Fashionability, Exhibition Culture and Gender Politics: Fair Women 2020004509, 2020004510, 9781138493568, 9781351027786

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Fashionability, Exhibition Culture and Gender Politics

Fair Women was the Victorian equivalent of a ‘blockbuster’ exhibition. Organised by a committee of women, it opened to great fanfare in the Grafton Galleries in London, and was comprised of both historical and contemporary portraits of women as well as decorative objects. Meaghan Clarke argues that the exhibition challenged contemporary assumptions about the representation of women and the superfciality of female collectors. The Fair Women phenomenon complicated gender stereotypes and foregrounded women as cultural arbiters. This book uncovers a wide range of texts and images to reveal that Fair Women brought together fashion, modernity and gender politics in new and surprising ways. It shows that, while invariably absent in institutional histories, women were vital to the development of the modern blockbuster exhibition. This book will be of interest to scholars in art and gender studies, museum studies, feminist art history, women artists and art history. Meaghan Clarke is Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex, UK. Cover image credit: Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth [detail], John Singer Sargent, 1889, oil on canvas, 221 ´ 114 cm, Tate. Photo © Tate

The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 Series Editor: Stacey J. Pierson, SOAS, University of London

The Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950 provides a forum for the broad study of object acquisition and collecting practices in their global dimensions. The series seeks to illuminate the intersections between material culture studies, art history, and the history of collecting. It takes as its starting point the idea that objects both contributed to the formation of knowledge in the past and likewise contribute to our understanding of the past today. The human relationship to objects has proven a rich feld of scholarly inquiry, with much recent scholarship either anthropological or sociological rather than art historical in perspective. Underpinning this series is the idea that the physical nature of objects contributes substantially to their social meanings, and therefore that the visual, tactile, and sensual dimensions of objects are critical to their interpretation. This series therefore seeks to bridge anthropology and art history, sociology and aesthetics. Nature and the Nation in Fin-de-Siècle France The Art of Emile Gallé and the École de Nancy Jessica M. Dandona Collecting and Displaying China’s “Summer Palace” in the West The Yuanmingyuan in Britain and France Louise Tythacott Female Portraiture and Patronage in Marie Antoinette’s Court The Princesse de Lamballe Sarah Grant The Emergence of the Antique and Curiosity Dealer in Britain 1815–1850 The Commodifcation of Historical Objects Mark Westgarth Nordic Private Collections of Chinese Objects Minna Törmä Fashionability, Exhibition Culture and Gender Politics Fair Women Meaghan Clarke For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/The-Historiesof-Material-Culture-and-Collecting-1700-1950/book-series/ASHSER2128

Fashionability, Exhibition Culture and Gender Politics Fair Women

Meaghan Clarke

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Taylor & Francis The right of Meaghan Clarke to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by him/her/them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Clarke, Meaghan, author. Title: Fashionability, exhibition culture and gender politics: Fair women / Meaghan Clarke. Description: New York: Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2020004509 (print) | LCCN 2020004510 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138493568 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351027786 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Fair women (Exhibition) (1894: Grafton Galleries) | Feminism and art. | Exhibitions–Social aspects. Classifcation: LCC N72.F45 C59 2020 (print) | LCC N72.F45 (ebook) | DDC 701/.03–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004509 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004510 ISBN: 978-1-138-49356-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-02778-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

List of fgures List of plates Preface Acknowledgements

vi viii ix xviii

PART I

The Exhibition

1

1

Exhibiting Fair Women

3

2

‘Feminine Weapons’: Women, Collecting and Connoisseurship

30

PART II

Modern Fair Women 3 4

57

Performing the Modern Woman: Actresses, Celebrity Culture and Exhibitions

59

(Re)Envisioning New Women: Eveleen Myers and Gertrude Campbell

88

PART III

Fair Women Redux

119

5

Reinventing Fair Women: Women, Exhibitions and Art Writing

121

6

International Fair Women: The Edwardian Revival 1908–1910

144

Epilogue

170

Bibliography Index

173 192

Figures

0.1 0.2 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 2.1 2.2 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 3.9 3.10 3.11 3.12 4.1

‘Visitors at the Loan Collection at the Guildhall at Guildhall Exhibition’, Graphic, 1892 ‘Private View Day at the New Gallery: the Crush in the Central Hall’, Graphic, 1893 Plan of the Grafton Galleries, Magazine of Art, 1892 Octagon Gallery, Grafton Galleries, 1892 Large Gallery, Grafton Galleries, 1892 Self-portrait, Violet Manners, Duchess of Rutland, 1891 Countess of Westmoreland, Violet Manners, c.1892, Portfolio, 1894 Angela Burdett-Coutts, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Francis Henry Hart, 1882 Georgina (Lennox), Countess Bathurst by Thomas Lawrence, c.1792, Portfolio 1894 ‘Our Own “Dream of Fair Women” – With Apologies to the other Exhibition’, Moonshine, 1894 ‘The Light Side of Nature,’ Phil May, Sketch, 1894 ‘Historical Relics Exhibited at the Grafton Galleries,’ Queen, 1894 ‘Grandmother’s Treasures’, Illustrated London News 1873 Lady Jane Grey by Lucas de Heere [Lady as the Magdalen by the Master of the Female Half-Lengths, c.1525–1550], Fair Women 1894 ‘What we are coming to: A Ladies Smoking Party’, Sketch, May 1894 ‘Mrs Langtry as Aphrodite in “A Society Butterfy” at the Opera comique’, Sketch, June 1894 ‘Mrs Langtry in Act II and Act III’, Sketch, May 1894 ‘Fair Women’, Pears’ Pictorial, 1894 ‘Shopping in sedan chairs’, Pears’ Pictorial, 1894 Sarah Bernhardt, Walter Spindler, c.1894, Portfolio ‘Madame Sarah Bernhardt in “Izeyl” At Daly’s Theatre’, Graphic, July 1894 ‘Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News, June 1892 ‘Sarah Bernhardt in London’, Illustrated London News June 1894 ‘Finishing Touches: Madame Sarah Bernhardt in her Dressing-Room’, Graphic, July 1894 Sarah Bernhardt, W. & D. Downey, 1890s, platinotype panel card Ellen Terry, Frederick Hollyer, c.1890, platinotype cabinet card Sir Francis Galton, Eveleen Myers, 1890s platinum print

xi xii 4 5 5 7 8 9 12 19 20 22 41 48 63 65 66 68 70 72 73 74 76 78 79 82 91

Figures 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7 4.8 4.9 4.10 4.11 4.12 4.13 4.14 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Rebecca at the well, Eveleen Myers, 1891, sepia photogravure Eveleen Myers; Silvia Constance Myers; Harold Hawthorn Myers; Leopold Hamilton Myers, probably Eveleen Myers, mid-1890s Eveleen Myers, possibly Cyril Flower, 1890s, platinum print Mary Chamberlain, Eveleen Myers, platinum print, 1890s Dorothy (née Tennant) Stanley, Eveleen Myers, published 1890, carbon print Sir Henry Morton Stanley; Dorothy (née Tennant), Lady Stanley and ‘Sali’, Eveleen Myers, 1890, platinum print Agnata Frances Butler, Eveleen Myers, 1891, platinum print Anne Jemima Clough, Eveleen Myers, 1890, platinum print Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, Eveleen Myers, 1900s, platinum print Self-portrait, probably Eveleen Myers, c.1900, platinum print ‘The New Woman’ George DuMaurier, Punch, 1895 Gertrude, Lady Colin Campbell, W. & D. Downey, 1893 ‘Lady Colin Campbell,’ Cycling Illustrated, c.1896 Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, [unknown woman], Marc Gheeraedts [d. 1621], Fair Women 1894 Georgina Duchess of Devonshire, and her daughter, Reynolds [1784], Fair Women, 1894 Mary Robinson as “Perdita”, Reynolds [1782], Fair Women, 1894 Countess Somers, G.F. Watts [1850s], Fair Women, 1894 Louisa Baylies, Fair Women from Vogue, 1894 ‘Lady Wantage’s Collection of Pictures’, The Connoisseur, 1911 ‘Four Beautiful Portraits at the Fair Women Exhibition’, Illustrated London News, 1908 ‘Four Beautiful Studies from the Fair Women Exhibition’, Illustrated London News, 1908 Cigarette, Paul Helleu, c.1895 Roubadah, Princess of Cabul, Omar Meherab, c.1800 [reproduced in 2nd National Loan Exhibition: Woman and Child in Art, London, 1914, as Unknown Persian painter, Portrait of a Woman, probably by the author of a portrait of Fath ‘Ali Shah Qajar, c.1810]

vii 92 94 95 96 98 99 101 102 104 106 108 111 112 122 123 124 125 128 135 148 149 151

156

Plates

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

The New Woman, Albert George Morrow, poster for the Comedy Theatre, 1894, colour lithograph Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1538 Veronica Veronese, D.G. Rossetti, 1872 Cleopatra, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1877 Sedan chair, Samuel Vaughan, 1763 Private View of the Old Masters Exhibition, Royal Academy, 1888, Henry Jamyn Brooks, 1889 Pair of opera glasses, Tiffany & Co., 1893 Earrings, stone turquoise coloured, veined with brown, blue and purple Hector and Andromache, c.1775–1799 Geraldine Georgiana Mary Hervey, Marchioness of Bristol, The Hon. Henry Richard Graves, 1870 Portrait of a Lady [Perhaps Mrs Henry Broughton], attributed to Thomas Gainsborough, c.1770–1775 Mabel Morrison, Charles Lepec, 1866 Lillie Langtry, George Frederic Watts, 1880 Fair Women and Pears’ Soap, Pears’ Pictorial 1, no. 5 (September 1894) Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, John Singer Sargent, 1889 Eveleen Tennant, John Everett Millais, 1874 Mary Endicott, Mrs Joseph Chamberlain, John Everett Millais, 1890–1891 Eleanor Sidgwick, James Jebusa Shannon, 1889 Gertrude Elizabeth (née Blood), Lady Colin Campbell, Giovanni Boldini, 1894 Corinna of Tanagra, Frederic Leighton, 1893 The Dream of Fair Women, James Eadie Reid, 1902 Harriet Sarah Loyd-Lindsay, Lady Wantage, P.A. László, 1911 Lillah McCarthy, as ‘Donna Anna’, Charles Shannon, 1907 Train for a ball gown, Charles Conder, c.1903 Woman Smiling, August John, 1908–1909 Dame Christabel Pankhurst, Ethel Wright, exhibited c.1909 Portrait of a Lady; Mrs Lionel Phillips, Giovanni Boldini, 1903

