JOPLING SCHOOL OF ART
Mrs Jopling’s School of Art was founded by Louise Jopling who as Louise Jane Goode (16 November 1843–19 November 1933) was born in Moss Side, Manchester, one of the nine children of Thomas Smith Goode, a railway contractor, and his wife Frances. She married at Kensington in 1861 Francis Romer, they had two children in London before moving to Paris when Romer became secretary to Baron Nathaniel de Rothschild. The Baroness, who was a gifted artist, recognised Louise’s talent when Romer showed her some his wife’s pencil sketches. She suggested that Louise study art and after taking classes at the state technical school in Paris, Louise started at the studio of the Anglo-French artist and engraver Charles Joshua Chaplin. Francis and Louise had a judicial separation in 1871, but he died in 1873 when she married at Kensington in 1874, Joseph Middleton Jopling (1831–1884), a civil servant who was also a was a watercolour painter and exhibited at the Royal Academy. As Louise Romer she exhibited at the Royal Academy 1870–1873 and at the Grosvenor Gallery, alongside painters including James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and the pre-Raphaelite Boys Club. She joined the Society of Women Artists in 1880 and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters in 1891 and one of the first woman to be admitted to the Royal Society of British Artists in 1901. Joseph Jopling died in 1884 and in 1887 Louise married lawyer George W. Rowe but continued to use Jopling's name professionally. She established her own school of painting for women in 1885 when Louise started to give ‘demonstration’ classes in her studio, these went well and in 1886, she moved to South Kensington where her new home had a studio large enough for her to continue teaching and as interest grew in ‘Mrs Jopling’s School of Art’, the venture became more formal. She developed a more complete curriculum, including tuition in watercolours, black and white illustration, and sculpture. She took an extra studio in nearby Clareville Grove and recruited other teachers to tutor up to thirty students. Louise was one of the first people to be interviewed by Henrietta Müller (1846-1906) when she launched her Women’s Penny Paper that same year and Müller devoted a good chunk of the article to the art school, commenting: ‘Mrs Jopling-Rowe, apart from her own artistic career, is doing excellent work at her school in teaching women-students to work in earnest.’ In 1891 Louise was one of the four women who were founder members of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. In 1894, Louise moved to 3 Pembroke Road in South Kensington, and re-located the school to a larger building backing onto it in Logan Place and in 1901, she set up a new business, the Jopling Art Club. For a fee of 5 guineas a year, artists who had exhibited in any London gallery could work from the school model every morning, use the studio for private work in the afternoons and evenings and exhibit their work at the weekends. Amateurs were also allowed to join, thought they had to pay ten guineas a year. Towards the end of the First World War Louise made some changes in her life, she gave up her house in London, closed the school and moved to Amersham, her home until her death in November 1933. Suffolk artists who studied at Mrs Jopling's School of Art include Winifred Austen and Alice Kirkby Goyder.