A PENCIL PORTRAIT OF FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE FEMINIST MOHL COLLECTION

VON MOHL COLLECTION: Mary Clarke Mohl (1793-1883), by direct descent, Mary Clarke's personal tooled leather-bound sketch and scrap-book. The album (300 x 245 mm). embossed 'M. C.' in gold leaf lettering, containing 26 extremely competent pencil studies and a few watercolours (two landscape, and four flowers). The most important drawing is a portrait of FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE at Embly park (220 x 160 m). attributed to Joanna Hilary Bonham Carter (1821-1865). In the same collection there is also a portrait of an unknown sitter [Monrau?] signed Hilary Carter. (Hilary Carter is known for two other portraits of Florence and a statue.) A drawing by Mary Bayley (1801-1878), born in England to Daniel Bayley of Manchester and Maria Barbara Fock of St. Petersburg, Russia. Other portraits by I. Roulin, r. Cazey and others.

The additional box contains four children's portraits in pencil, two men embracing (in ink), with the caption "Wohl mir Treue Freund" (18th century? Koningsberg), one albumin (van Mohl family?), and 8 pencil studies. One by Louise von Dörnberg.

Mary Clarke Mohl (nicknamed Clarkey), lived an extraordinary life at the crossroads of French and British culture and society. Nearly all of it was spent in Paris, where she saw three revolutions and was on friendly terms with so many of the great names of the day. But she never lost her attachment to Britain and in the Rue du Bac she offered a home-from-home to William Thackeray and Elizabeth Gaskell, the Brownings and the Trollopes, as well as to many aristocrats, diplomats, politicians, intellectuals and writers like Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell.

She was also one of Florence Nightingale's closest friends , and provided vital encouragement to launch her career in nursing. Also she convinced her friend Hilary Bonham Carter, Florence's cousin, that she had a duty not to please her family, but to work at her painting and become a proper professional painter.

Mary Clarke Mohl saw herself as standing in a long line of great French women, starting with Madame de Rambouillet in the early 17th Century, who

had wielded their intellect and charm in the service of culture, politics and reason. Mohl deplored that most women were educated to please men, and she pleaded for alternatives to marriage. Mohl believed in developing women's intellectual potential and supported Bedford College and other schemes for female education. She lamented how single women lacking career opportunities, were ground down by household duties. In a letter written in 1862 she laments how in England, "The men talk together; the lady of the house may be addressed once in a way as duty, but the men had all rather talk together and she is pretty mute… They have no notion that a lady's conversation is better than a man's."

Clarkey was one of a generation that laid the ground for the changes that followed in women's lives. From their letters, we know that she was a rock-like figure for Florence Nightingale, persuading her to stick with her vocation despite the horrified opposition of Florence's family.

Provenance: the vendor is directly descended from an historically important aristocratic Prussian family: Johann Jacob Moser (1701-1785) considered to have laid the legal foundations of the modern German state, whose daughter, Christine-Beate, married Karl Gottlob von Mohl; their descendants were statesmen, jurists, diplomats, botanists and intellectuals. The vendor is the great grand-daughter of Ottmar von Mohl, nephew of Mary.

had wielded their intellect and charm in the service of culture, politics and reason. Mohl deplored that most women were educated to please men, and she pleaded for alternatives to marriage. Mohl believed in developing women's intellectual potential and supported Bedford College and other schemes for female education. She lamented how single women lacking career opportunities, were ground down by household duties. In a letter written in 1862 she laments how in England, "The men talk together; the lady of the house may be addressed once in a way as duty, but the men had all rather talk together and she is pretty mute… They have no notion that a lady's conversation is better than a man's."

Clarkey was one of a generation that laid the ground for the changes that followed in women's lives. From their letters, we know that she was a rock-like figure for Florence Nightingale, persuading her to stick with her vocation despite the horrified opposition of Florence's family.

Provenance: the vendor is directly descended from an historically important aristocratic Prussian family: Johann Jacob Moser (1701-1785) considered to have laid the legal foundations of the modern German state, whose daughter, Christine-Beate, married Karl Gottlob von Mohl; their descendants were statesmen, jurists, diplomats, botanists and intellectuals. The vendor is the great grand-daughter of Ottmar von Mohl, nephew of Mary.