If each of us could choose the time and place of our birth – the when and where – I would guess the list of those opting for “1822, Whitechapel” would not be a long one. Notorious for centuries as the most deprived and dangerous area of London, Whitechapel would reach its pinnacle of infamy sixty-six years hence for the serial murders committed by Jack the Ripper, but though he had yet to be born (in another ghetto a thousand miles away in Poland) the grim conditions needed to propagate his Autumn of Terror were already in place.
Whitechapel, circa 1890
It was into this impoverished environment that Arthur Wood was born. Luckily for Arthur, his father was a hardworking man who, by 1840, had managed to drag his young family out of East London to set up home in the more cheerful environs of Charing Cross, enabling his son to go to school and study law. By the time he turned fifty, Arthur Wood was a successful barrister living in suburban Islington with his wife and four daughters. Arthur Wood’s success afforded his girls the sort of opportunities denied to the seventy-six thousand people still struggling just to stay alive back in Whitechapel.
Like so many young middle class Victorian women, Catherine, Emily, and Ursula Wood chose to study art but unlike some they possessed real talent, especially the youngest daughter Ursula who, in 1886, was accepted at the prestigious St. John’s Wood Art School. Here she became a pupil of its founder Abelardo Alvarez Calderón, and of two Royal Academicians in William Frederick Yeames (painter of ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’) and Lawrence Alma Tadema, an illustrious and rigorous trio who certainly put their pupils through it.
Students at St. John’s Wood Art School, circa 1890
This was no part-time sketching class for the amusement of young ladies of leisure. The students at St. John’s Wood worked from 10am to 5pm, Monday through to Saturday, initially focusing on drawing from the Antique (typically Greco-Roman sculpture) before moving on to still life and miniature painting, and finally to the drawing of life models. The school also attached great importance to its classes on perspective and composition, at which Ursula Wood always excelled.
Although her two elder sisters had talent it was Ursula who was the real star, not only of the Wood family but of her year at St. John’s Wood. Following the lead of the established London academies run by Henry Sass and Thomas Heatherley, the principal aim of the college was to prepare its most promising students for entry into the Royal Academy Schools. Ursula Wood passed her probationary exam and became a fulltime student of the Royal Academy in 1888. During her time at Burlington House she won the Turner Medal, the first time the honour had ever been awarded to a woman and, in 1890, made her debut at the annual Royal Academy Exhibition where she would continue to have her work shown for the next three decades.
‘Amor et Pietas’ by Ursula Wood (1896)
The painting is now available to purchase and can be viewed at our Gallery page.
Of all the paintings Ursula Wood exhibited in her long and successful career none would garner more praise than a large subject picture painted specifically for the Royal Academy Exhibition in the summer of 1896. ‘Amor et Pietas’ (in this secular context meaning “love and compassion” in Latin) depicts a group of six Victorian children standing in a walled garden about to lay to rest their pet dog. The title is carefully chosen and deliberately grandiloquent. The Latin phrase amor et pietas has its roots in the devotional art of the Renaissance and can be seen carved into the extravagant marble tombs found in the Vatican necropolis; they are not usually applied to the back garden burial of a humble pet. But of course, that is the point. The artist’s message is clear; the death of a beloved little dog should be no less important to a loving God than the passing of a Pope. A beautifully composed autumnal scene, ‘Amor et Pietas’ was subsequently selected for the prestigious Victorian Era Exhibition held at Earl’s Court in 1897 celebrating the finest artistic achievements of Queen Victoria’s reign.
In both her art and her personality, there is more than a hint of Frank Holl about Ursula Wood. One of the most gifted artists of Victorian Britain (elected a Royal Academician in 1883, aged 38), Holl was the foremost exponent of mid-19th century Social Realism. He was a man of genuine conscience whose paintings reflected his compassion for those degraded by poverty and other misfortunes. Holl’s skill and sincerity reverberates in the paintings of Ursula Wood. Although the children in ‘Amor et Pietas’ are unmistakably middle-class, Wood’s ability to convey their great love for and devotion to their dog reminds me very much of the feeling present in Frank Holl’s paintings of working-class children, not least in the latter’s first important painting, ‘A Mother and Child’.
‘Amor et Pietas’ by Ursula Wood (detail, left). ‘A Mother and Child’ by Frank Holl (right).
‘A Mother and Child’ by Frank Holl is from my own collection.
