Edith Martineau, ARWS (1842-1909)
Edith Martineau was a pioneering figure among artists of the Victorian period, in that she was one of the first women to be admitted to the Royal Academy Schools and one of the first to be elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours. She was also ambitious in the range of her subject matter, applying her admired precision of handling to floral still life compositions, landscapes, rural genre scenes and portraits of children.
Edith Martineau was born at 30 Mason Street, West Derby, Liverpool, on 19 June 1842, one of the eight children of the Rev Dr James Martineau, an eminent Unitarian minister and religious philosopher, and his wife, Helen Higginson, the daughter of a Unitarian minister. She was the niece of the writer and theorist, Harriet Martineau, her father’s closest sibling. In 1844, when she was two years old, the family moved to their newly built house, Park Nook, in Prince’s Park, to the south of the city. Taught at home, she received her first experience of formal education when she attended Liverpool School of Art in her early teens.
In 1857, Martineau moved with her family to London, and settled at 10 Gordon Street, in Bloomsbury.
From there, she began attending classes at Leigh’s Academy, in Newman Street. Then, in 1862, she became one of the first women artists to be admitted to the Royal Academy Schools. According to Charlotte J Weeks, writing in The Magazine of Art in 1883, she also attended some classes at the Slade School of Art.
In the year that Martineau entered the RA Schools, she also successfully submitted a work for exhibition to the Society of British Artists. She would soon exhibit regularly at a range of venues in London, including the Royal Academy and the Society of Lady Artists, and widely in the provinces. During the years 1883-86, she was a member of the Dudley Gallery Art Society, before being elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1888, one of the first women to receive that honour.
Soon after the Martineaus moved along the road to 5 Gordon Street, in 1874 (but before they moved to 35 Gordon Square in 1880), they began to holiday in Scotland, taking The Polchar, a cottage in Rothiemurchus, Aviemore, that became the family’s summer residence for the next 50 years.
In 1901, she moved – with her sisters, Gertrude and Mary Ellen – to 5 Eldon Road, Hampstead, which had been the home of their brother, Russell, until his death in 1898. Once there, she became a member of the Hampstead Art Society.
In 1902, she and Gertrude co-edited their father’s unpublished sermons, as National Duties and other Sermons and Addresses. Then in 1906, they held ‘Aviemore and the Highlands, and other water-colour drawings’, a joint exhibition at the Modern Gallery. It was the most significant of Edith’s life, for she died at home three years later, on 19 February 1909, aged 66. A further exhibition of the work of Edith and Gertrude, along with their sister-in-law, Clara Martineau, was held at the New Dudley Gallery in 1910, partly in commemoration of Edith’s death. At the time of her death, an obituary in The Art Journal compared her work to that of Helen Allingham, and the Allinghams and the Martineaus had moved in the same intellectual and cultural circles.
Further reading
Kristina Huneault, ‘Martineau, Edith (1842-1909)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, vol 37, page 13