Preface

I paid my fourth visit to the Grafton Galleries this week, where the exhibition of “Fair Women” is drawing all London, literally, not merely as the advertisements have it. I compared with utter irreverence the picture of Lady Colin Campbell by Boldini, full as it is of vivacity, charm and audacious grace, with the calm, pulseless perfection of Sir Peter Lely’s lifeless models, and I yearned to lift up my voice and congratulate myself on the age we live in. Everything that is, better than everything that was, I am quite convinced of that…I shall never cease to regret that you have not seen this exhibition at the Grafton, for it is interesting from every point of view – not alone the pictures of fair and unfair women, but the glass cases down the centre of the room which contain the belongings of dead-and-gone beauties; and then the opportunity it gives you – an opportunity previously(?) afforded by no other exhibition I have attended – of studying the art that is and the art that was!!1 So wrote the journalist Eliza Davis Aria after her fourth visit to the exhibition Fair Women. Fair Women, held at the recently-opened Grafton Galleries on Bond Street in 1894, was the Victorian equivalent of a contemporary blockbuster. As its title suggests, Fair Women featured historical and contemporary portraits of ‘fair’ women. It was hugely popular: the exhibition included over 200 paintings and sculptures as well as more than 600 miniatures and decorative objects. As a predecessor to the curatorial strategies of current exhibitions at national museums, such as the V&A, Tate and the National Portrait Gallery, large oil paintings were shown alongside fans, laces, embroideries, jewellery and other luxurious objects that the contemporary sitters depicted in the portraits both collected and wore. It was proftable. The overall taking during the run of the show was £8000 (roughly equivalent to ¾ million pounds today). The exhibition came about due to the efforts of a nineteen-woman ‘Committee’ and it was such a success that its run was extended through the autumn (forcing the Portrait Society to migrate with its annual exhibition to the New Gallery). What made it so successful? The success of Fair Women has conventionally been linked to its part in a late Victorian celebration of ‘beauty’ in portraits of women. In this reading it is understood as part of an 1890s revival of depictions of beauty that evoked nostalgia for an historical aesthetic.2 The year 1894 saw the emergence in plays and novels of the independent and professional New Woman . Caricatured smoking, reading and riding a bicycle, she threatened conventional ideals of womanhood. Was Fair Women therefore, a resounding antidote to contemporary gender politics? It has been argued that the exhibition was a ‘slap on the wrist’ for the New

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Woman. It served to placate contemporary concerns about ‘advanced’ women.3 Yet in 1894 the exhibition lead Aria to declare the present ‘better than it ever was’, not a slap nor an antidote, but a triumph. A closer examination not only of the exhibition itself and the responses of journalists, but also of the objects in it and the women involved, suggests greater ambiguity. I will dig deeper into Fair Women to ask: what was its historical signifcance in relation to both the specifcity of its staging and the wider social and cultural context of its material? It is clear that Fair Women made the Grafton Galleries a key artistic and cultural venue in 1890s London, but its signifcance was transmitted much more broadly through reviews in the art press as well as in popular cartoons, advertising and a widely referenced illustrated literary response to the show. I will argue that the contents of the 1894 exhibition and its myriad responses and iterations reveal both contestations and opportunities for women to intervene in culture and modernity. I will show how fashionability, exhibition culture and gender politics overlapped to inform and frame the historically-specifc importance of an exhibition dedicated to Fair Women. As Aria implied, accounts of Fair Women indicated that it was perpetually busy, and the majority of the visitors were women. London illustrated newspapers offer visions of exhibition-goers, such as at the Guildhall Gallery in 1892 or the ‘crush’ in the New Gallery in 1893 (Figures 0.1 and 0.2).4 In both images modish women stride through the galleries, stopping to examine works or discourse with fellow-visitors. In the Old Masters private view at the Guildhall Gallery, women appear to occupy the spaces of the gallery en masse. They are fashionably dressed and stop to look at paintings, examine the catalogue or discuss its contents with friends. The multiplicity of images like this from the press at the turn of the century are testament to the importance of women as visitors and viewers of exhibitions. Women visited exhibitions in vast numbers. While early nineteenth-century accounts of women gallery visitors emphasized their superfciality and lack of objective interest in art, Helen Rees-Leahy has recently called for a recalibration of assumptions about female spectatorship in museums. She argues that women could be active rather than merely passive ‘lookers’ in galleries.5 Rees-Leahy’s work is vital to understanding the possibilities for women’s interventions in exhibition culture circa 1900. Fair Women was a space in which women could complicate gendered assumptions about viewing museum objects and more crucially as ‘curators’ question the premise that connoisseurs were necessarily male.6 Fair Women further relates to the prevalence and complex nature of women’s roles in nineteenth-century museums. In Kate Hill’s recent analysis of women and museums in the period, she argues that museums, as unique cultural institutions which straddled the public and private, or the domestic and the scholarly, were borderlands opened to women (and were opened by women).7 Whilst often excluded from employment within established institutions like museums, temporary exhibitions offered women unique leadership roles as organisers and patrons.8 Fundamental to this was the expanding role of women as collectors and recent scholarship on women as collectors of material culture has similarly challenged conventional gendered narratives.9 Fair Women was a kind of ‘borderland’ where women could establish and redefne their expertise in ways that were limited elsewhere. The choice of location in the newly opened Grafton Galleries was hugely signifcant in the reception and success of the exhibition. Nearby the spectacle of Regent Street was a centre for fn-de-siècle consumer culture. The West End was undergoing a period

Figure 0.1 ‘Visitors at the Loan Collection at the Guildhall at Guildhall Exhibition’, Graphic, 1892. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

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Preface

Figure 0.2 ‘Private View Day at the New Gallery: the Crush in the Central Hall’, Graphic, 1893. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

of intense growth and women were the constant occupiers of these new spaces, crossing between theatre, shop and gallery.10 The Grafton Galleries integrated Fair Women into the socio-geography of the West End.11 Chris Breward has demonstrated London’s status as a fashion capital where theatres and galleries commingled.12 Sartorial, artistic and theatrical connections were privileged in Fair Women. Many women were intensely engaged in the turn-of-the-century emphasis on self-fashioning, while some had a more direct impact on exhibition culture through professional careers in the theatre, in journalism, and as artists and photographers. Fashionability in its most expansive sense encompassed the presentation and interpretation of fashion through diverse cultural forms. Manifested in a diversity of ways, it was immediately evident in the interplay of the fne art on view in the exhibition and its environs. Aileen Ribeiro has emphasised that the rise of haute couture and the distribution of more accessible forms of clothing to a wider audience was linked to the interest in portraiture among female patrons, not only in terms of commissioning portraits, but going to view them as a pleasurable pastime.13 In addition, Fair Women intersected with a wider experience of metropolitan modernity that was inherently cosmopolitan.14 The representation of exotic goods in Liberty’s just down the road offered access to ideas of empire and femininity that were also entangled in the objects on display in the exhibition.15 The signifcance of portraiture in the modern period has undergone considerable reassessment. Marcia Pointon asks how portraits function as artworks in social

Preface

xiii

and political networks. The paintings in the show were billed as portraits of ‘fair’ women. Unusually in fne art the study of portraiture shifts attention away from the artist, instead placing particular emphasis on the sitter, as exemplifed by the primacy given to the sitter in the labelling of portraits in the National Portrait Gallery. Portraits are believed to give insight into the character, and indeed biography, of the sitter. Lara Perry’s analysis of the role accorded to women in the National Portrait Gallery collection offers pivotal insight into historical interpretations of female ‘beauty’ in portraiture. Beauty was not limited to physical attributes. Consequently, Fair Women gave its female organisers the opportunity to present famous women as exemplars, celebrated for their ‘wit’ and ‘intellect’.17 While portraits have often been considered as distinct objects by particular artists, here they will be repositioned spatially and temporally within their original locations in the exhibition and within the context of contemporary cultural responses to the show.18 By the end of the nineteenth century the singular insight into character provided by a portrait was complicated by the reproduction and circulation of painted and photographed portraits through mass media. As Julie Codell has argued, these now presented identities as intertextual and permeable across high and low culture, geographies and historical periods.19 Therefore, I think about portraiture in the context of its reception and of the wider circulation of the show and images through mass culture. Tamar Garb suggests that in 1890s France, the parallel emergence of the ‘femme nouvelle’ involved a rethinking of women’s physical appearance and psychological presence, with portraiture functioning as one of the representational arenas for a new conceptualization of the feminine.20 In this context, Colleen Denney has turned to four scandalous Victorian women to establish that, through painted and photographic portraits and their professional careers, they engaged in modernist debate about the representation of women.21 It can be argued that several of the women associated with Fair Women were independent and professional New Women. Moreover, while some of the women involved in Fair Women could be identifed with a more conservative position on women’s rights, they held considerable cultural power. ‘Advanced’ women were represented in a variety of ways, across different kinds of media. Exhibitions facilitated this kind of boundary crossing; aristocratic, Bohemian, middle-class and international women appeared and contributed. Fair Women immediately followed a period of signifcant gains in rights for women. Women had campaigned for several causes during the preceding decade successfully, such as the Married Women’s Property Acts and the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, as well as temperance, labour and suffrage. The years immediately following Fair Women in 1894 saw the formation of the National Union of Suffrage Women’s Societies (1897) and the Women’s Social and Political Union (1903). The 1890s is seen as important historical moment in the development of this suffrage politics, but it has largely been read through key fgures involved in political organisations and/or professions such as medicine. The last years of the Edwardian period coincided with a widespread and militant suffrage campaign punctuated by mass marches and violent protest. The absence of attention given to the diverse group involved in Fair Women may have in part been to do with the fact that their political involvement is both elusive and contradictory.22 However, Fair Women remains vital to understanding the contested histories of gender, sexual independence and representation. The book does not attempt a comprehensive survey of the exhibition of Fair Women. Instead it takes an in-depth case study approach to consider objects, collection displays 16

