Henrietta Rae was born on 30 December 1856 in
Hammersmith,
London, to Thomas Burbey Rae, a civil servant, and Ann Eliza Rae (), a musician who had been a student of
Felix Mendelssohn. She had three brothers and three sisters. Rae began formally studying art at the age of thirteen, being educated at the Queen Square School of Art,
Heatherley's School of Art (as the school's first female pupil) and at the
British Museum. Rae reportedly applied to the
Royal Academy of Arts at least five times before eventually gaining a seven-year scholarship. Her teachers there included Sir
Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who had the strongest influence on her later work, as well as
Frank Dicksee and
William Powell Frith. '', 1909, a representative example of her work In 1884 she married painter and fellow Royal Academy student
Ernest Normand, but kept her maiden name – a choice considered unusual at the time – because she had already begun to establish her reputation as an artist, having been a frequent exhibitor at the annual Royal Academy exhibitions since 1881. Rae and Normand lived in
Holland Park, the residence of many other artists of the day. Frequent visitors included
Leighton,
Millais,
Prinsep, and
Watts. However, the attention was not always welcomed. In her memoirs, Rae described the overbearing attitudes and conduct of some of the more senior artists. In one such case, Prinsep dipped his thumb in cobalt blue paint and marked up one of Rae's pictures. In retaliation, Rae "accidentally" burnt his hat on her stove. Rae and Normand travelled to Paris in 1890 to study at the
Académie Julian with
Jules Joseph Lefebvre and
Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant. In 1893, they moved to
Upper Norwood, into a studio that was custom-built for them by Normand's father. The couple had two children, a son (born in 1886) and a daughter (born in 1893). Rae
exhibited her work at the
Palace of Fine Arts and
The Woman's Building at the 1893
World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois. Rae was a supporter of
feminism and
women's suffrage. In 1897 Rae organised an exhibition of the work of female artists for the Jubilee of
Queen Victoria. She died on 26 January 1928 at Upper Norwood. ==Works==