Women and Art

This essay traces the social and institutional barriers women artists encountered in the Victorian art world, detailing the challenges stemming from their unequal access to education, particularly their exclusion from pivotal life-drawing classes alongside their limited representation in exhibition venues and the gendered expectations that often confined and channelled their work in certain directions. While outlining the obstacles women artists faced that created substantial disadvantages in the mainstream art institutions and markets, this essay also sheds light on the alternative routes women artists crafted to achieve professional and economic success. It sets out the alternative educational venues they took advantage of, as well as the forms of work they embraced such as illustration, design, and the decorative arts, which provided alternative platforms for their creative expression and commercial success.

In 1870, when the author and historian John Cordy Jeaffreson wrote a brief history of ‘Female Artists and the Art Schools of England’ for the first volume of Art, Pictorial and Industrial, he asked a question that often featured in discussions of women artists in the period:

[H]ow comes it that, though women have been encouraged in all times to cultivate music and painting, their sex has produced no composers or pictorial artists of the highest excellence? How comes it that … the studios, no less accessible to petticoated than bearded students, have never produced a superbly grand female painter—seldom produced any female painter who even deserves a place in the second class of artistic celebrities?

(Jeaffreson 1870, 30)

Jeaffreson’s question was echoed by other writers of the period such as Eric Sutherland Robertson, who, in his 1883 collection of biographies of English Poetesses claimed it as a ‘fact that no woman has equalled man as a poet … Did Mrs. Hemans rival Wordsworth, or Landor, or Keats, or Shelley?,’ he asked. ‘Did Mrs. Browning rival any of these last-named poets, or has she rivalled Tennyson? Did Miss Rossetti rival her dead brother?’ (Robertson 1883, xv). Though Robertson addressed women’s supposed lack of achievement in authorship, others, such as the author Dinah Craik, singled out art as the more difficult activity for women to pursue. While the author only needed pen, paper, and a surface on which to write, the artist needed expensive materials, specialist training, and some form of studio space in which to work. Women’s success in the art world was, Craik argued, ‘the most difficult – perhaps in its highest form, almost impossible to women’ (Craik 1858, 50).

Jeaffreson claimed to be reluctant to express an opinion on why this was the case, but his discussion of female artists offered a number of explanations for women’s second-class status in the art world, explanations that went beyond Robertson’s assertion that Nature made the domestic mission woman’s first priority, unfitting them for greatness in art. ‘What woman would not have been Niobe rather than the artist who carved the Niobe?’ Robertson mused. Given that all of Niobe’s 14 children were slaughtered by the gods because of her excessive pride in them, the answer obviously would seem to be just about anyone. While Jeaffreson didn’t reproduce Robertson’s essentialist claims, he did outline the social and institutional conditions that created a distinction between male and female artists and led to women’s second-class status in the art world, conditions that included issues such as education, particularly women’s lack of access to life-drawing classes and the social opposition to women viewing and studying the unclothed body; access to exhibitions and the opportunities for selling one’s work that they provided; and the way in which certain genres and ways of working were gendered as masculine or feminine.

‘It cannot be maintained’, Jeaffreson argued, ‘that the girls of past generations had the same facilities as young men for procuring artistic instruction’ (Jeaffreson 1870, 30). Prior to the middle of the century, women generally relied on private instruction from a family member or drawing master for their education in art. Pamela Gerrish Nunn provides an extensive list of such artists in her book Victorian Women Artists, but some of the most successful, to name just a few, included Catherine and Lucy Maddox Brown, Henrietta Ward, Louise Jopling, Emma Sandys and Rebecca Solomon (Gerrish Nunn 1987, 30). As one of the female accomplishments, drawing was a standard part of young ladies’ education, but they were disadvantaged in pursuit of more advanced instruction. While their brothers could improve their early education at the most significant, and free, art school, the Royal Academy, women were left to gather their education where they could. By the 1830s some smaller establishments such as Heatherley’s School of Art or Henry Sass’s Academy began to admit women (Devereux 2016, 17), but the Royal Academy continued to exclude female students, even though two of its founding members were women: Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser. This only changed after 1860 when the first female student was admitted by mistake. Signing the drawings included in her portfolio with only her initial and surname, L. Herford was accepted by the admissions officers, who only realised after the offer had been made that the L. stood for Laura. Despite some objections, Herford had the support of the Academy’s president, Charles Eastlake, and it was eventually decided that she should be admitted. Herford’s admittance to the school was deemed by Ellen Clayton (1876), in her two-volume survey of English Female Artists, to be ‘the first important opening to women to share in the art education privileges accorded to their brothers’ (Clayton 1876, vol. 2, 84). Other women soon followed Herford, including her niece, the successful illustrator Helen Paterson (later Allingham), and Louisa Starr, the first woman gold medallist in the school. Clayton notes how in the ten years following Herford’s admittance around 40 women had been enrolled in the school.