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and modern portraits. While the book is broadly chronological it attempts to sketch out patterns that emerge across the period 1894-1910 in relation to the theme of ‘fair women’. The focus of the book is an exhibition that originally took place in London; however the objects displayed and the individuals involved traverse national boundaries. The study of Fair Women illuminates the emergence of the block-buster. Its success was in part due its timely, albeit controversial, intersection with mass culture and contemporary gender politics. The book is divided into three parts. Part I begins with an exploration of the exhibition’s organisation and reception, considering in detail the display; the role of women as organisers, collectors and contemporary sitters; and the extensive reviews published in the press. Chapter 1 initially asks how were women involved in ‘curating’ the loan exhibition at a new commercial gallery space? Individual Committee members and their contributions will be considered. I will consider the theme and format of the exhibition in the wider contexts of exhibition history and metropolitan culture. The exhibition was a tremendously popular with the public. However, the show was also contentious, garnering not only praise, but ridicule in the press. Cartoons offered mocking illustrations of contemporary ‘fair womanhood’. The chapter concludes with an investigation into the multitude of responses to the exhibition’s theme, in both the popular and the specialist press. I will demonstrate that Fair Women contributed to larger debates about the role of women and changes to exhibition culture. Chapter 2 explores the diversity of objects on display at Fair Women. Items associated with fashionable adornment had signifcant meanings in Victorian culture. They evidenced transnational circulation and the exchange of material culture. Objects such as clothing and miniature portraits were also prized for the clues they gave about the lives of celebrated women. The addition of decorative art emphasised the role of women as historical and contemporary collectors of objects. Female lenders to Fair Women were particularly evident. Committee members lent from their own newly acquired and/or familial collections as did middle-class professionals. This chapter investigates the objects and collecting histories of these women. I will argue Fair Women gives insight into the degree of female engagement in collecting at the end of the century. The exhibition reveals women’s involvement in new approaches to collecting as much imbued with knowledge and provenance as concerns about aesthetic criteria. Women were playing active roles both as ‘philanthropic citizens’, lending work from their own collections, and in buying and selling works. Part II, Modern Fair Women, turns to Aria’s observations on the ‘audacious’ modern sitters. Three of the women featured were professional actors: Lillie Langtry, Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry. Lillie Langtry was represented in a portrait by G.F. Watts. Sarah Bernhardt appeared in depictions by the painter Walter Spindler and the sculptor Prosper d’Epinay. Ellen Terry was painted by J.S. Sargent in character as Lady Macbeth. These women were known as much for their profession as for their beauty, and their presence in popular culture circa 1894 was pervasive. Two other modern women sitters had direct connections to the art world. Eveleen Myers was ‘on the wall’ as the subject of an 1874 portrait by the John Everett Millais, but by the 1890s she had established herself as a portrait photographer. Her portraits of celebrities had appeared in the press and in galleries so her role as creator, rather than sitter, was well known to exhibition goers. Gertrude Campbell was the art writer depicted by Boldini. This last portrait at the vanguard of contemporary portraiture had been completed specifcally for the Fair Women exhibition. These fve female sitters offer a provocative

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counterpoint to the idea that circumscribed defnitions of Fair Women were espoused by the curators. In public life and in the press each of these women strategically manipulated her own image. Part III, Fair Women Redux, explores the afterlives of Fair Women. Chapter 5 considers the theme of ‘fair women’ as it re-emerged in exhibitions and texts over the ensuing decade. These included the publication of an illustrated ‘memorial’ catalogue and subsequent books and articles around the theme of Fair Women. These are considered in relation to the foregrounding of women’s biography and re-definitions of ‘fair’ womanhood in relation to modernity, fashionability and gender politics. Transatlantic recreations of the exhibition and its themes follow similar patterns overlapping with cultural philanthropy and emergent women’s magazines. Committees of women pursued temporary exhibition projects both in America and Britain. In London the Woman’s Work exhibition exemplifes the continued resonance of combining portraits of historical and modern ‘fair’ women with decorative objects. Women’s expertise as collectors and lenders was also made evident in the press. Alongside these developments in exhibitions the art press shifted dramatically to prioritize collecting and connoisseurship in publications such as the Connoisseur and the Burlington Magazine. While much attention has been given to the emergent male collectors and connoisseurs, women formed part of this originary coterie, many of whom had already contributed to Fair Women and exhibition culture more widely. The press, like temporary exhibitions, gave space for female voices otherwise excluded from formal institutions. The fnal chapter turns to the end of the Edwardian period when Fair Women was reincarnated annually between 1908 and 1910 by the International Society of Sculptors, Painters & Gravers. The International Fair Women exhibitions, staged at the New Gallery and the Grafton Galleries, mimicked the original in their inclusion of historical and contemporary art. How did Fair Women at the end of the Edwardian period differ from the Fair Women of 1894? Just as the original Fair Woman exhibition had coincided with the appearance in the press of the independent New Woman, the International Society shows were contemporary with militant suffrage activity. In celebrating women as objects of beauty at times of political upheaval, did they simply reify existing stereotypes or did they unsettle them? In art history the Edwardian exhibitions have marked the demise of the long Victorian Era; the exhibition that followed Fair Women at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 was Manet and the Post-Impressionists (since identifed as the cultural quake that started British Modernism). The chapter will consider the International Society’s decision to stage Fair Women and then explore the exhibitions chronologically through a selection of objects from each of the three displays. Thus, in tracking Fair Women across two decades the book will unravel a complicated history of female representation and exhibition culture that intersected with modernity in surprising ways.

Notes 1 Mrs E. Aria, ‘The Class of Fashion’, Hearth and Home, no. 163 (28 June 1894): 255. 2 Kenneth McConkey, Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2002), 90. 3 Aileen Ribeiro, ‘Fashion and Whistler’, in Whistler, Women, and Fashion, ed. Margaret MacDonald et al. (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2003), 50; Margaret Maynard,

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5

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18

19

Preface ‘“A Dream of Fair Women”: Revival Dress and the Formation of Late Victorian Images of Femininity’, Art History 12, no. 3 (1 September 1989): 322–41; Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain (Chicago, Ill ; London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 146. Ribeiro has recently wondered if analyses of the exhibition as a denial of contemporary art and of the demands of the ‘New Woman’ may have been exaggerated. Aileen Ribeiro, Facing Beauty: Painted Women & Cosmetic Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 284. J. Comyns Carr and Charles Edward Hallé had split from the Grosvenor Gallery in 1888 to form the new Gallery. Colleen Denney, At the Temple of Art: The Grosvenor Gallery, 1877-1890 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999); Christopher Newall, The Grosvenor Gallery Exhibitions: Change and Continuity in the Victorian Art World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Helen Rees-Leahy, Museum Bodies: The Politics and Practices of Visiting and Viewing (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 153-170. While theorists have identifed the implied heterosexual masculine gaze in visual media, wherein woman is spectacle, Erika Rappaport suggests that during this period theatre managers, writers and retailers also envisioned a female spectator. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 192. Meaghan Clarke and Francesco Ventrella eds, ‘Women’s Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseurship’, Visual Resources 33, no. 1–2 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1080/019737 62.2017.1308623. Kate Hill, Women and Museums 1850-1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 2. Rebecca Rogers and Myriam Boussahba-Bravard, ‘Introduction: Positioning Women in the World Fairs, 1876-1937’, in Women in International and Universal Exhibitions, 18761937 (London: Routledge, 2017), 18. Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800-1940 (Berkeley, Calif; London: University of California Press, 2008); Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, Women and Things, 1750-1950 : Gendered Material Strategies (Farnham, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); Alla Myzelev and John Potvin, Material Cultures, 1740-1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting (Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2009). Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 2000), 184. Pamela M. Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, eds., The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London 1850-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Christopher Breward, Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 67-96. Ribeiro, ‘Fashion and Whistler’, 32. Brenda Assael, The London Restaurant, 1840-1914 (Oxford: University Press, 2018). On the latter half of the period see Andrew Stephenson, ‘Edwardian Cosmoplitanism ca. 19011912’, in The Edwardian Sense : Art, Design, and Performance in Britain, 1901-1910, ed. Morna O’Neill and Michael Hatt (New Haven, Conn; London: Yale University Press, 2010), 249–82. Sarah Cheang, ‘Selling China: Class, Gender and Orientalism at the Department Store’, in Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling, ed. Louisa Iarocci (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 117–36. See also Mica Nava, Visceral Cosmopolitanism: Gender, Culture and the Normalisation of Difference (Oxford ; New York: Berg, 2007), 6. Pointon proposes that portraiture as an ‘instrumental art form, a kind of agency’. Marcia R. Pointon, Portrayal and the Search for Identity (London: Reaktion, 2013), 11–12, 14. Lara Perry, History’s Beauties: Women in the National Portrait Gallery, 1856-1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 114. Anna Gruetzner Robins argues that the social and individual identity of sitters is central the original meaning of portraits and this is best retrieved within the context of the exhibition. Anna Gruetzner Robins, A Fragile Modernism: Whistler and His Impressionist Followers (New Haven, Conn; London: Yale University Press, 2007), 84. Julie F. Codell, ‘Victorian Portraits: Re-Tailoring Identities’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 34, no. 5 (1 December 2012): 494, https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2012.738089.

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20 Tamar Garb, The Body in Time: Figures of Femininity in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Seattle, Wash; London: University of Washington Press, 2008), 60. 21 Colleen Denney, Women, Portraiture and the Crisis of Identity in Victorian England: My Lady Scandalous Reconsidered (Place of publication not identifed: Routledge, 2017), 3. 22 Talia Schaffer, The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 12.

