The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the rise of the mercantile classes in Britain and the creation of a new industrial elite. Concurrently, there was a shift towards increasing independence for women and a raised awareness of women’s rights, as crucial changes were enacted in the laws concerning marriage and ownership of property. In the sphere of collecting, women became major promoters of modern art, even if they were less in evidence than their female counterparts in the USA or their male equivalents in Britain. It was not until 1951, for example, that the National Museum of Wales was enriched by the Davies sisters’ collection, even though they began collecting before the First World War. Historically, more credit has been given to English and Irish male philanthropists, such as Sir Samuel Courtauld and Sir Hugh Lane, than to the women who played a key role in the early accessioning of Impressionism in British museums and galleries. These included not only the Davies sisters in Wales, but collectors such as Anne Kessler in England and Rosalind Maitland and Isabel M. Traill in Edinburgh.
Elizabeth Russell Workman (1874–1962) (Fig.
Elizabeth Workman on board
For reasons which will become clear, the Workman collection was dispersed in the late 1920s and 1930s. As a result, many of the more important paintings were absorbed by major international museums, such as the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Elizabeth assembled the collection almost entirely through the assistance of three British dealers: Glasgow-based Alexander Reid, his son A. J. McNeill Reid, and their London partner Ernest Lefèvre. However, no diaries and virtually no personal correspondence to or from Elizabeth have survived and it is difficult to form an opinion of her motivations for buying or of any philanthropic intentions she might have had. In many ways, therefore, her collection should be viewed as a reflection of the pioneering efforts of Reid and Lefèvre to promote modern French painting — and contemporary Scottish art — in the early years of the twentieth century.
While efforts have been made by scholars in the past to fill in the gaps, the full extent and importance of the Workman collection has not been properly recognized, while Elizabeth herself remains a two-dimensional figure, variously described as ‘E. R. Workman’, ‘Mrs R. A. Workman’, and even ‘R. E. Workman’. The only essay on the collection was published in
Art history has focused to date on the important role of dealers like Paul Durand-Ruel in bringing Impressionism to Britain and winning (exclusively male) clients such as Henry Hill of Brighton and John Duncan of Benmore among the rising classes.
Among the earliest women collectors of Impressionism in Britain were Ellen Sickert (née Cobden, 1848–1914) and her sister Jane (1851–1947). Ellen was the wife of the artist Walter Sickert and they were all close friends of Degas, especially from 1885, when the latter painted Ellen’s portrait.
In the early 1890s, for financial reasons, the Sickerts shared a house with Jane, who subsequently became the owner of both the
Daughters of the British statesman and reformer Richard Cobden, the Cobden sisters were politically active and early proponents of women’s rights, as well as passionate about art. (Anne was even arrested in 1906 for participating in suffragette activities.) Jane’s husband was the publisher Thomas Fisher Unwin, who not only published avant-garde works by the likes of Ibsen, Nietzsche, and H. G. Wells, but acquired three works by Van Gogh in Paris shortly after the couple married in 1892. Was it in fact Jane, rather than her husband, who was behind these purchases?
The Cobden sisters had very different profiles from most female collectors in Britain, but they shared their espousal of the feminist cause with, for example, the American philanthropist and suffragist Louisine Havemeyer (1855–1929). In 1875, when she was still unmarried, Havemeyer bought her first works by Degas and Monet, advised by Mary Cassatt, and in 1929 she left her important collection of Impressionist painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Cassatt, along with Lilla Cabot Perry, encouraged other women collectors, including Sarah Choate Spears in Boston; while the agent Sara Hallowell inspired Bertha Palmer (1849–1918) in Chicago to build up a significant collection of paintings by Degas, Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro in the early 1890s.
Encouraged by the developing taste for Impressionism in Britain, and of later significance to Elizabeth, it was around this period that the Glasgow dealer Alexander Reid opened his Glasgow gallery, known as La Société des Beaux-Arts. Established in 1889, it sold works by Degas, Manet, Monet, Sisley, and Pissarro to a number of Scottish merchants and industrialists.
