"Adventurers All"

A Pilgrimage of Ideas: Bedford’s Travelling Foundations

A passion for women’s education was
not the only idea Bedford New College’s
founder, Elizabeth Jesser Reid (1789-
1866), brought to the pioneering women’s
college upon its opening in 1849. Reid’s
Unitarian faith, and the non-sectarian
curriculum Bedford adopted as a result,
invited women from all walks of life to
come to Bedford and present their unique,
sometimes controversial, ideas.

Reid’s letters show her keen interest in the wider world. She shared correspondence with Italian politician Giuseppe Mazzini and joined the crowds greeting the revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi on his visit to Britain.

She discussed the American Civil War with her friend Henry Crabbe Robinson, was actively involved in the Abolitionist movement and hosted anti-slavery lectures at the College. Bedford’s outward-looking foundations provided fertile ground for global social movements.

Elizabeth Jesser Reid [BC PH.1.1]

One of the most famous “pilgrimages” to Bedford College was undertaken by Sarah Parker Remond (1826-1899), a high-profile American abolitionist campaigner.

When Remond came to England in 1859, she enrolled at Bedford College and stayed as a guest in Reid’s home. She brought a strong sense of social justice to Bedford where many early students would go on to campaign for women’s suffrage, educational rights, and women’s property rights.

Sarah Parker Remond, undated photograph, Portrait Photograph Collection, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum. Salem, Mass.

Emily Penrose

Dame Emily Penrose (1858-1942) served as the first formally appointed Principal of Bedford College from 1893 - 1898. Her responsibilities included acting as educational head, manager of the residence, head of the library, and college professor of Ancient History. When she first took the position, student numbers at the college were in decline, but Penrose helped to turn fortunes around; according to a Treasury Committee report on universities, “some of the increased prosperity of Bedford College was due to the energy and efficiency of Miss Penrose.”

Emily Penrose [BC PH.1.1]

The Parthenon [2020.3], Penrose, Dame Emily, 1887, watercolour

In her early years, family trips across Europe to Versailles, Paris, Dresden, Berlin, and Italy enabled Penrose to study languages and the arts.

She was taught drawing and painting by her father, the architect Francis Cranmer Penrose (1817-1903) whom she accompanied to Athens in 1886 on his appointment as the first Director of the British School there. Her study of the Parthenon displays at an early stage her keen eye for architectural detail and her devotion to ancient history.

"Dame Emily Penrose (1858-1942)" [P1605], Laszlo, Philip Alexius de, 1907, oil on canvas

After her time at Bedford College, she became Principal at Royal Holloway College, when she sat for this portrait painted by Philip de László. She cuts a striking figure wearing the blue academic dress of the “steamboat” women - so called for having to make the sea crossing to Ireland to receive their degrees at Trinity College Dublin. This was because when Penrose finished her studies at Oxford, most British universities did not award full degrees to female students. De László encouraged his scholarly sitters to wear their hoods draped across their bodies in a neoclassical style.

Christiana Herringham

Lady Christiana Herringham (1852-1929) was an influential figure within the women’s suffrage movement and a distinguished artist. Her expertise in the medium of tempera sparked a revival in its use for painting. Her husband, Sir Wilmot Herringham, was a prominent benefactor of Bedford College and donated a large part of her extensive art collection to the college after her death in 1929.

Christiana Herringham, c1885, © Jean Vernon-Jackson collection.

In 1903 she co-founded the National Art Collections Fund (now Art Fund), in the belief that the provision of art to the wider public was a vital collective responsibility. She was able to travel widely and produced many studies of important buildings and monuments. Her expertise was widely respected, and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), founded by William Morris and Philip Webb, tasked her with reporting on the condition of various artefacts and buildings.  Her work contributed to debates over the restoration of sites such as St Mark’s Basilica in Venice.

“Italy: Venice – St Mark’s Basilica: In the Narthex”; Herringham, Lady Christiana Jane, late 19th-early 20th c., tempera on tanvas, [P1560]

During her visits to India between 1906 and 1911 she became fascinated by the ancient frescoes in the Ajanta Caves, Maharashtra. Dating from 450-650 CE, the frescoes depict various episodes of the Buddha’s life. She set about copying them, thus preserving an important part of India’s heritage and challenging ideas surrounding the superiority of western art. Her Times obituary described how "these paintings were often difficult to see, and still more difficult, even dangerous, to reach," making her work "an heroic and an extremely exacting task." The copies went on display at the Crystal Palace in 1912.

"India, Ajanta - Fragment from the Hamsa Jataka" [P0913], Herringham, Lady Christiana Jane, c. 1909-1911, pencil, gouache, watercolour & tempera on paper

See more works Herringham made during her travels in the gallery below.