 4 July 1909, offering to present a lifesize marble statue of Sardanapalus by the American sculptor W.W. Story (refused).’

162 See NGA, NG14/125/1; acquisition file.

163 See NGA, NG14/130/1: acquisition file.

164 NGA, NG6/2/42: letter regarding the bequest of Mrs Hodges, 2 March [1852]. The trustees declined a picture by ‘P. Nasmith’.

165 See NGA, NG6/9/294: letter confirming that two pictures bequeathed by Mme Mohl had been declined, 10 October 1883.

166 See NGA, NG7/410/16-17: letters regarding collection of pictures not selected from the Lady Lindsay bequest, 23 and 27 November 1912. See also NGA, NG6/11/591, an earlier letter from the trustees to Lady Lindsay, declining her offer on the grounds of lack of space for hanging in the galleries, 8 February 1877.

167 For a summary of Edith Cragg’s bequests to the V&A, see The Times, 1 June 1925, 13.

168 See https://www.vam.ac.uk/search?q=Yolande+Lyne-Stephens+&astyped=#in_objects (accessed 6 May 2020).

169 See https://collections.vam.ac.uk/search/?q=Sybil,%20Marchioness%20of%20Cholmondeley (accessed 6 May 2020).

170 See http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O360090/cover-unknown/ (accessed 6 May 2020).

171 See http://www.ryeartgallery.co.uk/collection-artists/202/claude-muncaster (accessed 6 May 2020): Claude Muncaster, Lighters Returning from Venice to Murano, 1956 (acc. Mun1).

172 See http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O121884/ring-unknown/ (accessed 6 May 2020).

173 See https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/art-artists/name/isabel-constable (accessed 6 May 2020).

174 See NGA, NG7/163/13, 15-16: letters from Miss Tarratt of October and November 1893 regarding NG1393.

175 The transferred work is Sir Thomas Lawrence, Isabel Smith, called Munia, Nurse to the Angerstein Family, about 1800 (Tate, T00768). See NGA, NG14/230 and https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lawrence-isabel-smith-called-munia-nurse-to-the-angerstein-family-t00768 (accessed 6 May 2020).

176 See NGA, NG14/113/1: acquisition file.

177 See NGA, NG3/1952/1: letter from Ruth Edwards bequeathing the picture in Fantin Latour’s memory, 4 September 1904. See also NGA, NG3/1952/5: photograph of Mrs Edwards with the double-portrait by Fantin-Latour in the background, presented by Sir Charles Sherrington, 1934; and NG3/1952/7: another photograph of Mrs Edwards presented by Sir Charles Sherrington, 1934.

178 See Sarah Herring, National Gallery Catalogues: The Nineteenth Century French Paintings: Volume 1: Barbizon School, London: National Gallery Company, 2019, 174–76.

179 Cited from her will, of which there is a copy in her National Gallery collector’s file.

180 See Maria Alambritis, ‘Modern Mistresses on the Old Masters: women and the writing of art history, 1860–1915’, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of London, 2020; and ‘Old Masters, Modern Women’, special issue of 19., edited by Maria Alambritis, Susanna Avery-Quash, and Hilary Fraser, https://19.bbk.ac.uk/issue/116/info/ (accessed 6 May 2020).

181 For example, as a result of this research project, the date on the credit line for NG1892 has been changed from 1843 to 1845, on the authority of the Gallery’s Inventory, which gives ‘1845’ as the date of acquisition (and Princess Sophia Matilda’s death date of 1844).

182 See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/support-us/legacy-awareness-month-wilkies-young-woman-kneeling-at-a-prayer-desk and https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/support-us/legacy-awareness-month-bellottos-fortress-of-konigstein-from-the-north (accessed 6 May 2020).

183 We highlighted this approach when the Gallery posted tweets in May 2020 incorporating information and links which reunited Isabel Constable’s gifts of paintings to the National Gallery, Tate and V&A, as part of an AHRC project, ‘#collectionsunited’, itself an initiative to raise awareness of the ‘Towards a National Collection’ programme, which is a ‘major five year £18.9 million investment in the UK’s world-renowned museums, archives, libraries and galleries. The programme will take the first steps towards creating a unified virtual “national collection” by dissolving barriers between different collections – opening UK heritage to the world.’ See https://ahrc.ukri.org/research/fundedthemesandprogrammes/tanc-opening-ukheritage-to-the-world/ (accessed 31 May 2020).