Though Herford’s enrolment was often lauded as a personal victory, it was, as Deborah Cherry has shown, the culmination of a concerted efforts by women artists, spurred on by the burgeoning feminist movement, to make space for themselves in the Academy. Cherry details what she terms a ‘women’s art alliance’ that formed in the later 1840s that brought together a range of women dedicated to both art and feminist politics including, among others, Herford, Anna Mary Howitt, Eliza Fox, Jane Benham, Anna Blunden, Rebecca Solomon, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Harriet Martineau, and Anna Jameson (Cherry 2000, 12). This ‘sisterhood’, as it was termed by Howitt in her 1853 Sisters in Art, sought in some ways to create a network of like-minded artists along lines similar to that established by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. From the late 1850s, this women’s art alliance agitated for women to be admitted to the Academy, drafting petitions, publicly campaigning, and making themselves visible by attending Academy lectures (Cherry 2000, 16–18). Success seemed to be achieved when Herford was accepted to the school, but, though this event marked an important advance for women artists, resistance to women’s presence in the school, and the professional art world more generally, remained strong in some quarters into the twentieth century (Gerrish Nunn 2013). Though admitted to the school, women continued to be excluded from the life-drawing classes until 1893. And no women were elected as members of the Royal Academy until the painter Annie Swynnerton in 1922.

Access to life-drawing classes has often been identified as one of the most significant disadvantages that women artists faced in the nineteenth century. Without the ability to study the body, women were practically excluded from working in the full range of genres, particularly those considered the most prestigious forms of academic art. This discrepancy was overtly addressed by the opening of the Slade School of Art at University College, London in 1871. The Slade was particularly significant as an art school that was explicitly committed to equality in education between its male and female students. In 1883, the artist Charlotte J. Weeks remembered the opening address for the school by the first Slade Professor at UCL, Edward Poynter, establishing the principles on which the school would be run: ‘Here for the first time in England, indeed in Europe, a public Fine Art School was thrown open to male and female students on precisely the same terms, and giving to both sexes fair and equal opportunities’ (Weeks 1883, 325). The effect of the Slade, Weeks notes, was the establishment of a precedent for women’s inclusion in life classes and equal education that had continued to expand in other educational establishments in the decade that followed.

Prior to the opening of the Slade, women had some access to life-drawing classes, but these were primarily private lessons that were not widely available. Jo Devereux cites one example of classes that were offered by Fanny McIan, the first principal of the London Female School of Design (later Female School of Art). While the government curriculum for the Schools of Design had strict gendered rules, only allowing figure drawing for male students until 1866 when women were finally allowed to draw clothed figures, ‘McIan subverted the prohibition of women drawing nudes by holding sub rosa drawing classes at her house instead of the art school’ (Devereux, 20). Life classes were also run by Eliza Fox, whose art lessons for women artists that she ran from her father’s library in the 1850s were crucial for the establishment of Howitt’s artistic sisterhood (Cherry 2000, 67).

The Slade was an important catalyst for the increasing numbers of women artists that gained professional standing in the later decades of the nineteenth century. Artists that trained at the Slade included Kate Greenaway, Helen Allingham, Evelyn De Morgan, Mary Watts, Gwen John, and Vanessa Bell, to name just a few. But before the Slade, one of the most important educational establishments for women artists were government-led design schools. The first Government School of Design was opened in London in 1837 in order to address what was seen as the poor state of the design of Britain’s manufactured goods, especially in contrast to commercial goods produced in France and Germany where schools of design were well established. The schools followed what was often called the ‘South Kensington System’, art training for industry that focussed on design principles and practical skills. The Schools of Design, later renamed Schools of Art, expanded across the UK, growing over the course of the century to 150 in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, with seven in London alone. Though the schools taught both male and female students, a dedicated Female School of Design opened in 1842, which, alongside lessons in drawing and design principles, offered instruction for women in skills such as wood engraving, porcelain and miniature painting, lace work, and embroidery. This type of training was also later expanded by specialist enterprises that helped solidify women’s professional status in the Arts and Crafts movement such as the School of Art Needlework in 1872, the School of Art Wood Carving in 1879, the Chromo Lithographic Art Studio in 1883, and the apprenticeship scheme run by the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women that placed pupils in decorative art firms (Callen 1979).

