History

The marriage of David Findley and Annabella Paulet certainly was a union of its time, for wasn’t it Noelle who was disowned by her family, scowled and scorned upon by the ones she loved, for the adoration that blossomed between husband and wife? Yes. And though the Paulet family were no longer on board to owe their female offspring any such personal dues, it was David who prepared to look after his beloved family. He had quickly assumed the role of a Professor at Oxford University, assimilating himself as part of the community with his wife who quickly grew plump with a series of healthy pregnancies. As each child grew up nourished by this rare, honest kind of love, talents and passions blossomed into fully grown adults — the same was said for their two youngest, and the babies of the family, Felicité and Alexander. Felicité was born in 1863 in March, for with the welcoming of Spring came the high-pitched call of the new-born who entered the world with her fists ready to punch the sky. She was, as were all the children, beloved. And even at two, when her younger brother was born, Felicité helped to welcome him into the fold.

From as young as four years old, Felicité took a natural interest in the arts. She would go to museums with her mother and older sisters, admiring the travelling exhibitions of both future masterpieces and contemporary superstars. Annabella would note Felicité’s obsessional stares at such gilded pieces of art, retelling the day’s adventure to her husband upon the marital bed. David, who was not afraid to rise his daughters to the same levels as his sons, promptly made sure to supply his youngest daughter with drawing pads, lines of charcoal and oil pastels, escorting her to the public statues where she’d copy from life, as the autumnal buzz of Oxford remained around them. Naturally, she fell in love with the tales of Oxford itself, sitting on her papa’s lap as he read aloud from the books that lined the studious halls of their familial home.

At ten years old, David and Annabella decided to invest in their daughter’s interests, and hired a special art tutor to guide her talent. With him on board, Felicité was free to draw from life, in museums or botanical studies that would later mean to support her work on canvas. She would drew her tutor, her sisters, her brothers… her parents, too, were hardly saved from her travelling eye. Finding a fault with watercolours however, she primarily remained with drawing in charcoal or the newer form of oil pastels, which allowed Felicité to work on the go. And as much love she gleaned from the art, the failure of not capturing a portrait just right, or a sketch refusing to translate from head to paper grew all too much as bouts of immense and debilitating melancholy became all too heavy.

At the tender age of thirteen, David arranged for Annabella to take their youngest daughter to the Southeastern coast on medical advice of a doctor — there she took to the waters, clutching at her mother’s hand whilst descending into the shivering cold of the ocean. She would continuously return to the coast for treatments throughout her life for either a week, a month or several in one session — most of the times she returned home fully revitalised, others, she would only shrink, as if she had been left in the ocean for too long.

As the family began to splinter into different directions, it felt as if Felicité and her younger brother, Alexander were due to never leave their mother’s bosom. With her constant trips to the coast, it did not take long for Felicité to find her ways to entertain herself. At sixteen, she began to seek the acknowledgment of travelling artists or her contemporaries artist groups, who had begun to filter into the world with the passing of the Industrial Revolution. As her older sisters became married, and differing versions of the selves she had known as a child, Felicité sought a new way to become who she was fated to be. She began to pose on the sly, allowing artists to take her likeness in tea rooms or by the river, she began to read more and would often spend her hours on the greens with piles of unread books — she would draw and write, often chasing her melancholy through the medium of pencil. On her 18th birthday, she ascended to London.

In 1878, Felicité was enrolled to attend studies at Somerville College, where she played as a classical student. She got on well with the students, the teachers and the studies themselves, but it loomed heavy that her heart yearned for the art she found so hard to shake off. Before the end of the academic year, she dropped out on advice from a tutor who told her parents that she ought to be sent to Paris to study at the Académie Colarossi, a place which seemed to burst with the modern and the exciting. Though she had never left Oxford before, Paris welcomed Felicité with open arms and she was placed in the spare room of a family friend’s house in the 6th arrondissement. In Paris, Felicité thrived, and came face to face with the heroes of the day as she went to watch the painters make their work. Compared to London, Paris was embarking on a new age of painting that involved impressionist brush strokes and striking portraits. She published in feminist journals, and fully underwent a transformation beneath that glittering city.

Still, it is the hope of every British artist to enrol beneath the banner of the Royal Academy. And after nearly four years of study, Felicité applies and is accepted to study for a year to become part of that prestigious sect of artists. Alas, compared to what she had come to know and love in Paris, the Royal Academy failed to make the mark it once did, and after only two terms she dropped out. Declaring that London failed in doing what Paris was succeeding at, Felicité shunned the Academy and joined the New English Art Club, a group of artists taught in Paris who longed to introduce the new world of Impressionism to the city of their birth. Desperate to fill her time with art, Felicité rejected modelling to almost anyone but her close knit circle of friends, and thus demanded to only be the artist herself as she drew at all hours of the day — picking on the moon at night, or friends’ faces, or even passer-bys who sat taking their tea in delicate tearooms.

By 1887, Felicité and Sila Nanuq, an artist she had met in Paris, became intertwined and thus secretly engaged — secret if only because Felicité wished to make a name for herself before aligning herself to marriage, a transition that had paled her sisters’ identities now that they were Mrs Brewster and Frell. But she is happy, even if melancholy tries to draw a wedge between herself and her future.


TIMELINE

1863 Born to Mr David Findley (a Professor of Physics at Oxford University) and Mrs Annabella Findey (nee, Paulet) in Oxford, England
1865 Her brother, Alexander, is born but after six pregnancies, Annabella is told that she cannot have anymore children
1872 Assigned a special art tutor despite her mother’s hesitation, who encihes Felicité’s talent
1874 Rossetti’s Prosperine is exhibited at the Ashmoleon, her father takes her and it is then in which she falls in love with art
1875 Sent to take to the waters in Essex for her health after a doctor diagnoses her with great melancholy and possible hysteria
1876 Taken to Paris by her parents, and visits the Impressionist exhibition at the house of Paul Durand Ruel, 11 rue Peletier.
1878 Travels to London with her father to find an art school of his liking and to visit the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition (a visit that becomes a yearly trip), before enrolling into the first term at Somerville College, Oxford where she studies the Classics before deciding that her heart belongs in art
1880 Sent to Paris to study at the Académie Colarossi, where she is allowed to paint from life
1881 Writes a poem in the feminist paper La Citoyenne, and illustrates for the first issue & attends the sixth Impressionist exhibition at Nadar’s studio
1882 Exhibits in Paris under the alias of Laodice,
1883 Leaves Paris to return home, wherein she applies and enrolls into the Royal Academy but it soon becomes clear that the Academy luls far behind what she knew in Paris. Against the grain she shuns the Academy after only two terms, and instead moves in with her sister in Highgate, where she rents out a room of her own
1885 Exhibits alongside the ‘New English Art Club’ at the Egyptian Hall, London,
1887 Felicité gets secretly engaged to long time friend and part time lover, Silas Nanuq, who is a sculptor and works alongside her