“Elizabeth Davies, Jarrow”: women in the Newcastle Art School

a talk by Dr Melanie Stephenson - The talk will last approximately 1 hour and there will be refreshments available.Dr Melanie Stephenson has contributed three essays to the Friends of the Hatton bulletin this year to celebrate the centenary of the renaming of the gallery to the Hatton Gallery.

This talk complements her research and highlights some of the women in Newcastle Art School during George Hatton's time there.During my research into the life and achievements of Richard Hatton and the history of the Newcastle Art School in the period covering the 1880s to the 1920s, women were a constant and common presence.

Their names appeared in newspaper reports of prizewinning students, handwritten in the front of art school textbooks, in the lists of scholars achieving Fine Art degrees, as teachers in the Art School curriculum, in exhibition reviews and inscribed on beautiful objects. Their physical presence in similar numbers to their male counterparts is evident in art class photographs.

This talk will focus on some of those names, for example, women such as Elizabeth Davies, who made their mark on the artistic life of this region in the early decades of the 20th century.