Many women artists who eventually went on to the Slade or the Royal Academy, including a number of those mentioned above, started their training at either one of the London Schools of Art in London or at one of the regional schools. Though it is impossible to list all the women artists in the period who attended the national Schools of Art, an indicative list can give a sense of the importance of these schools for women’s art training in the second half of the century. Some of those who supplemented their art education with time in the South Kensington schools included Joanna Boyce, Gertrude Jekyll, Mary Ellen Edwards, Catherine Sparkes, Mary Sympson Tovey, and Elizabeth Thompson Butler, one of the most successful women artists of the period, who started her training at the South Kensington schools before heading to Europe to seek the atelier-style art education that some argued was most desirable. Rebecca Solomon studied at Spitalfields School of Design, as well as learning from her brothers Abraham and Simeon. Eleanor Fortesque Brickdale attended the Crystal Palace School of Art before moving to the Royal Academy. Outside the capital, the regional schools were also important for women’s training. Helen Allingham initially studied at the Birmingham School of Art before transferring to the Female School of Art in London and then ultimately the Royal Academy, following her aunt Laura Herford. The Pre-Raphaelite artist Kate Bunce attended the Birmingham school, as did Celia Levetus, who like Allingham developed a successful career as an illustrator, and May Morris spent some time teaching there. The Glasgow School of Art, with its distinctive Art Nouveau style, was crucial in the education of artists such as Jessie M. King and Frances and Margaret MacDonald. Annie Swynnerton, the first women to be elected as an associate member of the Royal Academy, studied at the Manchester School of Art, which was under the direction of Walter Crane in the 1890s. And Laura Kight, the first full member of the RA, studied at the Nottingham School of Art.

By the 1890s, the South Kensington System was seen as old-fashioned and out-of-date, a perception vividly illustrated by Ella Hepworth Dixon in her 1894 novel The Story of a Modern Woman, when she described the Central London School of Art as a place of ‘ancient paint-tubes, oily rags, furtively munched sandwiches, and the presence of a preponderance of people to whom the daily tub is possibly not of vital importance’ (Dixon 1894/2004, 84). Though the government art schools may have lacked what Dixon, who had herself studied at a Paris atelier, described as an ‘art “atmosphere”’, their focus on art education for industry and the development of practical design skills had been pivotal in expanding the number of women artists who were able to earn a living through art. For those seeking to make career in fine art, exhibitions were important to securing publicity and earning money. Women exhibited at the Royal Academy, but the numbers were limited. Jeaffreson records that the proportion of women’s to men’s art work exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1850 was 1 in 10, and in 1860, it was 1 in 13 (Jeaffreson 1870, 29). Even when galleries such as the Dudley and the Grosvenor were opened in the 1860s and 1870s to challenge the dominance of the Royal Academy in the Victorian art world, the proportion of women exhibiting in these spaces remained low. Jan Marsh notes that in the Grosvenor’s 14 years of exhibitions from 1877 to 1890, ‘women’s works formed only 17% of the total, and hung in less prestigious rooms’ (Marsh and Gerrish Nunn 1997, 47). Women were also often excluded from the professional societies and networks that men enjoyed. Marsh notes that women were not allowed in clubs such as the Garrick and the Hogarth, which were important spaces where male artists could mix with important art dealers and collectors (Marsh and Gerrish Nunn 1997, 51). Similarly, in the decorative arts, women were refused entry to the Art Workers’ Guild, which had been founded in 1884 to support workers in the Arts and Crafts movement.

To deal with this discrepancy, alternative female-only societies were formed, such as the Art Worker’s Guild alternative, the Women’s Guild of Arts which was founded in 1907 (Thomas 2020, 5). The Society of Female Artists (SFA) had been formed 60 years earlier in 1857 to give women artists an exhibition opportunity of their own. Reviews in the generally supportive periodical The Art Journal often praised the work exhibited at the SFA. The first exhibition in 1857 was proof for The Art Journal that the women who exhibited there were skilled artists who ‘did not over-estimate their own powers’ (‘The Society of Female Artists’ 1857, 215). The journal’s disdain was instead reserved for the ‘certain class of connoisseur, real or pretending, [who] speak disparagingly of the productions of female artists – to regard them as works of the hand rather than of the mind – pretty and graceful pictures, but little else’ (‘The Society of Female Artists’ 1857, 215). It was this attitude, the journal noted, that both contributed to the disadvantages women artists faced in the art world and was refuted by the evidence of the exhibition.

