Mary Sargant Florence (1857–1954)

Mary Sargant Florence was born in London, England. She studied art in Paris and at the Slade School in London. Her brother F.W. Sargant became a sculptor. In 1888, she married Henry Smyth Florence, an American musician, with whom she lived in the USA and had two children: Philip Sargant Florence, who became an economist, and Alix Strachey, who became a psychoanalyst and translator of the writings of Sigmund Freud. She designed her house, Lord's Wood, near Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where she moved with the children after her husband died in an accident in 1891. As a painter, Mary Sargant Florence is best known for her works Children at Chess (c. 1903), Suffer Little Children to Come unto Me (1913) and Pentecost (c. 1913). She painted fresco decorations at the Old School, Oakham, Rutland, and at Bournville School near Birmingham. She was a suffragist, feminist, supporter of the Women's Tax Resistance League, and a member of the committee for the Hague Peace Congress of 1915. She published a book on militarism and feminism with Charles Kay Ogden, and wrote Colour Co-Ordination (1940), a work on the history, theory and esthetics of color. She also edited two volumes of the Papers of the Society of Painters in Tempera.