BARBARA LEIGH SMITH BODICHON (BRITISH, 1827-1891)

The daughter of the radical politician Ben Smith, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was an ardent campaigner for women's rights, and one of the founders of Girton College, Cambridge (the university's first women's college) in 1869, alongside Emily Davies. She also became a co-founder of 'The Ladies of Langham Place', the first group of its kind which tackled the rights of women to own property. She married a French doctor living in Algiers, Eugene Bodichon, in 1857, the same year that she founded the Society for Female Artists and from then split her time between England and Algiers. She became friends with the Pre-Raphaelite circle, who admired her enthusiasm for painting, Rossetti writing in 1853 to his sister Christina, ‘Ah! if you were only like Miss Barbara Smith, ... blessed with large rations of tin [money], fat, enthusiasm, & golden hair, who thinks nothing of climbing up a mountain in breeches or wading through a stream in none, in the sacred name of pigment.' She was a pupil of William Holman Hunt and exhibited at both the Paris Salon and the Royal Academy.