Lucy Madox Brown

Lucy Madox Brown exhibited at the Royal Academy, married into the Rossettis, and stopped painting. She was the daughter of Ford Madox Brown by his first wife, brought up partly by an aunt, and trained in her father's studio - which was an education few women could get, since the Academy schools did not admit them. Her first exhibited picture, Painting the Death Warrant of Lady Jane Grey, was shown in 1869 and well reviewed. She worked in watercolour on historical and literary subjects - Romeo and Juliet, Ferdinand and Miranda, Margaret Roper recovering her father's head from London Bridge - and exhibited regularly for five years. In 1874 she married William Michael Rossetti, the brother of Dante Gabriel and Christina and the family's methodical archivist, and had five children in seven years. The painting effectively stopped. She turned to writing instead and produced a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1890 for a series on eminent women, which is a serious piece of work and was the first full account of her in decades. She had tuberculosis and spent her last years abroad for the climate, dying at San Remo in 1894. Her sister Catherine painted too, and their brother Oliver - a prodigious talent who published a novel at seventeen - died at nineteen of blood poisoning, which broke their father. William Michael, who catalogued and edited everything the Rossettis produced and preserved the movement's papers, left almost no record of her own work. Her pictures were scattered and several are now untraced, and the reassessment of her as a painter rather than a wife is recent enough that most of it has happened since 2000.

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