Reid made his earliest sales of Impressionist pictures in 1892, but it was not until later in the decade that British women collectors began to focus more consistently on modern French art. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the earliest purchases were made by female artists, or by women who, like the Cobden sisters, had close artistic connections, or by society hostesses who enjoyed the company of artists. An important moment may have been the bequest of Gustave Caillebotte’s collection to the French State. In 1896 around forty paintings by Degas, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, and Cézanne went on public display at the Musée du Luxembourg, attracting the attention of visitors to the city. In the same year, while they were living in Paris, the painter Esther Sutro (1869–1934), accompanied by her husband the playwright Alfred Sutro (1863–1933), bought Van Gogh’s
Another woman collector with British connections was the painter Romaine Brooks (1874–1970), the American wife of the English pianist and classical scholar John Ellingham Brooks. By 1905 she had acquired Degas’s
An overlooked figure of this period is Lady Alice Shaw-Stewart (1863–1942), who lived at Ardgowan, near Inverkip in Ayrshire. A member of the Oxford luminary group known as ‘The Souls’, she hosted literary salons in Scotland and regularly entertained artists, prime ministers, and members of the royal family. She was also one of the earliest British collectors to buy Impressionist art but, since these purchases were made in the name of her husband, Sir Hugh Shaw-Stewart (1854–1942), her own role as a collector, like many women of this period, has been all but forgotten. In 1905 she acquired Monet’s
The most significant female supporter of the Impressionists in Britain before the First World War was Mary Hunter, née Smyth (1856–1933), a famous society hostess. Her sister was the composer Dame Ethel Smyth and Mary took great pleasure in supporting the arts. She was married to Charles Hunter, a Northumbrian coal-owner, and they divided their time between London and Hill Hall, near Epping, where they invited celebrities from the literary and artistic world. She befriended Monet in London and invited him and his wife Alice to Venice, to stay at her Gothic Palazzo Barbaro for two weeks in October 1908. As a result, Monet produced his dazzling series of atmospheric, almost Symbolist evocations of the floating city and Mary Hunter acquired his
Another society hostess, Emerald, Lady Cunard — American-born Maude Alice Burke (1872–1948) — made the most challenging purchase of the pre-war period: Gauguin’s
As these few examples show, most female collectors in Britain before the First World War had strong artistic connections or pretensions. On the whole, they failed to take a sustained interest in Impressionism and were not concerned with building up a substantial collection. The exceptions were Gwendoline (1882–1951) and Margaret Davies (1884–1963), whose background could not have been more different from most of the examples discussed above. They were brought up as strict Calvinistic Methodists, yet they inherited an enormous fortune, which they spent on travel, art, and music. Their father died in 1898 leaving them around a million pounds, largely inherited from his own father, David Davies of Llandinam (1818–1890), who had made his fortune from the coal industry, as well as building railways and docks.
The sisters began collecting in 1908, focusing initially on Turner, as well as Barbizon and Hague School painters, and moving on to Whistler and Monet. It was Gwendoline who built up the sisters’ outstanding collection of late works by Monet, including several Venice paintings, a view of Charing Cross Bridge (1902), and three Water Lily paintings. Robert Meyrick has emphasized the role of the sisters’ agent and adviser Hugh Blaker (1873–1937) in their purchases.
