Maud Joachim’s Hunger Strike Medal comes to Glasgow Women’s Library

Silver and enamel hunger strike medal awarded to Maud Joachim in 1909. Acquired by Glasgow Women’s Library in 2023 with a grant of £13,200 from the National Fund for Acquisitions, funded by the Scottish Government.

In September, Glasgow Women’s Library launched a public fundraising appeal to enable us to purchase a hunger strike medal awarded to suffragette Maud Joachim in 1909 by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). The medal, previously in a private collection, was up for auction at Bonhams in London on 3rd October 2023.

Hunger strike medal awarded to Maud Joachim

Maud Joachim was arrested, with the claim that she had, “conducted herself in a disorderly manner and committed a breach of the peace” in Dundee on 20 October 1909, along with Adela Pankhurst, Helen Archdale, Catherine Corbett and Laura Evans. They had interrupted a meeting led by Winston Churchill the day before, 19 October, by leading a crowd and shouting “This way! Votes for Women!” When interviewed later, Churchill called them “a band of silly, neurotic, hysterical women”. Maud went to prison where she was released after a four day hunger strike.

We knew that raising the money for a successful bid for Maud’s medal would be a challenge, but we did it! Media coverage in The Guardian and on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour helped, and the response was overwhelming.

Our winning bid was £32,500 and, with buyers’ premium of £9,100, the total cost was £41,600. With a grant of £13,200 secured from the National Fund for Acquisitions, we fundraised a massive £28,500, with 544 people donating. This is exceptional crowd-source fundraising, and we would like to thank everyone who donated for their generosity.

We were also thrilled to be contacted by several members of the Joachim family who lent their full support to our campaign and are delighted that Maud’s medal is now in the collection at Glasgow Women’s Library.

Sue John collecting the medal from Bonhams

With my Co-Director Adele Patrick, we collected the medal from Bonhams on 11 October. It was a privilege to finally hold Maud’s medal – such a small and humble item, but with huge significance in suffrage history. It was an emotional moment and a reminder of the bravery of generations before us. Maud’s medal will be treasured at Glasgow Women’s Library – a symbol of resolve, hope, celebration and activism in the past, present and into the future.

We can now see the inscription on the back of the horizontal purple, white and green bar, confirming that Maud was force fed on 1 March 1912, during another period of imprisonment.

The medal bar ‘Fed by Force 1/3/12’

On 19 October 2023, exactly 114 years after disrupting Churchill’s meeting in Dundee, we pay tribute to Maud, and to all other courageous suffrage activists who endured violence, abuse, humiliation, intimidation and imprisonment so that women could vote.

Sue John                                                                                                                                                  Director of Operations, Resources and Enterprise                                                                                Glasgow Women’s Library

https://womenslibrary.org.uk/

Another McMenace

Denise the Menace costume designed and worn by Ellie Diamond for an appearance on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK. Acquired by Leisure and Culture Dundee in 2021 with a grant of £3,000 from the National Fund for Acquisitions, funded by the Scottish Government.

© Dundee Art Galleries and Museums, DC Thomson & Co Ltd. Image by GSR Photographic

To celebrate the 80th birthday of Beano in 2018, The McManus gave the best present it could and became … The McMenace. It seems only fitting that the museum continues to earn its stripes from Beano’s most cherished wild child. But in 2020 there was a new kid on the block …

Red and black stripes? Check!

Mad mop of black hair? Check!

A trusty sidekick in the form of a black-and-white dog? Check!

Move over Dennis because Ellie Diamond is serving up some Denise realness.

Dundee’s very own drag queen, Ellie Diamond, sashayed onto screens in the first episode of the second series of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK as Denise the Menace. In response to the challenge ‘Queen of Your Home Town’, Ellie wanted to celebrate Dundee’s rich history through her love of comics. It really shouldn’t come as any surprise that we were very keen to acquire the outfit and, thanks to the National Fund for Acquisitions, we successfully purchased it from Ellie.

