A slice of Evening Standard history will go on show when the National Portrait Gallery reopens this Thursday.
This 1932 portrait of two Fleet Street newspaper sellers is included in a new show dedicated to pioneering photographer Yevonde Middleton.
Mystery surrounds the identity of the women in the picture with curator Clare Freestone speculating that they might not be newspaper sellers at all but high society debutantes who worked as models on the side. She said: “I also think it is a studio set-up even though it looks to be on the street as we know she wasn’t really taking outdoor photographs at that time.”
The picture was included in Yevonde’s first solo show that same year which launched her 60-year career taking portraits of royalty, writers and film stars all featuring her trademark use of what she described as “a riot of colour”.
It shows a copy of the Standard from Saturday March 12, 1932, with a front page describing how Chelsea fans prepared for an “all-night coach ride” up to Huddersfield to see their team take on Newcastle United in the semi-final of the FA Cup — a game they lost 2-1 with Newcastle going on to beat Arsenal in the final.
Freestone, who is the gallery’s photography curator, said she thought the subject was a natural choice for Yevonde — whose life and career was tied up with Fleet Street — and that the colour of the headlines would have “seemed a vivid shot for her to take”.
She said: “My theory behind this is that she lived with her husband in the Temple just down the road from Fleet Street and he was a journalist who worked for different newspapers including the Evening Standard so that must have been around her and also she was a real feminist so women out and about selling newspapers would have been a subject that was interesting for her.”
The gallery acquired Yevonde’s archive in 2021 and the show, Yevonde: Life and Colour has more than 150 pictures from a career in which she stuck to her motto of “Be original or die”.
The archive was researched and digitized with funding from Chanel’s culture fund. Former Serpentine Galleries CEO Yana Peel, who heads arts and culture at the fashion firm, said the work was part of its commitment to “elevating the voices of women and broadening representation in cultural storytelling”.
The National Portrait Gallery — which is reopening after three years of major refurbishments — will also host an exhibition of previously unseen photographs by Sir Paul McCartney during the first days of Beatlemania. It features images taken between December 1963 and February 1964 when the band rocketed in popularity and first conquered America. Sir Paul, 81, approached the gallery in 2020 after finding the images, which he had thought were lost.
