Details

Name

Ernest Normand

Brief Biography

1857–1923, English

Occupation

Artist

Description

Ernest Normand was born in 1857 in Paddington, the second son of George Barten and Mary Ann Normand. In the 1881 census, his father’s occupation was given as a general and French merchant and the family lived at 5 Auckland Road, Croydon, Surrey. Ernest was a student at the Academy Schools from 1880 un1883 and studied under Pettie. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1881 and continued to exhibit there on a regular basis. He was best known for his history and genre paintings. While there, he met his future wife, Henrietta Rae, a fellow student.
Henrietta Rae was born on 3 December 1859 at Grove Villas, Hammersmith, the youngest of seven children of Thomas Rae, a civil servant with theatrical interests, and Anne Eliza Graves, a talented musician who had studied under Mendelssohn. Henrietta became interested in art at an early age and began studying at the Queen’s Square School of Art at the age of 13, and in 1874 entered Heatherley’s School of art. Three years later, in 1877 she entered the Royal Academy Schools on her sixth attempt, and remained there for seven years where her teachers included WP Frith, Frank Dicksee and Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Henrietta first began exhibiting in 1879 with a small landscape at the Society of British Artists and then, from 1881 exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy until 1919. She was best known for her large-scale paintings of the female nude, mythological paintings and portraits. She had a portrait practice in Belfast, and her portraits were more commercially successful than her other works.
Ernest and Henrietta were married in Croydon on 26 May 1884 and set up home in Holland Park Road, Kensington, which was something of an artists’ colony in the 1880s. They were near neighbours of the President of the Royal Academy, Frederick Leighton, who became their friend and mentor particularly of Henrietta. Their son, Rae, was born in 1886 and their daughter, Florence, in 1893.
In 1890, Ernest and Henrietta went to Paris to further their studies at the Academie Julian and then spent several weeks painting en plein air at Grez-sur-Nemours, near Barbizon. Shortly after their return, they moved to 4 Fox Hill Gardens, Upper Norwood, Surrey, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Frederick Leighton continued to take a close interest in their progress and was instrumental in ensuring that they contributed to the murals for the Royal Exchange in the City of London in 1900. Henrietta painted a fresco of Sir Richard Whittington and his charities, and Ernest contributed King John signing the Magna Carta, and the Legend of Lancelot and Elaine. The preparatory drawing for this panel was sold in London in 1990 for £15,400.
Ernest and Henrietta both exhibited at the RGI, Ernest with ‘Pandora’ in 1906, and ‘On the threshold’, the painting donated to Kelvingrove, in 1909. ‘On the threshold’ had originally been exhibited at the RA in 1903. ‘Pandora’was sold in New York in 1998 for 57,500 dollars. Henrietta showed ‘Songs of the morning’ at the RGI in 1904 and ‘Hylas and the nymphs’ in 1912. Both are in private collections. Ernest gave up painting in 1908 due to failing eyesight and Henrietta stopped exhibiting in 1919.
Ernest died of heart failure in Kensigton on 23 March 1923 and Henrietta died at home in Upper Norwood on 26 January 1928. Both are buried in the Normand Mausoleum in Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. In her obituary in ‘The Times’, it was said that, ‘She and her husband were kindly people, and for years made their roomy at Upper Norwood, with its beautiful garden, a hospitable centre for young artists and other friends.’