Daphne Park
Henry Mee, (1955-)
Date: 2009
Medium: Oil on canvas
Donor: The artist in 2009
About the sitter
Daphne Park (1921–2010); Principal 1980–89. Came to Somerville in 1940 to read French. Worked for the SOE in WWII; eventually became a senior MI6 controller in Hanoi, Moscow, the Congo and Zambia. She achieved the rank of Controller Western Hemisphere in 1975, the highest position held by a woman in MI6 at the time. She retired to take up the Principalship of Somerville, and was made Baroness Park of Monmouth by Margaret Thatcher in 1990.
College was unaware of her secret career until it was publicly revealed by a BBC Panorama programme in 1993.
About the artist
British painter; read Fine Art at the University of Leeds. 23 May 1990: Mee’s one-man show British Eminencies: Portraits of our Age at Sotheby’s included this portrait of Baroness Park of Monmouth (as well as another of Professor Dorothy Hodgkin)
The Parliamentary Works of Art Committee commissioned Mee to paint Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher [see link just above], former Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Alec Douglas-Home, Denis Healey and Queen Elizabeth II.
Further information
Remembering the Somerville Women of World War Two – Somerville College Oxford
Daphne Park – Somerville College Oxford also has link to video of Baroness Park reflecting on her wartime career
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Mee
https://artuk.org/discover/people/park-daphne-26559 Art UK – this portrait and his other works