Family Portraits: The Life and Art of Alice Mary Chambers

Little known today, Alice Mary Chambers (c.1855-1920) was a notable figure in the late nineteenth-century British art world. Chambers exhibited her work at the Royal Academy, was a trusted friend to the infamous art collector Charles Augustus Howell, and donated Dante Gabriel Rossetti's death mask to the National Portrait Gallery. A previously unknown portrait by Chambers of actress Mary Anderson (1859-1940) survives in a private collection in New Zealand. The discovery of this striking lithograph in Pre-Raphaelite style provides an opportunity to gather available information about a talented and well-connected artist associated with Whistler and the Pre-Raphaelites, but whose biography and family ties have so far been overlooked.