A colourful life through a lens

Suffragette and groundbreaking photographer Madame Yevonde was as adept at capturing COUNTRY LIFE Frontispiece subjects as she was at creating conceptual art with high-society models sporting rubber-snake headdresses, says Lucinda Gosling

- Lucinda Gosling

AT first glance, there seems little to connect the Hon Christian Methuen and Miss Rachel Johns, who respectively appeared on the Frontispiece of this magazine on May 1, 1915, and August 29, 1974. The common denominator, despite nearly 60 years’ difference, is that they each had their picture taken by the same photographer. Her name was Madame Yevonde. Theirs were the first and the last Yevonde portraits to be published in COUNTRY LIFE, bookending the extraordinary career of a pioneering photographer.

When the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) reopens this month after a three-year, £41 million refurbishment (‘A fresh face’, June 7), it will position Yevonde firmly centre stage with a major exhibition celebrating her life and work. Integral to this story is Yevonde’s long association with magazines such as COUNTRY LIFE, which gave her a platform and a vital source of income.

Born in Streatham, London SW16, on January 5, 1893, and christened Yevonde Philone Cumbers, she was the elder daughter of Frederick Cumbers, a manufacturer of printing inks. She grew up in a prosperous and liberal-minded middle-class household and her teenage years were dominated by her activism in support of the suffrage cause. She marched, lobbied and attended meetings; she even sold The Suffragette newspaper, but recoiled from the idea of breaking the law and the associated horrors of prison. Nevertheless, suffrage values fostered an independent streak and led her to believe there should be more to life than marriage and children.