Lady Phillips

Dorothea Sarah Florence Alexandra, Lady Phillips (née Ortlepp; 14 June 1863 – 23 August 1940) was a South African art patroness and promoter of indigenous culture. She was married to Sir Lionel Phillips, 1st Baronet, a mining magnate and politician and was known by one of her middle names, Florence.

Florence Ortlepp was born in Cape Town in 1863, the only daughter of Albert Frederick Ortlepp, a Colesberg land surveyor and naturalist, and Sarah Walker. She received her education at Rondebosch and later in Bloemfontein. Lionel Phillips met her on the diamond-diggings and married her in 1885. They moved to Johannesburg in 1889. She travelled extensively from 1887, but returned hurriedly to be with her husband during his trial following the Jameson Raid. After his sentence, reprieve and exile, they left for London and established a home in Grosvenor Square while maintaining a country house at Tylney Hall in Hampshire. While the couple lived in London, Florence acquired a keen interest in art and bought numerous works by artists of the time, including William Orpen, William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert, Philip Wilson Steer, Camille Pissarro, Claude Monet and Alfred Sisley. She presented many of these works to the Johannesburg Art Gallery, which she actively helped to establish.

On a visit to South Africa in 1905, she commissioned Rudolf Marloth to undertake his Flora of South Africa, a mammoth work published in 6 volumes between 1913 and 1932.

After resettling in Johannesburg, she started acquiring paintings with a view to eventually founding an art gallery, which after many difficulties took shape as the Johannesburg Art Gallery. She played a leading role in projects aimed at cultivating and preserving the local artistic heritage. She persuaded Sir Max Michaelis to donate his considerable collection of 17th century Dutch and Flemish paintings to the city of Cape Town. She headed a movement to preserve and restore the Koopmans-De Wet House in Cape Town and was an enthusiastic collector of Africana furniture, both for her own home and public institutions. She was instrumental, with Prof. G.E. Pearse, in establishing a Faculty of Architecture at the University of the Witwatersrand.

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