After the war the sisters increased their expenditure, as well as venturing into Fauvism. In 1920 alone they bought eight works by Pissarro, six by Maurice de Vlaminck, four Cézannes, and one each by Paul Signac and André Derain. On Gwendoline’s behalf Blaker offered three works by Cézanne on loan to the Tate, but — just as the National Gallery was half-hearted about Hugh Lane’s generous bequest of Impressionist pictures in 1917 — the gallery was reluctant to accept them. It was only after all three were included in Roger Fry’s 1922 exhibition of ‘The French School of the Last Hundred Years’ at the Burlington Fine Arts Club that the Tate agreed to take
The impact of the Davies sisters’ loans to galleries and exhibitions outside Wales cannot be underestimated. It is always said, for example, that Samuel Courtauld was inspired by the Davies’s Cézannes at Fry’s exhibition to build up his own collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art during the 1920s. He was also influenced by another woman with advanced tastes in art, his wife Elizabeth, whose role in the formation of the collection has only recently been acknowledged. Elizabeth Courtauld, née Kelsey (1875–1931) was passionate about music and art and, like many women collectors of this period, a constant guide and support to her husband’s collecting activities. It was she, rather than Courtauld, who made the first two purchases for the collection: Renoir’s magnificent
Many of the issues raised above also apply to Elizabeth Workman and provide a useful framework in which to examine her collecting practice. Like Bertha Palmer and Elizabeth Courtauld, her activity as a collector has often been confused with that of her husband. For much of her life Mrs Workman’s name rarely appeared in any stock book or daybook, while almost all correspondence was conducted by her husband. In addition, and unlike most prominent women collectors, her pictures were sold well before she had ceased collecting and it is virtually impossible to draw conclusions about her role as a philanthropist. What is certain, however, is the quality of the works she acquired, as well as her role as a supporter of the avant-garde.
Elizabeth was born Elizabeth Russell Allan on 23 November 1874 at 272 Bath Street, Glasgow, the eldest of six children. She had two brothers, James and Thomas, and three sisters, Ann, Margaret (Gretta), and Agnes. The girls were all highly educated and were among the first pupils at the all-girls boarding school St Leonard’s in St Andrew’s where the belief was that ‘a girl should receive an education that is as good as her brother’s, if not better’.
Elizabeth’s future husband, Robert Workman, was also brought up in the west of Scotland. His parents, William Service Workman and Margaret (née Orr) lived at Dunluce House in the village of Dullater, Dunbartonshire and in 1900 acquired an elegant Glasgow town house designed by the Scottish architect John Gaff Gillespie at 12 University Gardens.
Robert and Elizabeth Workman were married at Rhu, near Helensburgh, on 21 September 1900.
In 1953 McNeill Reid, recalling the gallery’s relationship with the Workmans, asserted that the couple were both involved in building up the collection of Scottish pictures, as well as the occasional work by the Norwegian painter Frits Thaulow and the Dutch Impressionist George Hendrik Breitner. The more avant-garde French pictures were very much Elizabeth’s domain, since she was ‘always rather ahead of her time’ (McNeill Reid 1953). Before the First World War, it is impossible to tell whether Robert or Elizabeth was guiding their choice of Scottish paintings, since the purchase books always list Robert as the buyer, while the later collection sales attribute the entire collection to Elizabeth. In 1903 it was possibly Robert who commissioned a portrait of Elizabeth by the Glasgow artist Harrington Mann (private collection), which remains in the family. In March of that year the couple bought two ‘large’ paintings by E. A. Hornel and David Gauld from Alexander Reid and, two months later, a picture by Thaulow.
Edward Atkinson Hornel,
Just before the war the couple turned to William Orpen and William Nicholson, acquiring a ‘Bouddha’ by Orpen, most likely
William McTaggart,
In summary, therefore, McTaggart aside, the bulk of the Workmans’ Scottish pictures, up until the First World War, were acquired jointly, while the French pictures were purchased by Elizabeth, albeit on Robert’s account. Thereafter, and certainly after 1923, most purchases were made in Elizabeth’s name, at the Lefèvre Gallery in London. From that date, as we shall see, Robert was preoccupied by his shipping business and this was also the period when Reid and Lefèvre were working as unofficial ‘partners’, making the London gallery a convenient and familiar location. Even after 1923, however, correspondence with dealers was still conducted predominantly by Robert, similar to the arrangement with Bertha and Potter Palmer.
