Dorothy Tennant (painter)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dorothy Tennant (1896)
Henry Morton Stanley. Portrait of Dorothy Tennant (1880)

Dorothy Tennant , also Dorothy, Lady Stanley , Mrs. HM Stanley , Mrs. Henry Curtis (born March 22, 1855 in London , † October 5, 1926 ), was a British painter of Victorian neoclassicism . Her first marriage was to the African explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley .

biography

Dorothy Tennant was a daughter of Gertrude Barbara Rich Collier (1819–1918) and the wealthy landowner and politician Charles Tennant (1796–1873). Her sister was the photographer Eveleen Myers . The mother had spent the first 24 years of her life in France and was friends with Gustave Flaubert , Léon Gambetta and other French intellectuals. Her salon was frequented by leading members of London society. Dorothy Tennant and her sister, both "celebrated beauties", actively participated in the mother's social life.

Dorothy Tennant studied painting with Edward Poynter at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and with Jean-Jacques Henner in Paris . From 1886 she exhibited her works in London, in the Royal Academy and then in the New Gallery and the Grosvenor Gallery . Outside of London, her pictures were shown in the Fine Art Society in Glasgow and in the autumn exhibitions held in Liverpool and Manchester . The newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer acquired her portrait of the French President Léon Gambetta . On the other hand, she specialized in painting street children, beggars and street vendors in London and published these drawings in books including London Street Arabs (1890).

In 1885 Dorothy Tennant met the journalist and Africa explorer Henry Morton Stanley when he was sitting for a portrait. For more than a year he courted the 34-year-old who still shared her bedroom with her mother and had "just as hard with men as he with women". She refused marriage proposals from him twice. While Stanley was on the expedition again , she changed her mind and wrote him eagerly. In 1890 Stanley and Dorothy Tennant married in Westminster Abbey . Stanley insisted that his young assistant accompany him and his wife on their honeymoon in Switzerland . Existing diary passages from this period were partially blackened, probably by his wife after his death. For since her husband in 1899 Knight had been beaten, she led the Informal Lady Stanley .

There are suspicions that Stanley was homosexual and that the marriage was probably never consummated, which is why she remained childless. Instead, the couple adopted a son, Denzil Morton Stanley, in 1896.

After Stanley's death in 1904, she married the physician Henry Jones Curtis a second time in 1907. In 1909 she published the autobiography of her late husband Henry Morton Stanley and is said to have removed all references to other women in his life.

gallery

  • His First Offence (1896)

  • L'Amour Blessé (1895)

  • Cover of Emin Pasha and the Rebellion at the Equator (1890)

  • Illustration from the book London Arabs (1890)

  • Illustration from the book London Arabs (1890)

Publications

  • London Street Arabs (London: Cassell & Co., 1890); archive.org

Web links

Commons : Dorothy Tennant  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c Henry Morton Stanley: The Autobiography Of Sir Henry Morton Stanley . Ed .: Dorothy Stanley. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909.
  2. ^ Eveleen Myers (née Tennant) (1856-1937), Photographer. In: National Portrait Gallery. Retrieved April 13, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Eveleen Myers 1856 - 1937. In: photo-web.com.au. Retrieved March 8, 2020 .
  4. ↑ Grosvenor prints (PDF file) Retrieved March 7, 2020.
  5. ^ A b Frances Spalding: 20th Century Painters and Sculptors . Antique Collectors' Club, 1990, ISBN 978-1-85149-106-3 .
  6. ↑ Ellen Ross: Slum Travelers. ISBN 978-0-520-24906-6 , p. 239 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  7. ↑ a b Adam Hochschild: Shadows over the Congo. ISBN 3-608-94769-8 p. 137 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  8. ↑ Women power. . . Does it affect African leadership? In: The Herals. April 7, 2011, accessed March 7, 2020 .
  9. ^ Henry Morton Stanley. In: britannica.com. March 4, 2020, accessed on March 7, 2020 .
  10. ^ Supplement to the British Medical Journal (1944)
personal data
SURNAME Tennant, Dorothy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stanley, Lady Dorothy (married name); Stanley, Mrs. HM (author name); Curtis, Mrs. Henry (married name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English painter
DATE OF BIRTH March 22, 1855
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH October 5, 1926