Yevonde: Life and Colour

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In the early 1910s, while looking through the suffragette newspaper Votes for Women, Yevonde Philone Cumbers came across an advertisement seeking a photography assistant. Her curiosity was piqued: she had been determined to find a career, believing it would aid the women’s movement, and photography was an important tool in creating suffragette propaganda. Soon, Cumbers (or Madame Yevonde, as she was called) was studying under the tutelage of Lallie Charles, at the time Britain’s most commercially successful woman portraitist. In 1914, she set up her own studio in London, in a building shared with the Women’s Institute, thus beginning a photography practice that would span over six decades. The British photographer Yevonde was a businesswoman and tireless creator; as an innovator committed to color photography when it was not considered a serious medium, her work is significant in the history of portrait photography. Yevonde’s portraits embody glorified tradition countered with a desire for the new; her most renowned body of work is a series of women dressed as goddesses posed in surreal tableaux from the 1930s. Yevonde championed photography during a time when there were few women photographers working professionally, and this book tells the story of her life, her works and her 60-year career. Yevonde: Life and Colouris on display at the National Portrait Gallery, London until 15 October 2023. However, a personal disinclination for suffragette lawbreaking (and the prison sentence that would likely follow) led her to champion women’s emancipation via a different route. The National Portrait Gallery, London, reopens in June following a three-year closure for the “ largest redevelopment” in its 127-year history. Its opening exhibition, Yevonde: Life and Colour, will be the most comprehensive to date on British photographer, Yevonde Middleton (1893-1975).

Portraiture comes in every medium at the NPG, from toby jug to daguerreotype, church sampler to public statue, marble bust to digital print. A barely used rotunda has now become an eerie gallery of death masks – the London trees outside cast their fluttering reflections on the bronze face of Oliver Cromwell, strangely outsize even in death. The life mask of Marc Quinn, cast in 10 pints of his own blood, has so deteriorated with the decades as to stand as its own presage of death. John Gielgud as Richard II in Richard of Bordeaux by Yevonde (1933). Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery At the same time, Yevonde was excited to discover that a few studios were beginning to explore the new process, despite feeling that their preoccupation with achieving naturalistic colour rendered everything “astonishingly unattractive”.Extraordinary lives are rediscovered – the Georgian boxer Jem Belcher, the Victorian miniaturist Sarah Biffin, born without arms or legs. The hang is so democratic, it unites servant with mistress and raw recruit with general on the same level. The wall texts are all enthralling knowledge. a b c d "Middleton [née Cumbers], Yevonde Philone [known as Madame Yevonde]". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) Dwyer, Britta C. (13 November 2006). "The Zinkeisen sisters – Great Scotswomen (from The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women)". Heritage & Culture. Edinburgh University Press. Archived from the original on 7 August 2007 . Retrieved 17 April 2010. You are immediately in the here and now – and the great feat of this renewal is to sustain that effect from first to last. Visitors ascend by escalator to the Elizabethan court, where the queen appears surrounded by her many male champions, all briefly captured in stupendous portraits before their respective executions or fall from grace. Round a corner, you are confronted by funeral monuments, spotlit in dramatic darkness.

Rare and profoundly significant’: the Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare, associated with John Taylor, circa 1610. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery, LondonYevonde: Life and Colour is supported by The CHANEL Culture Fund, and builds on Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture, a major partnership project that aims to enhance the representation of women in the Gallery’s Collection. Yevonde shot onto three negatives through filters to create a separation image ready for printing. Her Vivex colour Carbro-type prints were made at the first colour print service for professional photographers in the UK. The exhibition will undoubtedly serve as an introduction to Madame Yevonde’s work for most visitors, but she wasn’t unknown during her time. In 1932, she had her first solo exhibition at the Albany Gallery in Mayfair, London, which was met with warm reception. Five years later, MoMA included two of her images in a photography survey: color pictures documenting the construction and interior decoration of the ocean liner RMS Queen Mary. The composition of one of these works, RMS Queen Mary, Funnel (1936), is strikingly modernist, with geometric lines and forms reminiscent of Alfred Stieglitz’s The Steerage (1907)—if The Steerage were richly saturated with shades of red. Madamde Yevonde, RMS Queen Mary, Funnel, 1936 Madame Yevonde, Mask (Rosemary Chance), 1938 A suffragette and lifelong supporter of women’s rights, Yevonde opened her first studio in London in 1914, aged just 21. In a career spanning more than six decades, her portraits, still life, and commercial work straddled the genres of narrative art, Modernism, mythology, and Surrealism. From her teens, Yevonde was an advocate of women’s suffrage and was active in the Women’s Social and Political Union, the militant wing of the suffrage movement, from 1909.