...almost nothing is known of her except her legacy of elegant, whimsical and romantic illustrations. Her name was Jennie Harbour. ...Her father was a Jewish emigrant from Poland who settled in the East End of London. Like so many others he was probably seeking escape from the pogroms and restrictive living conditions faced by Jews in Eastern Europe in the latter part of the 19th Century. But as a milliner he was able to support a family in a reasonable manner. The fact that he had adopted a recognizably English name – Harbour – probably did his business no harm either. But what his original name was has not been uncovered. Jennie was the Harbour’s second child, born in 1893, but surprisingly, at the age of 7, she was listed in the 1901 UK Census as attending a girl’s boarding school in Kent. Sending children to boarding school at an early age was quite normal for Britain’s middle and upper classes but was probably unusual for a family in the Harbour’s circumstances. It was not as if the Harbour family had relocated – they were still living in London – so the reason for her being sent to school, as distinct from starting to be taught her father’s trade as a milliner, had another explanation. I speculate that it was because her parents recognized some sort of spark of intelligence and creativity and wanted to give her every opportunity to develop it. Her trail goes cold for 11 years with the next trace being her returning from a cruise to The Canary Islands in Oct. 1922. At that time she was still Miss Jennie Harbour with her occupation recorded as ‘artist’. The fact that she was traveling with passengers listed as brokers, solicitors... means that she had money which, presumably, he had made by selling her works. In fact, in 1921, a publication titled My Book of Favorite Fairy Tales’ was published with Jennie Harbour Illustrations so perhaps she had been celebrating... (http://collectingvintagecompacts.blogspot.nl/2014/11/compacts-by-rex-prints-by-jennie.html) undefined

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