In one of very few surviving letters, written to the French dealer Paul Rosenberg in 1924, Robert makes a clear reference to Courbet’s
McNeill Reid dates Elizabeth’s first purchase of a work by Degas to 1916 but there is no evidence of this in the Reid stock books (McNeill Reid 1953). We do know that she owned
In the summer of 1919 Elizabeth acquired a small oil study by the American painter James McNeill Whistler entitled
McNeill Reid also brought back a number of works by the Nabis artist Édouard Vuillard, including
Elizabeth bought two pictures by Vuillard from this exhibition:
Edgar Degas,
Less than a year later, however, the Workmans had returned at least three of their recent purchases, notably the Monet, the Renoir, and the small Whistler oil study. In January 1921 the Renoir fetched an impressive £3250 at the London branch of the New York dealer M. Knoedler & Co, whose American clients had included the Havemeyers, Henry Clay Frick, and William Rockefeller. The price realized by the still life gives a sense of the inflated price of Renoir’s paintings at this time. The artist had died in December 1919 and his works had immediately risen in value, thanks also to the support of critics such as Clive Bell who had praised especially his late work in his book
It is possible that Elizabeth had a change of heart about these works, but it might be that the couple were in need of instant liquidity. Even though they both came from comfortable upper-middle-class backgrounds they were now moving in the higher echelons of London society. By 1920 Robert occupied a prominent position in the world of ship owning. He was chairman of several shipping companies, notably the Northumberland Shipbuilding Company, and had also acquired the family company Messrs Workman, Clark of Belfast, which had a reputation for building innovative transatlantic liners. The company was at its peak in the early 1920s, when it was valued at £7 million. In keeping with their rising status, the couple moved, in 1921, to 3 Seamore Place, Park Lane, one of London’s most exclusive addresses. The architects Hepworth and Wornum redesigned the elegant interior, which the Workmans furnished with fifteenth- and sixteenth-century stained glass, Chippendale and Hepplewhite furniture, Dresden and Chelsea porcelain, and their collection of modern pictures.
Wyndham Lewis gives an indication of the opulent lifestyle that the couple briefly enjoyed at Seamore Place:
With three liveried menservants at lunch incessantly pouring out champagne, from the most sedative caledonian intonations that have ever massaged my ears, one obtained all the advantages of an all-too-brief Lochside holiday. And yet in this mansion there were more exciting things than Highland Cattle, for Mrs Workman (of whom I did an excellent portrait) was one of the only people in England to understand French painting, of which she had some remarkably fine specimens. (p. 229)
In 1921 the Workmans’ fashionable new home was featured in
The Billiard Room, 3 Seamore Place, Park Lane, ‘Interior Domestic Architecture’,
Sailing, and in particular racing, was also a passion of Elizabeth’s. Just after the war she acquired
In 1921 and 1922 the Workmans’ name disappeared from the Reid & Lefèvre stock books and it was not until October and November 1923 that there was a renewed flurry of activity, coinciding with an exhibition of post-Impressionist art organized by Alex Reid at the Lefèvre Gallery in London. It was also from that autumn onwards that Elizabeth Workman’s name was now logged, in place of her husband’s. Was Robert strategically transferring certain assets into his wife’s name, or was he in fact giving her financial independence while he himself focused on the business, which was taking up more and more of his time? Certainly, from around 1923 onwards, Robert Workman’s business suffered a series of setbacks, exacerbated by problems with the supply of steel, as well as by an unstable economy. In September 1923 the share price of the Northumberland Shipbuilding Company dropped so dramatically that there were rumours of forced liquidation.