In spite of The Art Journal’s praise, the fortunes of the SFA remained precarious. It often suffered from suspicions of second-rate status, and many women artists struggled to sell their work through it. While the SFA received support from some prominent members of the women’s rights movement such as Barbara Bodichon, some of the more successful artists often avoided sending work there, concerned that their reputation would suffer if associated with the society. But, though the society was never very commercially successful, and the inclusion of women artists more liberal than rigorously selective, it’s very presence in the exhibition scene ‘led to general reform in exhibition [and] brought into discussion … issues concerning women’s participation in the visual arts which previously had been scarcely articulated’ (Gerrish Nunn 1987, 86).

Exhibition opportunities also arose around the decorative arts and the Arts and Crafts movement. The 1885 Bristol Loan Exhibition of Women’s Industries, for instance, was a landmark exhibition that attested to range and vitality of what the Englishwoman’s Review called ‘professional’ women’s work in the industrial and fine arts (‘Women’s Industries Exhibition’ 1885, 98; see also Ferry 2007). The array of work on display included, alongside farm produce and architectural and technical tracings and diagrams, art pottery, wood carving, handwoven rugs, lace and art needlework, painted fans, floral displays, straw work, metalwork, and wallpaper designs. There were rooms devoted to women’s paintings, chromolithographs, and watercolours. The tea room was decorated with portraits of eminent women, including many women authors and public figures of the century. And there were also rooms given over to a dress exhibition and women’s work in interior design, two commercial fields that were redefined as art in the later decades of the century and promoted as artistic professions for women (Sparke 2008; see also Zakreski 2020). Though the Englishwoman’s Review admitted that the term professional was being given its most ‘extended meaning’ in describing the range of work on display, they were careful to distinguish it from the work girls might produce in their drawing rooms, and even the work of women in the past, by highlighting the superiority and skill which could only be achieved through specialist education and thorough training (‘Women’s Industries Exhibition’ 1885, 98). This was not the weaving of the spinsters of old, but the skilled work of modern professionals made possible by the ‘good art-classes and technical schools’ (‘Women’s Industries Exhibition’ 1885, 98).

While it remained challenging for women to sell their productions in the fine art societies, the decorative and industrial arts offered a more stable source of income and an opportunity to develop skills and activities already associated with women’s work into art forms (Elliot and Helland 2002). The School of Art Needlework, for instance, had the dual function of restoring embroidery to its historical position as an art form while also training women in an art form that provided an income. Women artists were directed towards forms such as art needlework and textiles more generally because they were seen to accord with innate female qualities: to be dextrous, decorative, and delicate; to prefer softer, more pliant mediums such as fabric or watercolours over stone or oils; to represent domestic or ornamental subjects; to work on a small rather than a large scale; to ornament rather than shape; to remain private and avoid publicity and fame. These qualities constituted a feminine aesthetic against which women artists and their work was measured.

One example of such judgment can be found in the critical reception of Elizabeth Butler. Before Swynnerton was elected as an associate member of the Royal Academy 1922, the closest any woman had come was Butler, who was nominated for membership after the grand success of her Crimean War painting The Roll Call in the 1874 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, the most important event of the art calendar. Butler failed to be elected by a margin of two votes, a result that worried some of the more conservative members of the Academy. The fact that Butler painted ‘unladylike’ battle scenes when ‘she might have confined herself to animals, or historical works, or portraits, or she might have indulged all the finesse of a woman’s taste in the fascinating pursuit of genre painting’, led to her painting being praised by John Ruskin as ‘Amazon’s work’ (Oldcastle 1879, 258, 259, 261). Ruskin’s judgement of Butler reflected the widespread perception that women who chose to work in mediums or genres that weren’t considered feminine, like Butler’s large-scale oils of military scenes, were unusual, unladylike, and, in more critical opinions (especially given dogmas such as Robertson’s that ‘children are the best poems Providence intended women to produce’ (Robertson 1883, xiv)), even ‘unnatural’.

