The Suffragette is a series of paintings based on historical photographs and related readings that are part of the archive at the Museum of London and various related online sources and books. The series starts with portraits of some of the historical figures from the 19th century who influenced the movement in Britain directly or indirectly, and concludes with portraits of the suffragettes themselves and their political adversaries and spouses. There are 65 paintings (2011-2023).
The influencers’ portraits include: Frederick Douglass, an American abolitionist, who toured Britain on speaking engagements in 1845, Ida B. Wells, who visited in the late 1900’s was active in the American civil rights movement for African Americans, Louise Michel, a French feminist and anarchist, Henri Rochefort, a French journalist and noted polemicist, Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant, Anglo/Irish landowner and British MP, Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx, Richard Pankhurst, family patriarch and socialist and Keir Hardie, a trade unionist, socialist, Labour Party co-founder, Labour MP, a pacifist and supporter of women’s suffrage.
The suffragette’s portrayed include: the principal co-leaders of the WSPU, Emmeline Pankhurst and her eldest daughter Christabel, followed by Mrs. Pankhurst’s two other younger daughters, E. Sylvia Pankhurst, and Adela Pankhurst and they are in turn are followed by just a sampling from the thousands of women activists who would come to comprise the WSPU fraternity: Annie Kenney, Flora Drummond, Mabel Capper, Mary Leigh, Edith New, Emily Wilding Davison, Grace Roe, Mary Richardson, Una (Dugdale) Duval, Daisy Dugdale, Grace Olive Walton, Grace Macron, Margaret Scott, Florence Jane Short, Margaret Mcfarlane, Olive Hockin, Mary Blathwayt, Teresa Billington Greig, Marion Wallace Dunlop, Lady Constance Georgina Bulwer-Lytton, Dame Ethel Mary Smyth, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrewnce and her husband Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence.
The political adversaries list consists of: Queen Victoria 1819-1901, King Edward VII 1901-l910, King George V, 1910-1936, Prime Minister Henry Campbell Bannerman (1905-1908), Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, Countess Margot Asquith, Beatrice Venetia Stanley, David Lloyd George, cabinet minister and ring leader of the party progressives, and his first wife Dame Margaret Lloyd George followed by Lady Frances Lloyd-George, who was his secretary and mistress for many years, and after Margaret died, became his second wife, Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, Home Secretary with his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, Lady Clementine Ogilvy Spencer-Churchill, spouse of Winston Churchill, Reginald McKenna, Home Secretary.