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Emily Ford revisited

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font all souls church leedsCo-founder of the Leeds Suffrage Society designed art promoting the suffragist cause.

An appeal launched recently aims to raise £6,000 to restore Emily Ford’s paintings in All Souls’ Church in Leeds.

Launched by the West Yorkshire Group of the Victorian Society, the appeal draws attention to Ford both as an overlooked yet significant artist and an important early suffragist.

The All Souls paintings, which are attached to the cover of the church font, represent only a small portion of her artwork, most of which has not survived.

The chair of the Group and Leeds historian Janet Douglas has argued that Ford, although overshadowed by her older sister, Isabella Ford, is an “interesting woman in her own right.”

Isabella has undoubtedly enjoyed the greater historical reputation as a social reformer and suffragist, but there has been a recent resurgence of interest in Emily Ford’s art work.

And next year, she will feature in a major exhibition on lesser known Pre-Raphaelite artists in the Netherlands’ Groninger Museum.

She was trained at the Slade School of Fine Art shortly after it opened in 1871 and exhibited work in the Royal Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery.

Ford’s religious art work once decorated churches throughout England, including London. The majority has not survived because of churches being demolished or changing tastes in church decoration.

The series of eight panel paintings are attached to the font cover that Ford donated to All Souls in 1891 to commemorate her baptism at the age of 39.

Not having been cleaned since that time, they have fallen into a very poor state of repair. Figures depicted in some of the paintings have completely disappeared.

According to Douglas, the unique value of these paintings lies in their depiction of Ford’s friends and contemporary Anglican clerics.

These individuals include a significant number of women of both local and national importance.

Among them are the women’s rights advocate Emelia Russell Gurney and Lady Mount Temple, who was a patron of D.G. Rossetti and particularly close to Ford.

Ford co-founded the Leeds Suffrage Society with her sister Isabella in 1890.

Later, as Vice-President of the Artists Suffrage League, she used her creative talent to design art promoting the suffragist cause, including the banners carried in their marches.

The font paintings convey the importance of religion to Ford’s life and art.

Born into a Quaker family, she became interested in spiritualism and psychological research as an adult.

It was after her conversion to Anglicanism in 1890 that she primarily produced religious art, especially wall murals. The subjects of the font paintings are Biblical, but the heads of the figures depicted are those of her friends and contemporaries.

This ties them to Ford’s life as a devout Christian, suffragist and social reformer. Executed in the Italian primitivist style, they also demonstrate her skill as a trained artist.

Other surviving examples of Ford’s paintings can be viewed on the BBC website.

The restoration appeal was launched on Saturday at All Souls’ Church. Donations can be made through the Victorian Society’s website.

  1. Kathy Bugden says:

    I have a tiny watercolour which I purchased in the 1970s in Camden, London. It is signed E.S.Ford. i have been trying to find the artist and the only name I come up with is Emily Ford. I wonder if you could tell me if she did sign her paintings ‘E.S.Ford’? I would be happy to email a photo of it.

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