Henry Du Pré Labouchère
Date of birth: 1831.11.09
Place of birth: London
Date of death: 1912.01.15
Place of death: Villa Christina Montughi, near Florence, Italy
Category: journalist
Identity:
Henry Du Pré Labouchère, journalist and Liberal MP, married Henrietta Hodson (1841-1910) an actress.
Life:
Labouchère was correspondent for the Daily News in Paris during the Franco-Prussian War and in 1877 he founded Truth, a magazine devoted to the exposure of social fraud, serving as its editor. Whistler was in frequent correspondence with him and the newspaper.
He was Liberal MP in turn for Windsor, Middlesex and Northampton and sat in the House of Commons from 1880-1906. He supported the Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone and was known as a Radical, supporting anti-imperialist legislation. He is most famous for his 1885 introduction of an amendment to Section II of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which criminalized homosexual acts between men, punishable by up to two years hard labour, the law which, ten years later, would convict Oscar Wilde. He was elected Liberal MP for Northampton in 1884, having been an unsuccessful candidate for Middlesex in the 1868 election. He was elected again in 1903.
He owned Harmony in Yellow and Gold: The Gold Girl - Connie Gilchrist y190, in the 1880s; J.-E. Blanche saw the painting in Whistler's Tite Street studio in 1884. According to Robert Ross (quoted by Pennell 1921), Labouchère let Whistler have the painting back 'to work on it' but Whistler 'had not touched the canvas' but wanted to destroy it. According to Ward, Labouchère said that although Whistler had the painting for ten years, 'he is still not sufficiently satisfied with it to return my picture, and I don't expect ever to see it again'. It was in Whistler's studio at the time of his death, in 1903, and returned by Miss R. Birnie Philip to Labouchère.
Bibliography:
Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 2004; Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, and Joseph Pennell, The Whistler Journal, Philadelphia, 1921 ; Thorold, A. L., Life of Henry Labouchere, London, 1913. The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler, 1855-1903, edited by Margaret F. MacDonald, Patricia de Montfort and Nigel Thorp; including The Correspondence of Anna McNeill Whistler, 1855-1880, edited by Georgia Toutziari. Online edition, University of Glasgow, 2004.