Ellie made the outfit herself from material bartered from a local haberdashery (Dennis would be proud). Not able to find an appropriate Gnasher, she spray-painted a white dog and glued in some joke-shop teeth (again a move that her name-sake would wholeheartedly approve).

But beyond the fun of the acquisition, on a deeper level it allowed the museum to acquire and represent an area of the collection that had not previously been openly showcased in our history exhibits – LGBTQ+ voices and experiences. Thanks to funding from Museums Galleries Scotland, we were able to purchase a bespoke mannequin to display the outfit in all its glory. We fully acknowledge that this is just one element in the huge rainbow of LGBTQ+ collecting and that we have a lot more to do to make our displays more inclusive and representative of our City. But as a first step, we think we’ve earned a coveted RuPeter badge on our stripes.

© Dundee Art Galleries and Museums, DC Thomson & Co Ltd, Ellie Diamond. Image by Alan Richardson

Carly Cooper
Curator (Social History)
Leisure and Culture Dundee
https://www.leisureandculturedundee.com/culture

Key Novel by a Woman Ahead of Her Time

First US edition of Nan Shepherd’s novel The Weatherhouse (1930) with a rare inscription by the author. Acquired by University of Aberdeen Museums & Special Collections in 2022 with a grant of £750 from the National Fund for Acquisitions, funded by the Scottish Government.

Key Modernist. Influential Scottish writer. Trail-blazing feminist. The author Anna ‘Nan’ Shepherd (1893-1981) could lay claim to being all three.

Nan was a native of Cults, Deeside in Aberdeenshire. She graduated from the University of Aberdeen in 1915 and spent most of her professional life as a lecturer in English at Aberdeen Training Centre for Teachers (later the College of Education). A busy post-retirement career saw Shepherd edit the Aberdeen University Review and lend support to many emerging Scottish talents, such as Marion Angus (1865-1946) and Jessie Kesson (1916-1994).

A passionate and life-long devotee of hill-walking in the Cairngorms, Shepherd was the author of the acclaimed memoir The Living Mountain. Seamlessly blending autobiography and evocative descriptions of the landscape, it was completed in 1945 and finally published in 1977. She was also an accomplished poet and the author of three novels.

The Weatherhouse (1930), Shepherd’s second novel, has been described by Roderick Watson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Stirling, as ‘by far her most complex and subtle achievement’. Set in the fictional North-East Scotland community of Fetter-Rothnie, like all Shepherd’s work it draws heavily on a keen sense of observation. The story traces the interactions of a cast of mostly female characters in the aftermath of the First World War, and how their lives are impacted by the return of men from the Front. The book reflects Nan’s own experience as an unmarried woman, at a time when female status was still defined within the maxims of a patriarchal society.       

Thanks to assistance from the National Fund for Acquisitions, the University of Aberdeen Museums & Special Collections has just acquired a fine copy, in its original dustjacket, of the first US edition of The Weatherhouse, published by E P Dutton & Company, New York. There is an inscription from Shepherd to her housekeeper, Mary Lawson, on the front flyleaf. Nan cared for both Lawson and her own mother in old age until their deaths.  

Nan Shepherd’s stone, Makar’s Court, Edinbugh. Photo by Stefan Schäfer, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Shepherd was recognised in 2000 with a commemorative paving slab at Edinburgh’s Makars’ Court, bearing a line from her novel The Quarry Wood: ‘It’s a grand thing to get leave to live’. As testament to her enduring influence, Shepherd’s portrait and this quotation also feature on the current Royal Bank of Scotland £5 note.

Dr Keith M C O’Sullivan
Senior Rare Books Librarian
University of Aberdeen

www.abdn.ac.uk/collections

A Chippendale Secretaire Lost for 50 Years

Mahogany secretaire, designed and made between 1775 and 1779 by Thomas Chippendale Snr (1718-1779) and Thomas Chippendale Jnr (1749-1822). Acquired by the Paxton Trust in 2022 with a grant of £19,000 from the National Fund for Acquisitions, funded by the Scottish Government.