184 See Louise Richter, ‘The Mond Collection for the Nation’, The Connoisseur, 66, 1923, 130; Louise Richter, Recollections of Dr. Ludwig Mond, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1920; Thomas Adams, ‘Gifts to the Nations: Ludwig Mond’s Art Collections in London and Rome’, in Transnational Philanthropy, Palgrave Macmillan: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-29127-7_3 (accessed 30 May 2020).

185 For instance, Gallery records note that the two following picture were ‘Bought with contributions from the Benson family and the Art Fund, 1927’: Philips Koninck, An Extensive Landscape with Houses in a Wood and a Distant Town (NG4251) and Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a Woman inspired by Lucretia (NG4256). It would be interesting to tease out who the family members were; given the subject of the Lotto painting, it seems reasonable that one or more women may have been involved.

186 https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2020/11/avery-quash-and-riding.pdf.

187 This is the case, for instance, with Barbara Ackroyd, Denise Antenen and Joyce Evelyn Judd.

188 Pauline Matthews was awarded an OBE in 1979 for services rendered to the Dyfed Area Health Authority; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_Birthday_Honours (accessed 23 January 2024).

189 Interestingly, since the Gallery’s foundation over a quarter of the collection has been acquired the result either of financial gifts or bequests of paintings made by private individuals.

190 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/about-us/press-and-media/press-releases/legacy-of-stockton-french-teacher-allows-national-gallery-to-purchase-first-max-pechstein-painting (accessed 23 January 2024). Martha Bailey has been the subject of a feature in The Sunday Times, see Liam Kelly, ‘Gallery lands £6.75m from a French teacher’, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/national-gallery-lands-6-75m-from-a-french-teacher-zgv2xrbzw (accessed 23 January 2024).

191 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/about-us/press-and-media/press-releases/painting-by-abraham-bloemaert-acquired-by-the-national-gallery (accessed 23 January 2024).

192 See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/about-us/press-and-media/press-releases/the-national-gallery-acquires-poussin-s-eucharist-showing-the-last-supper-from-his-first-cycle-of-pictures-of-the-seven-sacraments#:~:text=It%20can%20be%20viewed%20in,of%20the%20'Seven%20Sacraments' (accessed 1 April 2024).

193 Relevant to note here is the fact that a previous owner of the painting was the important female art collector and gallery owner, Camille Felicie Leroux (1875–1953) in 1952. According to ongoing research by Sarah Herring, French genealogy searches clarify that she was the first wife of Louis César Haudebert (1879–1932), son of painter and lithographer Auguste Léon César Haudebert (1851–1914), known as Léon Hodebert, who died at Neuilly-sur-Seine. Louis César, who also used the name of Hodebert, took over the Galerie Barbazanges at 198, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris in 1923. Camille Felicie Leroux is probably the Camille Hodebert listed in the 1926 census as an ‘antiquaire’ (listed as married, and as born 1875 in Eure-et-Loir, which corresponds with her birth certificate) in the Faubourg Du Roule, Paris. In the 1920s she seems to have run the Galerie Hodebert at 134, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré (it does not seem to have been in existence in 1930). What is worth noting here is that the Gallery's most recent acquisition at the time of writing (September 2024), Lawrence Alma Tadema's After the Audience, was likewise purchased thanks to the generosity of the same three women whose legacies enabled the acquisition of the Eva Gonzales.

194 NG3259 was acquired by the National Gallery with the Sir Hugh Lane Bequest of 1917, in partnership with Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin. See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/edouard-manet-eva-gonzales.

195 Suzanne Bosman, The National Gallery in Wartime, London: National Gallery Company, 2008.

196 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/support-us/leave-a-legacy/pauline-matthews-legacy-gift-manod (accessed 23 January 2024).

197 Obituary for Felicity Owen (1926–2019), The Times, 4 June 2019, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/felicity-owen-obituary-5q5vbd99f (accessed 23 January 2024).

198 Obituary in The Times, 4 June 2019.

199 For further details of the Beaumont Gift, see https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/people/sir-george-beaumont (accessed 23 January 2024). See also John Constable’s painting, Cenotaph to the Memory of Sir Joshua Reynolds, erected in the grounds of Coleorton Hall, Leicestershire by the late Sir George Beaumont, Bt., of 1833–6, bequeathed by Miss Isabel Constable as the gift of Maria Louisa, Isabel, and Lionel Bicknell Constable, 1888 (NG1272); see https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/john-constable-cenotaph-to-the-memory-of-sir-joshua-reynolds (accessed 17 April 2024).

