Alice Mary Chambers was born in Harlow, Essex, in either 1854 or 1855, the daughter of the Rev John Charles Chambers, a controversial figure in the Anglican Church, and his wife, Mary (née Upton). Their two older children had both died in infancy in 1852. At the time of her birth, Alice’s father was vicar of St Mary Magdalene in Harlow, but, in 1856, he became perpetual curate of St Mary’s, Crown Street, and warden of the House of Charity, both in Soho, London, positions that he retained until his death. He has been described as turning ‘St Mary’s into a model for managing a parish along ritualist [or Anglo-Catholic] lines’ (Morris, 2004).
By consent, he and his wife separated ‘each to live crypto-monastic lives of celibacy and charity’ (Mumm, 2001, page 3).
The census for 1861 records that Alice and her mother were living at Fernley Bank, West Hill (now Westwood Hill), Sydenham, a school for young ladies run by her mother’s sisters, Sarah, Martha and Anna, and at which her mother also taught.
A decade later, the census for 1871 records that Alice and her mother were again living with her father – at 16 Upper Woburn Place, Bloomsbury. However, within the next three years, both her mother and father had died (in 1873 and 1874). In his will, J C Chambers made his brother, the Rev Oswald Littleton Chambers (Vicar of Hook, Yorkshire), guardian of his daughter, and left the income from a substantial sum—between two and three thousand pounds – for his daughter’s ‘maintenance and education’. In 1877, J C Chambers became posthumously controversial, when his two-volume publication, The Priest in Absolution (1866 & 1870), was condemned in the House of Lords by the Earl of Redesdale for its promotion of auricular confession.
Nothing is known of the artistic education of Alice Mary Chambers, but she had certainly emerged as a painter by 1875, when she produced her earliest dated work, a watercolour of a young woman entitled Contemplation. However, it is only from the 1880s that her career can be charted in any detail.
Before 1881, Chambers had begun to establish a close relationship with the artists’ agent, Charles Augustus Howell, who may be considered one of the most colourful characters of the Victorian age. The friend and agent of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, it was Howell who, in 1869, persuaded the Pre-Raphaelite artist and writer to dig up the poems that he had buried with his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. Through Rossetti, he met John Ruskin and, during the late 1860s, acted as his secretary, specifically managing his discreet charitable donations. He had a mixed reputation in his lifetime, being regarded as both a ‘gifted raconteur’ and a ‘prodigious liar’ and worse (Merrill, 2011).
Chambers became a member of a close circle around Howell that also included his wife, Kitty, and his mistresses, the artist, Rosa Corder, and Clara Vaughan. Together they were described by James McNeill Whistler as ‘the Cock and his Hens’. It has been suggested that Chambers was the third of these mistresses, though somehow she managed to stay loyal to Howell and retain something of her respectability. In 1885, both she and Corder even provided promissory notes in order to help Howell, when the art collector, Samuel Wreford Paddon, took legal action against him for fraud.
Chambers was at her most artistically productive during the years of her friendship with Howell and his circle, as if she needed the support of a likeminded community. By 1881, she was living at 17 Red Lion Square – an address with significant Pre-Raphaelite associations – and describing herself as ‘an artist in drawing and painting’. From that year until 1893, she exhibited nine works at the Royal Academy of Arts, most of which were either portraits or images of women from literature and myth. In the same period, she also provided the frontispiece illustration for Mary Hullah’s The Lion Battalion (1885), a collection of stories for children.
When Howell died in 1890, he and Chambers were living at the same address in Southampton Row, and possibly in a ménage with Rosa Corder. Chambers was named as one of the two executors and trustees of his will, along with the auctioneer, Frederick John Bonham, and as one of the two guardians of Rosalind, his daughter by Kitty, along with Corder. (In 1883, Corder had given birth to his other daughter, who was christened Beatrice Ellen Howell.)
Through the 1890s, Chambers lived a peripatetic life, spending a lot of time in France and Spain. In 1892, she angered Corder by taking Rosalind on a trip to Normandy, and a lawsuit followed. The result was that the girl ‘was made a Ward in Chancery and was sent to Harrow to be educated and reared by a clergyman’s widow’ (Cline, 1978, page 28). Following the death of Corder in 1893, Rosalind was placed with the widow and daughters of a West Indian judge. Despite these distractions, Chambers continued to produce work and exhibit it at the New Gallery and the Royal Institute of Painters 117 in Water Colours, and also in the provinces.
In 1901, when she was living at 15 Ann’s Villas, West London, Chambers described herself in the census as ‘living on own means’ rather than as ‘artist’. From that time, she retained an address in London – including one at Brook Green in 1906, and one at Vincent Square in 1912 – but spent most of her time either at Rose Cottage, Church Norton, Selsey, in Sussex, or abroad in Italy or Spain. Selsey must have been of particular significance, as Howell had also had a house there. When Elizabeth Pennell visited her to talk about her memories of Whistler, she found ‘a woman of about fifty, stout, pleasantly ugly, with no endeavour to dress so as to improve matters’ (The Whistler Journal, Philadelphia: J B Lippincott, 1921, page 69). In doing homage to the artists that she had known, she also donated a plaster death mask of Rossetti to the National Portrait Gallery.
Alice Mary Chambers died at Pomona House, 111 New Kings Road, Fulham, on 5 May 1920.
Further reading:
Clarence Lee Cline, The Owl and the Rossettis: Letters of Charles A Howell and Dante Gabriel, Christina and William Michael Rossetti, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978;
Thomas McLean, ‘Family Portraits: The Life and Art of Alice Mary Chambers’, Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature, The Ohio State University Press, Number 133, Summer 2018, pages 69-81;
Linda Merrill, ‘Howell, Charles Augustus (1840?–1890)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2011, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/39340;
Jeremy Morris, ‘Chambers, John Charles (1817-1874)’, H C G Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/5074;
Susan Mumm (ed), All Saints Sisters of the Poor: An Anglican Sisterhood in the Nineteenth Century, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press/Church of England Record Society, 2001