Mahogany secretaire, designed and made by Thomas Chippendale Senior and Junior, on display at Paxton House. © The Paxton Trust. Photography by Nick Haynes.

This outstanding mahogany secretaire, or writing desk, designed and made by the master cabinetmakers Thomas Chippendale Senior and his son, also called Thomas, was commissioned by the enslavers Ninian and Penelope Home for their recently-purchased home, Paxton House in the Scottish Borders. Based mainly on the Caribbean Island of Grenada, they owned or part-owned two plantations in Grenada and one on the island of Mustique. Ninian, who became Lieutenant-Governor of Grenada in 1792, was murdered in Fédon’s Uprising in 1795.

The secretaire open, showing the drawers and pigeonholes. © The Paxton Trust. Photography by Nick Haynes.

The couple visited Scotland intermittently, buying Paxton from Ninian’s uncle, Patrick Home, in 1773. Between 1774 and 1791 they filled the house almost exclusively with furniture from the Chippendale firm. Ninian required writing furniture in nearly every room in the house to conduct his estate business. This unique secretaire is beautifully constructed with multiple pigeonholes and drawers for filing documents, and a discrete fold-down secretaire drawer. Exceptionally, this piece retains not only the marbled paper-lined trays in the base that were a signature Chippendale feature, but also fragments of the original baize dust covers which protected the documents held within. The secretaire is made from highest quality Jamaican mahogany cut down by enslaved African people clearing tropical rainforest for plantations. The Homes made enough money from the sugar, cocoa, and coffee grown by around 450-500 enslaved African labourers to commission this piece and the interiors of the Drawing Room and Dining Room from Chippendale and Robert Adam (1728-1792). The Chippendale furniture collection at Paxton House, one of the largest in the world, is of national and international importance.

Chippendale secretaire with a model representing Ninian Home in replica 1780s costume, seated on a 1786 Chippendale chair and holding replica lists of enslaved people at Waltham, Grenada. © The Paxton Trust.

The secretaire was continually in use by the family at Paxton House until 1970 when it was sold and ended up in private collections in the USA. The acquisition of this masterpiece has been supported with generous grants from the National Fund for Acquisitions, the Art Fund, The Chippendale Society, and the Museums Association’s Beecroft Bequest. A private donor kindly supported additional costs including transportation and conservation. The vendors, Kevin Kleinbardt and Ahna (Hogeland) Petersen of Yew Tree House and Clinton Howell, generously reduced the sale price to support the return of the secretaire to its original home.

The secretaire is now displayed at Paxton House, in the room for which it was made, within the context of a new permanent exhibition, Caribbean Connections and Slavery, developed in partnership with Descendants, an African and Caribbean group. It also features in an online trail accessed via https://paxtonhouse.co.uk/news/sugar-slavery/. The exhibition and trail launched on 4 June 2022, the 30th anniversary of Paxton House opening to the public. Both have been supported by grants from the Museums Association’s Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund and Museums Galleries Scotland.

Dr Fiona Salvesen Murrell
Curator
The Paxton Trust

www.paxtonhouse.co.uk

The Testament of Alexander Jaffray

Manuscript testament of Alexander Jaffray (1614-1673), dated Kingswells 29 April 1673. Preceded by three addresses/epistles dated February 1672, March 1671 and December 1670 (revised November 1672). Acquired by Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives in 2022 with a grant of £5,000 from the National Fund for Acquisitions funded by the Scottish Government.

Original documents that shed light on religious belief in seventeenth-century Scotland are extremely rare. The testament of Alexander Jaffray is an extraordinary example of an individual articulating their moral and spiritual viewpoint at a time of significant change within society.

