Partner Vere Stuart Menteth Hutchinson

Queer Places:
The UCL Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, Gower St, Kings Cross, London WC1E 6BT
Three Ways, Turville Heath, Henley-on-Thames RG9 6JU, UK

Dorothy BurroughesDorothy Mary L. Burroughes-Burroughes (1883 - 18 July 1963) was a British artist known as a painter, illustrator and linocut artist. She designed posters and wrote and illustrated a series of children's books. She was friends with Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, her lover was Vere Stuart Menteth Hutchinson (1891-1932). Her relationship with Vere was traumatic: Vere developed a virus at thirty-three which progressed to paralysis and insanity; and then to her early death when she was only forty-one.

Dorothy Burroughes was born into a wealthy London family. Her father, James Burroughes, was the proprietor of Burroughes & Watts, Britain’s leading manufacturer of billiard tables and accessories. The family lived in a grand house on Portland Place, and when James died in 1912 he left over £90,000 together with a thriving business that enjoyed royal patronage.

Burroughes was born and lived most of her life in London, although in her later years she lived near Henley-on-Thames.[1][2] She studied at the Slade School of Art and at Heatherley's in London before furthering her studies in Germany.[3] Burroughes produced illustrations for a number of magazines including Bystander, Sketch and the Illustrated London News.[4][1] She produced posters for the London Underground, including the poster For the Zoo in the style of a Japanese colour woodcut.[5][3][6] Throughout the 1930s and into the 1940s she wrote and illustrated a series of children's books, often on animal themes.[7] Animals were also a recurring theme in the prints she produced as were cloud formations. Her prints often featured towering banks of cumulus clouds above an English landscape.[3] Burroughes also illustrated books by other writers, notably The Story of the Red Deer which was published bu the Gregynog Press in 1936 and for which she produced eleven colour prints.[7]

From about 1913, Burroughes lived with her partner Vere Hutchinson, an author who had five books published but died in 1931 after a protracted illness.[8] They lived firstly in unfurnished rooms off the Harrow Road and later in a large house in Maida Vale. Despite their success, and privileged backgrounds, the couple struggled for money and rented out the upper floors of their house in Maida Vale while they lived in the basement. Somewhat bizarrely, they also supplemented their income by breeding West Highland Terriers, although their situation had improved sufficiently to enable a move to Hampstead by about 1928. Hutchinson’s health, however, continued to deteriorate and she died four years later.

Burroughes was elected a member of the Society of Women Artists in 1923 and became a member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1925.[1] She exhibited with the Fine Art Society in London and both the London Transport Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum hold examples of her work.[4][5][9]

At the outbreak of the Second World War, Dorothy was living in Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. Her books and exhibitions became less frequent during the 1940s and she seems to have retired by about 1953 when she was 70. At the time of her death on 18 July 1963 she was living in the comfortable surroundings of Turville Heath, near Henley-on-Thames, and left over £26,000 in her will.

V. S. M. Hutchinson's will (probate London, 27 October 1932) left all her possessions to Dorothy Mary Burroughes Burroughes. The will of Dorothy Mary Burroughes Burroughes (probate Oxford, 6 September 1963) leaves her estate, including Hutchinson's copyrights, first to Margaret Elizabeth Craft, and after Craft's death to be divided equally into three parts between Tom Laurie James Burroughes, Peggy Woodman and Laurie Howell. The current position has yet to be clarified.

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