Constance Gordon Cumming

Name
Constance Gordon Cumming
Date of birth
26 May 1837
Place of birth
Altyre/Moray/Scotland
Date of death
04 Sep 1924
Place of death
Crieff/Perthshire/Scotland
Gender
Female
Biography
The twelfth child of Eliza (née Campbell) and Sir William Gordon Gordon-Cumming, Bt., Constance Frederica (known to her family as Eka) was born in 1837 at the family seat in Altyre, Morayshire, Scotland. In 1842 her mother died after the birth of her youngest brother. The following year, aged only 6 or 7, the young Gordon-Cumming began what was to be the first of many trips away from the family home, to stay with an elder sister who had recently married. She returned to live with her father and stepmother in 1846. Initially schooled at home Gordon-Cumming completed her education at Hermitage Lodge, Fulham from 1848 to 1853. Holidays were spent back at Altyre where she enjoyed ‘sketching, fishing (comparatively unusual for women in Victorian England), walking and climbing… She developed an adventurous temperament and love of mountaineering.’

Following her father’s death in 1854, Gordon-Cumming adopted a peripatetic lifestyle moving between the homes of her married sisters ultimately leading to the invitation to travel to India with her half-sister Emilia in 1868. In the words of one biographer ‘her globe trotting took on the air of a series of rather far-flung social calls’. This comment rather diminishes just what Gordon-Cumming achieved on her journeys – as she travelled, she undertook large scale watercolours of the sights she saw. During the period from 1868 to 1880 the places she visited included: Gibraltar, Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, Australia, Fiji, New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, Tahiti, California, Hawaii, Japan and China.

Upon her return to Scotland, she began publishing detailed narratives of her journeys. At Home in Fiji, first published in 1881, includes her four months in New Zealand and A Lady’s Cruise in a French Man-of-War, 1882, recounts her time in the South Pacific. She published numerous other titles including an autobiography Memories in 1904. Gordon-Cumming exhibited her watercolours at various times, most notably showing more than 300 works at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, 1886.

Comparing herself to her friend and contemporary the botanical-artist Marianne North (1830-1890), Gordon-Cumming regretted ‘that I did not follow her example, and present my portfolios as a whole to the nation, as illustrations of Greater Britain. Undoubtedly their greater value was collective, in presenting…realistic pictures of…each country where I so long sojourned’. She recognised however that the cost of keeping a permanent gallery was beyond her means. Instead, she presented portfolios of her travels to members of her family, keeping several for herself ‘to be looked over on those very rare occasions when a busy Present allows a little time to think over the Past.’


Karen Taylor, Constance Frederica Gordon-Cumming (1837–1924): A Lady of Adventurous Disposition (London: Karen Taylor Fine Art, 2025), 3.
J. Robinson, quoted in Elizabeth Baigent, ‘Cumming, Constance Frederica Gordon-’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/42347, accessed 1 Apr 2025.
C. F. Gordon-Cumming, Memories (Blackwood: Edinburgh, 1904), 351.
Ibid., 352. Capitalisation follows original.