Lettice Ramsey (2 August 1898 – 12 July 1985) was a British photographer.

Life

Lettice Cautley Baker was born on 2 August 1898 in Guildford, Surrey, England. Her father Cecil was a surveyor and her mother Frances (née Davies-Colley) was a painter, trained at

the Slade The UCL Slade School of Fine Art (informally The Slade) is the art school of University College London (UCL) and is based in London, England. It has been ranked as the UK's top art and design educational institution. The school is organised as ...

. The Baker family moved to County Sligo, Ireland, soon after Lettice's birth, where Cecil Baker had leased rights to oyster farming in the estuary near

Rosses Point Rosses Point ( or ) is a village in County Sligo, Ireland and also the name of the surrounding peninsula. Rosses Point is at the entrance to Sligo Harbour from Sligo Bay with Oyster Island being the long thin landmass notable when entering th ...

. Ramsey's father died when she was a small child; her mother remarried in 1915. She attended

Bedales Bedales School is a coeducational boarding and day public school, in the village of Steep, near the market town of Petersfield in Hampshire, England. It was founded in 1893 by Amy Garrett Badley and John Haden Badley in reaction to the li ...

, then

Newnham College, Cambridge Newnham College is a women's constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1871 by a group organising Lectures for Ladies, members of which included philosopher Henry Sidgwick and suffragist campaigner Millicen ...

, where she studied philosophy. After working for a brief time in vocational guidance in London, she returned to Cambridge to work in the Psychology Library. In 1925, she married mathematician

Frank P. Ramsey Frank Plumpton Ramsey (; 22 February 1903 – 19 January 1930) was a British people, British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26. He was a close friend of ...

, and they had two daughters before his early death in 1930 from liver disease. To support her family, Ramsey took a photography course at

Regent Street Polytechnic The University of Westminster is a public university, public university based in London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1838 as the Royal Polytechnic Institution, it was the first Polytechnic (United Kingdom), polytechnic to open in London. The Po ...

. Introduced to photographer

Helen Muspratt Helen Margaret Muspratt (13 May 1907 – 29 July 2001) was a British photographer. Early life and education Born in Madras, India, to British Army Lieutenant-Colonel Vivian Edward Muspratt and his wife, Lily May, née Hope. She studied photogr ...

by artist F. H. "Fra" Newbery, the two women opened a studio together in Cambridge in 1932. Lettice Ramsey died on 12 July 1985 in Cambridge, England.

Work

The photography studio, Ramsey & Muspratt, was a successful commercial venture, and the pair photographed influential social, academic, and artistic figures in Cambridge throughout the 1930s. Muspratt moved to Oxford in 1937 and opened a second studio there; Ramsey maintained the studio in Cambridge, and both retained the Ramsey & Muspratt studio name. They remained close throughout their lives. In the 1930s, the Ramsey & Muspratt studio was noted for using the

solarization Solarization or solarisation may also refer to: * Solarization (photography) In photography, solarization is the effect of ''tone reversal'' observed in cases of extreme Exposure (photography), overexposure of the photographic film in the came ...

process in some portrait work; two of the firm's photographs were accepted in the London Salon of Photography in both 1936 and 1937. While Ramsey's Cambridge work was primarily portraiture, she photographed on her travels, including Russia in 1933, an around-the-world trip in 1948, and later travel to Nepal, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Mexico. She visited Cambodia in the late 1960s. Fourteen of Ramsey's portraits of the

Bloomsbury Group The Bloomsbury Group was a group of associated British writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century. Among the people involved in the group were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, a ...

were published in a calendar by the Charleston Trust in 1990. In 2012–2013, the

National Portrait Gallery, London The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is an art gallery in London that houses a collection of portraits of historically important and famous British people. When it opened in 1856, it was arguably the first national public gallery in the world th ...

presented an exhibition of Ramsey & Muspratt work exploring Ramsey's friendship with the

poet

Julian Bell Julian Heward Bell (4 February 1908 – 18 July 1937) was an English poet, and the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell (who was the elder sister of Virginia Woolf). The writer Quentin Bell was his younger brother and the writer and painter Angelica ...

. Ramsey retired in 1978.

References

External links

Lettice Ramsey photos
Stephen Burch's Birding & Dragonfly Website.
Portrait of Lettice Ramsey née Baker
by Frances Baker, Newnham College, University of Cambridge.
Ramsey and Muspratt, Photographers, Cambridge
An Analysis of Desk Diaries from the Early Years of the Firm (1932-1935).
Lettice Cautley Ramsey (née Baker)
National Portrait Gallery. {{DEFAULTSORT:Ramsey, Lettice 1898 births 1985 deaths 20th-century British photographers 20th-century English people 20th-century English women 20th-century British women photographers Artists from County Sligo English women photographers Photographers from Cambridgeshire Photographers from Guildford Women film pioneers Ramsey family People educated at Bedales School