Which 17th century painting in the National Gallery was slashed in 1914 by suffragette Mary Richardson?
Mary Richardson arson, smashed windows at the Home Office and bombed a railway station. She was arrested nine times, receiving prison terms totalling more than three years. She was one of the first two women force-fed under the 1913 Cat and Mouse Act in HM Prison Holloway. Richardson would recover at the cottage of Lillian Dove-Willcox in the Wye valley. She was devoted to Dove-Wilcox and wrote poetry about her love for her. Richardson's most famous act of defiance occurred on 10 March 1914 when she entered the National Gallery in London and slashed Velázquez's famous painting the "Rokeby Venus" with a
Mary Richardson Mary Richardson Mary Raleigh Richardson (1882/3 – 7 November 1961) was a Canadian suffragette active in the women's suffrage movement in the United Kingdom, an arsonist and later the head of the women's section of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) led by Sir Oswald Mosley. She grew up in Belleville, Ontario, Canada. In 1898, she travelled to Paris and Italy. She lived in Bloomsbury, and witnessed Black Friday. At the beginning of the 20th century, the suffragette movement, frustrated by a failure to achieve equal voting rights for women, began adopting increasingly militant tactics. In particular, the Women's Social