16 Facts About Bertha Newcombe

Bertha Newcombe was an English artist and suffragist.

Bertha Newcombe exhibited works in the French naturalist style in the Paris Salon and at the Society of Lady Artists and the Royal Academy in London, with some critical success.

Bertha Newcombe was born in Lower Clapton, Hackney, London, on 17 February 1857.

Bertha Newcombe was the author and editor of children's educational books.

At the age of 19, Bertha Newcombe attended the Slade School of Art in London, where the French painter Alphonse Legros had recently taken over as professor of drawing, painting and sculpture.

Almost twenty years later Bertha Newcombe returned to the Slade with the writer Alice Stronach when they were preparing an article for the magazine The Sketch.

In 1884, The Times felt that 'In the drawing "Home at Last", Miss Bertha Newcombe has given us perhaps the best piece of work that she has yet accomplished in her very French manner,' and the Morning Post the following year explained that she has 'endeavoured to follow in the footsteps of French painters of rural scenes.

Bertha Newcombe had continued to exhibit with the Society of Lady Artists throughout the 1880s, and at the Royal Academy from 1882.

Bertha Newcombe continued to exhibit a few paintings, but channelled her interests in art into the commercial illustration of books and magazines.

Bertha Newcombe was not in love with me, in the usual sense, or at any rate as he said only for a very short time.

Bertha Newcombe's mother died in 1905, and she exhibited at the Royal Academy for the last time in the following year.

Bertha Newcombe's parents had supported women's suffrage, and her mother, Mrs Hannah Hales Newcombe, had been treasurer of the Croydon branch of the National Society of Women's Suffrage in 1873.

In 1909 Bertha Newcombe was on the NUWSS's executive committee.

Bertha Newcombe was fully committed to the unglamorous realities of political campaigning: fund-raising, personal financial contributions, propagating the NUWSS's message through the sale of its newspaper, Common Cause, and playing a role on organising committees.

That Bertha Newcombe was an artist was only of minor relevance to her activism.

Bertha Newcombe was 55, Mabel 50, and by the 1920s they were living at Petersfield in Hampshire.