Yevonde Middleton

Who was Yevonde Middleton?

Yevonde Cumbers Middleton was an English photographer, who pioneered the use of colour in portrait photography. She used the professional name Madame Yevonde.

Educated at the liberal and progressive Lingholt Boarding School in Hindhead and subsequently at the Guilde Internationale in Paris, as well as boarding schools in Belgium and France, from an early age Yevonde Cumbers displayed an independent attitude. Her heroine was women's liberationist Mary Wollstonecraft, and she joined the Suffragette movement in 1910. Upon leaving school, she returned to the family home in Bromley, Kent, and became active in suffragette activities, but realising that she was not cut out to be a leader in that field, she soon became bored with it. Instead she sought, and was given, a three-year apprenticeship with the portrait photographer Lallie Charles. With the technical grounding she received from working with Charles, and a gift of £250 from her father, at the age of 21 Yevonde set up her own studio at 92 Victoria Street, London, and began to make a name for herself by inviting well-known figures to sit for free. Before long her pictures were appearing in society magazines such as the Tatler and the Sketch. Her style quickly moved away from the stiff "pouter pigeon" look of Lallie Charles, toward a still formal, but more creative, style. Her subjects were often pictured looking away from the camera, and she began using props to creative effect.