Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters

Seven sisters made their mark on Victorian art and culture and deserve to be far more than just distant relatives and distant memories today

G F Watts, Miss Virginia Pattle (1826-1910), 1849-1850 (detail). Oil on canvas, 249 x 143 x 11 cm. (with frame or mount). Eastnor Castle Collection.

Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village, Compton, Surrey
27 November 2025 – 4 May 2026

by ANNA McNAY

You might well be excused for never having heard the name Pattle, nor having been aware of the seven Pattle sisters – Adeline, Julia, Sara, Maria (“Mia”), Louisa, Virginia and Sophia – who helped shape Victorian art and culture in the UK. In fact, you will probably have come across at least one of them at some point, since their dynasty spreads wide, with Mia, the middle child, becoming the grandmother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf; Sara becoming mother to the pre-Raphaelite artist Val Prinsep; and Julia marrying Charles Cameron and, well, taking up photography (the rest, as they say, is history). It is Sara, however, who is really at the centre of this story, since it was at her Kensington salons at Little Holland House – the heart of “Pattledom” – that artists, including GF Watts, would meet and get to know one another, fall in love and encounter their muses.

Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters begins outside the dedicated Watts Gallery exhibition space, because the curators really want to impress just how key the sisters were in Watts’s life, by connecting the exhibition with the historic gallery. “In a way,” ventures the assistant curator, Eleanor Stephenson, “if it weren’t for them, you could say we wouldn’t be here and the gallery wouldn’t be here.” This is no exaggeration, since it was Sara’s niece, Mary Emily “May” Prinsep (orphaned and brought up as one of Sara’s own), who first brought GF and Mary Watts to Compton.

One star work, hanging here in the historic gallery, from the Watts collection, is his fresco-style painting, The Sisters (1852-53), which depicts Sophia and Sara, standing on the terrace at Holland House. Clearly related, they are wearing Kashmiri shawls over their loosely draped, corset-less gowns, and matching rakhi bracelets (traditional jewellery honouring the bond between siblings), which reflect their Anglo-Indian upbringing – all the sisters, except Mia (who was born on a ship), were born in West Bengal, at the height of the British Empire. On the opposite wall, a self-portrait by Watts hangs next to a stunning solo portrait of Sophia – Lady Dalrymple (c1851-53) – dressed all in white, with, what her descendants called her “Puducherry” eyes (Puducherry is a city on the Bay of Bengal and the sisters’ great-great-great-grandmother was a Bengali Hindu from Chandannagar).¹

G F Watts, Miss Virginia Julian Dalrymple (Mrs Francis Champneys), 1872. Oil on canvas, 132 x 84 cm. Watts Gallery Trust.

The first room proper is dedicated to the sisters’ roots: the people and places they would have known in their early lives in Kolkata.² It opens with a facsimile portrait of Adéline Maria and James Pattle with four of their daughters – Adeline, Julia, Mia and Sara – painted on a trip to Paris in 1818, as well as further portraits of each sister alone. It also looks at the notion of sisterhood, and a vitrine at the top of the stairs holds a number of beautiful and thoughtful gifts, handmade by one sister for another. For example, Julia is known to have made numerous scrapbook albums with prints of her and others’ photographs, and on show is one of only two albums that still exist that she gave to her sisters. This one was made for Virginia, and it is inscribed: “To my beloved sister Virginia, (Photographs of my own printing), with every fond Xmas wish, from Julia Margaret Cameron, Xmas Eve 1863.” It includes individual photographs of Virginia’s daughters, Isabella and Adeline; Julia’s two favourite nieces, Julia Jackson and Alice Prinsep; several of her own young children; and portraits of close friends, including Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Taylor. Alongside, another gift to Virginia is a manuscript of an 18th-century German ballad, Lenore, which Julia translated in 1847 (she was busy translating from German and Persian for many years before she came to photography).

Julia Margaret Cameron, Red album gifted to Virginia by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1863, Photographs pasted onto paper, 37 x 28.5 cm. Eastnor Castle Collection.