Manuscript testament of Alexander Jaffray, c1673

Along with its wider religious significance, Jaffray’s civic connections make the document of particular historical importance to Aberdeen; born into a prominent family, his father was a Provost of the city while Alexander was himself twice Provost, in 1649-50 and 1651-52. He represented the city in the Scottish Parliament between 1644 and 1650. In 1649, and again in 1650, he was one of six commissioners deputed to liaise with the exiled Charles II in Holland, while in June 1653 he was summoned from Scotland, with four others, to sit in the Little Parliament.

Educated at Aberdeen High School and Marischal College, Aberdeen, Jaffray’s religious beliefs changed during his lifetime, reflecting the religious upheaval of wider society. On the moderate wing of the Covenanters after 1638, his contact with Oliver Cromwell and his chaplain, John Owen, resulted in his views on religious liberty being significantly broadened. After his career in civic and public life came to an end in 1661, he became a significant religious leader and thinker, developing a particular affinity with the Quakers and joining their body in Aberdeen in 1662.

Although far from numerous during the 1660s and 1670s, it is likely that there were more Quakers in Aberdeen at that time than anywhere else in Scotland. Together with their Catholic counterparts in the burgh, they became the focus of significant repression and persecution after 1662. Several of the leading lights within the Aberdeen Quakers, including Alexander Jaffray himself, were former magistrates or magistrate’s wives. This made their break with traditional Protestantism all the more galling for those who remained within the established church and who perceived the very presence of the Quaker community as an affront to authority.

It is Jaffray’s thoughts around Quakerism that are contained within the testament, which is preceded in the manuscript by a number of letters to friends in the Quaker community both in England and Scotland. While Jaffray’s memoirs between 1650 and 1661 were rediscovered and published in 1833, they relate mainly to his political life and do not cover his deliberations on Quakerism. Consequently, the present manuscript is a unique record of his thoughts on the subject and his connections to the cause.

The acquisition was also supported by a grant of £5,000 from the Friends of the National Libraries.

Phil Astley
City Archivist
Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives

https://www.aberdeencity.gov.uk/services/libraries-and-archives/aberdeen-city-and-aberdeenshire-archives

Family Ties – A Story of Love, Loss and Reconciliation

Oil painting on canvas, Portrait de Lorna Marsali Woodroffe Lang, born Forbes-Leith (1893-1975), signed and dated 1916, by Philip Alexius de László (1869-1937). Acquired by the National Trust for Scotland (Fyvie Castle) in 2020 with a grant of £20,000 from the National Fund for Acquisitions funded by the Scottish Government.

The National Trust for Scotland was able to acquire a very important painting for Fyvie Castle in Aberdeenshire in November 2020, made possible by the kind assistance of the National Fund for Acquisitions and Art Fund.

Lorna Marsali was born in 1893 to Ethel-Louise Forbes-Leith and her husband Sir Charles Rosdew Burn, who adopted his wife’s surname when she inherited Fyvie Castle from her father, Alexander Lord Leith of Fyvie. She spent her childhood at Fyvie in the North East of Scotland. In 1913 Lorna Marsali’s grandmother, Marie-Louise Lady Leith of Fyvie, commissioned the portrait from a family friend, Philip Alexius de László, portrait painter to the nobility and British Royal Family.

Eager to be useful when the First World War broke out in 1914, Lorna enlisted as a volunteer nurse at a hospital in her father’s former family home, Studely Knowle in Devon. It was during this mission, already considered daring by her family, that she fell in love with Captain Frederick Conyers-Lang. They created a scandal by eloping, marrying in London in 1916 against the advice of her family. Several sittings had taken place for the portrait before it was completed that year.

Unfortunately, Lang’s fickle reputation was borne out and the marriage was not a happy one. In 1933, then a mother of two and more strong-willed than ever, Lorna divorced Lang and remarried the same year. Her new husband, Colonel George Prior, had known Lang at Sandhurst and there is a suggestion that he had pursued Lorna before she eloped with Lang. Passionate about horses and racing and rejecting the hectic social life of London, Lorna settled at her country estate, Fishleigh House. On the death of her husband she moved to Thorpe Mandeville Manor where she died in 1975.