Acknowledgements

The idea for this book began where the last ended delving into women at the fn de siècle and exhibition culture. Several conferences and guest lectures (beginning with a North American Victorian Studies Association [NAVSA] panel at Yale some years ago and more recently events at the Tate, Birkbeck, the Ashmolean and National Gallery) have provided important opportunities to explore aspects of this research. I am extremely grateful to organisers, other speakers and audiences, including members of the British Women Artists Network and the Museums and Galleries History Group, for sharing ideas as the project took shape. Numerous scholars have helped me to think more carefully about the topic. I am grateful to Lara Perry, Sarah Cheang, Diana Maltz, Chris Breward, Ysanne Holt, Andrew Stephenson, Julie Codell, Anna Gruetzner Robins, Colin Cruise, Morna O’Neill, Tim Barringer, Janice Helland, Deborah Cherry, Sarah Victoria Turner, Grace Brockington, Amelia Yeates, Patricia de Montfort, Robyne Calvert, Nancy Rose Marshall, Alison Yarrington, Helen ReesLeahy, Kate Hill, Anne Helmreich, Pamela Fletcher, Barbara Pezzini, Carol Jacobi, Richard Ormond, Gail Marshall, Richa Dwor, Laurel Brake, Ana Parejo Vadillo, Ruth Livesey, Gowan Dawson, Laurel Brake, Hilary Fraser, Susanna Avery-Quash and the generosity of anonymous readers. Special thanks to Georgia Atienza, Constantia Nicolaides, Peter Funnell, Lizzie Heath, Jan Marsh, Carol Blackett-Ord, Bryony Millan, Ruth Brimacombe, Terence Pepper and Alison Smith all of whom have been or are at the National Portrait Gallery. Thanks also to Chloe Woodrow (Ickworth), Tessa Kilgarriff (Watts Gallery), Rachel Roberts (Cheltenham Ladies’ College), Katherine Field (Philip de László Foundation), Patrick Layne (Bangor Library), Philip Roe (Hugh Lane Gallery), Laura Dennis (Newnham), Chloe Dobson (Sussex Library), as well as curators and archivists at the National Art Library, Blythe House, Tate Archive, Special Collections and Rare Books British Library, National Gallery Archive, Girton and Trinity College, Cambridge. I am grateful to the many collections that have generously enabled reproductions. This book has been supported by a Publications Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and I am immensely grateful for its support. My sincere gratitude to Stacey Pierson and Isabella Vitti, Katie Armstrong and the rest of the team at Routledge. Many students (UG and MA) have wonderfully shared their enthusiasm and ideas for ‘representing women’ seminars and dissertations. I am, as ever, grateful for the support (even when other commitments intervened) and expertise of colleagues and PhDs (past and present) at the University Sussex: Geoff Quilley, Francesco Ventrella, Carolyn Sargentson, Maurice Howard, David Mellor, Ben Burbridge, Jo Pawlik,

Acknowledgements

xix

Wendy Hichmough, Anna McSweeney, Linda Sandino, Emma Doubt, Eksuda Singhalampong, Eiman Elgibreen, Penny Streeter, Sarah French, Una Richmond, Susie Willis, Alexandra Loske, Darren Clarke, Claudia Field, Claire Wintle, Alistair Grant and Carolyn Dixon. Thanks especially to Liz James, Michelle O’Malley, Flora Dennis, Tracy Anderson, Hannah Jordan and Anne Stutchbury. Last but not least, thanks to my children, for their laughter and patience, and my family in the UK and Canada for their boundless support and encouragement, especially to my mother to whom I dedicate this book.

Part I

The Exhibition

1

Exhibiting Fair Women

The Fair Women exhibition in the Grafton Galleries is emblematic of London’s transformation into a modern cosmopolitan city that offers a stage for the debates about the role of modern women and their myriad enjoyments of urban pleasure. The popular press widely viewed Fair Women as a triumph, but it also attracted ridicule. Cartoons offered mocking illustrations of contemporary ‘fair womenhood’ and critics wrote disparagingly about the committee’s curatorial choices, particularly in relation to the decorative arts. What was the exhibition about? To understand this I will frstly consider the venue, the Grafton Galleries, and the involvement of the committee of women before moving on to explore the wider contexts of exhibition history and metropolitan culture. The multiple responses to the exhibition indicate that it was enmeshed in contemporary debates about the representation of women and gender politics.

Fair Women in the Grafton Galleries Fair Women opened on 12 May 1894 for the summer season, following on from the annual spring run of the Royal Academy exhibition. The Grafton Galleries itself had opened the preceding year as a venue for temporary exhibitions and other forms of entertainment. Started as a company with a share capital of £50,000, it was operated by Thomas Denman Croft as managing director; the art dealer Francis Gerard Prange as art director; and a secretary, Henry Bishop, who had spent two years at the nearby Grosvenor Gallery; as well as a board of honorary directors drawn from law and politics.1 The Grafton Galleries’s Memorandum of Association placed considerable emphasis on its function as a multi-purpose venue: ‘to carry on the business of proprietors for the exhibition of pictures, sculpture, and works of art generally, and of refreshment rooms and rooms for public and private concerts, receptions, or parties of any kind where music, dancing, or other entertainments may be provided’.2 Thus, from the outset the Grafton Galleries was a site for the partaking of artistic, as well as other activities associated with pleasure and leisure in the capital: music, food and dancing. An article heralding the new gallery in the Magazine of Art announced particularly that the space was grand containing an imposing suite of rooms extending from the entrance on Grafton Street to Bruton Street (Figure 1.1).3 The building was the work of the established London architects J.T. Wimperis and Arber, and a special feature was made of the lighting, with windows not in the centre of the

Figure 1.1 Plan of the Grafton Galleries, Magazine of Art, 1892, © The British Library Board

Figure 1.2 Octagon Gallery, Grafton Galleries, 1892, © The British Library Board

Figure 1.3 Large Gallery, Grafton Galleries, 1892, © The British Library Board

6

The Exhibition

ceilings but contiguous to the centre, as in the break-away Salon at the Champs de Mars in Paris. After entering through a hall, visitors entered the Octagon Gallery, followed by a Large Gallery, a Middle Gallery and then crossed a lobby to reach a Long Gallery or End Gallery (Figures 1.2 and 1.3). The high standards which were brought to bear on the exhibition spaces were equalled in the refreshment rooms catered by Venant Benoist, purveyor by Special Appointment to HRH the Prince of Wales, the House of Commons, and the Aristocracy and Nobility of the United Kingdom.4 However, the palatial spaces had to be flled and this required a committee.

The Committee The Fair Women catalogue frontispiece followed a traditional format listing the Grafton Galleries’s honorary directors as well as the three staff members. But, importantly it also listed a large committee responsible for the exhibition, one made up entirely of women. The nineteen-strong ‘Committee’ was a formidable group, a mixture of aristocratic and wealthy middle-class genealogies, and some had direct links to the gallery directors and staff. The Marchioness of Granby, Lady Hothfeld and Countess of Wharncliffe were wives of directors of the gallery.5 Eleanor Croft was the wife of the Grafton Galleries’s managing director.6 The Committee formed as a result of these connections and wider social networks. The ffteen others listed were the Duchess of Devonshire, the Duchess of Portland, the Duchess of Sutherland, the Marchioness of Salisbury, the Marchioness of Bristol, Countess of Radnor, Countess of Crawford, Countess of Dudley, Countess of Ilchester, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Lady Iveagh, Lady Wantage, Lady Middleton, Lady Cecil Scott-Montagu and Mrs. Astor.7 The Committee contributed to the exhibition in various ways that were immediately visible: signifcantly as lenders, but also as sitters and even as an artist. Although all members were aware of the social capital gained in acquiring and displaying portraits, some were more familiar with historic family collections of art, while others were in the midst of amassing their own great collections. Several had themselves gained renown as sitters during the preceding decades. The Duchess of Devonshire was one of the dominant members of London society and had just married the Duke of Devonshire in 1892, after the death of her frst husband, the Duke of Manchester, thereby earning herself the label the ‘double-duchess’. Three years later she achieved further acclaim for the costume ball she threw to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee, where she dressed as Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra.8 The Marchioness of Granby, Violet Manners was an artist and a member of the Souls, an avant-garde circle that combined culture, intellect and politics.9 Her self-portrait of 1891, a three-quarter profle with aesthetic long hair and direct gaze, emphasised these characteristics (Figure 1.4). A professional portrait artist, Manners’s works had been exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, New Gallery and Royal Academy.10 At Fair Women, Manners’s portrait of Sibyl Fane, Countess Westmoreland, a fellow-member of the Souls, was hung in the End Gallery (Figure 1.5), as well as Miss Norah Bourke, who would marry Manners’s brother, Harry Lindsay, the following year and later gain acclaim as a garden designer (Figure 1.5). Susan Montagu-Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, Countess of Wharncliffe and her husband were important patrons of the arts and hosted Bohemian society dinners. She was later described by the celebrated actress Lillie Langtry as: ‘Brilliantly clever and artistic, it would have been diffcult to fnd a more perfect example of the grande dame than was the tall, handsome Lady Wharncliffe. … But oh! after the frst dinner

Exhibiting Fair Women

7

Figure 1.4 Self-portrait, Violet Manners, Duchess of Rutland, 1891, © National Portrait Gallery, London

at Wharncliffe House, she smoked cigarette after cigarette, and my country soul was shocked!’11 Her husband lent a large collection to Fair Women, which included family portraits of the celebrated writer and traveller Mary Wortley Montagu, who, like Lady Wharncliffe, had an unconventional persona. Adelaide Maria Guinness, Lady Iveagh, another Committee member, was a great socialite and in the course of only four years,

8

The Exhibition

Figure 1.5 Countess of Westmoreland, Violet Manners, c.1892, Portfolio, 1894

between 1887 and 1891, she and her husband, the brewer and philanthropist Edward Cecil Guinness, frst Earl of Iveagh, had acquired a large picture collection, buying principally from the dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons, spending over £530,000 on 200 pictures. The core of their collection echoed Fair Women’s focus on eighteenth-century portraits by Reynolds, Romney and Gainsborough.12 Bankers were a group that merged more easily with the aristocracy during the nineteenth century, as exemplifed by Committee members Harriet Sarah Wantage and Angela Burdett-Coutts (Figure 1.6). Both had inherited their wealth through

Figure 1.6 Angela Burdett-Coutts, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Francis Henry Hart, 1882, © National Portrait Gallery, London

