ESTELLE SYLVIA PANKHURST (1882-1960).

At the 2018 ‘Painting Light and Hope‘ exhibition of Annie’s works, there were also works by others in her artistic and social circles. One of these was Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst (who preferred to be addressed her middle name, ‘Sylvia’, rather than by her first name). One of her drawings appeared at auction recently, prompting me to revisit her artwork and create this page.

There is much information about Sylvia on the internet. I’d especially recommend www.sylviapankhurst.com (managed by Redbridge Museum & Heritage Centre) for a good, all-round appreciation of her life and work. I don’t recall any direct connection between Annie Swynnerton and Sylvia, but they must have been well aware of each other through their social connections.

Sylvia won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in 1900, but her ambitions were much changed when, in 1907, she made an artistic tour of working conditions across the country. This, along with routine experiences of being disregarded as an artist purely because she was female, prompted her to abandon art as a career and focus her attention instead on things such as women’s and worker’s rights, suffragism, socialist politics, support for soldiers’ wives during war-time and anti-war campaigning.

Over the years she became increasingly estranged from her family because of political and personal differences – she had a son by Italian anarchist Silvio Corio, but against her mother’s wishes and social convention declined to marry him. From the mid-1930s she became passionately interested in Ethiopian affairs, eventually settling in the country. When she died there in 1960 she was declared “an honorary Ethiopian” by Emperor Haile Selassie and buried, with great honour, in front of Addis Ababa cathederal.

The drawing which has appeared at auction (November 2024) is a rare example from her earlier ‘artistic’ period.