200 Felicity Owen and David Blayney Brown, Collector of Genius: A Life of Sir George Beaumont, New Haven, CT: The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1988. The exhibition at the National Gallery took place from 3 February to 3 May 1988. She contributed to the exhibition catalogue, Noble and patriotic: The Beaumont Gift, 1828, London: The National Gallery, 1988.

201 For financial legacies received by the Gallery from women since 2020 in date order: 2020: Miss Denise Antenen (died 2019); Mrs Felicity Cynthia June Owen (died 2019); Miss Jennifer Ann Pinney (died 2020); Mrs Joyce Evelyn Judd (died 2020); Mrs Lorna Rosemary Philips (died 2020); Miss Gladys Williams (died 2016); Ms Barbara Anne Ackroyd (died 2018). 2021: Miss Gillian Cleaver (died 2019); Miss Ann Margaret Douglas (died 2021); Ms Elizabeth Sebok (died 2021). 2022: Ms Maureen Margaretta Wilson (died 2022); Ms Frances Patricia Hill (died 2021); Mrs Martha Doris Bailey (died 2000); Ms Dorothy Kathleen Scruton (died 2021); Dr Sheila Margaret McNicol Brownlie (died 2021). 2023: Ms Dorothy Kathleen Scruton (died 2021); Pamela Berwyn Davies (died 2021); Ms Joy Nalpanis (died 2022); Miss Denise Antenen (died 2019); Miss Valerie May Williams (died 2022); Mrs Joyce Evelyn Judd (died 2020).

202 See https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1973-0616-12 (accessed 23 January 2024). For links to further items donated to the British Museum through Felicity Owen’s generosity, see https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/term/BIOG40836 and for the entries for the drawings by the three female artists see https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1998-0314-9, https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1998-0314-27 and https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1998-0314-10 (all accessed 23 January 2024).

203 Interview with anonymous legacy pledger, conducted by Ken Burnett for the National Gallery, 16 June 2016.

204 See preceding note.

205 Correspondence from the sons of Eileen McAllister to the National Gallery, 15 April 2024.

206 Letter from Peter Hayes to Michael Levey, 21 April 1983.

207 See https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/support-us/leave-a-legacy.

208 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/national-gallery-lands-6-75m-from-a-french-teacher-zgv2xrbzw.

209 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/support-us/leave-a-legacy/digital-memorial-book (accessed 23 January 2024). N.B. As a rule, names are usually added to the Memorial Book when the full legacy from the donor has been received.

210 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/adolph-menzel-afternoon-in-the-tuileries-gardens (accessed 23 January 2024). The credit line reads: ‘Bought with the assistance of the American Friends of the National Gallery, London, the George Beaumont Group and a number of gifts in wills, including a legacy from Mrs Martha Doris Bailey in memory of her husband Mr Richard Hillman Bailey, 2006.’

211 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/max-pechstein-portrait-of-charlotte-cuhrt (accessed 23 January 2024).

212 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/abraham-bloemaert-lot-and-his-daughters (accessed 23 January 2024).

213 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/nicolas-poussin-eucharist (accessed 1 April 2024).

214 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/eva-gonzales-the-full-length-mirror (accessed 20 April 2024).

215 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/sir-thomas-lawrence-charles-william-lambton (accessed 23 January 2024).

216 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/alvise-vivarini-virgin-and-child (accessed 23 January).

217 https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/lovis-corinth-portrait-of-dr-ferdinand-mainzer (accessed 23 January 2024).

13. Acknowledgements

Our grateful thanks to Nicholas Smith, Rupert Shepherd and Hugo Brown for their help with sharing data from the National Gallery’s archive and collections information system in preparation for this article, and to other colleagues Rickie Burman, Emma Capron, Alexandra Davis, Jonathan Franklin, Daniel Herrmann, Larry Keith, Isabella Kocum, Priyesh Mistry, Peter Schade, Katy Scrivener and William Shaw for supplying information from other internal sources about the Gallery’s female benefactors past and present. We are grateful to Maria Alambritis, Charlotte Avery, Emma Barker, Caroline Campbell, Gabriele Finaldi, Hilary Fraser, Sarah Herring, Marika Spring, Tom Stammers and Imogen Tedbury for reading an earlier version of the main article and offering helpful comments. We are likewise grateful to Meredith Loper, Legacies and Appeals Manager at the National Gallery, for her assistance in gathering certain facts for the Postscript. Thanks are due too to Charlotte Eaton, the Gallery’s Solicitor, for guidance over legal matters relating to the Postscript.