Making their mark

Margaret Bernadine Hall

THE daughter of one of Liverpool’s Lord Mayors, Margaret Bernadine Hall was a painter of portraits and genre work during the late 19th century. She lived in Paris from 1894-1907, where she produced most of her work, and where she is likely to have found the inspiration for Fantine, which hangs in the Walker.

Created in 1886, it depicts a mother and child and is based on a tragic character from the Victor Hugo novel, Les Miserables, who is forced sell herself in order to care for her daughter. It was donated to the gallery a year after her death in London, in 1910, at the age of 47.

Sophie Anderson

THE painting by Sophie Anderson that hangs in the Walker collection, Elaine, was exhibited in the first Liverpool Autumn Exhibition, in 1871, an event similar to the Royal Academy’s Annual summer Exhibition. It is based on the poem Lady of Shallot, by Alfred Lord Tennyson, which tells of the medieval heroine rejected by the knight Sir Lancelot. Instead of shame she chooses death and is seen as an object of dignity and beauty, although a Victorian woman rejected in a similar fashion would have been viewed with pity.

It was bought for the sum of £420 – more than four times the average industrial annual wage of the time.

Annie Swynnerton

A STRONG believer in equality for women in art and a founder of the Manchester Society of female painters, Manchester-born Annie Swynnerton became the first woman to be elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1922.

Her painting, The Sense of Sight, shows an angel who has descended to earth and now relies on her sight to re-establish her links with Heaven.

Evelyn de Morgan

WIFE of the potter William Frend de Morgan, Evelyn de Morgan’s art works helped to subsidise his pottery business. She painted Life and Thought Have Gone Away in 1893, depicting the immortality of the soul with images of death such as doves, butterflies and snakes.

It was bought for £600.

Mary Martin

MARRIED to the artist Kenneth Martin, Mary Martin was one of the most influential and distinguished of a group of English constructivist artists of the mid-20th century. Her sculptures and paintings are made up of geometric shapes and explore colour, line and form.

Her work, Cross, is a construction in stainless steel on wood. It won joint first prize at the high-profile John Moores Exhibition in 1969. Sadly, Martin died before the judges had announced their decision.