Radical Politics/Radical Painting: Emma Novello’s portrait of Richard Cobden

This event investigates the radical context of Emma Novello’s portrait of the politician Richard Cobden, painted in Paris in 1861.

Join Professor Simon Morgan (Leeds Beckett University) and Dr Rebecca Wade (Special Collections and Galleries, University of Leeds) for a pair of talks related to Emma Novello’s portrait of the politician Richard Cobden, accompanied by a pop-up display from the Novello Cowden Clarke Collection. 

The artist Emma Aloysia Novello painted an accomplished oil sketch of Richard Cobden in Paris in 1861, shortly after Cobden successfully negotiated the Anglo-French trade agreement that would become known as the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty. The portrait materialises the alliance between Cobden and the Novello family that contributed to the Paper Duty Repeal Bill; part of the ultimately successful campaign against ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, which extended access to information and democratised print culture in the second half of the century.

Presented to the Brotherton Library in 1953 as part of the Novello Cowden Clarke Collection, the portrait appears not to have been displayed in public since it was painted. New research has revealed its history and significance for the first time and established the existence of a yet untraced second portrait, exhibited at the South Kensington Museum and the Crystal Palace in 1869.

Emma Novello’s reputation as an artist has, until now, been obscured by the artistic potential and early death of her brother Edward Petre Novello, her status as an unmarried woman and confinement to a private asylum for the last two decades of her life. Here we begin to recover Novello’s agency as an artist and make visible her significance to histories of British portraiture and politics.

The event is connected with the conference The Radical North on Friday 29 November and timed to coincide with the Leeds Civic Trust’s unveiling of a blue plaque commemorating the Chartist newspaper the Northern Star following the event on Saturday 30 November.

This event is based on research developed through an Understanding British Portraits Fellowship, supported by funding from Arts Council England.