Yevonde: Life and Colour

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Signing her work simply, Yevonde (though she also worked under “Madame Yevonde”), she was a celebrated portraitist, innovative colourist and advocate for women in the profession. In short, she was a pioneer. Yet Yevonde is not widely known outside photography circles. There was a sharp transition in the exhibition from her early work to her work following the war. Yevonde became interested in colour photography in the aftermath of World War I; despite it being an expensive and complex undertaking, she remained undeterred. Her work reflected a renewed optimism in the wake of destruction and devastation with its bright colours, quirky costumes and creative settings. Yevonde: Life and Colour opens at the revamped National Portrait Gallery on Thursday and will feature a comprehensive selection of works dreamed up by this brilliant artist across a 60-year-career. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more joyful show anywhere in the country. A previously unseen self-portrait has also been uncovered, showing Yevonde looking directly into the lens, positioned alongside her weighty one-shot camera and using Herbert Read’s 1933 Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and Sculpture as a prop.

In 1921, she became the first women to lecture at the Professional Photographers’ Association. In the 1930s – against a tide of resistance – she championed the use of colour photography and was the first person in Britain to exhibit colour portraits. Goddesses and Others: Photographs by Madame Yevonde in 2005 at the National Portrait Gallery, London displayed 15 of her colour photographs from the 1930s. [15] Oliver Cromwell and his Roundheads face Charles I and his Cavaliers in a marvellous reprise of the English civil war through art. Eighteenth-century London is a fabulous throng of writers, drinkers, actors and ribald satirists. Nobody is isolated; every person, and their image, is treated as part of a living society. Madame Yevonde (1893-1975) was the first British photographer to exhibit colour portraits. She was born and lived in London, where she became wrapped up in the suffragette movement as a member of the WSPU, later going on to serve in the Women’s Land Army.

Yevonde Colour Archive

The exhibition’s strength is in its understanding that art is always a collaborative affair. Yevonde is the star of the show but there are other important contributors. Yevonde’s most famous project – the Goddesses Series of 1935 – was inspired by a charity ball. Soon after she photographed several society women in the guise of a mythological goddess. Each woman was furnished with props derived from Yevonde’s, sometimes whimsical, interpretation of their attributes. Yevonde’s only formal training was an apprenticeship to Charlotte (Lallie) Charles (1911-13). Despite not finishing, and taking only one photograph throughout, it gave her the fundamentals to start a photographic business. The show will explore Yevonde’s life and career through self-portraiture and autobiography, reflecting on the growing independence of women after the First World War and of the freedom that photography afforded her.

Rare and profoundly significant’: the Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare, associated with John Taylor, circa 1610. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery, London We must see one another’s work and criticise, and, more important still, receive criticism,” she wrote in her autobiography, “or we shall never improve”. a b c d "Middleton [née Cumbers], Yevonde Philone [known as Madame Yevonde]". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (onlineed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.) In the essay ‘Yevonde’s Goddesses’, included in the catalogue, Lizzie Broadbent writes: “Seen through today’s eyes, Yevonde’s images of (often) titled women dressing up and posing as goddesses might appear dated and elitist… However, through these works, Yevonde was reflecting and, to some extent, subverting contemporary trends in photography, design and society”. The National Portrait Gallery, London, reopens in June following a three-year closure for the “ largest redevelopment” in its 127-year history. Its opening exhibition, Yevonde: Life and Colour, will be the most comprehensive to date on British photographer, Yevonde Middleton (1893-1975).John Gielgud as Richard II in Richard of Bordeaux by Yevonde (1933). Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery Yevonde herself a modern independent woman embraced the commercial sector. Her intensely hued scenarios provide wry observations of the dual demands on readers of colourful new women’s titles. Freestone, Clare; Roberts, Pamela Glasson; Brown, Susanna (2023). Yevonde, Life and Colour. National Portrait Gallery, London. ISBN 9781855145634. Yevonde was a vivacious and adaptable photographer operating her London studio throughout most of the twentieth century. Feminist