In the tracks of F. Laura Cannan

While researching yesterday’s piece about the jolly skating minister, I spent some time poking about in the British Museum’s online collections, exploring eighteenth and nineteenth-century representations of skating. I was not disappointed! There were so many . . .

. . . in such a wide variety of media!

After a while enjoying myself among all of these wintery scenes depicting folk happily zipping about and falling over, I began to realise that almost everything I was looking at was part of the same bequest: that the majority of the museum’s skating-related material had been donated by an F. L. Cannan, in 1931. Intrigued, I narrowed down my search parameters to the contents of the bequest, and began to explore what had piqued this collector’s interest. What I discovered was truly fascinating.

Because the bequest abounded in images of women on ice.

Many of these women were emblematical figures, of the familiar eighteenth-century type, that represent the seasons, or a particular month . . .

Some of these women clearly enjoyed skating . . .

. . . with a male companion. . . .

. . . while many others skated capably and energetically, quite alone . . .

. . . sometimes leaving the men behind!

There were many interesting objects, as well as prints and drawings, depicting lone female figures, skating

And the bequest included several illustrations of nineteenth-century skating couples, moving elegantly, hand in hand, across the ice.

There were also a particularly large number of images of women skaters from other European countries.

The Netherlands . . .

Germany . . .

and France.

Whoever had put together this bequest was skating-obsessed to the point of collecting several costly original objects and artworks, as well as countless inexpensive reproductions. They also seemed to have a particular interest in the representation of women skaters, and skating pairs. So who was F. L Cannan?

The collector responsible for the British Museum’s curious abundance of eighteenth and nineteenth-century ice-skating related material was a woman, whose F stood for Frances and whose L for Laura (like many nineteenth-century women, she used her second name). Born in 1858 to a very wealthy London family, Laura grew up well-educated and remained single, spending the majority of her adult life keeping house with her older sister, Emily, in the well-appointed environs of Cornwall Gardens, Kensington. Laura’s wealth clearly enabled her to retain her personal independence, as well as to pursue a variety of sporting interests – ice skating in particular. She joined several London skating clubs, and began to collect images and objects depicting skating and its history. In the 1890s, references to “Miss Cannan’s” elegant appearance on the ice in Regent’s Park begin to appear regularly, each winter, in the London sporting press. We hear that on one occasion that Miss Cannan dazzled the crowd as she whirled about the ice, clad “entirely in red” while, at a ball at Princes’ skating club, a few years later, she cut a dashing figure when she appeared “in masquerade.” In 1897, F. Laura Cannan co-authored this:

. . . which was the first book in English dedicated to the art of combined or pairs figure skating. F. Laura Cannan was then briefly celebrated, in magazines like Hearth and Home, as a pioneer of English women’s sport.

Throughout the 1890s, F. Laura Cannan wrote articles under the pseudonym, “Diana” on a wide range of sporting subjects, bemoaning the fact that nineteenth-century society’s patriarchal norms prevented women from participating in both sports and sports journalism. “We have plenty of sporting women in England,” she wrote acidly, “who probably know a great deal more on such matters than many people who gain a living through a reputation for possessing knowledge.” She was evidently speaking from experience.

F. Laura Cannan was a firm advocate of women’s participation in sport, countering accusations of the impropriety of paired skating with the visual evidence her own collection provided: “For the sexes to skate in company is no new thing,” she wrote icily in The Gentlewoman, “one can see it portrayed in more than one old Dutch picture.”

Indeed, the extraordinary range of skating-related images and objects she collected, and later donated to the British Museum, provided ample evidence of several centuries of capable sporting women, independent women, women at their ease, enjoying themselves in winter landscapes, on skates, upon the ice.

It has been a genuine delight for me to happen across F. Laura Cannan’s bequest to the British Museum, to find out just a little about her life, and especially to explore her wonderful collection: a collection devoted, as much of her adult life seems to have been, to the distinctive winter pleasures of skating on ice.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this selection from F. Laura Cannan’s collection too!