Julia Goodman née Salaman

Julia Goodman née Salaman was born in the Strand, London. She was to become a prolific and much sought-after portrait painter. In the 1830s, she was living in Islington whilst she attended Sass’s Drawing Academy, a highly regarded art school, and after she married and started a family she lived for several years at 15 Claremont Square.

She had been born into an artistically talented family. Her brother, Charles Kensington Salaman, was a composer, and sisters Annie a writer and Kate a miniature painter, Rachel another writer and Rose a poet. The pattern was repeated with Julia’s own children: Edward would become a playwright and novelist, Miriam a pianist, and Walter a portrait painter, illustrator and author, all of them well-regarded in their time if largely forgotten today.

Julia herself, however, appears to have been one of the most gifted. Her output was considerable. She estimated in later life that she had painted about a thousand portraits. But they were good and she was in high demand, both from prominent Jews like Dr Francis Goldsmid, the Rev Dr Albert Lowy and David Woolf Marks, and from the wider community, among them the composer and musicologist Sir George McFarren; the founder of the Royal Academy of Music, the Earl of Westmorland; and the philanthropist, Sarah Countess Waldegrave. Several of her works were exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Society of British Artists.