Milly Childers (d.1922; active 1888-1921)
1889
Oil on canvas, 920 x 680mm (3614 x 2634")
Leeds Museums and Galleries (City Art Gallery)

Little is known about Milly Childers' artistic training, but she first exhibited a painting at the Royal Society of British Artists in 1890. Her portrait of her father, Hugh Culling Eardley Childers (1827-96), who was MP for Pontefract (1860-85), Chancellor of the Exchequer (1882-5) and Home Secretary in Gladstone's cabinet (1886), is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. It portrays him in a grey suit and top hat, relaxing and reading in a sunny garden in Menton, France, in 1891, a year before he retired. The surrounding garden is a vibrant green, and this strength of colour is not unlike that displayed in her self-portrait.
In this confident work Childers is wearing a bright-red painting smock that grabs our attention. She has also arranged her colours on the palette from light to dark in the manner demonstrated by William Hogarth (1697-1764) in his self-portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.

With its dramatic presentation and its skilful references to the art of the past, this painting testifies to the presence and identity of women as producers of culture and meaning in nineteenth-century Britain. The woman's gaze is direct and unflinching, a steady regard of those who are watching her.
(D. Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian women artists, 1993)

The focus is on her in the centre of the canvas, the dark background reinforcing the glow of light on her partially turned head, as she surveys us. Her signature is clearly inscribed in black, at the bottom left-hand corner of the work, as in the portrait of her father. There is no ornamentation, only the clever conceit of spread brushes and flat palette - perhaps invoking a painterly fan?
Once her father had retired, Childers travelled with him in England and France, producing landscapes and church interiors in an Impressionist style. She worked as a copyist and restorer for Lord Halifax at his house at Temple Newsam, Leeds - a post probably organised by her father. His political connections also paved the way for her commission to paint A Scene on the Terrace of the House of Commons; a photograph by Sir John Benjamin Stone (1838-1914) in the National Portrait Gallery's collection, taken on 4 November 1909, records her with the painting in situ. Twenty years on from her youthful self-portrait she has succumbed to a formalised photographic representation of her supposedly 'at work', posing with her palette whilst wearing a large plumed Edwardian hat.

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All images and text are subject to copyright protection. 22 May 2008