MARY HEADLAM (1874-1959)
An Artist Rediscovered
28th November – 23rd December 2024
PRIVATE VIEW
6-8pm Thursday 28th November
The exhibition is published online to coincide with the private view.
The recent wave of interest in women artists has, rightly, done much to establish a balance in the way their work is appreciated alongside that of men. Once well-known names have been revived, lesser-known names brought to the fore. But for a considerable body of work by a little known woman artist to come to light – not just one or two works by an obscure hand – is incredibly rare.
Mary Headlam was the subject of a small exhibition at Sheffield City Art Galleries in 1983, curated with great foresight by the late Anne Goodchild. But since then nothing of Headlam’s work has been seen beyond the walls of her family’s homes. There is little evidence of her existence online, no art market records of her work, nothing listed on ArtUK, nothing in ‘The Dictionaries’ …
Fittingly, this exhibition has come about off the back of our 2023 exhibition of works by Gwen Raverat, another fascinating woman artist who Mary Headlam knew well. A further connection came via her father, Admiral Sir John Corbett (1822-1893), whose topographical watercolours we have handled and who is the subject of a new book by David Peretz, Corbett’s great-grandson and Headlam’s great-nephew. It is thanks to David and his family that this exhibition is happening.
Mary Headlam trained at the Slade from 1892-1896, crossing over with both Gwen John (1876-1939) and Edna Clarke Hall (1879-1979). Her work is marked by that distinctive and extraordinary command of line that can only have come out of that place, at that time, and under the tutelage of Henry Tonks (1862-1937). Beyond the Slade, Headlam was part of a circle of highly educated women artists and writers that included the Syrett sisters. She was a regular exhibitor at the N.E.A.C. in the early years of the Twentieth Century, the vast majority of her output being illustration and landscape. But Headlam’s work was for the most part a private occupation and she sold very little. The result is that we are blessed with a good body of work with which to build a picture of the artist from the bottom up. Essential to this sifting, sorting, researching and understanding has been Alison Thomas. Her trailblazing book Portraits of Women, Gwen John and Her Contemporaries (Blackwells, 1994/6) made her the natural person to ask to tackle this new subject. We are hugely indebted to her for writing the introduction to Headlam’s life and work which is printed at the bottom of this page.
THE EXHIBITION
All works come from the family of the artist and are sold framed and mounted. For the purposes of this webpage we have divided the works into roughly chronological categories with very brief introductions to each. We encourage you to read Alison Thomas’s introduction at the bottom of this page once you have familiarised yourself with Headlam’s work.
STUDY DRAWINGS
Circa 1896/98
When Headlam joined the Slade in 1892 it already had its reputation for teaching outstanding draughtsmanship. Making copy drawings was an integral part of an artist’s education. But these were probably made at the end, or just after, Headlam’s time at the Slade, on a trip to Italy c.1896/98 with her mother and eldest sister. They show Headlam paying close attention to individual figures and figure groupings by Raphael, and to the powerful composition of Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement. This combination of exceptional draughtsmanship and expressive power marks Headlam’s work throughout her life.
PEOPLE and PLACES
Circa 1900 – 1945
Headlam’s portraits date to the early years of the century and are all of close friends and family. Of particular note below are portraits of two of the Syrett sisters (Nos. 7 and 9), and the self-portrait (No.22). Fascinatingly, Headlam’s figure studies and landscapes tend to cross over with her works of the imagination. See, for example, the portrait of a woman in a Westminster flat (No. 14 ) and her designs for ‘The Rose and the Elf’ (Nos. 38, 39 and 44). Similarly, her treatment of landscape, such as her views on the River Dart, could pass for otherworldy lands of fairy tale rather than topography…
Included below are drawings of most of the places that were important to Headlam during her life. Her mother moved to Cambridge after the death of her father in 1893. Headlam was already enrolled at the Slade by this point, so while Cambridge became a significant place – her brother was also a Fellow at Kings College – London was by then her home. In her early years of marriage she lived between Westminster and Hampshire, and then between Westminster and Sussex. After her husband died in 1936 she travelled to Jamaica, the light and colours having a lifelong effect on her. She moved to a flat overlooking Chelsea Physic Garden on her return from Jamaica but left London during the Blitz and moved to Kingswear, Devon. She stayed there until 1954, retuning to London for the final years of her life.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Circa 1905
Headlam was a child of the great age of British illustration and it seems it was always her intention to put her skills to this end rather than pursuing a career as a painter. In 1903 Lawrence and Bullen commissioned her to illustrate Netta Syrett’s The Magic City and other Fairy Tales, and in 1905 John Lane commissioned her to illustrate James Hogg’s Kilmeny. But most of her illustrative work is for Hans Christian Andersen. Sadly, no Andersen edition illustrated by Headlam was ever published, and despite producing a wealth of work in the first decade of the century, she did not produce more illustrations until the 1920s.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Circa 1925 – 1935
Headlam returned to illustration with gusto in the mid-1920s, stopping only with the death of her husband in 1936. Her subjects were again dominated by Andersen, and indeed many of her designs were direct continuations of those she had been working on c.1905. But in contrast to her earlier work, these drawings were influenced by her discovery of Samuel Palmer – rather than illustrations of the late nineteenth century – and were for the most part intended to be made into prints.