The impact of the slump, if any, on collectors such as Courtauld, whose fortune came from the manufacture of rayon, was not immediately evident, since 1923 was the year in which he began buying pictures in earnest. Nevertheless, McNeill Reid recalled that the London exhibition attracted very few clients:
For the first ten days or so the only sale was a Van Gogh [
Elizabeth’s purchases from the Lefèvre exhibition demonstrate not only how advanced she was in her tastes, but also her powers of discernment, since several pictures from her collection are now key works in major international museum collections. In addition to two still lifes by Henri Marchand she bought two outstanding works by Gauguin —
Paul Gauguin,
Vincent Van Gogh,
To put these purchases in context, Courtauld bought just one work by Toulouse-Lautrec from the Lefèvre exhibition. In comparison to Elizabeth he was slow to develop a taste for Van Gogh and, although he bought Gauguin’s
Unsurprisingly, other dealers besides Reid and Lefèvre made approaches to the Workmans, among them Paul Rosenberg in Paris. Rosenberg was one of the foremost French dealers and had made important sales to American clients such as Albert C. Barnes in Philadelphia and Arthur and Georgette Sachs (of the Goldman Sachs dynasty). He was also beginning to penetrate the London market, working in tandem with Reid and Lefèvre. In April 1924 Rosenberg sent Toulouse-Lautrec’s large canvas
By late 1924 Elizabeth was becoming even more daring in her purchases, but she was also able to buy at relatively low prices. In October 1924 McNeill Reid included five Matisse paintings in a large exhibition of modern French art which opened in Glasgow and moved to the Lefèvre Gallery in London the following month. The exhibition included works by Derain, Othon Friesz, Dufy, and Vlaminck, three works by Georges Rouault, and three by Braque and Picasso. P. G. Konody wrote the preface to the catalogue and when the show moved to London he reviewed it for the
Not since the memorable first two post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries has London had a chance of seeing so representative a collection of independent contemporary French paintings as the one which now fills the Lefèvre Galleries in King Street, St James’s.
Fry visited the exhibition and reviewed it very favourably. He was amused by Konody, ‘ex-watch dog of foreign heresies and denouncer of morbid tendencies, roaring as gently as any sucking dove over the merits of Picasso, Derain, Friesz and Matisse’.
Once again Elizabeth was the main buyer at the exhibition, demonstrating that her taste was already far in advance of Courtauld or any other British collector of the period. As McNeill Reid later recalled, despite the presence in Glasgow of major clients such as Burrell, Cargill, Richmond, Gow, and William McInnes, all of whom were beginning to take a serious interest in modern French painting, the exhibition there was commercially unsuccessful: ‘Almost without exception, the collectors of the West of Scotland proved timorous and the pictures went back to London.’
In 1926 the Workman collection featured in an article by J. B. Manson for
must have almost the mind of an artist […], must be deeply responsive to the meaning and expression of modern art […], must be aware of life itself and have a similar independence of vision […], not merely accepting what fashion says is acceptable. (Manson, p. 139)
As Wyndham Lewis and McNeill Reid later confirmed, it was Elizabeth, rather than Robert, who possessed such ‘independence of vision’ and she continued to expand her collection of modern art over the next two years, acquiring works by Raoul Dufy, Maurice Utrillo, Modigliani, Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, Léon Bakst, Jean Lurçat, and André Beaudin, as well as further masterpieces by Matisse.
Henri Matisse,
The Knoedler exhibition is the only indication of Elizabeth Workman’s potentially philanthropic intentions. It was also to be the first and only occasion on which her collection enjoyed truly international exposure. From 1926 onwards, shipbuilding, like many industries in Britain, had been suffering from the worsening economic downturn and in 1928 Robert’s family company, Messrs Workman, Clark of Belfast, liquidated its assets, changed its name to Workman, Clark and merged with the Northumberland Shipbuilding Company.
As a result, Elizabeth was forced to sell
In 1935 Robert’s company finally went into receivership and the couple retired to Gothic Lodge on Hayling Island, where they spent the rest of their days in relatively quiet seclusion. Elizabeth continued to buy and sell art before the Second World War, acquiring further works by Dufy and Lurçat, which she was offered at a reduced rate by Reid & Lefèvre, since the Workmans were ‘such good friends’ of the dealer and ‘among [Lurçat’s] very earliest supporters’.