Although her family forgave Lorna shortly after the elopement and welcomed her back to the fold, the painting was never hung at Fyvie as intended, passing by descent to Lorna’s granddaughter who eventually sold it. Having been listed in the de Laszlo Archives Trust as ‘untraced’ since its commission, its provenance is now confirmed. The family connection endures since the painting has united cousins who did not know of one another’s existence until the portrait came to light.

Vikki Duncan
Curator North
National Trust for Scotland

https://www.nts.org.uk/visit/places/fyvie-castle

Collecting the pandemic: Covid folk art from India

Five artworks on the theme of the Covid-19 pandemic by Indian folk artists, acquired by Glasgow Museums in 2020 with a grant of £1,107 from the National Fund for Acquisitions, funded by the Scottish Government.

Odisha Pattachitra in the Oriya Pattachitra style, Stay Home, by Apindra Swain. © The Artist (Image © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection).

A multi-disciplinary team from Glasgow Museums, Glasgow City Archives and Glasgow Libraries Special Collections has been working over the last twelve months to document the Covid-19 pandemic, collecting a wide range of objects encompassing social history, contemporary art, transport, world cultures, documentary photography, archives and paper ephemera. Everything acquired will go into Glasgow’s civic collections to represent and help future generations understand this time of crisis. Part of our proposal for contemporary collecting around the Covid-19 pandemic was to look beyond Glasgow at the global response. We were inspired by media coverage of Indian folk artists who were using their art as a means of describing their initial response to the pandemic. In partnership with Delhi-based Minhazz Majumdar, Curatorial and Cultural Advocacy Services, we acquired a capsule collection of Covid-themed Indian folk art as a record of the earliest artistic responses to the global impact of the pandemic and supported folk artists otherwise unable to work. We were fortunate to be able to collect these first responses and Glasgow Museums was the first UK institution to acquire such works.

Bengali patua narrative scroll by Bahadur and Rupsona Chitrakar. © The Artists (Image © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection).

Rajasthani Phad painting by Kalyan Joshi. © The Artist (Image © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection).

Throughout India, folk artists have been responding to the Covid-19 crisis in multiple ways, interpreting the pandemic according to their particular culture and tradition. The lockdown and loss of the tourist and pilgrimage markets mean that many are simply struggling to feed their families, but others have used the time, space and their artistic traditions to create awareness about the disease. It was decided to collect Covid-themed examples of high-quality works by known artists from the same traditions represented by those in our existing collection. We have therefore selected an Odisha Pattachitra in the Oriya Pattachitra style, entitled Stay Home by the artist Apindra Swain, a Bengali Patua scroll by Rupsona Chitrakar and her father Bahadur Chitrakar (brother of Gurupada Chitrakar), a Rajasthani Phad painting by Kalyan Joshi and a Kachni style of Madhubani painting from Bihar, probably by the artist Heera Kant. We also commissioned a tribal or Adivasi Warli piece by Rajesh Chaitya Vangad as this iconic tradition is an important omission from our current collection. Vangad’s work has multiple narratives that have been woven together much like the spider’s web depicted here. The prominent story is about the pandemic and its impact on mankind, but within this narrative are woven Warli environmental stories, issues around globalisation and Warli life lessons.

Kachni style Madhubani painting from Bihar by Heera Kant. © The Artist (Image © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection).

Adivasi Warli painting by Rajesh Chaitya Vangad. © The Artist. (Image © CSG CIC Glasgow Museums Collection).

Covid did impact on the logistics of the project in ways we could not always predict. Lockdowns in both India and the UK affected the transportation of the works, our ability to communicate with the artists, the ability of the artists to acquire some of their traditional materials, the physical examination of the works in India and the processing of works in Glasgow. We responded by being as flexible as possible regarding timelines and materials, such as allowing non-traditional mill-made paper and commercial inks and paints, and by communicating entirely via social media. We have all adapted to these new ways of working and in this case the additional effort was worth it. As well as acquiring five new commissioned artworks of national significance for Glasgow Museums’ collections, when taken in conjunction with other historical documentation they will serve as a visual record of a particular cultural perspective during an unprecedented global crisis.

https://www.thehindu.com/entertainment/art/when-indian-folk-art-finds-a-viral-muse/article31707869.ece
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-52464028

Patricia Allan
Curator of World Cultures
Glasgow Museums

Uisage Beatha Galore!

