Lettice Ramsey

Lettice Ramsey (2 August 1898 – 12 July 1985) was a British photographer.

Lettice Ramsey
Portrait of Lettice Ramsey by PAL Brunney, c.1970
Born2 August 1898
Guildford, Surrey, England
Died12 July 1985(1985-07-12) (aged 86)
Cambridge, United Kingdom
Alma materNewnham College, Cambridge
Known forphotography
Spouse(s)Frank P. Ramsey

Life

Lettice Cautley Ramsey (née Baker) was born on 2 August 1898 in Guildford, Surrey, England. Her father Cecil was a surveyor and her mother Frances (née Davies-Colley) was a painter, trained at the Slade.[1] The Baker family moved to County Sligo, Ireland, soon after Lettice's birth, where Cecil Baker had leased rights to oyster farming in the estuary near Rosses Point.[2] Ramsey's father died when she was a small child; her mother remarried in 1915.[1] She attended Bedales, then Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied philosophy.[3] After working for a brief time in vocational guidance in London, she returned to Cambridge to work in the Psychology Library.[4] In 1925, she married mathematician Frank P. Ramsey, and they had two daughters before his early death in 1930 from liver disease.[3]

To support her family, Ramsey took a photography course at Regent Street Polytechnic.[3] Introduced to photographer Helen Muspratt by artist F. H. "Fra" Newbery, the two women opened a studio together in Cambridge in 1932.[5]

Lettice Ramsey died on 12 July 1985 in Cambridge, England.

Work

The photography studio, Ramsey & Muspratt, was a successful commercial venture, and the pair photographed influential social, academic, and artistic figures in Cambridge throughout the 1930s.[6] Muspratt moved to Oxford in 1937 and opened a second studio there; Ramsey maintained the studio in Cambridge, and both retained the Ramsey & Muspratt studio name. They remained close throughout their lives.[7] In the 1930s, the Ramsey & Muspratt studio was noted for using the solarization process in some portrait work;[8] two of the firm's photographs were accepted in the London Salon of Photography in both 1936 and 1937.[9] While Ramsey's Cambridge work was primarily portraiture, she photographed on her travels, including Russia in 1933, an around-the-world trip in 1948, and later travel to Nepal, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Mexico. She visited Cambodia in the late 1960s.[10]

Fourteen of Ramsey's portraits of the Bloomsbury Group were published in a calendar by the Charleston Trust in 1990.[11] In 2012-2013, the National Portrait Gallery, London presented an exhibition of Ramsey & Muspratt work exploring Ramsey's friendship with the Bloomsbury Group poet Julian Bell.[12]

Ramsey retired in 1978.

References
  1. Kennedy, S. B.; Henry, Paul (2007). Paul Henry: With a Catalogue of the Paintings, Drawings, Illustrations. Yale University Press. p. 314. ISBN 0300117124. Frances Baker (1873-1944).
  2. Commons, Great Britain Parliament House of (1903). Sessional papers. Inventory control record 1.
  3. "Lettice Ramsey". Times. July 30, 1985.
  4. Smith, Charles Saumarez (April 19, 2016). "Lettice Ramsey". charlessaumarezsmith.com. Retrieved 12 February 2018.
  5. Marsh, Jan (10 Aug 2001). "Helen Muspratt (obituary)". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 February 2018.
  6. "Lettice Ramsey". Cambridge Evening News. 18 Jul 1985.
  7. Moorhead, Joanna (12 March 2016). "Helen Muspratt: The woman who photographed the Cambridge spies". Independent.
  8. "Notice". Cambridge Daily News. 25 Oct 1935.
  9. "Cambridgeshire Photographers". FadingImages. Retrieved 7 February 2018.
  10. Payne, Sara (c. 1969). "Cambridge's own first lady". The Times.
  11. Miles, Philip (1989). Bloomsbury Portraits by Lettice Ramsey. The Charleston Trust.
  12. "The Bloomsbury Poet & The Cambridge Photographer: Julian Bell & Lettice Ramsey". National Portrait Gallery. Archived from the original on 22 February 2018.


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