This article has aimed to provide an insight into one of Britain’s unknown collectors and to offer a glimpse of a lifestyle that was all too transient. Over the centuries art collections like Elizabeth Workman’s have been dispersed, and the collector has been forgotten. In certain cases, as here, this was caused by economic change and upheaval; such was the fate, for example, of the Scottish collector James Duncan’s collection, sold in the mid-1880s in order to shore up a failing sugar refining business (Fowle,
In other cases, such as that of the Davies sisters in Wales, or Anne Kessler in England, the role of women collectors has been undermined by that of their agent or adviser (in Kessler’s case, her uncle, Frank Stoop). By contrast, until very recently, male collectors such as Courtauld or Burrell have been credited with an independence of taste that ignores the role of the dealer and fails to take into account the key contribution of their wives. Indeed, only in the last decade or so has scholarship begun to shed a new light on the pioneering role of such women. Even more recently, thanks to the upsurge of interest in collecting and art market history, some of the more invisible figures, like Elizabeth Workman, are being rediscovered. Nevertheless, the reconstruction of such ‘lost’ collections not only entails painstaking research, it relies on access to dealer stock books and sale catalogues, as well as a broad understanding of the wider social context. Although we have a few tantalizing photographs of the interior at Seamore Place, without receipts and other correspondence the full scale and extent of Elizabeth’s collection, the role of her husband, and her motives for collecting can never be fully appreciated. Nevertheless, as Manson remarked in 1926, there is no doubt that Elizabeth Workman possessed a remarkable ‘independence of vision’ and she deserves to be recognized as one of the most innovative and advanced collectors of modern French art of the early twentieth century.
Alan Bowness,
Wyndham Lewis,
Letter from A. J. McNeill Reid to Douglas Cooper, 9 April 1953, Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, Douglas Cooper Papers, Box 14, Folder 5. Subsequent references to this letter will be cited parenthetically within the text as ‘McNeill Reid 1953’.
J. B. Manson, ‘The Workman Collection: Modern Foreign Art’,
I am profoundly grateful to Bella Janson, Elizabeth Workman’s great-granddaughter, for her generosity in sharing photographs, cuttings, and other archival material related to Mrs Workman. See also, Frances Fowle, ‘Alexander Reid in Context: Collecting and Dealing in Scotland in the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1994); Madeleine Korn, ‘Collecting Modern Foreign Art in Britain before the Second World War’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Reading, 2001); Madeleine Korn, ‘Collecting Paintings by Matisse and by Picasso in Britain before the Second World War’,
On Jane Cobden and the Sickerts’ relationship with Degas, see Anna Gruetzner Robins, ‘Sickert’s Campaign for Degas’, in Anna Gruetzner Robins and Richard Thomson,
Madeleine Korn, ‘Exhibitions of Modern French Art and Their Influence on Collectors in Britain 1870–1918: The Davies Sisters in Context’,
Fisher Unwin bought three works from Père Tanguy’s shop in Paris in 1893 (Bailey,
Erica E. Hirshler, ‘Helping “Fine Things Across the Atlantic”: Mary Cassatt and Art Collecting in the United States’, in
Richard R. Brettell, ‘Monet’s Haystacks Reconsidered’,
For example, Mrs Palmer’s Renoir,
On Alexander Reid and the early acquisition of Impressionism in Scotland, see Fowle,
There are currently twenty-two works by Degas in the Burrell Collection, but another was sold and one left to Berwick Museum. See Vivien Hamilton and others,
Bailey,
Sylvia Kahan,
Frances Fowle, ‘Making Money out of Monet: Marketing Monet in Britain 1870–1905’, in
Korn notes that she also owned
Brian Masters, ‘When Secrets Were Served with the Soup’,
Mark Evans, ‘The Davies Sisters of Llandinam and Impressionism for Wales, 1908–1923’,
Robert Meyrick, ‘Hugh Blaker: Doing His Bit for the Moderns’,
Evans, p. 222. On Lane, see Morna O’Neill,
Dimitri Salmon, ‘“Perhaps Courtauld’s Most Trusted Adviser”: Percy Moore Turner’, in
Karen Serres, ‘Introduction: Samuel Courtauld, Champion of Impressionism’, in
James Allan married Margaret Dunn Warren (1848–1946) in 1873.
