Detail of the portrait of Henry James O.M. by J.S. Sargent R.A. after being damaged by a suffragette, May 1914.

On the opening day of the 1914 Summer Exhibition, the suffragette Mary Wood attacked John Singer Sargent RA’s portrait of the author Henry James, breaking through the glass and slashing the canvas three times with a meat cleaver.

Wood wrote to the Women’s Social and Political Union: “I have tried to destroy a valuable picture because I wish to show the public that they have no security for their property nor for their art treasures until women are given the political freedom.” When the value of the portrait was given as £700, and the Secretary of the Royal Academy, Sir Walter Lamb, estimated that it had depreciated between £100 and £300 following the attack (the reported amount varies depending on the newspaper), Wood responded, “I quite understand; if a woman had painted it, it would not have been worth so much.”

As well as the value of the painting, though, it could also be that the portrait – painted by an elder statesman of the artistic elite celebrating a well-established writer for his seventieth birthday – was understood as representative of the social stagnation that the suffragette movement was challenging. The Royal Academy was well known as a bastion of conservatism, which had at this point admitted no women as Royal Academicians since Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman at its foundation in 1768.

Prior to this moment, the Academy hadn’t been subject to damaging suffragette action. In June 1909 a poster reading ‘Votes for Women’ had been stuck to the glass-framed front of Solomon J. Solomon RA’s portrait of the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith. Recorded in the RA’s Council minutes for 4 March 1912, the Academy had taken the decision to close the Winter Exhibition over a week early in order to ‘safeguard the valuable pictures now on loan’ following the damage of property elsewhere by suffragettes.

The climate intensified over the coming year: a group of suffragettes broke the protective glass of a number of paintings at Manchester Art Gallery in April 1913, and on 12 June the RA’s Council minutes report that a group of suffragettes had attempted to hold a meeting in one of the galleries during that year’s Summer Exhibition; following this a number of cupboards, gates and doors at the RA were kept locked as a preventative measure.

A couple of months before Richardson’s attack at the RA, Mary Richardson had slashed Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver at the National Gallery. There followed a spate of attacks on works of art at the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, British Museum, and the Royal Academy.