10 The Exhibition banking and had risen to prominence as independent philanthropists and benefactors.13 Another Committee member, Helen Matilda Chaplin Radnor, had a personal interest in portraiture, family collections and genealogies, having compiled four years earlier a Catalogue of Pictures at Longford Castle and Categorical List of Family Portraits.14 Her detailed catalogue itemised the Radnor collection of European pictures and family portraits room by room. She included ‘private’ fnancial information: in the Muniment room she had uncovered private account books and was therefore able to trace the sale and acquisition of the majority of works that entered the family collection between 1720 and 1823. This meticulous cataloguing of the collection put her in dialogue with developments in public institutions. The systematic documentation of collections was vital to the professionalisation of curatorship. Radnor was in close contact with one of these new professionals George Scharf, director of the National Portrait Gallery, who gave a detailed account of the collection in his sketchbook and diaries.15 In addition, Radnor’s husband was treasurer of the Royal Household under Salisbury, and there were other women on the Committee who held considerable sway in political circles. Interestingly, they came from both Tory and Liberal camps: however, this meant that as a group, these women had signifcant crossparty infuence. Georgina (Alderson) Gascoyne-Cecil’s husband was the Conservative leader of the Opposition, Lord Salisbury, who would oust William Ewart Gladstone’s Liberals to become prime minister again the following year. In contrast, Alice Harriet Hothfeld’s husband had served as a Lord-in-Waiting (government whip in the House of Lords) in the Liberal administration of Gladstone. Mary Dahlgren Paul Astor was the wife of the New York property millionaire who had recently relocated to England and purchased the Pall Mall Gazette. Nonetheless she had found her place in society easily and reportedly had a fondness for jewels worn by famous women.16 The diversity of the Committee was key to the success of the exhibition; there women could infuence an array of social and political coteries. K.D. Reynolds has demonstrated that aristocratic women at mid-century were not passive social butterfies. Rather they played active roles in estate management, school and church patronage, local communities, national politics and Queen Victoria’s court.17 To these arenas should be added cultural patronage: women also played active roles in forming the collections that would be prized at the end of the century. By its last decade, more women, many of them new to these elite circles, recognised the value of this kind of patronage. It is clear that the Committee of Fair Women was a nexus for wider social and political networks. One member of the Committee was particularly adept at negotiating these networks in order to secure loans of pictures. This was not, it appeared, an entirely confdential operation. The Sporting Times revealed: ‘we believe there is no violation of secrecy in stating that the successful results attained in the way of obtaining loans of the truly magnifcent works of art exhibited are mainly due to the exertions of the Marchioness of Granby’.18 Elsewhere, in the Aberdeen Weekly Journal, the Committee’s patrician members were highlighted as gatekeepers of private collections: ‘In organising a picture exhibition not even the most unthinking of Radicals could deny the advantage of having a committee of duchesses. For the duchesses have access to and command over the picture galleries of their husbands’.19 Radnor had demonstrated her expertise as keeper and curator of the family pictures. Her genealogical inventory of ‘Family Portraits’ was reinforced with contemporary portraits commissioned from James Jebusa Shannon between 1889 and 1897 (her eldest son and his wife were drawn in 1890 by G.F. Watts). Thus, she was acutely aware of the way in which family portraiture evinced

Exhibiting Fair Women

11

authority and fashionability, seeking to expand her ancestral collection with modern likenesses of the next generation. Crucially, in Fair Women this cultural patronage, often associated with domestic and private spaces, was located in a public space, thus the Committee was able to reposition this patronage into a public forum. The Committee bridged European aristocratic circles. A number had already been involved as ‘patrons’ in earlier temporary exhibition ventures, such as a German exhibition at Earl’s Court.20 Thus they would have been aware of the effort required in securing loans for large-scale exhibitions. The Committee membership also linked to a wider transatlantic network of women’s involvement in artistic and cultural projects. A well-known example was the Woman’s Building at the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893. Organised by a group of ‘Lady Managers’, led by Bertha Palmer, it offered a recent model for women’s involvement in exhibition organising, and the British section involved both the Marchioness of Salisbury and Baroness Burdett-Coutts.21

The Exhibition The Fair Women exhibition included over 200 paintings and sculptures as well as over 600 miniatures and decorative objects. The offcial catalogue for Fair Women followed the practise of other loan exhibitions catalogues of the period. It offered a numbered identifcation of the artist, title and donor and no illustrations.22 However, it did include short biographies of important historical sitters. The catalogue reveals that the frst room, the Octagon Room, contained a spectacular and varied group of Classical and Renaissance works including a Graeco-Roman portrait, Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a Woman Inspired by Lucretia and Holbein’s Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scotland and Christina of Denmark (Plate 2); Piero della Francesca’s Portrait of a Lady; Botticelli’s La Bella Simonetta; Lucas de Heere’s Lady Jane Grey; Pordenone’s Isabella d’Este; Titian’s Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus; Rembrandt’s Portrait of the Painter’s Wife; and Vermeer’s Girl Playing the Guitar. These paintings included representations of queens but also less regal fgures. In the second room, the Music Room or Large Gallery, viewers saw early works by Lely, Rembrandt, Rubens and Van Dyck. The room continued the theme of notable, but not necessarily aristocratic women, set by the Old Masters at the start of the show. The Lely pictures included the actress Nell Gwyn and two of the popular set of ‘Windsor Beauties’ from Hampton Court: Elizabeth Hamilton, Countess of Gramont and Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland (mistress of Charles II).23 The majority were eighteenth-century works, many of which visitors would have seen before either in Old Master exhibitions or as engravings. These included examples by Romney, Reynolds, Gainsborough and Lawrence. Reynolds’s Elizabeth Foster, Duchess of Devonshire appeared alongside Gainsborough’s portrait of the singer Mrs. Sheridan. Other examples were Reynolds’s famous portrait of the actress and writer Mary Robinson as Perdita and the actress Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse. The Centre room or Middle gallery began with three royal portraits: Heinrich von Angeli’s portrait of Queen Victoria, George Hayter’s Queen Victoria taking the Oath of the Coronation, June 28th 1838; W.B. Richmond’s HRH the Princess of Wales. These were followed by twenty more eighteenth-century portraits of notable sitters, including Elizabeth Linley (later Sheridan) by Reynolds, Madame du Barry by Greuze and Princess Elizabeth by Vigée-LeBrun. As the visitor followed the catalogue numerically around the rectangular room, she or he eventually reached Thomas Lawrence’s Miss Georgina Lennox, Lady Apsley (c.1792) followed by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s

12

The Exhibition

aesthetic piece Veronica Veronese (1872) (Figure 1.7; Plate 3). The two pictures, painted nearly eight decades apart, instigated a rather dramatic leap into the late nineteenth century. Lady Apsley was a portrait, but Veronica Veronese was an allegorical work representing the artist in the action of creation (although the model was Alexa Wilding). This work was followed by other representations of women as allegorical or historical fgures, such as Circe by Edward Burne-Jones and Cleopatra by Laurens Alma Tadema (Plate 4). Aesthetic or neo-classical subjects were interspersed with portraits of Victorian women.24 This perambulation of the centre room eventually ended with portraits completed in the preceding decade. The End Gallery contained a further eighty-one smaller works in paint, pastel, chalk, pencil and engravings by historical and contemporary artists. These included Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby by Van Dyck as well as eighteenth-century examples such as drawings of Robinson and the Duchess of Devonshire by Hoppner, Lady Hamilton by Romney and Elizabeth Fortescue, Marchioness of Lothian by Angelica Kauffmann. There were also several French sitters and artists such as the Empress Josephine and Caroline Bonaparte by Jacques-Louis David and Marie Antoinette by Anna Dorothea Therbusch. Recent works displayed in the room included a Sargent painting of a wax bust in the Museum at Lille said to be by Raphael, a portrait of Princess Alix of Hesse

Figure 1.7 Georgina (Lennox), Countess Bathurst by Thomas Lawrence, c.1792, Portfolio 1894

Exhibiting Fair Women

13

by F.A. Kaulbach, the aforementioned two portraits by Manners, and portrait of Sarah Bernhardt by Walter Spindler. Decorative objects were another major feature of the exhibition. The second half of the catalogue, titled ‘Miniatures etc.’ itemised a wide range of over 600 objects which were primarily displayed in cases throughout the exhibition. By virtue of their placement and their subject matter, the decorative and applied arts provided context for the portraits. The vitrines were placed in the centre of the rooms, so that visitors could consider the miniatures and decorative objects adjacent to the paintings on the surrounding walls, moving between the two. Two red leather sedan chairs ornately decorated with gilt metal were lent by Queen Victoria (Plate 5) and other larger objects included a table and harp. Alongside watches, chatelaines, harps, mirrors and fans, was the bodice worn by Lady Susan Fox-Strangways (later O’Brian) when bridesmaid to Queen Charlotte. A vast collection of miniatures was included. Many of these were similarly portraits of great historical women such as Catherine II of Russia and the French artist Vigée-LeBrun. In September 1894, the intended run of the exhibition ended, but it was decided that as a result of its overwhelming popularity it would be extended rather than closed. This posed further problems. Not only did it mean that the Portrait Society exhibition scheduled for the autumn was pushed to other premises, but also that many pictures and objects were requested back, because the loan period promised to lenders had ended. Consequently, the Committee had to undertake some careful manoeuvring to secure new loans and fll the gaps on the walls. The Octagon Room was substantially rehung, with Salino’s Venus, two portraits by Rembrandt including Saskia, Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Lady, Cornelius Jansen’s The Little Princess and Van Dyck’s Henrietta Maria and Princess Marguerite of Lorraine. In the Large Room, Romney’s The Country Girl, Reynolds’s Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse from Grosvenor House, Gainsborough’s Lady Eardley and Child, Santerre’s Mlle Desmarets and Greuze’s A Baccante were among the new works. Several of the nineteenth-century works in the Centre Room were replaced, resulting in the appearance of more Pre-Raphaelite works and portraits of great Victorian women such as the watercolourist and philanthropist Louisa Anne Beresford (née Stuart), Marchioness of Waterford and the niece of Julia Margaret Cameron Mrs. Leslie Stephen (Mrs. Herbert Duckworth) by G.F. Watts.25 The changes were well received and Fair Women’s status as the must-see show in metropolitan London stretched over more than six months to December.

