This exhibition chronicles 400 years of women struggling to be recognised as professional artists. They had the skills, and some were even earning their living through painting, but they were mostly denied recognition. History of Art, as taught in schools, and art as reproduced in albums, has mostly ignored these able and strong-minded women artists. Why?
Female artists of the royal courts
In the early years of the period covered by the exhibition, any artist needed patrons to buy their works. The best was to become a court painter, with a reigning monarch as patron. The earliest women painters in this exhibition, Susanah Horenbout and Levina Teerlinc were both Flemish, and daughters of manuscript illustrators, so got their artistic education in the family workshops. Both were admired by their contemporaries for their artistic skill, but little of their work has survived. Horenbout was a lady in waiting to Anne of Cleves in Henry VIII’s court, and Teerlinc served Elizabeth I. Another admired female artist of this early century was Elizabeth Inglis from Scotland, who illustrated manuscripts.
The Stuarts also enhanced the prestige of their court by recruiting famous artists. Charles I employed Artemisia Gentileschi who already had noble patrons from across Europe. She was the daughter of baroque artist Orazio, and painted strongly dramatic paintings in the style of Caravaggio, depicting scenes from the Bible or Greek myths. But she notably presented these from a female point of view. For example, her picture of Susannah and the Elders, painted when she was 17, is famed for showing a girl trying to ward off two predatory old men. Biographers have commented that this most likely reflects the experience she was having at the training studio of a sex pest who eventually raped her. In the exhibition is her self-portrait, skillfully accomplished in a leaning-forward posture.
Women working unsupported, sometimes unpaid
In this pre-photography era, what people rich enough to commission artists required was portraits of themselves or their families, in gorgeous expensive costume. Artists had to be very good at reproducing the folds and sheen of the cloth, silk, satin or velvet, the detail of button-holes and cuffs, the shine of the shoe buckles. Some male artists, from the Renaissance onwards, had the support of a workshop team. The chief artist would plan the pose and do the faces, leaving the costume details to be filled out by juniors. Women artists did not have such team support. They worked on their own, including negotiating the contract.
It is thus shameful to note that one such artist, Mary Black, was refused payment in 1764, on a full height portrait: there is the man, a physician called Messenger Monsey, in gorgeous pinky mauve satin suit, gazing shamelessly for posterity in an unpaid-for artwork.
Persistence secures international commissions
Nonetheless, even in this period, certain women did manage to persist with an artistic career. Some, such as the Scottish artist Catherine Read, succeeded in travelling to other artistic centres on the continent to train, and then got commissions from aristocrats making grand tours. Another woman artist who got a lucrative commission was Maria Cosway. She painted the Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana Cavendish, as Cynthia from Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queen in 1781. The swooping pose was a startling contrast to the usual stiff aristocratic portraits in satin dresses.
One of the most poignant pictures in the collection comes from mid-Victorian times, when there was awareness of how unfairly women artists were treated. It shows a woman, accompanied by her child, being turned away by a snooty art-dealer.
Women artists silenced and under-rated
A wider market for artworks, including dealers, began to develop from 1760 when the first art exhibition was held in London. Two women, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser were among the founders, but they weren’t allowed to become full members, attending council meetings. This meant that although some 900 women exhibited their work between 1760 and 1830 they had no say over choices of pictures for the exhibition or the prizes. Moser, for example, was mainly a painter of flowers, a genre that the male decision-makers under-rated.
I must admit that I did not like the flower pictures of this period. They consisted of over overstuffed urns, showy with large blooms but without displaying the leaves and shape of the whole plant, a trend that was overturned in the nineteenth century when botanical art got stronger.
‘Ladies’ hobbies’ banned by the Royal Society
In the 1770s, the Royal Society banned “needlework, artificial flowers, cut paper, shell-work, or any such baubles”. These were ladies’ hobbies, not worthy of exhibition. But, in fact, some of the makers of these achieved superb quality. One exhibit was embroidery of flowers in satin stitch which achieved an outstanding range of colours and light gradation.
There was another society “for Encouragement of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce” which offered cash prizes for such handiwork. Some women were able to have a career through such handiwork, but it is significant that their life-stories went unrecorded. This was in contrast to those of the foremost male artists.
Women artists tackle ‘male subjects’ and produce ‘indecent’ art
From the mid-nineteenth century, there were more places to exhibit, including in cities like Liverpool and Manchester. There was surprise when some women tackled ‘male’ subjects such as battle-scenes. Exhibitions also gave women more of a platform from which to organise campaigns against exclusion from the Academy. From the 1850s, women petitioned for equal rights in education and work.
The horny nub of the exclusion was that women were barred from life drawing classes. This is an essential step in artistic training. But it was regarded as improper for women to view the naked male body in public. The prudery of the period even shamed women artists who produced depiction of the female body less than fully clothed. A modern Cinderella by Louisa Jopling challenged this by showing a woman in her petticoat, one shoulder bare.
It was considered indecent.
Women were admitted to the Royal Academy’s life-drawing classes only in 1893. Only towards the end of the century and into the early twentieth century did women dare to depict nudes. One of the first was a large canvas, see featured picture above, with naked females in various poses, representing a story from Greek myths Psyche before the throne of Venus, by Henrietta Rae.
Forging their own path and developing new styles
When watercolour painting developed, women were also restricted in their membership of the main societies, but they founded their own. Against the odds some women persisted in their artistic careers, organising solo exhibitions, and developing links to dealers.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, some women painters, as with novelists, picked scenes from real life, catching action while it happens almost like a photo snapshot. An example of this is Elizabeth Forbes’ School is Out , see below.
The status of women’s art starts to improve
When photography developed, although women were not formerly excluded from the Photographic Society of London, meetings were held in the evenings. This was a time when women required a chaperone to be allowed outside the home. Nonetheless, some women persisted. By 1909 there were just eight women to 63 men in one leading photographic society.
In the twentieth century, especially after World War I, the status of women improved, even in the art world. In 1936, Laura Knight was the first women elected as a full member of the Royal Academy. The final room of the exhibition shows the variety of pictures achieved by these twentieth century women painters.
The long road to women’s rights in art
The exhibition is worth attending to see the actual pictures, rather than digital reproductions which, of course, exclude being able to look at a painting from different angles, and also restrict the colour range. But the intention of the exhibition is to convey the sweep of history with regard to women’s rights in art. The gist is that, although some outstanding individuals did achieve an artistic career through their sheer force of character in the eighteenth century, it was only when women got organised to campaign for change that progress began to happen, and that took about 100 years!
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