ETCHINGS and WOOD-ENGRAVINGS
Circa 1925 – 1935
Headlam made some etchings earlier in the century (Cf. No. 23) but almost all of her prints relate to her illustrations of c.1925-c.1935. Clearly intent on filling a gap in her technical knowledge she joined Graeme Sutherland’s printmaking class at Chelsea School of Art. Like Headlam, Sutherland was influenced by Palmer at this date, so the classes must have provided inspiration as well as practical information. Headlam first made etchings, but by the early 1930s she had moved to wood-engraving, seen by many as a more appropriate medium to sit alongside text – exemplified by the wonderful private press publishers of this date – and therefore the natural choice of the illustrator. The death of Headlam’s husband in 1936 brought to an end any aspirations she had of being a professional artist. So, while she continued to draw voraciously, making many beautiful landscapes after this date, her illustration all but stopped.
MARY HEADLAM
An Introduction
by Alison Thomas
‘Restraint makes for depth. Reserve for strength’
Shen Tsung Ch’ien, 1781
Mary Headlam’s work belongs to the Romantic tradition in British Art. There is a restrained, reflective quality in much of Headlam’s work that mirrors that of her own quiet life, lived at a gentle pace enabling her to give thoughtful attention to the insights and observations that provided her inspiration. Headlam worked on a small scale, favouring watercolour, pen & ink and pencil. This small scale, if anything intensifies her personal vision, one which sustained her throughout her working life.
Mary Headlam was born in 1874 at Horstead Hall Norfolk, the seventh of the nine children of Admiral Sir John Corbett (1822-1893) and Georgina Grace Holmes (1840-1918). Her father had inherited Horstead Hall some years before Mary’s birth. Headlam’s childhood, passed in the East Anglian landscape, nurtured a love for the natural world that would be expressed throughout her life in her work. John Corbett was himself an accomplished amateur painter who regularly drew and painted the ships, shores and seascapes encountered on his voyages. He encouraged his daughter’s artistic talent, probably giving Mary her first drawing lessons. His own artistic skills had been developed as a practical accomplishment during his naval training.
In 1892 Mary began four years’ formal art training at the Slade School of Art London; then one of the few British art schools that accepted female students on the same terms as male. Students spent the majority of their time drawing from life models, progressing to painting when judged sufficiently advanced. At the end of her second year Headlam was given an award for advanced drawing from the antique and, in the following year, gained further awards for Figure Drawing and Painting. Little work survives from Headlam’s student years, but the influence of her Slade training is evident in the superb draughtsmanship which underpins all her subsequent work.
During the decade following her studies Headlam was much occupied by illustration. Her appetite for which may have arisen from her friendship with the Syrett sisters who formed part of a fin-de-siècle London based community of authors and artists. Netta Syrett was a prolific author writing for both adults and children, while her sisters Nellie, Mabel and Kate worked as illustrators as well as variously designing fashionable fans, fabrics and costumes. Headlam’s friendship with the Syrett sisters had originated with Nellie, her fellow student at the Slade.
