05/12/25
Women of Influence: The Pattle Sisters
Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village, Compton, Surrey
27 November 2025 – 4 May 2026
You might well be excused for never having heard the name Pattle, nor having been aware of the seven Pattle sisters – Adeline, Julia, Sara, Maria (“Mia”), Louisa, Virginia and Sophia – who helped shape Victorian art and culture in the UK. In fact, you will probably have come across at least one of them at some point, since their dynasty spreads wide, with Mia, the middle child, becoming the grandmother of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf; Sara becoming mother to the pre-Raphaelite artist Val Prinsep; and Julia marrying Charles Cameron and, well, taking up photography (the rest, as they say, is history). It is Sara, however, who is really at the centre of this story, since it was at her Kensington salons at Little Holland House – the heart of “Pattledom” – that artists, including GF Watts, would meet and get to know one another, fall in love and encounter their muses.
Read my full review here