Who is Helen Thornycroft?

Helen Thornycroft (1848 – 11 November 1937) was an English painter and watercolourist of the Victorian era.

Born in London, she was a advocate of the Thornycroft intimates of sculptors, which included her maternal grandfather John Francis, her father Thomas Thornycroft, her mom Mary Thornycroft, and her younger brother Hamo Thornycroft. Hamo and Helen’s sisters Alyce (1844–1906) and Theresa (1853–1947) were both artists as well.Edmund Gosse was a relative by marriage. (The intimates had strong multiple links with the English art world of the nineteenth century; Theresa Thornycroft and Ellen Thornycroft Gosse studied painting below Ford Madox Brown.)

Helen’s brother John Isaac Thornycroft began his shipbuilding career by constructing a steam creation at house in his late teens. Helen, nicknamed “Nello,” was reportedly his “only helper” in this endeavor. While helping John Isaac, she was “nearly scalped” when her hair tangled in his machinery; she wore her hair rushed from then on, in defiance of the reigning custom.

Helen, Hamo, Alyce, and Theresa were everything trained in the Royal Academy schools starting in the 1860s, when the institution was only arrival to accept female students. The date and circumstances of Helen’s right of entry are disputed; by one account, she applied in 1862, but was rejected by Sir Edwin Landseer because of her youth (she was 14 at the time). Helen started out as a sculptor bearing in mind previous generations of her family; she exhibited a statue of Ophelia in the Royal Academy summer enactment of 1864. Within a year or two, however, she lonely sculpture to concentrate upon painting.

Helen travelled abroad subsequent to Hamo and Alyce in 1871; the siblings studied art like and modeled for each further through the 1870s. Hamo’s journals, kept during this period, provide sufficient evidence on the family’s affairs. By Hamo’s account, the juvenile Helen enjoyed a “wonderful” supply of natural energy. His journals record an evening later the two of them walked home at 2:00 AM; Helen was up by 6:30 to go swimming, then worked at the Royal Academy schools until 2:00 PM.

“Helen was a more prolific and vigorous artist than her sisters” — by the late 1880s she had her own studio and her own apartment, which was again uncommon for the time. She became known primarily as a flower painter, a genre long united with women; yet she with worked in further genres, including landscape and portraiture. Thornycroft exhibited her proceed at the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. She spent a decade (1899–1909) as vice-president of the Society of Women Artists. She never married. Many sources mistakenly have enough money the year of her death as 1912.