Begun in 1862 when Holl was himself a student at the Royal Academy Schools, ‘A Mother and Child’ was the first painting by the artist to be exhibited in London and was subsequently purchased by one of Victorian Britain’s wealthiest art patrons William Whitworth Schofield. Just as the mother in Holl’s picture comforts her ailing child, so the children in Wood’s painting cradle the lifeless body of their pet, until very recently a lifelong playmate, loving companion, and family member. We presume that this is the children’s first experience of mortality, if so the artist ensures that it is a moving and beautiful one.
If Ursula Wood was able to pursue a career as an artist because of her parents secure financial position, it was due to their progressive attitude to women’s education and personal ambitions that allowed her to do it without pressure to find a husband. Nevertheless, she was a young woman in what was still an old man’s world and, although by no means “nameless and friendless”, she no doubt had to circumnavigate the prejudices and preconceptions of the time. The late Victorian art world was run by, and principally for, men and although women were now able to study in many of London’s foremost academies their teachers were still men and even the pictures they painted – and entered in exhibitions exclusively for female artists – were judged by men. I think, in part, this accounts for Ursula Wood’s particular interest in painting women and not just in their traditional roles of wife and mother.
‘Nameless and Friendless’ by Emily Mary Osborn (1857). Not the fate of Ursula Wood but no doubt a painting that struck a chord with her and the many talented young female artists at St. John’s Wood Art School in the 1880s.
Images courtesy of Tate Britain
Ursula Wood was a woman’s woman and at a time when young women of a certain class were beginning to explore their independence and the possibilities unmarried life presented. For instance, a house without a husband (or any male presence) allowed women of independent means to show sisterly support to others who might need it. The 1911 national census reveals that Ursula Wood and her widowed mother had opened their home to Ursula’s 87-year-old spinster aunt and to two young female artists, Florence Lendrum and Rosabella Drummond (and another young French women who was probably the latter’s girlfriend).
Three years later, war broke out in Europe and Ursula Wood was presented with what must have felt like both a dilemma and yet at the same time Hobson’s Choice. Temporarily closing her studio in Camden (thereby effectively putting her professional career as an artist on hold) she volunteered for the Women’s Forestry Corps, one of the three divisions of the Women’s Land Army. The Corps – also known as ‘The Timber Girls’, or ‘The Lumberjills’, and rather appositely ‘The Wood Girls’ – played a crucial role in supplying the British Army and its allies with the timber needed for building barracks and prefabricated military HQ, munitions and food supply crates and of course gun stocks, ships, and aircraft. Her chance to serve the war effort also came with an unprecedented opportunity to sketch women at work and doing the kind of jobs they had never been called upon to do before and in unique circumstances.
Three of Ursula Wood’s sketches of the Timber Girls (circa 1916)
Images courtesy of the Imperial War Museums, London
Whilst working at the forestry camp in Wendover, forty miles outside London, Wood continued to draw and paint when time allowed. Her “models” were her comrades and the sketches she made of them at work and play once again evidence the quality of her figural drawing and flair for composition. My favourite is of the girls night off in the Old Banqueting Hall, at nearby Hatfield Palace. As in the commonplace burial of a little dog, Wood again finds great significance in an apparently insignificant event. What at first appears to be a simple scene of the girls taking a moment to forget their duties as they dance (with great abandon) to music from a gramophone player is transformed by the spectral presence of Elizabeth I. It was whilst under house arrest at Hatfield Palace that Elizabeth learned of her accession to the throne. What could be more appropriate than having the woman who brought peace and prosperity to England present to witness modern women similarly stepping-up in the nation’s hour of need.
‘Girls of the Women’s Forestry Corps, dancing to a gramophone’ by Ursula Wood (circa 1916). The detail (right) shows Queen Elizabeth I watching on.
Images courtesy of the Imperial War Museums, London
After the war, the (all male) management committee of the Imperial War Museums initially showed little interest in acquiring these charming and historically important works of art but thankfully recognition of their significance finally sank-in and they were bought for the nation. Just another example of the establishment struggling to overcome their prejudices and recognise the work of a female artist. For her talent and qualities as a modern woman, Ursula Wood should be remembered today as both a fine painter and a significant figure in the struggle for gender equality.
Between 1890 and 1922 Ursula Wood exhibited twenty-eight paintings at the Royal Academy and many others at the Society of Women Artists (of which she was a founder member), the Royal Scottish Academy, the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, Whitechapel Gallery, the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, and the Victorian Era Exhibition. Today, pictures by Ursula Wood can be found in the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum, and Manchester City Art Gallery.
‘Amor et Pietas’ is now available to purchase and can be viewed at our Gallery page.
by Gavin Claxton
© Academy Fine Paintings Ltd 2024