Milly Childers
{{short description|English painter (1866-1922)}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2022}}
{{Infobox artist
| name = Milly Childers
| image = Milly Childers, by Milly Childers.jpg
| imagesize =
| caption = Self portrait (1889)
| birth_name = Emily Maria Eardley Childers
| birth_date = {{Birth date|1866|2|26|df=y}}
| birth_place = Kensington, London
| death_date = {{Death date and age|1922|2|8|1866|2|26|df=y}}
| death_place = Hampstead, London, England
| nationality = British
| education =
| field = Painting
| training =
| movement =
| works = The Terrace, 1909
| patrons =
| awards =
| spouse =
| partner =
|father= Hugh Childers
}}
Emily "Milly" Maria Eardley Childers (26 February 1866 – 8 February 1922) was an English painter of the later Victorian era and the early 20th century. She is best known for her portrait The Terrace, 1909 at the Palace of Westminster.Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists, London, Routledge, 1993.
Early life and family
Childers was born in 1866 at 17, Princes Garden, Kensington,{{cite news |title= Births |work=The Times |publisher=The Times Digital Archive |date=27 February 1866 |page= 1}} into a prominent political family. She was the youngest of eight children of Hugh Childers and his wife, Emily Walker. Her father was a Member of Parliament and Cabinet minister. In 1868, her father was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty under Gladstone.Edmund Spencer Eardley Childers, The Life and Correspondence of Hugh C. E. Childers, 1827–1896, 2 Vols., London, John Murray, 1901.
Childers' mother died in 1875, when Milly was 9 years old. Four years later, her father remarried, to Katherine Anne Elliot (née Gilbert) in Paris. She was the daughter of Ashurst Gilbert, Bishop of Chichester and the widow of Hon. Gilbert Elliot, son of the 2nd Earl Minto.UK, Foreign and Overseas Registers of British Subjects, 1628–1969
Career
Childers began exhibiting her art around 1890. After her father's 1892 retirement from public service, father and daughter travelled together through England and France; Milly Childers painted landscapes, and church interiors. Her father's social and political connections brought his daughter some commissioned work, including as a restorer and copyist for Lord Halifax at Temple Newsam.Liz Rideal, Mirror, Mirror: Self-Portraits by Women Artists, New York, Watson-Guptill, 2002; p. 44. Childers exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.{{cite web |last1=Nichols |first1=K. L. |title=Women's Art at the World's Columbian Fair & Exposition, Chicago 1893| url=http://arcadiasystems.org/academia/cassatt9.html#childers|accessdate=28 July 2018}}
File:Sir John Benjamin Stone - photo of Milly Childers painting 'The Terrace', 1909 mw117056 (cropped).jpg by Sir John Benjamin Stone]]
Her landscape The Terrace, 1909 depicts the Members' Terrace outside the Palace of Westminster overlooking the River Thames. Featuring all men in Edwardian dress, it captures a time when women were barred from holding office or voting. It is now in the Parliamentary Art Collection. Other prominent paintings are the portrait of her father and a self-portrait from 1889. Others of her better-known works are Children Playing Hoops in the Street, Arromanches and [http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5263252 The Pannier market, Barnstaple]. Her style shows influences from the Impressionists.
Childers was the last artist to paint the interior of the original Reims Cathedral, which was destroyed in 1914 during the First World War.{{cite news |title= Death of Miss E. M. E. Childers.|work=The Times |publisher=The Times Digital Archive |date=11 February 1922 |page=7 }}
She died in 1922, aged 55, at Hampstead General Hospital in London. She was eulogised in The Times as "an artist of rare ability, and of a charming personality."
Gallery
{{Gallery
| title =
| align =
| footer =
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| whitebg =
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| captionstyle =
| File:Hugh Culling Eardley Childers by Emily Maria Eardley ('Milly') Childers.jpg | Portrait of Hugh Childers (1891)
| alt1=
| File:The Terrace, 1909 by Milly Childers.jpg
| alt2=
| File:Milly Childers - Little Fisher Boy, Jules Ferry.jpg
| Little Fisher Boy, Jules Ferry
| alt3=
| File:Milly Childers (1866-1922) - Portrait of a Sister of Ralph Stawel Dutton, as a Child, National Trust.jpg
| Portrait of a Sister of Ralph Stawel Dutton, as a Child
| alt4=
| File:Milly Childers - Reims Cathedral, France, 1914.jpg
| Interior of Reims Cathedral in 1914, shortly before its destruction in the war
| alt5=
| File:Milly Childers - Marietta.jpg
| Marietta
| alt6=
}}
References
{{reflist}}
External links
- {{Commons category-inline|Milly Childers}}
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20081020040026/http://members.cox.net/academia2/cassatt9.html#childers British Women Painters: 1893 Exposition]
- [https://heritagecollections.parliament.uk/collections/getrecord/HOP_WOA_3439 The Terrace] (1909 painting of the terrace at the UK Houses of Parliament)
- [http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait.php?search=ap&npgno=x19937 Photo of Childers and her work] (National Portrait Gallery, London)
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Childers, Milly}}
Category:English people of French descent
Category:English people of Portuguese-Jewish descent
Category:Painters from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
Category:People from Kensington
Category:19th-century English painters
Category:20th-century English painters
Category:20th-century English women painters
Category:19th-century English women painters
{{UK-painter-19thC-stub}}