Bottle of whisky recovered from the wreck of SS Politician, acquired by the Scottish Maritime Museum in 2020 with an NFA grant of £7,579.

As a curator I am occasionally called upon by the press to provide my “professional opinion” on interesting maritime items due to appear at auction or that have become newsworthy in some other way.  So when I was contacted by a reporter from USA Today to comment on the sale of a bottle of whisky recovered from the shipwreck of the SS Politician, I was excited to share what I knew about the 1941 wreck and the infamous cargo of whisky it carried. 

The acquisition included a brick also recovered from the wreck and the metal diving helmet used during the recovery

Bound for Jamaica and New Orleans carrying a cargo of goods to be sold to raise funds for the war effort, the vessel foundered on sandbanks off Rosinish Point on the Isle of Eriskay where islanders rushed to save the crew. Safely back on shore, it soon came to light that the ship was carrying 264,000 bottles of untaxed whisky.  Rationing had been hard on the islanders and they had been denied their national drink for many months. The temptation of so much amber liquid within reach was too much to resist.

Under cover of darkness and in the belief that ‘rules of salvage’ applied, locals from Eriskay and across the Outer Hebrides descended on the vessel to ‘rescue’ the whisky.  They engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the local Customs and Excise Officers, drinking and hiding the whisky around the island.  The struggle between the two groups became infamous when Scottish author Compton Mackenzie wrote a fictionalised version of the event in his comic novel Whisky Galore! on which the 1949 film of the same title was based.

The acquisition included a film poster for the 2016 remake of Whisky Galore!

Sadly, there were some serious repercussions for those caught with the illicit whisky, resulting in prosecutions and jail terms. Many of the men implicated came from reputable island families who would not normally have come to the notice of the law but this fateful wreck would have a huge effect on their lives.

This bottle wasn’t recovered by the islanders, or the Customs and Excise Officers, but was legally recovered in 1987 by a diving crew exploring the wreck after completing repair of a subsea cable. I was alerted to the auction too late to prepare a bid and that night I anxiously watched the sale online, secretly delighted when the whisky failed to reach its reserve price.  I knew it would be a fantastic addition to the Scottish Maritime Museum’s Recognised collection and could help us tell the real story of the ship, its cargo and its impact on the islanders. With the bottle relisted for sale and financial support from the National Fund for Acquisitions, we were delighted to secure the whisky, with its strong provenance and great backstory, for our collection.  We are already looking forward to being able to tell our audiences about the history of the bottle and its place in Scottish island folklore; perhaps with a dash of McKenzie’s romance and humour thrown in.

Slàinte Mhath NFA!

Abigail McIntyre

Senior Curator

Scottish Maritime Museum

Scottish Maritime Museum

Portrait of an Exceptional Woman

Photogravure portrait of Frau Muthesius by James Craig Annan, acquired by the Hunterian in 2019 with an NFA grant of £225.

Singer, author, champion of artistic dress – Anna Muthesius (1870–1961) was a multi-talented modern woman. Her beauty and elegance are brilliantly captured in this photogravure portrait.

Photogravure portrait of Frau Muthesius by James Craig Annan

Born Anna Trippenbach in what is now Saxony-Anhalt, she married the German architect Hermann Muthesius (1861-1927), who became cultural attaché at the German embassy in London. Anna was an important artistic figure in her own right. Through Hermann’s research into modern British architecture, the couple became good friends of the Glasgow architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) and his artist wife Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1864-1933). Mackintosh was godfather to their son, Friedrich Eckart, and the two couples corresponded and stayed as guests at each other’s houses. On one visit, Mackintosh left behind a pair of socks – Anna Muthesius said she knew they must be his because ‘they could only belong to some beautiful Scottish legs’!

