The daughters of a Methodist minister whose appointment to churches in
Birmingham and London in the 1850s brought
them into contact with Burne-Jones and,
hence, the Pre-Raphaelite circle.
The diminutive and forgiving Georgiana married Burne-Jones in 1860. Five
years later, the resourceful but depressive Alice married a peripheral
member of the Pre-Raphaelite group, John Kipling, who became an art teacher and
administrator in India; their son was the author Rudyard Kipling. In 1866 there was a double wedfding: the
beautiful, demure Agnes married Edward
Poynter, and Louisa married Alfred Baldwin, a Wolverhampton industrialist.
Subsequently Louisa became 'delicate' and acquired the services of the fifth
sister, Edith, to help in bringing up her only child, Stanley; who eventually
married an ambitious wife, became a Conservative politician, and was prime
minister on and off between 1923 and 1937.
The sisters studied art intermittently with the encouragement of Rebecca Solomon, but none of them made her own
name as an artist. There were also two brothers; the whole family's story is
told in Taylor, 1987.
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