Twenty years ago, I saw the self portrait that Mary Newton, formerly Severn, had painted in 1862. It was on long term to Bodelwyddan Castle, near Rhyl in Wales, as part of a wider display on Victorians aimed at schools. From what I can remember for Key Stage 1 and 2 students – that is infant (4-6 yo) and junior (7-11 yo) roughly. I had gone as part of a training / sharing knowledge trip as I was one of the few people interested in the Victorians when working at in the learning department at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). Mary’s husband Charles Thomas Newton bequeathed her portrait to the NPG when he died in 1894 – it is clearly stated in his will. Her self-portrait had been displayed in temporary exhibitions but was rarely on show in London.
When I got the ACE Developing Your Creative Practice grant, I thought I would try to see her self portrait in store. I knew the loan agreement no longer lasted since Bodelwyddan Castle – a faux Victorian pile – was now a hotel. I looked up the portrait on the catalogue and found that it was on display at Museo di Roma. After a fair bit of indecision, I decided that seeing it again could be combined with a whole load of other research on Mary’s father Joseph as well as visiting where she was born and lived for the first 10 years of her life.
I had visited Via Rasella, where the Severn’s were based for 10 years, in 2006 but had then only just started research on Mary. This time I have found out much more about how the city was transformed after 1870, when it became the Capital of the newly united Italy. The top of Via Rasella, for example, would have been more garden-like when Mary was born and spent her childhood there, as the Barbarini Palace extended its garden outward with vineyards and orange trees. Even central Rome was countrified and rural. A glimpse of a panorama painted from Villa Malta on Monte Mario – a place Mary visited and worked at in a visit in 1864 – gives that sense of a green city.
Seeing Mary’s portrait surrounded at the exhibition by other female artists at who either lived, worked, or were born in Rome, gave a sense of a community, shared imagery and confidence that was even absent in the recent Tate exhibition Now You See Us. Emma Gaggiotti (Richards) is one such artist, who was born in Rome (like Mary) and left London just as Mary started her professional career in 1853. Queen Victoria liked and bought her work, just as she did that of Mary’s in 1857 and beyond.
I spent a long time in the company of Mary’s self portrait and was a little tearful to see her in the way she wanted to present herself. Then I went and bought the catalogue*, and found a reference to my chapter on her, which had been published in 2023. It is a day in which the tangible and intangible memories of a past woman speak.
*Haria Arcangeli (2024) Women Painters in Rome, Rome.
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