Kate Perugini

Catherine Elizabeth Macready Perugini (née Dickens; 29 October 1839 – 9 May 1929) was an English painter of the Victorian era and the daughter of Catherine Dickens and Charles Dickens.[1]

Kate Perugini
Charles Perugini's portrait of his wife Kate
Born
Catherine Elizabeth Macready Dickens

(1839-10-29)29 October 1839
London, England
Died9 May 1929(1929-05-09) (aged 89)
London, England
NationalityBritish
EducationBedford College
Known forPainting
Spouse(s)
Charles Allston Collins (m. 1860⁠–⁠1873)

Charles Edward Perugini (m. 1873⁠–⁠1918)
Dora, by Kate Perugini (1892)

Biography

Born Catherine Dickens and nicknamed Kate or Katey, she was Charles Dickens' youngest surviving daughter, and according to her siblings her father's favorite child.[2] Dickens reportedly named her after his friend William Charles Macready.[3] As a girl, she also bore the nickname "Lucifer Box" for her hot temper.

She traveled widely with her family as a child, and performed in her father's elaborate amateur theatrical productions — including the 1857 performance of Wilkie Collins's The Frozen Deep before Queen Victoria.[4] In 1858, her parents separated and the children remained with their father. The reason for the separation remains unclear, though rumours have focused on the close trlationship between Charles Dickens and Ellen Ternan, an actress many years his junior, and/or Georgina Hogarth.[3]

Her first husband was the artist and author Charles Allston Collins, younger brother of Wilkie Collins; they were married on July 17th, 1860. Perugini reportedly had an affair with Valentine Prinsep during her marriage to Collins.[4] After his death from cancer in 1873, Kate married another artist, Charles Edward Perugini. The couple married in secret in 1873, then had an official ceremony in 1874. She and Perugini had one child, Leonard Ralph Dickens Perugini. He died on 24 July 1876, at the age of seven months. The Peruginis were active in artistic society, and maintained friendships with J. M. Barrie and George Bernard Shaw among other celebrities of their era.[5] Like her first husband, she pursued literary endeavors along with her painting.[6][7][8]

Kate was the primary source of information used by biographer Gladys Storey for her book Dickens and Daughter, which revealed Dickens's affair with the actress Ellen Ternan.[9] Kate is also the subject of three biographies by historian Lucinda Hawksley, Katey Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens's Artist Daughter, Charles Dickens' Favorite Daughter: The Life, Loves, and Art of Katey Dickens Perugini and Dickens's Artistic Daughter Katey: Her Life, Loves & Impact.

Charles Perugini died in 1918 and was buried alongside his baby son. Kate survived her husband by ten years, dying at the age of 89. One of the causes of death listed on her death certificate was "exhaustion."[10]

Career

At the age of 12, Kate Dickens began studying art at Bedford College, the first institution of higher learning for women in Britain. She became a successful painter of portraits and genre paintings, sometimes collaborating with her husband Charles Perugini. Kate sought to distinguish herself from her father, refusing to be associated only with his fame.[11]

In 1880 Sir John Everett Millais painted her in one of his "most striking portraits."[12] Millais had previously used her as a model for his painting The Black Brunswicker (1860).

A portrait painter, she started exhibiting her works at the Royal Academy shows in 1877. She also regularly exhibited her work at the Society of Watercolour Painters and the Society of Lady Artists. Perugini exhibited her work at the Palace of Fine Arts and The Woman's Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.[13]

Perugini was perhaps best known for her portraits of children, such as "A Little Woman," "Tomboy," "Dorothy de Michele," and "A Flower Merchant."[14]

See also

References
  1. Brian Stewart & Mervyn Cutten (1997). The Dictionary of Portrait Painters in Britain up to 1920. Antique Collectors' Club. ISBN 1 85149 173 2.
  2. Hilary Margo Schor (1999). Dickens and the Daughter of the House. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  3. "Kate Dickens Perugini". Spartacus Educational. Retrieved 2020-03-10.
  4. "Lucinda Hawksley | Dickens's Artistic Daughter, Katey". Retrieved 2020-03-10.
  5. Lucinda Hawksley, Katey: The Life and Loves of Dickens's Artist Daughter, New York, Doubleday, 2006.
  6. Kate Dickens Perugini, "Dickens as a Lover of Art and Artists," The Magazine of Art, Vol. 27 (January and February 1903).
  7. Kate Perugini, The Comedy of Charles Dickens: A Book of Chapters and Extracts Taken from the Writer's Novels, London, Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1906.
  8. Kate Dickens Perugini, "Edwin Drood and the Last Days of Charles Dickens," Pall Mall Magazine, Vol. 37 (1906).
  9. Gladys Storey, Dickens and Daughter, London, Frederick Muller Ltd., 1939; reprinted New York, Haskell House, 1971.
  10. "Catherine Elizabeth Macready "Kate" Dickens Perugini". Find a Grave. Retrieved 2020-03-10.
  11. "Charles Dickens' Favorite Daughter: The Life, Loves, and Art of Katey Dickens Perugini - Harvard Book Store". www.harvard.com. Retrieved 2020-03-10.
  12. Christopher Wood, Victorian Painting, Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1999; pp. 227, 274-5.
  13. Nichols, K. L. "Women's Art at the World's Columbian Fair & Exposition, Chicago 1893". Retrieved 30 July 2018.
  14. Plarr, Victor (1899). Men and Women of the Time: A Dictionary of Contemporaries. G. Routledge and sons, limited. p. 850. kate perugini a little woman.
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