Yevonde: Life and Colour

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Rare and profoundly significant’: the Chandos portrait of William Shakespeare, associated with John Taylor, circa 1610. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery, London

In the interwar years of rapid change and technological advances Yevonde became a pioneer working with the Vivex colour process. Her commitment to colour photography and imaginative technique resulted in a unique vision still fresh today. A previously unseen self-portrait has also been uncovered, showing Yevonde looking directly into the lens, positioned alongside her weighty one-shot camera and using Herbert Read’s 1933 Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Painting and Sculpture as a prop. Our reopening exhibition Yevonde: Life and Colour will explore the life and career of Yevonde – a pioneering London photographer who spearheaded the use of colour photography in the 1930s. This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sourcesin this section. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

But it was with the advent of Vivex – a technically demanding process for colouring photographs – around 1930, that Yevonde’s breakthrough came, despite strong resistance to colour photography from within the profession and potential clients. You are immediately in the here and now – and the great feat of this renewal is to sustain that effect from first to last. Visitors ascend by escalator to the Elizabethan court, where the queen appears surrounded by her many male champions, all briefly captured in stupendous portraits before their respective executions or fall from grace. Round a corner, you are confronted by funeral monuments, spotlit in dramatic darkness.

In 1933, Madame Yevonde moved once again, this time to 28 Berkeley Square. She began using colour in her advertising work as well as her portraits, and took on other commissions too. In 1936, she was commissioned by Fortune magazine to photograph the last stages in the fitting out of the new Cunard liner, the Queen Mary. This was very different from Yevonde's usual work, but the shoot was a success. People printed twelve plates, and pictures were exhibited in London and New York City. One of the portraits was of artist Doris Zinkeisen who was commissioned together with her sister Anna to paint several murals for the Queen Mary. [8] [9] Another major coup was being invited to take portraits of leading peers to mark the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. She joined the Royal Photographic Society briefly in 1921 and then again in 1933, and became a Fellow in 1940. [10] The RPS Collection holds examples of her work. In her 1940 memoir, In Camera, [11] Yevonde wrote, 'I took up photography with the definite purpose of making myself independent. I wanted to earn money of my own'. [12] Exhibitions [ edit ]Yevonde: Life and Colour opens at the revamped National Portrait Gallery on Thursday and will feature a comprehensive selection of works dreamed up by this brilliant artist across a 60-year-career. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more joyful show anywhere in the country. Yevonde Middleton, also known as Madame Yevonde or simply Y evonde (1893-1975), was a London-based photographer whose work focused on portraits and still lives. She was introduced to photography through her involvem ent with the suffragette cause and she was committed to colour photography when it was not considered a serious artistic medium. Yevonde’s work often integrated elements of Surrealist iconograph y, humorous still life compositions, and models in tableaux.

Previously unseen photographs of Princess Alexandra and the Duchess of Argyll are among 25 newly discovered works by Madame Yevonde to be unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery. Signing her work simply, Yevonde (though she also worked under “Madame Yevonde”), she was a celebrated portraitist, innovative colourist and advocate for women in the profession. In short, she was a pioneer. Yet Yevonde is not widely known outside photography circles. Yevonde shot onto three negatives through filters to create a separation image ready for printing. Her Vivex colour Carbro-type prints were made at the first colour print service for professional photographers in the UK. This magnificent reinvention could not happen without deep observation, curiosity, wisdom and experience. And above all, perhaps, with the sense of humour that is everywhere apparent and perceived as a British trait. You could spend days here, in this spectacular building, with its cobalt and vermilion walls and more than 1,000 exhibits, and come away every time with a new understanding of British history, life and art.Be Original or Die Photographs by Madame Yevonde in 1953 featured 64 color photographs produced from original glass plate negatives and Vivex prints. It showed her Goddesses series of 1935, in which society women posed in, surreal, mythical guises. [13] Turn round and you can see Mary’s mother through a doorway: the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, sleeves rolled up in John Opie’s pure and pensive portrait. Equally, there is a direct vantage point between Byron and his daughter, the mathematician and proto-computer-programmer Ada Lovelace. Everyone and everything connects, history knitting up.

I started experimenting madly”, she remembered in her autobiography, “oblivious of the fact that people did not want such things.” The most striking image which comes to mind is Joan Maude (1932) with her fiery hair posed in red monochrome. However, I would argue her later series, ‘A Galaxy of Goddesses’ (1935), triumphs over everything else. She was inspired by the costumed guests at an Olympian-themed charity ball she attended that same year. Yevonde asked twenty-three women she knew within her social network to pose as mythical characters. ‘Lady Dorothy Warren as Ceres’ and ‘Olga Burnett (née Herard) as Persephone’ stood out to me for their use of composition and colour, but perhaps it was just the ancient history student in me which drew my eye. You walk from the shining new entrance straight into the present. Marcus Rashford in a humble headshot, Stormzy sitting tight with his mother, Jeanette Winterson posing with a garden spade in Susanne du Toit’s specially commissioned painting. Scholes, Lucy (19 August 2023). "A Riot of Color". The New York Review of Books . Retrieved 25 August 2023. Madame Yevonde (1893-1975) was the first British photographer to exhibit colour portraits. She was born and lived in London, where she became wrapped up in the suffragette movement as a member of the WSPU, later going on to serve in the Women’s Land Army.

Family archive of Chloe Keighly-Peach Colour pioneer ‘Colour photography after dillying and dallying by the wayside, in the end arrived’. A suffragette and lifelong supporter of women’s rights, Yevonde opened her first studio in London in 1914, aged just 21. In a career spanning more than six decades, her portraits, still life, and commercial work straddled the genres of narrative art, Modernism, mythology, and Surrealism. The feminist aspects of Yevonde’s work are also emphasised, bringing to the fore the artist’s confrontational gaze upon the expectation of women to be beautiful wives and domestic goddesses during the 1930s. This is shown, for example, in the awareness of a staged perfection in Rosemary Chance’s pose in Laundry, and in the commentary on female stereotypes that are hinted towards in the Surrealist still life of a bust of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, who holds an iron. In the transformed National Portrait Gallery, almost half the sitters and artists are now women, and the Yevonde exhibition is a fitting celebration of this gallery-wide shift to a more inclusive narrative.