Virginia Surtees (1917–2017)

Virginia Surtees, née Bell, was born in London, a daughter of Edward Bell, an American diplomat, and his wife Bertha. Her mother was descended from Robert Surtees, a famous 19th-century historian and antiquarian who owned Mainsforth Hall in County Durham, England, an imposing country house that Virginia eventually inherited. Virginia spent her early childhood in Beijing; and after her father’s sudden death in 1924 and her mother’s re-marriage to a British diplomat, James Leishman Dodds, she followed them to various postings around the world. In 1937, at age 20, Virginia married another British diplomat, Ashley Clarke, in Tokyo, and accompanied him to postings in Lisbon, Paris, and Rome. Virginia was a popular figure in Rome, and admired for her beauty. She was photographed by Cecil Beaton and became friends with artists, actors, writers, and intellectuals such as Osbert Sitwell and Max Beerbohm. In 1960, she and her husband divorced and she married her lover David Craig, general manager in Italy for the BEA airline. This marriage lasted only two years, and she was living on her own in London when she decided to change her surname to Surtees, that of her maternal grandfather. His wife, Virginia’s grandmother, was the daughter of Ruth Herbert, a popular Victorian actress and model for Dante Gabriel Rossetti. This family connection sparked Virginia's curiosity about Rossetti and inspired her to form an important collection of his paintings, drawings and watercolors. She also embarked on what became a 10-year project to compile a complete catalogue of the then-neglected artist’s work.

It was published in two volumes in 1971 as The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and initiated a revival of interest in Rossetti that continues today. The catalogue entries also set a standard of scholarship for the study of pre-Raphaelite painting to which the next generation of art historians aspired. While engaged in her work, she acquired a wide circle of friends among museum directors and curators, art dealers, descendants of artists, scholars, students, and biographers. Virginia went on to write more than a dozen other books, many centered on lively, independent women such as Jane Welsh Carlyle (1986), Rosalind Howard (The Artist and the Autocrat, 1988), Susan Hamilton, (A Beckford Inheritance: The Lady Lincoln Scandal, 1977), Charlotte Canning (1975), Louisa Waterford (Sublime and Instructive, 1972) and Harriet Granville (A Second Self (1990).

In addition, she edited the diaries of the painters George Price Boyce (1980) and Ford Madox Brown (1981).