Because all the sisters except Virginia married men who were working in the British Empire, their children were typically sent to school in Britain and ended up living all together in Little Holland House. Stephenson describes this aspect of the family as “a multi-generational sisterhood”.

The next part of the exhibition seeks to bring to life Little Holland House and its soirees, and it comprises photographs of both Little Holland House and Holland House (to which the former was the dower house, leased to Sara and her husband, Henry Prinsep, their coterie of servants and maids, and their many houseguests), from a time when Kensington was still a village. The balustrade from Watts’s double portrait is clearly visible on the latter picture. There is also a composition of photographs of 11 men and one woman who would regularly have been guests at Little Holland House, including leading scientists John Herschel and Charles Darwin, authors George Eliot and William Makepeace Thackeray, and pre-Raphaelite figures including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and Lord Frederick Leighton. Watts was the houseguest extraordinaire, however, staying with Sara and her (extended) family for 24 years (he even stayed there for the two years he was married to the actor Ellen Terry).

Edward Burne Jones, The Little Holland House album,1859. Bound leather handmade book, 24.2 x 20 x 3.8 cm. Private Collection.

A remarkable object in this section is an album put together by Edward Burne-Jones, while he was ailing and being looked after by Sara at Little Holland House (she had a penchant for nursing feeble Victorian men). During this time, he met Sophia and became obsessed. He created this album as a gift, filled with poems and pen-and-ink drawings. The page on which it is open has an illustration of Sophia surrounded by the incomplete musical notation of a love song he was composing for her. It is signed “your abjectly devoted dog, Ned”. Near this, another real gem is Rossetti’s study for Writing on the Sand (1858), which, although using Elizabeth Siddal as the model, was gifted to Sophia. One certainly gets the flavour, from the objects and photographs on display here, that the Pattle sisters’ distinctive personal style was an influence on the pre-Raphaelites’ similarly bohemian aesthetic.

G F Watts. Humanity in the Lap of the Earth, 1851-52. Oil and turpentine on plaster, 115 x 91 cm. Leighton House, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Little Holland House was entirely filled with frescoes by Watts. Commissioned by Sara and Henry, he used the walls to explore his symbolist language and to cultivate an allegorical artistry that was about art for all, and which would take us towards nobler causes. Sadly, the house was demolished in 1875 to make way for Melbury Road and other properties in the Holland Park estate, but two fresco panels were saved, and one of these – Humanity in the Lap of the Earth (1851-52) – is on loan from Leighton House. An infant in a young woman’s lap, it clearly relates to the Madonna and Child motif, but also to that of Mother Nature. The model for Humanity was Virginia. Next to it hangs a small portrait of Sophia by Watts (c1856-59), showing frescoes in the background, and thus likely also painted at Little Holland House.

Unknown maker, The Green Dress, c1870. Silk bows and ribbon, metal hooks, metal eyes, lined with cream cotton. Watts Gallery Trust.

Another lovely connection made between exhibits is the green silk velvet dress worn by Sophia’s daughter Virginia in her portrait by Watts (1872), which is modelled near to said portrait. The dress is in the Watts Collection, and everyone is very happy to have this perfect occasion on which to bring it out once again. It was one of his portraits of Virginia Pattle, however – a full-length profile in which she wears a grey cape (1849-50) – that caused Watts heartache, since he was besotted by her (as was Thackeray, who wrote to his mother about “two Pattle girls who are prettier than their sisters”, referencing Mia and Virginia³), but this picture is said to have solidified Charles Somers-Cocks’s love for her and to have encouraged him to marry her.

A considerable section of the exhibition is devoted to Julia Margaret Cameron. Here, the walls have been painted a dark obsidian green, “to conjure up a dark room”, as Stephenson says. The aim of the section, as of the exhibition as a whole, is to introduce its protagonist, her world and her relationships with other great intellectuals of Victorian Britain, including, of course, Tennyson. Indeed, one of the highlights of this part of the display is a leather-bound volume of Cameron’s photographic illustrations for Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Other Poems, volume 1, a project on which they worked very closely, but which she was greatly disappointed with when he reproduced her photographs as small block prints. Here, we see an album of full-scale prints, made at Cameron’s own expense, and given as gifts to friends and family.

