Annie Swynnerton

Annie Swynnerton grew up in Manchester and trained at its School of Art, but the life class, where students draw from the nude model, was closed to women. So she went abroad for the training England withheld, first to Rome and then to the Academie Julian in Paris, where women could study without those limits.

She painted for a living her whole life, mostly women: portraits of fellow suffragists, allegorical nudes, winged figures full of light. She was a committed campaigner for women's votes, and with her friend Susan Isabel Dacre she set up the Manchester Society of Women Painters to win other women the exhibitions and training she had been denied.

In 1922, at the age of 78, she was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, the first woman to receive any such honour since the Academy was founded in 1768. The painter John Singer Sargent, then the most sought-after portraitist in London, had pushed hard for her election. She went on working into her eighties from her home on the south coast of England.