Jane Hope Bown CBE was an English photographer who worked for The Observer newspaper from 1949. Her portraits, primarily photographed in black and white and using available light, received widespread critical acclaim and her work has been described by Lord Snowdon as "a kind of English Cartier-Bresson."
Fleur Adcock was a New Zealand poet and editor. Of English and Northern Irish ancestry, Adcock lived much of her life in England. She is well-represented in New Zealand poetry anthologies, was awarded an honorary doctorate of literature from Victoria University of Wellington, and was awarded an OBE in 1996 for her contribution to New Zealand literature. In 2008 she was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit, for services to literature.
Berenice Alice Abbott was an American photographer best known for her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation of the 1940s to the 1960s.
Ethel Mary Partridge, Ethel Mary Mairet RDI, or Ethel Mary Coomaraswamy was a British hand loom weaver, significant in the development of the craft during the first half of the twentieth century.
Fanny Cornforth was an English artist's model, and the mistress and muse of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Cornforth performed the duties of housekeeper for Rossetti. In Rossetti's paintings, the figures modelled by Fanny Cornforth are generally rather voluptuous, differing from those of other models such as Alexa Wilding, Jane Morris and Elizabeth Siddal.
Fiona Caroline MacCarthy was a British biographer and cultural historian best known for her studies of 19th- and 20th-century art and design.
Grace Robertson was a British photographer who worked as a photojournalist, and published in Picture Post and Life. Her photographic series, including "Mother's Day Off" (1954) and "Childbirth" (1955), mainly recorded ordinary women in postwar Britain.
Dame Ethel Walker was a Scottish painter of portraits, flower-pieces, sea-pieces and decorative compositions. From 1936, Walker was a member of The London Group. Her work displays the influence of Impressionism, Puvis de Chavannes, Gauguin and Asian art. Walker achieved considerable success throughout her career, becoming the first female member elected to the New English Art Club in 1900. Walker's works were exhibited widely during her lifetime, at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of Arts and at the Lefevre Gallery. She represented Britain at the Venice Biennale four times, in 1922, 1924, 1928 and 1930. Although Walker proclaimed that 'there is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist — bad and good', she was elected Honorary President of the Women's International Art Club in 1932. Soon after her death, she was the subject of a major retrospective at the Tate in 1951 alongside Gwen John and Frances Hodgkins. Walker is now acknowledged as a lesbian artist, a fact which critics have noted is boldly apparent in her preference for women sitters and female nudes. It has been suggested that Walker was one of the earliest lesbian artists to explore her sexuality openly in her works. While Walker was contemporarily regarded as one of the foremost British women artists, her influence diminished after her death, perhaps due in part to her celebration of female sexuality. Made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1943, Walker was one of only four women artists to receive the honour as of 2010.
Sir Emery Walker FSA was an English engraver, photographer and printer. Walker took an active role in many organisations that were at the heart of the Arts and Crafts movement, including the Art Workers Guild, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society.
Gay Block is a fine art portrait photographer, who was born in Houston, Texas. Her work has been published in books, and is collected by the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the El Paso Museum of Art, the Jewish Museum (Manhattan) and the New Mexico Museum of Art.
Hedwig Marie "Hedda" Morrison was a German photographer who created historically significant documentary images of Beijing, Hong Kong and Sarawak from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Anne-Katrin Purkiss is a photographer, born in Chemnitz (Karl-Marx-Stadt), East Germany in 1959 and moving to Britain in 1984 after graduating from University of Leipzig in 1983. Her father Joachim Seyffarth (1928-2014) was a German curator of monuments and photographer.
Dorothy Bohm was a German-born British photographer based in London, known for her portraiture, street photography, early adoption of colour, and photography of London and Paris; she is considered one of the doyennes of British photography.
Ida Kar was a photographer active mainly in London after 1945. She took many black-and-white portraits of artists and writers. Her solo show of photographs at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1960 was the first of its kind to be held in a major public gallery in London. Kar thus made a significant contribution to the recognition of photography as a form of fine art.
Rosalind Polly Blakesley is a prize-winning author, art historian and academic. She has taught art history at the University of Cambridge and been a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge since 2002, and has been Professor of Russian and European Art since 2018. She previously worked at Queen's College, Oxford, the Russian Institute of Art History, Newcastle University, and the University of Kent. She has been selected to take up the office of Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, following the retirement of Lord Chris Smith of Finsbury on 1 October 2025.
Constance Mildred Howard, later Constance Parker, was an English textile artist and embroiderer who had a profound impact on the development and teaching of those subjects in Britain. The Constance Howard Gallery, part of Goldsmiths, University of London, is named in her honour.
Catherine Simon is an American portrait photographer and writer. She is known for her photographs of influential musicians, artists, and writers, including The Clash, Patti Smith, Madonna, Andy Warhol, and William S. Burroughs. One of her photographs of Bob Marley was used on the front cover of his 1978 album, Kaya.
Dorothy Hutton was an English painter, scribe and printmaker. She was particularly renowned as a calligrapher and most widely known for her London Transport posters.
Molly Suzanne Blake was a British illustrator, BBC children's television presenter and children's author.
Hilary Stebbing (1915-1996) was an artist, illustrator and children's author particularly associated with Puffin Books, and active in the United Kingdom from the 1940s to the 1960s.
