Winifred Coombe Tennant - A Life through Art

Mon, 04 Feb 08 12:12:00

 

Winifred Coombe Tennant (1874 – 1956) grew up in France and Italy but came to love the country of her husband and mother, Wales. She was sister-in-law to Eveleen Tennant, the distingushed Victorian photographer, and to H.M. Stanley, the explorer. In 1896 she moved to live in the Neath Valley, near Swansea, within earshot of the colliery hooters which regulated the lives of the local mining communities. From these mining villages emerged some of the painters whose work Winifred did so much to promote – including Evan Walters, among the first professionally trained painters in Britain to give a central place in his work to the people of mining communities.

 

Winifred was the most celebrated spiritual medium of her period, studied by the Society for Psychical Research. However, her work was published by the Society under the pseudonym Mrs Willett, and so this aspect of Winifred’s life remained unknown even to close family members until her death. Her diary records in intimate detail her affair with Gerald Balfour, brother of the Prime Minister, and the leading light of the Society.

 

On the other hand, the outline of Winifred’s public life was well known. She was a feminist, who campaigned for women’s suffrage from before the Great War. She became involved in party politics through an intimate relationship with the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. She stayed often at Downing Street, and recorded in her diary her impressions of such important events as the negotiations on the establishment of the Irish Free state. As a nationalist, among her heroes were Tom Ellis, the leader of Cymry Fydd, the Young Wales movement, and Michael Collins. Her description of hearing of the death of Collins in 1922 is among the many powerful and emotional pieces of writing to be found in her diary.

 

Winifred was sent as the first female delegate from Britain to the League of Nations in Geneva. International peace was an issue of fundamental importance to her. Her eldest son, Christopher, had been killed in the Great War.

 

On the fall of Lloyd George’s coalition government, Winifred stood for parliament in 1922. The Liberals were swept away and she did not get in, a fact which she regretted all her life, but which led, in part, to the redirection of her energy towards the support of young Welsh painters. She became a close friend of Sir William Rothenstein, director of the Royal College of Art, where many of them, including Ceri Richards, studied. After 1931, when she moved to London to live, she became the official buyer for the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, acquiring works by Cedric Morris, Morland Lewis, Augustus John and Gwen John, including the now celebrated John portrait, The Nun. Her diary records in detail her relationships with Augustus John and others.

 

It was after the death in 2003 of Winifred’s son Alexander Coombe-Tennant that Peter Lord was made aware by his widow, Jenifer, that Winifred had kept the diary every day of her life from 1909 until shortly before her death.

 

 

Winifred Coombe Tennant – A Life through Art

 

£30, hardback, published by The National Library of Wales: buy from our online shop

 

Winifred Coombe Tennant – A Life through Art Exhibition:

 

• Aberystwyth: The National Library of Wales until 24 March 2008
• Subsequently at the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff

 

 

Contact Information:

 

• Siôn Jobbins, NLW: 01970 632 902  sij@llgc.org.uk