‘Novelty’ and Loan Exhibitions Fair Women’s tremendous success was linked at the time to its inventiveness as an exhibition. While Fair Women was in effect a show of loans, the use of a theme, and its surroundings, were resolutely new and novel. It was through this ephemeral cultural realm that women exhibition organisers were effecting authority as arbiters of taste. The responses to the show in the mainstream press were largely positive and the public visited in droves. In fact, when the exhibition of Fair Women was rehung in September the Saturday Review writer quipped, ‘there was never a summer exhibition that was less in need of the reinforcement of novelty, or change of bill’.26 There had of course been literary precursors to Fair Women. The title itself was an allusion to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ originally written in 1833, but rewritten in 1842, and featured in many subsequent editions of

14

The Exhibition

Tennyson’s work, including the lavishly illustrated Pre-Raphaelite edition published by Edward Moxon in 1857.27 Tennyson had been inspired by Chaucer’s ‘Legends of Good Women’ of 1384. The heroines of Chaucer’s work were ten illustrious women who encountered misfortune, such as Cleopatra, Dido and Lucretia. Tennyson’s rereading of Chaucer was a dream-narrative describing his own imagined encounters with various great women who led or infuenced men. Typical was the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra who demanded, “‘Come here,/ That I may look on thee.” … She, fashing forth a haughty smile, began:/ “I govern’d men by change’”.28 But Tennyson added further powerful and strong early modern women including Margaret Roper (daughter of Thomas More), Joan of Arc and Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, although the narrator woke before he was able to meet them. ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ was one of Tennyson’s early poems which explored the pressing Victorian concern with the social roles and contributions of women.29 The reuse of the poem in 1894 can be related to resurgent concerns around gender politics and Tennyson’s recent death. (The longevity of his tenure as Poet Laureate (1850–1892) had meant that his poetry was constantly republished.) While the exhibition’s title demonstrates that his work continued to have a powerful resonance in the arts of the late nineteenth century, the exhibition did not itself adhere to the text of the poem, or indeed its visual interpretation by the Pre-Raphaelites. Instead, it rather dramatically staged new possibilities for interpreting ‘fair women’ both visually and textually.30 The Fair Women catalogue sought to extend the defnition of ‘fair’ women beyond physical characteristics. It included ‘pictures of women possibly more celebrated for their historical interest, their infuence, or their wit than for their beauty’.31 These wider defnitions of the ‘beauty’ of the sitters in the exhibition was alluded to by several reviewers. Particular attention was paid to the historical signifcance and infuence of the women featured in the exhibition. The Aberdeen Weekly Journal referred to the notion of the sitters of Fair Women as intellectual exemplars, commenting that many of the women were more ‘noted for their loftiness of intellect and their accomplishments than for their beauty of form’.32 In part this focus was due to another feature of the catalogue: short biographies of the sitters, which accompanied the artist, title and lender of the work. This frmly located the focus on the sitter rather than the portrait artist. Lara Perry has cogently argued that the exhibition was a bold move on the part of the Committee to reassert the association of women with beauty and reclaim from artists the quality of beauty as exemplary. By exhibiting portraits of ‘fair’ women the Committee reinserted them in discourses of women’s history and women’s power, a resistance to the appropriation of female beauty for the artist’s craft.33 There were female monarchs, artists, writers and actresses represented in the exhibition, several of whom such as Eliza Siddons, Wortley Montagu and Christina of Denmark, could not easily be associated with a nostalgia for historical standards of women’s status and behaviour.34 Indeed the women’s rights campaigner and Ladies Columnist for the Illustrated London News, Florence Fenwick-Miller, noted that the exhibition indicated the interest in all things that ‘appertain to women’. She opined that Fair Women indicated the diversity of women through history, and therefore she argued they should not be considered as a single category: ‘one wonders afresh at the silliness of the people who talk of “Woman” as an entity instead of recognising the infnite varieties in the one as in the other sex’.35 There was an exhibitionary model for Fair Women: the historic ‘loan’ exhibition. It was increasingly common in the latter half of the nineteenth century to hold

Exhibiting Fair Women

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loan exhibitions of historical works during the winter season at Burlington House to vary the exhibition calendar. The newer independent galleries, such as the Grosvenor Gallery and New Gallery, mimicked the winter loan exhibition model as did the Guildhall Corporation.36 Henry Jamyn Brooks’s picture, Private View of the Old Masters Exhibition, Royal Academy, 1888 of 1889 signals the importance of the event in the social season, with its portraits of key fgures in the London art world, notably Royal Academicians, wealthy industrialists and members of the aristocracy (Plate 6). Amongst the guests was Fair Women Committee member Harriet Wantage, who appears in the centre immediately to the right of Frederic Leighton, president of the Royal Academy, signalling her pivotal role in art circles and experience of the enterprise (as a lender). These ‘historical’ shows attracted huge numbers: the Guildhall purported to attract 300,000 visitors, 641 per hour on Sundays, in 1894, although notably its loan shows were free.37 In this context, Francis Haskell has identifed the importance of early Old Master exhibitions to the development of the ‘blockbuster’ phenomenon, now intrinsic to the museum economy, citing the 1898 Rembrandt exhibition in Amsterdam at the city museum as the frst of its kind.38 Fair Women can be seen as an earlier example of this development in museums. However, unlike the Rembrandt show, it broke from the pattern of Old Master exhibitions that focused on individual artists or schools. This inventiveness was key to its success (and likewise is a model retained in museums today). It also departed from the example of the Old Master Exhibition by taking place in the spring/summer, not in the winter, to coincide with the high season for exhibitions. This meant that it had the guarantee of tapping into a steady stream of visitors to other galleries in the West End, including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (7 May–6 August). The choice of site for the exhibition was key. Although it was in close proximity to the Royal Academy, Fair Women’s originality was possible because the Grafton Galleries operated as a kind of intermediate space. Unlike the Royal Academy and the Guildhall (or indeed Amsterdam museum), the Grafton Galleries was not an institution with its own collection. It was effectively a ‘Kunsthalle’ or temporary exhibition space, one more prevalent in London than has been realised. This made a difference because it was removed from established institutional structures. Anne Helmreich locates this model within the rising signifcance of exhibition culture and the ‘socio-geography of the art market’ in late Victorian London.39 While the Grafton Galleries’s development was distinct from commercial dealer-run galleries operating in this period, it can be positioned in the context of an expanding dealer and commercial gallery trade offering multiple contiguous sites for viewing both historical and contemporary art.40 One aspect of the dramatic growth in commercial galleries was their international focus, both in the artworks they displayed and their buyer networks. Pamela Fletcher argues that these new commercial spaces deployed a language of ‘fashionable cosmopolitanism’.41 Galleries attempted to capitalise on associations with fashionability and the modern by marking out an identity through links with France or French art. The appeal to ‘fashionable cosmopolitanism’ can be similarly applied to the Grafton Galleries. Fair Women was a loan exhibition and therefore theoretically removed from the market, but the gallery had already exhibited French Impressionists.42 Moreover, it echoed French salons in its architecture and its decision to forgo a private view in favour of an opening day for Fair Women.43 Stylish modern interiors and an elegant restaurant operated by a French chef supplanted the familiar ‘bribery’ with sherry at a press view.44 Therefore, the site itself signalled cultural awareness and sophistication.

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The Exhibition

The novel decision to display decorative objects such as jewellery, lace and perfume bottles alongside two-dimensional works of art was a departure from exhibitions showing historic collections of Old Masters. An early antecedent for this was at South Kensington, which had a policy of prioritising the exhibition of loans as a way of supplementing its collection and securing donations.45 There was also recent precedent for decorative art shows in London. In fact, the Grafton exhibition that immediately preceded Fair Women was a display of French decorative art.46 The exhibition also echoed the innovative style of the exhibitions of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, which was formed in order to hold exhibitions in ‘Design and Handicraft’. These were held from 1888 to1890 in the New Gallery, with a fourth held in 1893. Extant photographs of these exhibitions indicate placement of two-dimensional works alongside the walls and glass cases in the centre displaying smaller objects interspersed with larger pieces of furniture in a way that was similar to Fair Women.47 The Grafton Galleries had another London-based predecessor in the Grosvenor Gallery (1877–1890), the home of aestheticism. Fair Women cemented this linkage in the eyes of the critic F.G. Stephens who remarked in the Magazine of Art: ‘With the extremely attractive title of Fair Women the managers of the handsome Galleries … have done what the “Grosvenor” ought to have achieved long ago’.48 The Grosvenor Gallery had presented opportunities for women as patrons, artists and gallery visitors.49 The Grafton Galleries it seemed had taken the next step in dedicating an exhibition to historic and contemporary representations of women. In this sense, although the Grosvenor Gallery had closed in 1890, the Grafton Galleries staging of Fair Women achieved continuity on several levels: in terms of objects as well as a dedicated space created for and by female ‘patrons’ and visitors, while timed to be a comparable high point in the London season for the fashionable elite. Fair Women also suggested an interplay of Anglo-American and Anglo-French networks and exhibition ideas. The aim of the Women’s Building in Chicago had been primarily the display of fne art and ‘handicrafts’ by women, although there was a celebration of the achievements of women through a portrait gallery (primarily reproductions). The collection of portraits of eminent British women, compiled by the editor and early suffragist Helen Blackburn, had previously been displayed in the tea room of a Loan Exhibition of Women’s Industries held in Bristol in 1885.50 A similar focus on women’s work was made in the Exposition des arts de la femme in Paris (1892), which lacked a women-only committee but had three notable female members (the artists Rosa Bonheur and Elizabeth Butler and artist/collector Nélie Jacquemart) and, in an interesting precursor to Fair Women, representations of women appeared in a display of Braun reproductions after artists such as Titian, Rubens and Gainsborough as well as vitrines of decorative art.51 The interchange of ideas was reciprocal. The theme of ‘fair women’ as an exhibition would almost immediately travel back across the Atlantic where an exhibition was also organised by women with a similar agenda, while comparable exhibitions were subsequently held in Paris. Fair Women seems have been in dialogue with efforts at home and abroad to ‘curate’ galleries that were appealing to women intellectually, socially and spatially. However, such inroads were limited in the development of public institutions. In their efforts at museum patronage, women tried to combine professional and feminine identities in their practices. Hill contends that women adopted masculinised authoritative art historical discourses as well as a relational, domestic and decorative approach to collecting, yet few attempted to reform museum spaces to make them more appealing to