Surviving letters show that Anna and Hermann planned to stay with the Mackintoshes in Glasgow in June 1903, and it may have been on this occasion that Frau Muthesius visited the Sauchiehall Street studio of portrait photographer James Craig Annan (1864–1946). In the same year, she published a book, Das Eigenkleid der Frau (Woman’s Own Dress), where she argued that clothing should be adapted to the individual wearer and that women should design their own clothes and not be dictated to by Paris fashions. It seems likely, therefore, that the feathered hat and high-collared cape in Annan’s portrait were designed – and perhaps even made – by Frau Muthesius herself.

Annan had an international reputation as a photographer. His work was exhibited in Europe and America, and a number of his images – including this one – were published in the important photographic journal Camera Work. Photogravure is a printing process that involves etching a photographic image onto metal and then taking an impression from the inked plate. The result has a soft, rich, velvety quality, rather like a charcoal drawing. Annan learned the process from Karel Klic (1841-1926), in Vienna in 1883, and became one of its leading exponents.

Design for a silver fork and spoon by Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Annan’s portrait of Frau Muthesius joins a small group of related items in the Hunterian’s collection. Among these is Mackintosh’s design for a silver fork and spoon, made as a gift for his godson Friedrich Eckart Muthesius in 1904.

Photograph of a lost painting of Anna Muthesius by Francis Newbery

Also in the collection is a monochrome photograph of a lost painting of Frau Muthesius by Francis Newbery (1855-1946). More informal than Annan’s studio-based portrait, it shows her bending over her sewing. Recalling this painting in 1962, Newbery’s daughter described the sitter as ‘exotically beautiful’ and remembered that she was wearing a ‘green and blue Javanese wax print – a real innovation’. The Annan portrait is an equally memorable image of this exceptional woman, who expressed her personality through her remarkable clothes.

Joseph Sharples,
Curator of Mackintosh Collections
The Hunterian, University of Glasgow
www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian

An Iconic Acquisition with a Secret

Jacobite snuff box acquired by West Highland Museum in 2019 with an NFA grant of £3,450.

We were delighted to have the opportunity to purchase a rare hidden portrait Jacobite snuff box at the Lyon and Turnbull auction in Edinburgh in August 2019 at a cost of £9,750.

Circular snuff box with enamel tartan decoration

The circular box with enamel tartan decoration has a hinged cover which opens to reveal a plain interior. Inside, however, a hidden lid opens to reveal a finely enamelled portrait of Prince Charles Edward Stuart in tartan jacket and Jacobite white cockade. He wears the highest chivalric honours of England and Scotland, the Orders of the Garter and the Thistle, signifying the owner’s support for the legitimacy of the Stuart claim to the British throne. The portrait is a variant of the famous Robert Strange example which likely dates this piece to circa 1750.

Snuff box showing hidden lid

Snuff box with enamelled portrait of Prince Charles Edward Stuart

Hidden portrait snuff boxes such as this are amongst the most iconic Jacobite works of art. A Jacobite host could give his friends a pinch of snuff and, depending on the company, could reveal the hidden portrait. This example is in particularly good condition and finely enamelled. The West Highland Museum has been actively seeking Jacobite material since its inception in 1922 and its collections are based on material donated for the 1925 Prince Charles Edward Stuart Exhibition. The collection contains many unique and unusual objects, such as the Secret Portrait of Bonnie Prince Charlie, his death mask, paintings, drawings, miniatures, Jacobite glass, weapons and an important Jacobite archive. This valuable addition to the collection is now on permanent display.

We would not have been able to acquire this fine object without the financial support of the National Fund for Acquisitions, the Art Fund and a very generous local donor. We are most grateful to everyone who has contributed to make this purchase possible.

Vanessa Martin
Curator
West Highland Museum

http://www.westhighlandmuseum.org.uk