In 1903 Headlam received her first commission from the publishers’ Lawrence and Bullen. This was for a set of illustrations for Netta Syrett’s ‘The Magic City and other Fairy Tales’. Two years later John Lane published an edition of the shepherd-poet James Hogg’s ‘Kilmeny’ embellished with her drawings. In both volumes Headlam’s delicately fluid illustrations perfectly capture the ethereal sense of the other worlds into which readers are led by princesses and fairies. In 1905 Headlam’s work also appeared in an anthology of children’s stories, plays and poems entitled ‘The Dream Garden’. This had been compiled by Netta Syrett and to which many noteworthy Edwardian authors and illustrators had contributed. For it, Headlam illustrated Christina Denning’s ‘Fluff’, a delightful tale of a rebellious princess who, when thwarted in her wishes, transforms herself into a cat – Fluff. Headlam chose to depict the scene of the princess’s wedding morning when, exasperated by the tiresome attention of her maids and hairdresser, as Fluff she slips away leaving her wedding gown abandoned on the floor. It is perhaps possible to interpret this story of the transmuting princess as a subtle comment on young women attempting to free themselves from the stifling conventions of the era. Nothing is known of Headlam’s views on the matter but during this period she was living independently of her family in a series of London studio rooms.
Headlam’s involvement with illustration coincides with the so called ‘Golden Age of Illustration’: specifically the last quarter of the nineteenth century and up until the First World War when the publication of high quality illustrated books proliferated; a time when Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Walter Crane and Kate Greenaway were established as the country’s leading graphic artists. Though Headlam undoubtedly would have known their work her affinities lay elsewhere. Headlam’s illustrations, populated by princesses and maidens with equally flowing robes and hair, are much closer in spirit to the work of the Pre-Raphaelites and particularly to the singular visions of Rossetti and Burne Jones.
Headlam also illustrated many of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories. She was particularly drawn to tales that involved psychological drama such as that of a mother lamenting her dead son in ‘The Child’s Gravé’, or that of a Queen’s subjects desperately searching her kingdom for the ‘Loveliest Rose in the World’ to revive their sovereign as she lies on her death bed. Headlam tried, unsuccessfully, to interest a publisher in a volume of the Danish writer’s stories furnished with her illustrations. It may well have been that at that time the market was already saturated with collections of Anderson’s stories. In 1895 and again in 1899 George Newness had published lavishly illustrated collections. Nevertheless, Headlam’s proposed illustrations were seen on the walls of the prestigious New English Art Club where she exhibited regularly until her marriage.
On the 14th June 1906, at St Botolph’s Church in Cambridge, the then Mary Corbett married Horace Headlam, a civil servant later to become Director of the Public Records Office. After her father’s death in 1893 Headlam’s mother had moved to Cambridge to live with Mary’s elder brother William, a mediaeval Historian and Fellow of King’s College: the famous chapel became the subject of many of Headlam’s drawings. The couple had probably met through Headlam’s brother’s extensive Cambridge academic connections, indeed one of William’s colleagues at King’s College was Horace’s elder brother Walter, a Fellow in Classics. Mary and Horace Headlam were to enjoy thirty years of contented married life together. They inhabited a Westminster flat close to the Public Records Office, but spent much time in the Hampshire and Sussex countryside. Shortly after their marriage they commissioned the construction of an elegant Arts and Craft’s style house at Bramshott in Hampshire. Tragically however, on Armistice Day 1918, the building was destroyed by fire. Subsequently the couple removed to West Chiltington in West Sussex, a few miles from the town of Steyning where Headlam’s brother George was the local physician. The landscape around both dwellings frequently featured in Mary’s work, typically the local orchards, the dense woods of the South Downs and the ancient monument of Chanctonbury rings.
Although Headlam produced the occasional cityscape made from the windows of her Westminster flat, it was with the natural world that her real sympathies lay. The evocation of that natural world, first evident in her illustrations, found full expression in her frankly romantic landscapes. Headlam’s landscape watercolours display confident descriptive drawing softened with a single tonal wash, lending the finished work something of an ethereal dream-like quality. She presents us with a focused individualistic view of the natural world such as, for example, a forest clearing surrounded by thick tangled undergrowth of briar and honeysuckle, or a majestic centuries old oak tree illuminated by a shaft off sunlight penetrating the canopy of an ancient woodland.