William’s father William Orr Workman (of Davidson & Workman) also lived at 12 University Gardens (Glasgow Post Office records).
Extract from the Register of Marriages, Edinburgh, Scottish National Archives.
Robert Workman then lived at Westview, Worsley Road, Hampstead.
Alex Reid Daybook 1899–1909, London, Tate Archive, TGA 2002/11/250.
‘Interior Domestic Architecture’,
The Nicholson was bought in 1918 for £275. See Reid Daybook 1913–20, TGA 2002/11/279.
See sale catalogue,
‘Interior Domestic Architecture’,
Letter from Robert Workman to Paul Rosenberg, 13 May 1924, New York, MoMA, Paul Rosenberg Archive. (I am grateful to MaryKate Cleary for alerting me to the Rosenberg–Workman correspondence.) Elizabeth acquired this work from the collection of the mezzo-soprano Blanche Marchesi.
Fowle,
Reid Daybook 1913–20, TGA 2002/11/280. The explanation for this entry is unclear, unless Elizabeth was buying a gift specifically for her husband.
Reid Daybook 1910–12, TGA 2002/11/277. There is no mention of any purchase.
Reid Daybook 1913–20: ‘15 Sept [1919] Workman Roses et Nasturtiums £1800’. No artist’s name is given.
Reid Daybook 1913–20, 2 January 1920.
Hansard, HC (series 5), vol. 187, cols 671–3W (30 July 1925) <
Alfred de Rothschild had earlier lived at 1 Seamore Place. The houses were later demolished to give Curzon Street direct access to Hyde Park.
Andrew Stephenson, ‘“An Anatomy of Taste”: Samuel Courtauld and Debates about Art Patronage and Modernism in Britain in the Inter-War Years’, in
‘Royal Academy Exhibition Review’,
‘An 18th-Century London House Redecorated: No.2 Seamore Place, Mayfair: The Property of Sir William Berry Bt’,
Elizabeth Workman featured in numerous articles on the annual regattas, especially in 1923. See
‘Woman in Sport’, p. 377. British Pathé movies featured
For example, she was on the front page of the special feature on ‘Women in Sport’, p. 377.
Robert Workman published a statement in the
Lecture titled ‘Art Collecting in Dundee’ given by A. J. McNeill Reid to the Art Society in Dundee (1965), property of Professor I. R. C. Batchelor, Broughty Ferry, Dundee.
The entry in the Reid Daybook 1920–25, TGA 2002/11/275 is as follows: ‘26 Nov 1923 (Mrs Workman) 3 Oil paintings No. 3735 “Meyer de Haan” by Paul Gauguin £800; No. 3736 “Paysage Exotique” by Paul Gauguin £1650; No. 3734 “Jeanne d’Avril” by H. de Toulouse-Lautrec £1050.’
Letter from Robert Workman to Rosenberg, 24 April 1924, Paul Rosenberg Archive.
Letter from Robert Workman to Rosenberg, 13 May 1924, Paul Rosenberg Archive.
On 16 May 1924, for example, she acquired Manet’s
P. G. Konody, ‘Art and Artists: French Post-Impressionists’,
Roger Fry, ‘French Pictures at the Lefèvre Galleries’,
‘Glasgow’s Lost Chances: French Picture Bargains City Rejected of Great Value Today’,
These works and more are listed in the Curtis & Hanson sale catalogue (third day’s sale), 23 December 1931.
‘The Workman, Clark Case’,
Sale catalogue,
Letter from Reid & Lefèvre to Robert Workman, 1 April 1936. See also letters dated 4 April 1936, 1 May 1936, and 2 May 1936 (the last two to and from Elizabeth Workman) concerning this transaction. There are also two letters dated 24 April 1935 from Reid & Lefèvre written separately to Elizabeth and Robert Workman, concerning the sale of one of Elizabeth’s Modigliani drawings (at a loss) for only £15. All letters in the Tate Archive.