Emma Soyer The escape: a young girl with a bird cage 1836

Four years after his wife’s untimely death, the renowned chef Alexis Soyer penned a fulsome tribute to her in his revolutionary new cookbook The Gastronomic Regenerator (1846):

Her career was one, while it lasted, of great success, and must, had it not been so fatally brought to a close, have resulted in the highest fame; as it was, crowned heads of many nations paid homage at the shrine of her talents, and the cultivated sensibility of the aristocracy of this and other civilised nations has at once appreciated her artistic excellences by the spontaneous expression of admiration upon the examination of her works.¹ Alexis Soyer, The Gastronomic Regenerator: A Simplified and Entirely New System of Cookery, London, 1847, p. 826.

Fame being both fickle and fleeting, however, Emma Soyer’s name was to virtually vanish from recognition within a decade of her husband’s grieving encomium to her.

Alexis’s sorrow at the loss of his young bride was to know no bounds at the time. He erected an impressive marble tomb in her honour in Kensal Green Cemetery in North Kensington, London. Standing more than six metres high, this features a carved profile portrait of Emma, beneath which are embedded the enormous metal letters: ‘E.S. TO HER’. In 1848 he staged a great retrospective exhibition of 140 of Emma’s paintings and drawings, titled Soyer’s Philanthropic Gallery, all the profits of which were ‘devoted to establishing parochial soup kitchens for each destitute district in London’.²F. Volant & J. R. Warren (eds), Memoirs of Alexis Soyer: With Unpublished Receipts and Odds and Ends of Gastronomy, London, 1859, p. 128. While the profits were not as high as expected, the show nonetheless raised £259 in subscriptions, which proved sufficient to provide 5,000 rations of food for the poor. We are told by Alexis’s biographers that ‘notwithstanding the disregard of the Royal Academicians, the public Press (who must be authority in such matters) was unanimous in praise of her works, which was to Soyer the greatest consolation’.³ibid. p. 135.

Number thirty-eight in Soyer’s Philanthropic Gallery was The escape, 1836, and the accompanying catalogue told visitors:

This picture of a fine little girl is very remarkable for the melancholy and sorrowful expression of a child, losing unexpectedly a favourite pet. The difficulty of drawing a child in that troublesome attitude has been most ably surmounted by the talented artist.⁴Soyer’s Philanthropic Gallery (Prince of Wales’s Bazaar,1848), Exhibition catalogue.

This early Victorian ‘loss of innocence’ composition was recently put up at auction and has been generously donated to the NGV by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family. Painted with broad, confident brushstrokes and a simple yet poignant palette, The escape has an energy and poise that lives up to the artist’s reputation in her lifetime as being England’s contemporary Murillo. It also records the poignant words of a contributor to The Times published on her death in 1842:

Perhaps no female artist has exceeded this lady as a colourist, and very few artists of the rougher sex have produced portraits so full of character, spirit and vigour, and that broad basis of shade and light, of tint and shadow which constitutes one of the highest triumphs of art. ⁵‘The Late Madame Soyer’, The Times, 16 Nov. 1842, p. 4.

Considered a prodigy in her day, Emma was born Emma Jones in London, sometime between 1809 and 1813. Equally talented in the study of languages (Italian and French), music and art, her first teacher was the Belgian portrait painter François Simonau, who married her widowed mother in 1820. Under his instruction, Emma is credited with having drawn more than one hundred portraits from life with surprising fidelity ‘before the age of twelve’.⁶‘Obituary. Madame Soyer’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1842, p. 667.

Depending upon what date one accepts for her birth, Emma had her first work accepted for exhibition at the Royal Academy at the age of ten or fourteen.⁷The birthdate of 1813, given to Emma in Alexis Soyer’s memoirs, has recently been questioned. 1809 has been proposed instead by Gabriella Maria Madallena Randsen, ‘Emma Soyer. The Artist Wife of a Celebrity Chef’, MA Thesis, University of Buckingham, 2020, pp. 78–83.

Over the subsequent two decades she exhibited works regularly at the Royal Academy (including The escape in 1837), as well as with the British Institution and the Society of British Artists. She also exhibited paintings at three Paris Salons between 1840 and 1842, where her works were warmly received by French critics. In 1837 she married Alexis, a French chef who had been recently hired by Prince Polignac royalty. Alexis keenly promoted his wife’s art and in 1842 he travelled to Brussels to show her work to King Leopold of Belgium. In his absence, Emma, who was pregnant with the couple’s first child, miscarried and died.

After her death Emma was credited with having created more than 400 paintings. Only a handful of her paintings and drawings are known to survive today, despite her tendency to sign and date her works. Where they have gone remains an art-historical mystery. From the listings in exhibition catalogues, it seems that she frequently painted social interest pictures (such as The blind man at the Tower of London), or studies of poor urban children and workers. Hopefully more of Emma’s work will re-emerge, given the current interest in reclaiming the stories of unjustly forgotten historical women artists. Meanwhile, The escape stands as testament to the high quality of Emma Soyer’s work, justifying the praise showered upon her during her all-too-brief life.

Dr Ted Gott is Senior Curator, International Art.

The escape: a young girl with a birdcage, 1836, was generously donated by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program. See the work on display now at NGV International.

This article first appeared in the March–April 2024 edition of NGV Magazine.

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