The Lady Huggins–Slocombe Archive: autograph letters from the astronomer Lady Margaret Huggins to the portrait painter Shirley Slocombe, with related correspondence, drafts, enclosures, and ephemera.
London: 1896–1915. A substantial autograph archive — 102 items, more than 350 manuscript pages, almost all in Lady Huggins’s own upright hand — chronicling across nearly twenty years the private scientific and artistic life of one of the most accomplished women in Victorian and Edwardian British astronomy, and a co-worker in the partnership that founded the spectroscopy of the stars. The correspondence was kept by its recipient, the portrait painter Shirley Charles Slocombe (1872–1935), who painted both of the Hugginses and whose 1903 oil of Sir William hangs today, by Lady Huggins’s bequest, in the Royal Astronomical Society. The letters open in January 1896, when Slocombe first took Sir William as a sitter. They run through the knighthood, the Royal Society presidency of 1900 to 1905, and the great spectral Atlas of 1899. They run through the radium work of 1903, the death of Sir William in 1910 and of Lady Huggins herself in March 1915. They close with the executrix’s letter, three months after Lady Huggins’s own death, arranging for the portrait to be re-signed before its delivery to the Society. The title given here describes two things at once: the painted likenesses the archive records, and the second portrait it draws unawares — of Margaret, in her own hand, across two decades of letters. The archive is everything that lay beneath and around the formal outline of the career, in her own voice and at length. Across the 350 pages she moves freely between the technicalities of portrait painting and the state of the observatory; between the hanging committee of the Royal Academy and the night’s observing schedule; between the winter neuralgia and the energy she and her husband were pouring into radium. She counsels Slocombe through his engagement, his marriage, and a succession of family deaths; she manages Sir William’s public appearances, drafts diplomatic letters on his behalf, and deliberates over the framing, photographing and placing of his likenesses. And she reveals, in the plainest terms, how far the running of a Victorian scientific household was the work of its mistress: the dealings with printers, photographers and framers; the negotiation with patrons; the acceptance or deferral of honours for the sake of the work; the steady assembling, year on year, of a reputation whose public name would for decades be her husband’s alone. The portrait commission shows her acting as curator of her husband’s public image. She had wanted the picture, she explains at the outset, not for her own satisfaction but for something larger — that a true presentment of Sir William might enter the portrait collection of English natural philosophers at the Royal Society. Her instructions to Slocombe are exact: no robes, no theatre, no professional paraphernalia. “The human face is the divinest thing about a man,” she writes, and asks for a vigorous portrait full of feeling rather than a showy one. When she sees the first version she returns to him with a criticism that is also a piece of physiological testimony: prolonged observational work, she explains, has made his eyes so sensitive that any extra light or fatigue brings on a droop of the eyelids at once, and the finished portrait must record not a tired moment but the habitual gaze of a man who has spent half a century at the telescope. The same attention governs everything she asks for: the set of the head, the fall of the light, the degree of finish, each weighed against the single end of a likeness that would tell its sitter’s story when neither painter nor subject remained to tell it. She is, throughout, less a client than a collaborator, and the portrait that resulted — sober, unrobed, intent — is as much her conception as Slocombe’s. The technical knowledge the letters reveal at every turn is not ornamental. Lady Huggins had been photographing stellar spectra on gelatin dry plates at Tulse Hill since the early 1880s, and her darkroom and Slocombe’s studio are, for her, allied workrooms. When she worries how a peculiar bluish tone in the black of the monochrome portrait will behave in reproduction, she proposes in effect a photometric test, directing that a photograph be taken of the picture as it stands and insisting the print be a silver bromide; she reminds Slocombe that she and Sir William are both photographers, well used to judging photographs. When he proposes to try Herkomer’s new gravure process she discusses it with him as a practitioner; when Frederick Hollyer’s platinotypes after G. F. Watts come up she voices a judgement on their tone; when reproductions are to be made she writes directly to the lithographers Vincent Brooks, Day & Son. Her art criticism is of the same diagnostic cast — her reservations about the Academy’s hanging committee, her approval of Wyke Bayliss, her opinions on William Stott of Oldham, on Alfred Hunt, on Ford Madox Brown and Rossetti, and her admiration