The Research, Writing and Publication of ‘A Type of Beauty, the story of Kathleen Newton (1854-1882)’

One of my strongest childhood memories was finding a picture of Kathleen Newton while visiting friends of my parents who owned a big old house on a farm in Co Wexford. I didn’t know who she was then but as a curious 12-year old I was struck by her beauty, the way she held her fan and the wonder of her white ruffled gown and trailing yellow ribbons. Our host thought her ancestors had emigrated from the area during the late seventeen hundreds.

I found the same beautiful woman about ten years ago when I was looking through a coffee table book. There she was in an 1878 painting by French artist Jacques Tissot (1836-1902). It was from Michael Wentworth’s biography of Tissot that I discovered she was Kathleen Newton (1854-1882). Her love affair with Tissot scandalised Victorian London.

I was intrigued and began researching her life. I am eternally indebted to the staff of the National Archives at Kew and the National Library of Ireland. Records of the time are sketchy, incomplete and missing but with a lot of help and suggestions I pieced together the story that has become ‘Kate’ and in places I’ve enjoyed exerting creative liberty. 

Kate Kelly was brought up in Lahore and Agra and the more I found out about her the more fascinated I became with her gutsy individuality, belief in freedom and choice, her deep seated spirituality which owed as much to Catholicism as to Hinduism, and her beauty of which she was oblivious.

She was descended from an Irish catholic medical family. It is believed that her grandfather, Charles Kelly, left Ireland and practiced medicine in London. Like many young men of the time his son, Charles Frederick Kelly, was seduced by India and illusions of grandeur. He joined the East India Company and was initially stationed in Lahore where he worked as a clerk.

He married Flora Boyd whose family came from the North of Ireland and they had three children Frederick WD (Freddie), Mary Pauline (Polly) and Kathleen Irene (Kate). Around the time of the Sepoy Rising of 1858 he was transferred to Agra. Somewhere along the line he presented himself as a fighting man with the rank of major and began using the name of Ashburnham which was embraced by the whole family.

Kelly rose to the rank of chief adjutant and accountant officer in Agra and retired to London in mid 1860s. His wife was dead and his son remained in India. As Polly was married in London and Kate traveled back to India to marry, it is probable that she and Polly lived in London and I have put them into finishing school, as is likely given the times and their social status.

In the autumn of 1870, 17-year old Kate journeyed to Agra to marry Isaac Newton, a surgeon attached to the Indian Civil Service. It was match made by her father and in which she had no say. (I followed in her footsteps in Agra, seeing the railway station, offices of East India Company and Taj Mahal). En route she caught the eye of a Captain Palliser (the most likely being Captain CH Palliser of the Bengal Rifles, although it is not possible to rule out a sea captain but Lloyds records don’t go back that far. As there is no record of his first name I called him Harry). Harry did not succeed in seducing her but after the marriage ceremony in January 1870 (I have seen record) and before consummation, Kate - on the advice of her confessor - explained to Isaac the situation regarding Harry.

Isaac was reputed to be so incoherent with rage that his bride might be ‘damaged goods’ that he instituted divorce proceedings and sent her back to England with little money; the captain caught up with her en route and paid for their passage, the deal being that in return she would become his mistress. When she returned to London she was pregnant but refused to marry Palliser. Her father was courting a widow in Yorkshire and Kate’s daughter Muriel VM Newton was born there on 20 December 1871 on the same day as her Decree Nisi came through. Afterwards Kate and Violet went to live with Polly and her husband at Hill Road, St John’s Wood.

The next known fact is that Kate gives birth to a son in March 1876 – Cecil George Newton Ashburnham. Legend has it that she and Jacques Tissot met while posting letters and their attraction was instant. (But dates for Cecil’s birth don’t match which I why I had them meet in Paris sometime previously – also wanted to use backdrop of Paris, House of Worth, Boating on Seine, first staging in Paris of Carmen, etc.). Following his involvement in the events of the Paris commune in 1871, Jacques Tissot had moved to London, changed his name to James and settled in St John’s Wood in a mansion built in the 1840s. (I saw over this house which became the home of Sir Alma Tadema when Tissot returned to Paris. It has had a modernising make-over and is currently owned by a Syrian businessman).

Kate and children moved into no 17 Grove End Road (it is now re-numbered 44). She was the love of his life, his mistress and muse; he called her Mavourneen and ravissante Irlandaise, and was fascinated by the conflict of her Irish catholic background, divorce and status of unmarried mother of two children. He was one of the most commercially successful painters of the day, although Oscar Wilde referred to his subjects as ‘common’.

Kate and Jacques’s life was one, he described as ‘domestic bliss’; she sat for innumerable paintings with the grounds and interior of No 17 as backdrops, such as: ‘Holyday’, ‘Type of Beauty’; ‘Kathleen Newton at the Piano’, ‘Mrs Newton with a Parasol’, etc., until she contacted TB.

The London Census of 1882 shows Kate and children living with her sister Mary P A Hervey (Polly); and only Tissot and his servants listed in number 17.

Unable to watch Jacques’s grief as the disease took hold, she overdosed on laudenham and died in November 1882. Tissot sat by her coffin for four days. Because of her suicide and religion, she was buried in un-consecrated ground in Kensal Green Cemetery.

Again legend has it that on the day she was buried before Jacques Tissot left his home, the children and his paintings to return to Paris, he commanded his gardener to burn Mrs Newton’s mattress.

His life after is well documented from the séances where he communed with Kate to his Femmes à Paris series, the paintings of the New Testament, and Images from the life of Christ which were shown in London in 1897.

A Type of Beauty, the story of Kathleen Newton (1854-1882) will be published by Cape Press in 2010.

You will find more information about Kathleen Newton in Wikipedia.