There are also a number of beautiful portraits, including a gorgeous profile of Julia Jackson, Cameron’s most frequent sitter out of all her immediate family. The V&A is also loaning “The Dirty Monk” portrait of Tennyson, whom Cameron befriended and photographed in a makeshift studio in Little Holland House in the summer of 1865. There are also later works from after she emigrated to British Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) to support her family’s coffee plantations, and, of course, a masterful portrait of Watts from 1864.

A touching inclusion is a photograph (by an unknown maker) of Cameron with two of her children, Henry Herschel Hay and Charlie Hay. In all, she raised 11 children: five of her own, five orphaned children of relatives, and Mary Ryan, whom she found begging on Putney Heath. Once again, this exemplifies the sense of a broad and intertwined, loving and sharing family.

A real treat is the inclusion of three items of swami jewellery – a pin, a necklace in the shape of the cross, and a locket – which were found at Cameron’s Isle of Wight home, Dimbola, and again are on show to exemplify the sisters’ proud Anglo-Indian identities.

Vanessa Bell, Portrait of the Artist's Mother, c1950-55. Oil on board, 24.1 x 19.1 cm. Private Collection.

Hermione Lee, in her biography of Virginia Woolf, calls the Little Holland House salon the “spiritual ancestor” of Bloomsbury,⁴ and it is with a section on the Bloomsberries, centring very much on Julia Jackson, that the exhibition closes. First, there is a marble of her head, made by Carlo Marochetti (c1863), an Italian-born sculptor renowned in Victorian Britain; a photograph of this head with Angelica Garnett, Vanessa Bell’s daughter with Duncan Grant, at Charleston farmhouse in 1930, is shown alongside. Then there is a portrait by Bell of her mother, painted after a photograph by Cameron, and a chalk sketch of Jackson by Watts (Study of Mrs Leslie Stephen, 1870-72).

A number of delightful book jacket designs that Bell and Woolf worked on together as a collaboration for the latter’s various books at the Hogarth Press demonstrate further sisterly co-working. Woolf is said to have been brought up with tales of her mother’s childhood, later describing it as “a summer afternoon world”.⁵

The highlight of this section for me, however, and certainly one of my favourite pieces in the exhibition, is a full-length oil-and-collage portrait of Bell by Grant, painted on a door or tabletop, the year before they moved to Sussex. Wearing a strappy, orange-red dress, with one arm raised above her head, Bell looks every bit as wide-eyed and alluring as her Pattle ancestors in Watts’s paintings of them.

In her essay, Pattledom, Woolf wrote that her great aunts: “Half French, half English were all excitable, unconventional, extreme in one form or another, all of a distinguished presence, tall, impressive and gifted with a curious mixture of shrewdness and romance. No domestic detail was too small for their attention, no flight too fantastic for their daring.”⁶ Each and every object in this exhibition links to another, and together they thread like beads on a string to tell the story – in all its fantastic detail – not only of the Pattle sisters themselves, but of Watts and the pre-Raphaelites, right through to the Bloomsberries, with numerous constant factors. There are plenty of further beads still to be added, and plenty I couldn’t mention here, but this enthralling demonstration of research opens many conversations reaching right through and around Pattledom. Well done team Watts, and may they be continued!

References
1. Women of Influence – The Pattle Sisters, Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village, exhibition catalogue, 2025, page 34.
2. Colonialism and its legacy is talked about openly throughout the exhibition, with no attempt to hide it as the elephant in the room. The fact that the sisters assumed aspects of Indian culture as such a part of their identity – eating curries, wearing textiles and jewellery and speaking Bazaar Hindustani – added to the fact of their Bengali blood, means it is addressed head on and is not seen as a problem, as regards them at least.
3. Op cit, exh cat, page 26.
4. Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee, Vintage, London, 1997, page 86.
5. Op cit, exh cat, page 17.
6. Pattledom by Virginia Woolf in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, volume 3, 1919-1924, by Andrew McNeillie, London: Harcourt, 1989.