of Watts’s frames, which she wanted because, as she put it, “Watts’s frames do not shadow the picture they surround.” It is throughout the habit of a mind trained to compare, test and revise. It is the same mind, and the same voice, that appears when the subject turns to science. In a twelve-page letter of August 1903 she reports that she and Sir William have been working intensely hard on radium — the spectrum of the new element was then among the most contested subjects in physics, and the Hugginses’ was among the last of their joint researches — with interesting and important results, and gives two pages to her recent election to the Royal Astronomical Society and to how long it had been since the Society had chosen any honorary member at all. In November 1906 she writes, unguardedly, that she wishes they could anticipate the remedies and preventions that the medical science of, say, 1920 would have won. The quiet politics of her position as a woman among the institutions of late-Victorian science is marked not by grievance but by levelness of tone: writing of frames the Academy might refuse, she adds that when that august body advances so far as to have ladies on its council she hardly thinks it will look kindly on frames with holes in them. Of the social mechanics of the Academy’s summer show she observes that the knowledge a portrait hangs there impresses most people more than the sight of it, since few are competent to recognise intrinsic merit — a sentence that might stand as a verdict on her own reception. There is no complaint in any of it. What the letters record instead is a woman who understood the institutions of her science precisely — their committees, their honours, their slow machinery of recognition — and who worked them, on her husband’s behalf and her own, with the same exactness she brought to a photographic plate. The longest documentary thread in the archive is the history of Sir William’s portraits, which runs unbroken from the first commission of January 1896 to the executrix’s letter of June 1915. It records, in sequence: the early sittings at Slocombe’s Scarsdale Studios in Kensington; the photographing of the portrait in progress by William E. Gray of Bayswater in 1898, the platinum print still present in the archive; the 1903 Royal Academy submission, with the Academician W. F. Yeames — the painter of And When Did You Last See Your Father? — writing to confirm that the portrait hangs and looking very well, and supplying a pencilled map of the gallery to locate it; the delicate handling, in a long letter of September 1905, of the Royal Society’s decision to commission John Collier rather than Slocombe for the President’s portrait, in which Lady Huggins offers the consoling thought that the Slocombe picture will find a home where more eyes will see it than at the Society; and, a decade later, the arrangement for the canvas to pass to the Royal Astronomical Society. The archive thus records the construction and placing of a scientist’s likeness from commission to bequest — the sittings, the photographing, the framing, the exhibition, the rivalry of painters, the final gift to a learned society — from within, in the voice of the wife who directed every stage. The archive preserves the other voices too. Three drafts survive of Slocombe’s own letters to Lady Huggins, on his Scarsdale Studios paper and heavily struck through, showing the care with which he framed his replies; two letters come from Sir William himself, a brief appointment card and a longer, characteristically forthright refusal to lend his name to a scheme he did not believe in; two more are from Yeames. The nurse E. G. Hazells writes from the sickroom at More’s Garden, Chelsea, on 10 March 1915, correctly judging that Lady Huggins might linger a fortnight or more — she died exactly two weeks later, on 24 March. And the telegram of 13 May 1910 by which Lady Huggins broke the news of her husband’s death survives intact, addressed to Slocombe at his studio: “Sir William entered the Spiritual Life yesterday.” Among the enclosures are a pencil sketch of Sir William by Slocombe; a tracing, in Lady Huggins’s hand, of an ornament she wore at a sitting, sent so that he could render it precisely; a bookplate of her own design bearing the monogram M.L.H.; a small folder of October 1900 marked “Re Lady Bute,” with clippings on the death of the third Marquess of Bute; and — most singular — a separately printed leaf of her own poem, Years, signed in print. Several of the leaves carry ochre paint-stains transferred from the studio in which they were read and answered, a small physical trace of the two worlds the correspondence joined; one envelope still bears its Edwardian penny stamp and cancellation. The ordinary furniture of a long friendship — the Christmas greetings, the printed cards, the condolences on mourning-bordered paper — survives alongside the substantial letters, so that the run reads less as a selection than as a friendship preserved whole. Margaret Lindsay Murray, of Dublin, had married William Huggins in 1875, when she was twenty-seven and