Launched today, my new print edition with Dan Bugg at Penfold Press, The Tiger’s Bride. It marks a return to a theme I explored in my first print with the Penfold Press, Man Slain by a Tiger. The two prints have a common interest in Staffordshire Pottery and in particular their ‘penny-dreadful’ celebration of awful events. Based on the Staffordshire group titled The Death of the Lion Queen, my print draws on the history of Ellen Bright, who in 1850 at Wombwell’s Menagerie entered a cage of mixed big cats for the entertainment of the crowd.
At just seventeen years old Ellen was a relatively inexperienced animal trainer, and on this occasion things did not go well for her. An eyewitness account by a doctor in the audience who attended her after the incident, records that she’d twice set her whip at the face of the tiger who attacked her. The wounds as described by him were catastrophic. She didn’t recover consciousness and he was unable to save her.
Ellen is buried in a grave she shares with her cousin William Wombwell, who the year before her death was killed by an elephant while working at another menagerie in Coventry. Surprisingly, the tiger continued its life as before at Wombwell’s, exhibited as ‘The animal which killed The Lion Queen’. However the law thereafter changed, forbidding women to enter cages with big cats for the purposes of entertainment.
Below: my first print with Penfold Press, Man Slain by a Tiger, 2015
There are several versions of The Lion Queen as portrayed in Staffordshire groups, with and without a title on the base, some with flowered hoops, and some without. The rearing animal is sometimes striped and sometimes spotted, presumably according the painter’s whim.
Ellen’s fate was recorded in broadsheets of the day, accompanied by chilling artist’s impressions of her death. But as a celebrated show person I think she would have preferred the Staffordshire commemorative figure group of a rose-cheeked soubrette in a pretty stage costume, flanked by big cats in thrall to her charms. My print nods to the Staffordshire group, but also to the traditions of the Victorian stage, toy theatre, folk art and my love of birds. And my love of Angela Carter, too, from whose riff on Beauty and the Beast I borrowed my title.
Below: pencil study for The Tiger’s Bride.
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