An Arts and Crafts painted plaster bas relief plaque by Ellen Mary Rope, in an oak frame 96.5cm x 46.5cm overall Ellen Mary Rope was born in 1855 at Blaxhall in Suffolk. She specialised in sculpture, particularly bas reliefs in a variety of materials, and worked in London for much of her artistic career, often sharing a studio with her niece Dorothy Anne Aldrich Rope, also a sculptor, and near another niece, Margaret Edith Rope. At some time in the nineteen-twenties, she retired to the family farm in Suffolk, where she died in 1934. Her early artistic influences included the philanthropist and social housing reformer Octavia Hill (1838-1912), whose Nottingham Place School in Marylebone she attended from 1870, studying drawing under her tutorship. She then moved onto the Slade and, from 1880, studied sculpture and modelling. In 1885, she had three bas-reliefs accepted by the Royal Academy and subsequently came to share a studio with Elinor Halle, a fellow student from the Slade. She was active in the decorative arts, designing for the Della Robbia Pottery, Birkenhead, from 1886 until its closure in 1906 and showed at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society exhibition from 1889. She showed panels for ceiling, wall, mantelpiece and nursery decoration as well as designs for an electrical bell push, doorplates, a tea caddy and a letter box. Her Della Robbia design work brought her into more public view and her depictions of fairies and children were particular favourites and well as more religious themes, including angels. This exposure, together with her place within the Arts and Crafts Movement, led to architectural commissions. Most significant was an invitations to design four spandrels for the Women's Building at the Chicago 1893 World Columbian Exposition. Her plasters for the popular market were sometimes coloured or sometimes left plain and she aimed to be accessible to people of relatively modest means. Her panels "were primarily designed to be executed at a low cost and repeated if desired, so that they could be used by others than the very rich." (The Builder).