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women. Although not a permanent museum context, Fair Women importantly gave the Committee a space in which women could adopt multiple identities. Moreover, in following, at least temporarily, the Grosvenor Gallery model it became a space most appealing to women. Temporary exhibitions arguably gave women opportunities, not available in art museums, for articulating art historical discourses and developing curatorial practices. 52

(Re)Viewing Fair Women: Parody and Ornament The show caused a sensation. This raises the immediate question why? The wideranging appeal of the title that had been chosen for the exhibition was noted by several art critics. Pondering the success of the show in the Art Journal, Claude Phillips opined: ‘Something must be credited to the attraction exercised by an ad captandam title, which if distasteful to those who take the exhibition with the seriousness which it fully deserves, had proved an excellent catchword for the general public’.53 Was an ‘excellent catchword’ all an exhibition needed? Or did Fair Women also appeal to the male and female public because of the exceptional opportunity of seeing work they would not otherwise have? Haskell has suggested that visitors to temporary exhibitions share Cinderella’s heightened emotion and intensity of observation because of an awareness that the magic can only be short-lived.54 The example of Cinderella is apposite in the case of Fair Women, as many of the visitors experiencing the ‘magic’ were reported to be female. The pull of the ‘blockbuster’ full of lustrous loans was no doubt part of the reason for its success. Moreover, ‘Cinderella’ conjures up the notion of the exhibition as a dreamscape, a direct allusion in fact to Tennyson’s ‘dream’. This certainly resonates with contemporary art criticism highlighting the exceptional display of eighteenth-century British art marshalled for the exhibition. The Athenaeum praised Reynolds’s technique,55 while the National Review drew attention to the Romneys: It may be doubted whether Romney, as a painter of fair women, has ever been so fnely and so comprehensively represented as on the present occasion. Though a harder and a much less subtle colourist than either of his great contemporaries, he at his best approached Reynolds in English sweetness and grace, Gainsborough in sprightliness and elegance.56 Art critics commented on Fair Women’s representation of this ‘national’ school: ‘the English school … shines out with an unsurpassed charm and is illustrated with a completeness such as has not often been attained in a modern exhibition’.57 Fair Women conjured up an Elysian past. But an equation of Fair Women with an escapist ‘fairy tale’ elides any intersection with modern life and contemporary debates about the representation of women.58 I would suggest that it was the modernity of the theme in celebrating female accomplishments and individuality, and its locatedness, via its organisers, lenders and modern sitters, in popular culture that also made it appealing. Andrew Stephenson points to the altering attitude of women towards art galleries and exhibitions as public spaces for fashioning and displaying modern social and sexual identities.59 Therefore, a blockbuster exhibition of portraits of women becomes a lens through which to examine the way in which women were represented at the fn de siècle. Equally it also gives insight into the way in which women actively constructed

18

The Exhibition

their own representation. In effect their agency was doubly present, as sitters, but also in actively articulating the narrative of ‘fair women’. The physical boundaries of Fair Women were blurred, its visitors spilled out into Bond Street and the surrounding spaces of the West End. Exhibition reviews, theatre reviews, cartoons, fashion plates, photographs, charitable events, society news and advertisements provided a textual and pictorial context for the exhibition-goer. While exhibition reviews during the season were generally common in the mainstream press, Fair Women’s dissemination into a multiplicity of popular forms was remarkable. Moreover announcements heralded the exhibition long before it opened, listing the names of members of the Committee.60 Given all of these factors it is perhaps not surprising that the show garnered considerable glowing column-space. The show was a resounding success but one that raised questions for some critics at the time. Interpreters grappled with the category of ‘fair women’ and in so doing revealed anxiety about its slipperiness, veering off the pedestal to female independence. Here ‘fair’ was a key area for debate. Not all critics were willing to follow the lead of the exhibition catalogue in placing value on the varied intellect and accomplishment of the sitters, rather than physical appearance. Stephens opined that of the 250 pictures, ‘there was much to be desired in “fairness”, of a very considerable number of them, including a certain category which it would be juster to call hideous’.61 In art reviews, a frequent point of criticism was the relative beauty or lack thereof in contemporary women. The modern female was deemed less attractive than her historic ancestors. Writers enquired why this was the case, which of course raised the question of whether blame ought to be apportioned on the artists or sitters. This attitude was made much more explicit in the cartoon that appeared in Moonshine titled ‘Our Own “Dream of Fair Women” – With Apologies to the other Exhibition’ (Figure 1.8). The caricaturist for Moonshine was taking aim at a variety of attributes and stereotypes of contemporary women. In the image a collage of portraits depicted ‘fair women’ with differing physiognomies, such as ‘a perfect nose’ and ‘magnifcent teeth’. However, the cartoon was not limited to physical attributes, it included the bespectacled ‘grand intellect’, gazing down at an open book. So at the same time the illustrator made a crucial link between Fair Women the exhibition and the ‘intelligent’ woman, although mocking, it confrmed the existence of a New Woman, mimicking the pervasive images of reading women. Popular cartoons like these are fundamental to a fuller understanding of Fair Women, for it is clear that caricature was one way in which the show was placed in a direct visual dialogue with the idea of the ‘modern woman’.62 In another cartoon by Phil May, also mocking the exhibition, three older women stand in a circle beside a sandwich board, where one can make out the advertisement for the exhibition (Figure 1.9). Above the women a poster reads: ‘Grafton Galleries Fair Women Admission 1/-’. Two of the women are bent over with age and one clutches an umbrella. The cartoon comments, like the Moonshine example, on the age and ‘fairness’ of the women; there is an implied dissonance between the gallery-goers and the women on the wall. The third woman is similarly meant to be unfattering, she stands upright, cape parted to reveal her solid fgure, apron and hand on hip. Her pose might suggest an undercurrent of female defance.63 While similarly mocking Fair Women the May cartoon underlines the popularity of the exhibition in a way that was infected by contemporary debates about the representation of women in relation to age and class. The sandwich-board

Figure 1.8 ‘Our Own “Dream of Fair Women” – With Apologies to the other Exhibition’, Moonshine, 1894, © The British Library Board

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The Exhibition

Figure 1.9 ‘The Light Side of Nature,’ Phil May, Sketch, 1894, © Illustrated London News Ltd/ Mary Evans

advertisement was also part of the visual fabric of metropolitan space; visiting exhibitions necessitated traversing city streets.64 Women’s magazines and women art writers declined to join in the parodic responses to female sitters and female visitors. They presented an alternative narrative with descriptions of visiting exhibitions. The ‘Stroller’ writing in Hearth and Home commented that her second visit to Fair Women had confrmed her opinion: [T]here has seldom been a more attractive picture show on view in London. There is scarcely a portrait that does not repay study. I was especially struck this time with Sir John Millais’s magnifcent “Miss Eveleen Tennant, now Mrs. Frederic Myers,” with Bastien Lepage’s “Madame Sarah Bernhardt,” and with Mr. Watt’s “Mrs Langtry.” The presentment of the Jersey Lily is very sober, and not so strong as it might have been, but there is a strange charm of simplicity in the work. The beauty of the face is left unadorned, the black bonnet suggests nothing so much as the Salvation Army. How fashions change!65 The author emphasised not only the overall attractiveness of the exhibition, but returned to the ‘beauty’ and ‘magnifcence’ in modern portraits: the early ‘sober’ Langtry portrait (akin to missionary workers in the East End) contrasts with her contemporary status as an icon of fashionability. The Stroller’s remarks subverted the

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mocking emphasis on modern physiognomy. The Stroller was also drawn to the portraits of the women most familiar to the exhibition visitor: the autonomous, au courant fgures of Tennant, Bernhardt and Langtry. Similarly, Sarah Sophia Beale writing in the American Architect and Building News proclaimed: Although one is not surprised in fnding the gallery full of women’s portraits, it is somewhat monotonous. … But is not an exhibition exclusively of portraits somewhat dreary? And is it not a relief to turn to Mr. Sargent’s grand study of blue and green – Ellen Terry as “Lady Macbeth” – to Mrs. Herkomer’s study in white, the celebrated “Miss Grant,” or to Mr. Watt’s truly beautiful head of “Mrs. Langtry,” certainly one of the most charming faces in the gallery, if not the most beautiful? Sir Frederick Leighton’s grand “Corinna of Tanagra” is a splendid type of woman; and Mr. J.J. Shannon’s “Iris” is delightful in spite of it being an echo of Romney.66 Beale’s emphasis on the ‘relief’ of modern exemplars was perhaps a refection of her own advanced views on taxation and enfranchisement.67 But these contrasted rather dramatically to the cartoonish ‘fair women’ of Moonshine and the Sketch. It is clear that visitors were already accustomed to seeing decorative as well as fne art within the spaces, which may have contributed to the success of the juxtaposition. In spite of the theoretical hierarchy between the fne arts and the decorative arts, the arrangement of the exhibition encouraged visitors to make links between the portraits hanging on the wall and objects contained in the cases rather than view them discretely. Critics worked to spell out some of these associations for their readers. The Athenaeum pointed out that the bodice worn by Fox-Strangways, who appeared in the recently cleaned oil painting by Allan Ramsay, was the one she wore as one of Queen Charlotte’s bridesmaids.68 By viewing portraits alongside objects of material culture the viewer was able to imagine a more expansive materiality in relation to their original sitters. The objects appeared to animate the portraits and vice versa, offering the viewer further insight into the personalities involved. The visitor to the exhibition made the obvious link between the jewellery and other accessories present in the large oil portraits and the objects held in the cases thereby reinforcing the iconography and genealogy of the objects in the paintings. It was in a women’s magazine, Queen, that objects in the decorative section were particularly celebrated. Queen included a special page of illustrations of ‘historical relics’ from the exhibition, including fans, jewellery and objects associated with Queen Elizabeth and Marie Antoinette (Figure 1.10).69 Moreover, middle-class women visitors to the exhibition, could imagine locating the objects within their own homes or on their fashionable bodies. Even if an item was connected to an aristocratic genealogy or was too valuable, they could imagine placing similar types of objects, perhaps more modern or less ornate, in a display cabinet. In this context the display of decorative art was in dialogue with the spaces beyond the gallery. The interrelationships between shopping and art destinations were also made visible through advertising. The May 1894 Graphic advertisements showed how strollers around Bond Street could visit Streeter London The World’s Goldsmith Jewellery and Lapidary, the Crown Perfumery and Co., purchase lace produced by poor gentlewomen or have their portrait ‘drawn from Life or Photograph’.70 The shop window was a space where art and commerce intersected; photographic portraits of celebrities were prominently displayed.71 As the Stroller byline implied, women