he fifty-one. What followed was a thirty-five-year scientific partnership at the Tulse Hill observatory in south London: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography records that she co-authored and illustrated most of her husband’s later scientific papers, and from 1889 he had begun to add her name to their joint work, beginning with their study of the spectrum of the Orion nebula. Her own publications included a monograph on the violin-maker Giovanni Paolo Maggini (1892), the articles on the armillary sphere and the astrolabe in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and papers in the astronomical journals; the first book to carry her name beside her husband’s on its title page was the Atlas of Representative Stellar Spectra of 1899, and she later edited the posthumous Scientific Papers of Sir William Huggins (1909). In May 1903 she and Agnes Clerke were elected Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society together — only the fourth and fifth women ever to be so honoured, after Caroline Herschel, Mary Somerville and Anne Sheepshanks. The partnership to which she had given herself was the one that founded the spectroscopy of the stars. William Huggins had been one of the founders of astronomical spectroscopy, the man who first turned the spectroscope systematically on the stars and read in their light the chemical elements they shared with the earth; who showed that certain nebulae were not unresolved clusters of stars but masses of glowing gas; and who first measured a star’s motion in the line of sight from the shift of its spectral lines. After his marriage the Tulse Hill observatory became a two-handed enterprise, and the move into photography of the spectrum — the technique on which the later work depended — coincided with Margaret’s arrival. It was she who brought the patience and the manual exactness that dry-plate spectrum photography demanded, and the published record of the partnership’s second half, the photographic record above all, is in large part hers. The archive is the private register of that enterprise, kept by the partner whose share in it the title pages were slow to admit. The portrait project did not end with Sir William. Shortly after his picture came the painting of Lady Huggins herself, to correspond with his and in the same style, so that the two might be reproduced together. The archive is the document of the life within which her naming as a partner in the published work, and the quarter-century of labour behind it, took place. That life has at last been recovered. The standard modern study, Barbara J. Becker’s Unravelling Starlight: William and Margaret Huggins and the Rise of the New Astronomy (2011), reconstructs Margaret’s role from the surviving observatory notebooks and correspondence and restores her to the centre of the Tulse Hill enterprise; Mary Brück’s study of women in early British and Irish astronomy does the same on a smaller scale. The present archive is the raw material of exactly that recovery: 350 pages in her own hand, a portrait of the partner whose share in the work the record had for a century kept half in her husband’s shadow. No comparable body of her papers has appeared in the trade. References: B. J. Becker, Unravelling Starlight: William and Margaret Huggins and the Rise of the New Astronomy (Cambridge, 2011); M. T. Brück, Women in Early British and Irish Astronomy: Stars and Satellites (Dordrecht, 2009); Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. ‘Huggins, Dame Margaret Lindsay [née Murray]’ (by B. J. Becker); C. E. Mills and C. F. Brooke (eds.), Sketch of the Life of Sir William Huggins, K.C.B., O.M. (Richmond, 1936); M. L. Huggins and W. Huggins, Atlas of Representative Stellar Spectra (London, 1899). One hundred and two items, 1896–1915. The greater part is autograph correspondence in the hand of Margaret Lindsay Huggins, mostly on cream wove letterpaper and laid bifolia engraved “90, UPPER TULSE HILL, S.W.”, ranging from one-page notes to a continuous twelve-page letter; total extent of her correspondence in excess of 350 manuscript pages, in dark inks in her upright hand. With two letters by Sir William Huggins; three drafts by Slocombe on Scarsdale Studios letterhead with heavy deletions; a letter from the executrix Julia Montefiore; a deathbed letter from the nurse E. G. Hazells, 10 March 1915; two letters from W. F. Yeames R.A., one with a pencilled gallery map; and a telegram of 13 May 1910 announcing Sir William’s death. Enclosures include a preliminary pencil sketch of Sir William by Slocombe; a 1898 photographic print of the portrait in progress with the studio stamp of W. E. Gray on the verso; a pencil tracing of an ornament in Lady Huggins’s hand; her monogram bookplate (M.L.H.); a folder “Re Lady Bute” with press clippings; and a privately printed poem, Years, signed in print. Some leaves bear ochre paint-stains transferred from the studio and are preserved in archival sleeves; two letters are fragments; the rest intact, well preserved and legible, with light foxing and toning.
Item #6601
Price: $38,000.00