The types of ‘feminine’ work women were often encouraged towards were more often those associated with the decorative rather than the fine arts. Alongside embroidery, women were directed towards work that required meticulous and delicate skills like wood engraving, rather than the more creative, masculine work of drawing on wood (Flood), or china painting rather than pottery modelling and shaping (Buckley), as well as work that was dedicated to the production of domestic and decorative objects like jewellery, metalwork objects for the home, dressmaking, and interior design (Callen). Commenting on the surge in women painters on china, for instance, the art critic Cosmo Monkhouse noted how this ‘harmless and charming’ occupation ‘opened out a congenial career to hundreds of women’ (Monkhouse 1884, 246). Artists such as Rebecca Coleman and Linnie Watt turned their skills and training in watercolours to china painting, exhibiting their work at both the Royal Academy, the Society of Female Artists, and what Monkhouse termed the ‘Royal Academy of China Painting,’ a gallery run by the retailers Howell and James that held a yearly exhibition beginning in 1876 of Painting on Pottery and Porcelain (Anderson 2013). Watt, who was particularly known for her landscapes, produced similar images on canvases, china plates and Christmas cards, and whatever the medium, her work, according to Monkhouse, was particularly suited for display in a domestic setting because it was ‘specially fitted for daily companionship, eloquent of grace and beauty when appealed to, and at other moments silently adding by their light and colour to the general cheerfulness of the room’ (Monkhouse 1884, 249).

Alongside these decorative arts, perhaps the most lucrative medium for women artists in the later decades of the century was illustration, a ‘field of art in which women were the least constrained or held back by their gender’ (Quirk 2019, 163). Perhaps the best known female illustrator of the period is Kate Greenaway, whose distinctive images of children spawned a host of imitators and a recognisable ‘Greenaway style’. But as a recent collection by Jo Devereux makes clear, illustration was a medium of artistic expression as well as a source of income for a number of female artists whose work has been forgotten or ignored (Devereux 2023). One example is Alice Havers, who left behind fine art in order to build a lucrative career in illustrating. Havers trained at the South Kensington school and then the Royal Academy and started exhibiting at the Royal Academy exhibitions in 1873, with her 1877 contribution The Eve of St. Mark seen to establish her ‘claim to rank as an artist of uncommon excellence’ (‘An Exhibition of Christmas Cards’ 1882, 31). To make money, though, Havers turned to Christmas card design, a growing artistic employment for women in the 1880s (Zakreski, 2016). Havers’s success was prompted by her card A Dream of Patience, a design that won first place and £200 at a competition run by the publishing firm Hildesheimer and Faulkner and exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1881. Havers’s card was a huge success; it was repeatedly reprinted with different decorative borders and backs and was produced for a range of holidays, including Valentine’s day with a verse on the back from Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1881 Aesthetic parody Patience that ‘Love is a plaintive song, / Sung by a suffering maid’. The design was also reprinted for a souvenir programme for Patience that was issued in 1889. Though little is currently known about Havers, A Dream of Patience cemented her reputation as an illustrator, and until her death in a few years later in 1890, she enjoyed a flourishing career, continuing to illustrate for both cards and books for Hildesheimer and Faulkner and other publishers. She was regularly employed by The Magazine of Art for their Poems and Picture series, where she provided illustrations for poems by authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson, William Allingham, and J. Arthur Blackie, among others. She also continued her collaboration with the Savoy and Gilbert and Sullivan when she designed an eight-page illustrated programme for Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1884 play, Princess Ida. Havers was just one of many women who turned their artistic training to illustrating, and as her example suggests, and as Jo Devereux notes, ‘women illustrators in the nineteenth century were able to inhabit the textual space of the periodical more readily than the physical space of the museum, gallery, or art school’ (5).

The tendency for women artists to work across different media, combining or substituting their fine art aspirations with work in illustration or the decorative arts caused some consternation for a writer for the Spectator, who, in their review of Ellen Clayton’s English Female Artists, warily mused:

The first effect produced by this book is to raise in our minds the question – What constitutes an artist?… If all the ladies who have ever dabbled in oil painting, in conjunction with fancy work and paper flowers, are to go down to posterity as Female Artists, we shall be more puzzled than ever to discover the right application of the word’

(quoted in Gerrish Nunn, 38)

The careers of women artists in the nineteenth century demonstrates not the debasement of art through its association with work traditionally associated with women and amateur craft work, as this review suggests. Instead, research in this area collectively attests to the diffusion of art through everyday life and the central role that the woman artist played in the extension and prominence of artistic culture in the nineteenth century.

References

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