“Now that I so seldom have the strength to paint, I have started on a self-portrait. This way the model is always available, although it isn’t at all pleasant to see oneself.” – letter to a friend, 1921 This year marks the 150th anniversary of one of Finland’s most famous painters, whose long career spanned… Read More from Helene Schjerfbeck
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Harriet Tubman
Never having received appropriate recognition in life, after death, Harriet Tubman became an African American icon and a hero to later generations of Civil Rights activists. Her concrete achievements in war and peace, and her struggles on behalf of African Americans and women in particular, surely make her someone that disabled people can also call a… Read More from Harriet Tubman
Helen Keller
“The public must learn that the blind man is neither genius nor a freak nor an idiot. He has a mind that can be educated, a hand which can be trained, ambitions which it is right for him to strive to realise, and it is the duty of the public to help him make the… Read More from Helen Keller
Virginia Woolf
“As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets as sanity does.” I never thought I would like Virginia Woolf: I thought… Read More from Virginia Woolf
Frida Kahlo
“I am not sick. I am broken. But I am happy as long as I can paint.” A century ago, in the Blue House, on the outskirts of Mexico City, Frida Kahlo came into the world, destined to live a life of suffering, but also to be remembered as one of the greatest woman artists… Read More from Frida Kahlo
Emily Dickinson
Exultation is the going Of an inland soul to sea, Past the houses – past the headlands – Into deep Eternity. Bred as we, among the mountains, Can the sailor understand The divine intoxication Of the first league out from land? Born to a typical New England bourgeois family, Emily was a sickly teenager, but… Read More from Emily Dickinson
Florence Nightingale
“We want to rouse the interest of the public: for behind the Cabinet in England always stands the House of Commons & behind the House of Commons always stands the British public. And these are they we want to interest: and these can only be interested by narratives of real lives.” Although Florence Nightingale is a… Read More from Florence Nightingale