Jacqueline Mulhallen

The Paintings

 

While touring Sylvia with Lynx Theatre and Poetry, Jackie felt it was necessary to keep up to date with the latest research.

 

In 1991 she bought a copy of the 1908 London Magazine from Elizabeth Crawford's catalogue Woman and her Sphere and found that it was illustrated with seven reproductions of Sylvia Pankhurst’s paintings.  For the play, Lynx Theatre and Poetry had photographed almost all the paintings in Richard Pankhurst’s collection and almost all those in the only other extant collection.  Only one of those paintings was in those collections!

 

Lynx immediately issued a press release asking if anyone knew of the whereabouts of these other paintings but so far we’re still looking!

 

The discovery was the subject of Jackie’s article ‘Sylvia Pankhurst’s Paintings:  A Missing Link’ in the Women’s History Magazine, summer 2009 and also of the Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Lecture she gave in August 2009.

 

The importance of Sylvia’s paintings of working women - perhaps the first paintings of women at work - was acknowledged by Susan Homewood who featured Jackie’s article ‘Sylvia Pankhurst’s Northern Tour’ at www.sylviapankhurst.com.

 

Jackie also reviewed Katherine Connelly’s Sylvia Pankhurst: Suffragette, Anti-Fascist and  Scourge of Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2013) and the exhibition of Sylvia Pankhurst’s paintings at the Tate Gallery 2013 on www.counterfire.org.

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She has also written a blog for Pluto Press on Sylvia Pankhurst and the film Suffragette, which is no longer available on their website but can be read here.