In 1904 Annie Swynnerton created two paintings both titled New risen hope, depicting a naked child seemingly floating in mid-air, with head tilted back and eyes looking expectantly out at the viewer. In the larger and more finished of these two works (in the NGV Collection), the child’s modesty has been clothed with what Swynnerton historian Katie Herrington describes as ‘dramatised drapery – evocative of seventeenth-century Italian Baroque painting’;1Katie J. T. Herrington, ‘Genteel portraits and vivid nudes: Annie Swynnerton’s living figures’, in Annika Aitken et al. (eds), She Persists: Perspectives on Women in Art & Design, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2020, p. 102. the infant’s hands are raised in the air and the child floats within a nimbus formed from a rainbow. In the smaller version (in the collection of Tate, London), the child’s body, clad in nothing, is shown to just below the navel, while the arms are pointed downwards with the hands not depicted at all and no rainbow grace note is included. Swynnerton, herself, described the New risen hope compositions in a gender-neutral manner, as depicting ‘a lovely English child rising out of a grey and mysterious mist’;2The Evening News, 6 Feb. 1922, in Katie J. T. Herrington & Rebecca Milner, Annie Swynnerton. Painting Light and Hope, Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, 2018, p. 96. however, it is tempting to read them as showing a young girl, given Swynnerton’s interest in women’s rights and the suffragette movement. The New risen hope paintings could thus be seen to ‘represent hope for women’s future freedoms’.3ibid.
Swynnerton exhibited the smaller version of New risen hope in the New English Art Club’s Winter 1906 exhibition, when the critic for the Manchester Guardian noted that
the very personal art of Mrs. Swynnerton [is] shown here in one of her finest examples, ‘Hope,’ a picture of a girl-child springing with a lovely gesture out of a background of misty, delicate blue, which lingers and reflects on the tremulous, eager body as though the child had just detached itself from the sky. The artist has given a new life to the symbol-figure. It is delightful and impressively womanly’.4‘The new English art club’, The Manchester Guardian, 20 Nov. 1906, p. 6.
The larger version was acquired directly from the artist in mid 1906 by the NGV’s first London-based Felton Bequest Adviser, the artist George Clausen. It was noted at the time in the London art press that
One of Mr. Clausen’s aims has been to provide the Melbourne Gallery with characteristic pictures by certain living painters of distinction not already represented … Mr. Clausen has in the main gone outside the Academy. His taste is not only sound, but catholic, and there is the advantage of his knowing and being popular with artists of various schools.5‘National Gallery of Australia, Melbourne’, The Art Journal, Nov. 1906, p. 334.
By 1906 Swynnerton and Clausen had become close friends, which might explain why Clausen purchased the NGV’s New risen hope at a significantly reduced rate. Whereas Clausen paid £150, in July 1904, Swynnerton had previously offered the work to another potential buyer for 200 guineas or £210.6Annie Swynnerton, letter to an unnamed recipient, 23 Jul. 1904, in Susan Thomson, The Life and Works of Annie Louise Swynnerton, Manchester Art Press, Manchester, 2018, p. 16. It is incorrectly stated here that New risen hope was ‘purchased by fellow painter George Clausen (1852–1944) and donated by him to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne’ (p. 59). Clausen was in fact acting on behalf of NGV when he acquired the work with Felton Bequest funds, there being no donation to Melbourne on his part. The price of £150 paid by Clausen is given in ‘New pictures. Mr. Clausen’s purchases for the art gallery’, The Age, 31 Aug. 1906, p. 9. When the painting arrived in Melbourne in November 1906, it was given a cautious reception by the art critic from the Age newspaper:
New Risen Hope by Annie Swynnerton, the figure of a child in front of a violet background, with the hint of a rainbow in the distance, and surrounded by flowing blue drapery. The artist has striven from the translucent effect of light through the child’s hands, but has scarcely succeeded in the attempt.7 ‘New pictures at the National Gallery’, The Age, 16 Nov. 1906, p. 5.
The theme of New risen hope may well have seemed personal to Swynnerton when, in 1907, Clausen nominated her for election to the Royal Academy; however, she was overlooked in favour of another male artist.8Christine Allen & Penny Morris, Annie Swynnerton, Painter and Pioneer. The First Woman Associate of the Royal Academy, Sarsen Press, Winchester, 2018, p. 86. Clausen, and fellow contemporaries John Singer Sargent and Charles Shannon, among others, nominated her again to become an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1914, when she was also defeated by a male candidate. Swynnerton historians Christine Allen and Penny Morris noted that ‘after 1914 there was not another Swynnerton painting at the RA summer exhibition until 1920, and it may be that she had been so disillusioned by her failure to be elected that she had withdrawn from the institution’.9ibid.
Swynnerton was finally elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy (ARA) in November 1922, the first woman artist to receive that honour since the Academy’s foundation in the eighteenth century. Celebration of her success was short-lived, however, when it was revealed in the English press that the seventy-eight-year-old Swynnerton ‘was, in fact, too old to become an active ARA as the age limit was 75 … [leading to] a suspicion that to elect a woman over the age of eligibility could have been a cynical ploy on the part of the RA’.10ibid. p. 89.
In July 1923 a celebratory exhibition in Swynnerton’s home city was organised at the Manchester Art Gallery, in which the smaller version of New risen hope was included. The work was then purchased by the President and Council of the Royal Academy under the terms of the Chantrey Bequest and entered the Tate’s collection. It was subsequently exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition in 1924, when it received an ecstatic reception in The Times, whose art critic argued that
For sheer impulse in painting, the lyrical cry in paint, there is nothing to equal ‘New-risen Hope,’ by Mrs. Annie Swynnerton, A.R.A., recently bought for the nation out of the Chantrey Bequest; and the emotional qualities of the picture, the ‘sudden April’ mood and the quivering colour are associated with an astonishingly fine piece of incisive drawing in the contour of the tilted head.11‘Royal Academy. Second notice’, The Times, 5 May 1924, p. 20.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
