Jessie Holliday

Jessie Holliday was born into a Quaker family on 5 February 1884. Her father was Henry Holliday and mother, Eliza Matilda Denman. He was Secretary of the Iron and Steel Company. She was educated in wealthy institutions.
Aged thirteen, she went to the Quaker school, Polam Hall, for three years. In 1903 she entered the Cope & Nichols school of painting at South Kensington. There she developed a talent for drawing and painting receiving a Silver medal for drawing. From there she was at the Royal Academy School until 1906.
The following year she began to portraiture in earnest, tackling many important socialist figures and leading thinkers. Amongst them were Clifford Allen, Hugh Dalton, Dr Somerville Hastings, the Labour MP for Reading, P.S. Florence, the statistician, and Lady Constance Lytton, the leading militant suffragette. She went on to include as her sitters George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and Blank Whites.
She became a leading light of the early Summer School Movement at which Fabian intellectuals foregathered. It was at one of these she met her husband. Jessie Holliday supported the Food Reform Movement; part of which was her own personal contribution by becoming a vegetarian. At the time of her move to American she was a well known as a watercolourist and for her drawings.
Jessie was a highly-strung and emotional woman. After the birth of her son, Shaw Dana, she developed serious post-natal depression. She had already attempted suicide several times. And whilst Edmund was in bed with pleurisy, she slipped out and drowned herself in the lake nearby. Her body was recovered and it was considered an accidental death.
Jessie Holliday died on 17 June 1915, aged only thirty-one years. She was survived by her husband, Edmund Trowbridge Dana, and her baby son.