‘Anyway, why shouldn’t we have our own show? The RA doesn’t get a bad press because it’s all men’ (Kathleen Guthrie in The Observer in 1962). There is a Liss Llewellyn touring exhibition Fifty Works by Fifty British Women Artists and five paintings from this will be on the Post this week. Winifred Nicholson painted Amy in 1928.

This is the Cynthia who had to accept that so many of her friends and relations were never coming back from the war, the Cynthia that Helen Dunmore wrote about in her poem (quoted on the Post last week)): the sadness of her gaze is palpable. This drawing, in a private collection, is by Francis Dodd. The Persephone Book that should accompany this drawing is of course The Happy Tree.

Cynthia was painted by Wilfrid de Glehn in 1908 when she was 21. Seven years later she began the war diaries which are by far her most important  work (although unpublished in her lifetime); they are a crucial document about the way the war affected the initiators, one might almost say the promoters, the upper classes. This painting is in a private collection.

When Cynthia Asquith wrote the first volume of her memoir Haply I May Remember  a reviewer in America wrote: ‘It shows how one of the greatest revolutions in English history was met by an individual of flexible mind and stout heart, who belonged to the class least prepared to withstand it… There is no ”moaning at the bar” for our Cynthia… She grabbed at commissions whenever they were offered and race after deadlines, even when she had to meet them with a family gathering or extensive house party in full swing…This is in such striking contract to the perennial wailing of the Russian aristocracy when suddenly forced to earn their own livings and otherwise behave like ordinary human being, that we find ourselves doffing our hat and raising a cheer for the ruling class of England.’  This is Augustus John’s painting of Cynthia, 1917. It’s in Ontario.

Cynthia and Herbert (Beb) Asquith were engaged in 1910, a year of political upheaval and constitutional crisis which had begun in November 1909 when the Conservative-dominated House of Lords rejected the Liberal Government’s ‘People’s Budget’: the Parliament Bill, which sought to remove some of the power of the House of Lords, eventually became law in August 1911. At the wedding in July 1910 ‘the bride advised the ushers to separate the guests according to their Liberal or Conservative leanings rather than by more traditional attachments to bride or bridegroom’ (Cynthia’s Times obituary).

Lady Cynthia Asquith was born in 1887 into an aristocratic background that envisaged much more of the same for its descendants. But everything was different for Cynthia, because she did not marry money, she was a writer (although her best work, her First World War diaries, was not published in her lifetime) and she was beautiful and spoilt, what we would nowadays call entitled. But she was fascinating and never dull for a second, which is why she had so many friends. One of them was DH Lawrence. He wrote about Cynthia quite harshly in ‘The Rocking Horse Winner’: ‘There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. They looked at her coldly, as if they were finding fault with her. And hurriedly she felt she must cover up some fault in herself. yet what it was that she must cover up she never knew. Nevertheless, when her children were present, she always felt the centre of her heart go hard. This troubled her, and in her manner she was all the more gentle and anxious for her children, as if she loved them very much. Only she herself knew that at the centre of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love, no, not anybody.’ Lawrence wrote this in 1926 when Cynthia was 39. Imagine going through life with those words in your head! However proud you were of being muse to a ‘great’ writer. Or however many people there were that adored you (and there were many). The photograph is Cynthia (on left) and her family in 1903 when she was sixteen.

Cynthia Asquith moved to Bath in 1946, to Claverton Lodge on Bathwick Hill, ‘the most lovely house and best situated I have ever seen… the night view down on to the lights of Bath far below is a Dream of Beauty.’ Although she sold the house four years later, she is buried next to her husband Beb in the Smallcombe Cemetery below the garden (grave HM51). Cynthia Asquith was of course the author of the extraordinary Diaries 1915-18 and wrote memorably in November 1918 ‘I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before … One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war.’ These words inspired Helen Dunmore to write ‘The Duration’ here in 2013. (Cynthia Asquith seems to be very under-represented on the web and will be the subject of the Post next week.)