The woman who pioneered colour photography

When colour photography first came in at the start of the last century, it met a surprising amount of resistance from distinguished photographers. But Madame Yevonde loved it, owned it, revelled in it. She invested in a new Vivex repeating back camera, exhorting her fellows at the Royal Photographic Society in 1932: ‘Hurrah, we are in for exciting times. Red hair, uniforms, exquisite complexions and coloured fingernails come into their own… If we are going to have colour photographs, for heaven’s sake let’s have a riot of colour.’

But what she went on to create was far better than that. In her classical series ‘Goddesses’ (1935) she controlled colour like a Renaissance master, painting with it, creating atmosphere and character. Her immortal women are by turns vengeful, erotic, sad and gay; as emotionally radiant as a Powell and Pressburger composition, as camp as a Pierre et Gilles shoot. Her goddesses come to us familiar from their inheritors.

Never mind that the series – which boasts a duchess, a countess, a baroness, umpteen ladies and a Mitford sister – was sometimes problematic for critics, one of whom called it ‘a posh pit of decadence’ in the Guardian when it was last shown at the National Portrait Gallery in 1990. The ‘Goddesses’ are now the centrepiece of the headline show, Yevonde: Life and Colour,at the newly reopened NPG, which repositions her as a serious contender in 20th-century photography. They’ve even taken away her ‘Madame’. I rather liked its feminine pomp, though I suppose it does smack of fortune-teller.

‘She definitely used “Madame”,’ curator Clare Freestone told me, as she walked me round the show. ‘But on balance, things she had full control over were primarily “Yevonde”.’ She certainly never used “Cumbers”, her maiden name, although Freestone points out that her father’s commercial colour printing firm, Johnstone & Cumbers, where she toured large vats of ink as a girl, meant there was colour in her DNA.