Headlam’s response to the English landscape is influenced by the painting of Samuel Palmer whose spell she fell under in the late 1920s. It seems highly likely that she would have seen the Victoria and Albert’s 1926 exhibition entitled ‘Drawings, Etchings and Woodcuts by Samuel Palmer and other Disciples of William Blake’ which reestablished Palmer’s reputation after he and his work remaining largely neglected for half a century. Headlam’s family recall her spending long hours studying reproductions of Palmer’s drawings and etchings. Perhaps it was Palmer’s influence that led Headlam to decide to take up printmaking herself. The discipline of etching well suited Headlam’s use of line and love of intricate detail. It was probably no coincidence that she chose to join an etching class run by Graham Sutherland at the Chelsea Art School. Sutherland too was one of the generation of painters and printmakers who had fallen under Palmer’s spell. At this time he was producing etchings of pastoral subjects as did Headlam. Typical is her ‘Autumn’ which enchants with its fruit laden apple trees glowing in a slanting evening light, while others, such as that of a lone ploughman preparing the fields for spring planting or a shepherd gathering his flock as evening falls, evoke a timeless vision of rural life that Palmer would have recognised.
By the early 1930s Headlam’s print production had expanded into wood engraving. It is possible that her friend Gwen Raverat had introduced her to, and perhaps also tutored her in the technique. Raverat and Headlam had known each other since the1890s when Headlam’s mother had moved to Cambridge, at one time living next door to Raverat’s parents. Raverat was a leading figure of the wood engraving revival of the early twentieth century. Most of Headlam’s surviving wood engravings are re-workings of the illustrations that she had made for Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales during the early 1900s. Raverat’s success as a book illustrator may have encouraged Headlam once again to interest a publisher in a volume of the Danish writer’s stories using her illustrations. In the event, however, Headlam’s print making activity ceased with the intense grief she felt at the unexpected death in March 1936 of her husband from tetanus. He was then sixty eight years of age. .
During their shared years together, Mary and Horace Headlam had regularly travelled overseas, mostly to Europe but several times further afield such as to Cairo after Mary’s sister Margie had married a colonial judge. The couple also went once to India to visit Margie’s twin brother Jack and two other of her brothers; all employed in the subcontinent. Seeking solace in her grief at Horace’s passing, Headlam embarked at the end of 1936 on a further overseas visit to Jamaica accompanied by her niece Margaret. The exotic tropical landscape bathed in brilliant sunlight proved a revelation to Headlam. Soon the pages of her sketchbooks were filled with broad sweeping drawings and watercolours of the luxuriant vegetation covering the hillsides above the inland town of Mandeville, and of coastal views around Port Antonio. These sketches, with their blue washes heightened with pearly pinks and creams hint at a familiarity with Edward Lear’s watercolours of Greece and the Middle East.
Initially, after her return to England, Headlam based herself in London where she overlooked and frequently painted views of the renowned Chelsea Physic Garden, often in springtime. Again these works reveal the lingering influence of the ‘Seer of Shoreham’, most particularly in her unexpected use of dabs of candy-pink pigment to depict abundant cherry blossom, just as Palmer had done when painting his own garden. In 1941 however, and possibly as the result of one night during the wartime Blitz on London when the area surrounding her flat was badly bombed, Headlam moved to live permanently at Kingswear in Devon where her brother George and his wife were then living. Here, in a flat perched high above the river Dart, well away from the destruction being wrought on London, Headlam regained a sense of tranquility and found a new subject for her painting. The River Dart, with its steep densely wooded banks and the ruined Dartmouth castle downstream became a landscape that Headlam came to know intimately. Its features were assembled and reassembled by her in subtly different compositions. She preferred to paint in the early morning or late evening, drawn to the poetic potential of the half light of dawn and dusk. Characteristically, Headlam would complete detailed pen and ink drawings with unifying washes of delicate colour, thereby infusing each work with a distinctive, somewhat mystical quality, a hallmark of her work. These sensitive interpretations of the Devon landscape hint at the sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich and Turner, the latter of whom Headlam is known to have greatly admired.
In 1954 Headlam’s brother George died and Headlam returned to London after which she seems to have stopped working, She settled in Chelsea where for the last five years of her life she lived in a flat in Warwick Square. She died on 16th March 1959 aged eight five years, largely unrecognised as the visionary that she undoubtedly was.
Alison Thomas, September 2024