Inside History: Protest. Revolt & Reform

"I broke the
glass of the
pictures as a
protest against
the wicked
sentence passed
upon Mrs
Pankhurst."
sticks and umbrellas – were banned
from public museums and galleries,
whilst plain-clothes detectives trailed
after any suspicious-looking woman who
might enter. By 1914, planned closures
at times of heightened suffrage activity
took place, causing further disturbance
for disgruntled visitors and agitated
gallery staff.
Unlike the window smashing campaign,
smashing paintings was not a formulated
moment involving hundreds of women at
one time. The most famous attacks on
paintings were isolated incidents,
undertaken by individuals or a very small
group, and the choice of painting was
often selected because of their subject;
Mary Wood deliberately chose to slash
the portrait of Henry James by Sargent at
the Royal Academy in 1914, because she
knew (and given women were still not
admitted to the RA): ‘…if a woman had
painted it, it would not have been worth
so much.’
But as we look to the national museums
to understand how these campaigns
impacted public space, closures, and
visitor restrictions, we must recognise
where the first painting smashing took
place in 1913 - in the city where
Pankhurst had, ten years previously,
founded the militant campaign.
On the evening of Thursday 3rd April
1913, at around quarter to nine, three
women stood in room No.5 of
Manchester Art Gallery. According to the
statement of the guard, he heard a loud
smashing noise, rushing in to find the
women holding ‘a small confectionary
hammer and another instrument’. The
other instrument proved to be a screw
wrench hidden behind a statue. The
hammers bore notes featuring messages
that read: ‘Votes for Women’, ‘stop
forcible-feeding’ and ‘Parliament for
dishonourable men; imprisonment for
honourable women.’
Throughout the Gallery, thirteen
paintings were smashed, causing over
£100 worth of damage. Lillian Forrester,
Annie Briggs and Evelyn Manesta were all
arrested; upon her detainment, Forrester
and Manesta declared, as if rehearsed: ‘I
broke the glass of the pictures as a
protest against the wicked sentence
passed upon Mrs Pankhurst.’ Annie
Briggs remained silent.
The attack on Manchester Art Gallery had
been planned by Lillian Forrester, but
across the city, and indeed, across the
nation, women were protesting the
sentencing of Emmeline Pankhurst, who
had been arrested for inciting the
bombing of David Lloyd-George’s halfbuilt
country house. In a rousing
speech in court, and recorded in her
autobiography My Own Story,
Pankhurst declared that militant
action would only come to an end when
the vote was won, saying: ‘We are
women, rightly or wrongly, convinced
that this is the only way in which we can
win power to alter what for us are
intolerable conditions, absolutely
intolerable….[T]here is only one way to
put a stop to this agitation; there is only
one way to break down this agitation. It
is not by deporting us, it is not by
locking us up in gaol; it is by doing us
justice.’ Women in the courtroom sang
out for their leader, whilst others, like
Forrester, planned their retribution.
Perhaps the most famous attack on
public art came from Mary Richardson,
who after Emmeline Pankhurst’s arrest
in 1914, calmly walked into the National
Gallery and slashed Velázquez’s Rokeby
Venus with a meat cleaver. In a zealous
statement, Richardson claimed:
‘I have tried to destroy the picture of the
most beautiful woman in mythological
history as a protest against the
Government for destroying Mrs
Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful
character in modern history… if there is
Lillian Forrester wearing a fresh rose. Taken at Eagle
House in Batheaston (Public Domain)
INSIDE HISTORY 41