Code: 11674
Dimensions:
Catherine 'Kate' Fisher (née Cobden) (1844-1916)
"Dog Rose" ("Rosa Canina")
Watercolour over pencil on card
Signed & dated by the stem "Kate Fisher. Midst. [Midhurst] 1868"
Measures:-
14.5 cm × 21 cm
An interesting Victorian botanical watercolour with some wonderful associations.
This painting is by Kate Fisher the eldest surviving daughter of the radical Liberal statesman and leader of the Anti-Corn Law League Richard Cobden MP (1804-1865).
Kate Cobden married Richard Chester Fisher (1840-1928) of Midhurst in 1866, a lawyer and only child of a neighbour in Sussex. Richard Fisher was educated at Eton and Christchurch Oxford and was originally intended for the Church but decided against it. They had become engaged in October 1863. At the time of their engagement Richard Cobden wrote to his younger sister Priscilla on 6 Octr 1863 that although "I know nobody to whom I would more confidently entrust the dear one" he was concerned that his prospective son-in-law had not yet found a career and that although they weren't intending to marry imminently "long engagements are good for the young man, I am not so sure they are desirable for the other party". He said, however, that he felt a father had no right "to constrain [his daughter] to accept his choice of a suitor". His would-be son-in-law joined the Middle Temple in November 1863 and was called to the bar three years later. R.C. Fisher Esq was much involved in the 'Cobden Club' which had been founded after the death of his wife's father.
Richard Cobden's daughters Kate, Nellie, Jane and Anne were determined to preserve their father's memory and his principles. They established a "sisterhood" dedicated to promote radical causes through actions of their own. Of the sisters, Ellen Melicent 'Nellie' Cobden (1848-1914) was a writer and the first of the three wives of the artist Walter Richard Sickert (1860-1942) (they divorced in 1900); Jane (1851-1947) was a pioneering female politician, suffragist and campaigner for women's rights; and Anne Cobden-Sanderson (1853-1926) a suffragette and socialist who married the private press publisher Thomas Sanderson, a leading member of the "Arts and Crafts" movement.
Kate was, perhaps, the least strident of the Coden sisters but she is the only one whose name appears among the 1500 signatories of "The 1866 Women's Suffrage Petition List" (at the age of 22 she was the only sister old enough to sign). She and her husband lived at Hill Top, Midhurst, Sussex. Fisher's father was an antiquarian (he was an executor of the estate Felix Slade) and his son inheritated and added to an important library of early illustrated books, old master prints and drawings and a significant collection of Japanese netsuke. Most of these books were sold en bloc to the philanthropist C.W. Dyson Perrins (1864-1958) just before they were due to be auctioned by Sotheby's in 1907.