Figure 1.10 ‘Historical Relics Exhibited at the Grafton Galleries,’ Queen, 1894, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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regularly walked in the city; the underground and the omnibus facilitated daytrips downtown and the Grafton Galleries might be but one stop in a woman’s West End peregrination. Grand hotels were built to house the infux of visitors and department stores and cafes catered to a buying public.72 So, the location, production and reception of Fair Women made material links with the urban fabric of its immediate surroundings. Contrary to a view of women as excluded, sexualised and objectifed, women in modern city life were consumers and workers.73 They were intrinsic to the transformation of the West End as primary occupiers in the new urban space; the West End not only offered them opportunities for pleasure and leisure, but also the experience of independence and creativity.74 ‘The Stroller’ gave voice to the female gallery-goer visiting and revisiting Fair Women, as the column recorded her experiences ‘consuming’ the city. Women ‘strollers’ participated in the ‘ocular economy’ of the city and accessed multiple spaces where visual culture could be experienced.75 The West End was the immediate orbit in which viewers saw the exhibition. Increasing female investment in ‘fashion’ and the fashionable spaces of the West End corresponded with their independence. Both the Athenaeum and the National Review were critical of the sheer numbers of objects in the show. The former noted the superabundance of objects to look at in the exhibition and observed that not one but a dozen visits would be required to do justice to the whole collection because ‘the materials of several exhibitions are needlessly heaped together’.76 Here the criticism implied a lack of discernment on the part of the organisers and their unwillingness to limit the numbers of pieces loaned by individual collectors. Perhaps as a result of these obvious links with the surrounding consumer culture, the inclusion of ‘industrial arts’ also attracted considerable criticism. In the National Review, Claude Phillips also offered backhanded praise of the curatorship of the exhibition. He deemed the industrial arts, ‘an imperfectly digested series of objects’, but they ‘served to complete in appropriately piquant fashion one of the most brilliant special exhibitions that have been seen in London’.77 The Studio response was in a similar vein: Cases which fll the centre of the rooms are the treasures of a hundred armoires and museums of old mansions. The pretty things a dowager brings out on wet days to show a favourite grandchild – here in profusion fans, miniatures, frocks and lace and a hundred other trifes.78 The Studio’s comments, possibly written by the editor Gleeson White, were resoundingly dismissive of this aspect of the display; ‘pretty things a dowager brings out on wet days’ and labels such as ‘trifes’ were especially deprecating. This echoed hierarchical binaries that emerged with modernity between masculine and feminine artistic production and consumption. The reviewer neglected to mention that a number of the lenders of objects were not ‘dowagers’ or even female. Like the works that hung on the wall, the pieces in cases were drawn from a diversity of collectors, male and female, several of whom represented a modern confuence of connoisseurship and collecting rather than aristocratic heritage. This was exemplifed in a large collection of enamels and miniatures lent by the physician J. Lumsden Propert. Unlike large oil canvases originally intended to hang in large country houses, small objects were more accessible to a wider range of collectors and this was refected in the greater number of middle-class lenders.

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The Exhibition

In the Art Journal, Phillips acknowledged that the decorative art amplifed the ‘unity’ of the theme of Fair Women, but similarly highlighted the gendered nature of the decorative art display: The laces, the fans, the jewellery and goldsmith’s work, though not in all cases of equal exquisiteness, happily complete the collection as a whole, and still further accentuate its unity. To the innumerable ladies who had made the Grafton Galleries their haunt during the summer months it has been almost as great a source of amusement to examine this armoury of feminine weapons, adornments and appliances as to gaze upon the counterfeit presentments of the fair dames themselves, to some of whom, or their sisters, they may well have belonged.79 Phillips suggested a predominantly female audience over the summer. He emphasised the decorative objects as a ‘source of amusement’ to women viewers, as opposed to a source of ‘study’ and surmised the greater value of objects to women than the portraits themselves. Intriguingly, he termed the objects ‘feminine weapons, adornments and appliances’, contrasting and belittling the objects in relation to masculine weapons of war or imperial confict displayed on the walls of many Victorian billiard rooms and gentlemen’s clubs. However, in so doing Phillips revealed the power of decorative objects and his own unease about female agency in relation to fashionable adornment and collecting. The decorative arts were already a battleground for female authority with the emergence of a more militant domesticity. Women writers advised the middleclasses on the creative potential of ‘curating’ the domestic interior.80 As Janice Helland and Bridget Elliott have shown, decorative art, fashion, interior design and artisanal production were mediums through which women critically engaged with modernity.81 Phillips’s review could also be considered in relation to not simply historical ‘feminine weapons’, but new models of femininity in circulation in the 1890s. In the New Woman novel The Image Breakers by Gertrude Dix, the protagonist Alison Granville Smith represents the type of new woman professional and has all the ‘feminine weapons ready to hand’ and is able to ‘slip back and forth between her role as a writer and social investigator and the role of drawing-room hostess and fashionable socialite’.82 Decorative accessories, such as fans and jewels, were a part of bodily self-fashioning. They were performative, but also carried authority about objects beyond the drawing room into the public spaces frequented by professional women writers and social investigators. Figurative examples of women who, like the character of Granville Smith, combined professional and fashionable identities were evident elsewhere on the walls in Fair Women. In including these portraits the exhibition drew attention to the signifcance and functionality of the objects in a way which did not necessarily imply demure behaviour. In fact the objects in the cases were not all ‘old’, the cases echoed modern interiors, mixing historical and contemporary objects. Temporary display moved this material from the home to the gallery; Fair Women emphasised these knowledges and the identities connected with the objects. Fair Women promulgated several strands of change in the arts and in late nineteenth-century culture in general. In resembling a domestic interior, the exhibition Fair Women blurred the separation between public and private spaces, embracing the pioneering work of the Grosvenor Gallery in crossing the boundaries between a public gallery and private aesthetic interior. This meant, of course that the exhibition also engaged with the obverse: it helped to dissolve notions of separate spheres and subtly

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to question the identifcation of the domestic interior as singularly private. The setting was not an ‘old mansion’, but the brand-new palatial interior of the Grafton Galleries with excellent lighting and facilities. However, the suggestion that the objects belonged in dowagers’ private homes resonated with a parallel trend. While rethinking home through the public spaces of the gallery, the exhibition was also in dialogue with house ‘museums’ created by women in America and Britain; acquisition allowed women to express their own individuality in the decoration and ‘curation’ of spaces. Morna O’Neill has identifed Catharine Wolfe’s dining room at Vinland, Rhode Island, created by Walter Crane in 1883, as a ‘hybrid space, situated within the domestic yet continually open to guests’.83 Several of the female lenders to Fair Women also had their own house museums, as will be discussed in the next chapter. Their domestic spaces were open to guests and documented in mass culture. Temporary exhibitions facilitated even further dissemination of their collections, however the very public cultural engagement and exhibitionary encroachment evident in Fair Women was met with a degree of apprehension. While some reviews of the exhibition suggested a mocking comparison between the portraits on the wall and contemporary women, they also implied that the Committee had orchestrated a selection of objects that refected the interests of women as collectors and art gallery visitors. Hence women themselves could be arbiters of taste, not only the presumed ‘male’ critic. The next chapter will ask how women were implicated in the objects displayed as collectors and lenders.

Notes 1 Honorary directors for Fair Women: Viscount Baring; Alfred Farquhar, Esq.; Henry John Brinsley Manners; Marquis of Granby, M.P.; Hon. John Scott-Montagu, M.P.; and others included in early catalogues and correspondence were Lord Hothfeld; E.M. Underdown, Esq.; Q.C. Earl of Wharncliffe. Grafton Galleries, Fair Women (London, 1894). 2 Memorandum and Articles of Association of the Grafton Galleries, 16 June 1891, Tate Archive TGA 737/1 quoted in Anne Helmreich, ‘The Socio-Geography of Art Dealers and Commercial Galleries in Early Twentieth-Century London’, in The Camden Town Group in Context, ed. Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt, and Jennifer Mundy, May 2012, accessed 14 March 2014, www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/camden-town-group/anne-helmr eich-the-socio-geography-of-art-dealers-and-commercial-galleries-in-early-r1105658. 3 It covered no less than 270 feet in length and 20 to 30 feet in breadth. M. Phipps Jackson, ‘The Grafton Gallery’, The Magazine of Art, January 1892, 348–50. 4 The building had already received a substantial number of visitors; it opened on a Sunday in March of 1894 at the request of the National Sunday League and 1722 people attended ‘Pall Mall Gazette Offce’, Pall Mall Gazette (Monday, 19 March 1894), issue 9044. 5 (Marion Margaret) Violet Manners (Lindsay), Duchess of Rutland (1856–1937); Alice Harriet (Stracy-Clitherow) Hothfeld (d. 1929); Lady Susan Charlotte (Lascelles) Wharncliffe (1834–1927). Biographies of the Committee members are elusive (few have entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). Longer studies or memoirs are referenced later. 6 The Sporting Times made note of Croft’s ‘invaluable assistance’ to her husband. ‘Fair Women at the Grafton Galleries’, Sporting Times, no. 1600 (19 May 1894): 2. Eleanor Fraser Tomlinson, d. 1944 (m. Thomas Denman Croft, May 1890). 7 The patroness was the Princess of Wales. Louise Frederica Augusta Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1832–1911); Winifred Anna Cavendish-Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (1863– 1954); Millicent Fanny Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, Duchess of Sutherland (1867–1955); Georgina Gascoyne-Cecil, Marchioness of Salisbury (1827–1899); Geraldine Georgiana Mary Anson, Marchioness of Bristol (1834–1927); Helen Matilda Pleydell-Bouverie,

26

8 9 10 11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

The Exhibition Countess of Radnor (1846–1928); Emily Florence, Countess Crawford (1848–1934); Rachel, Countess of Dudley (1867–1920); Mary Eleanor Anne, Countess of Ilchester (1852–1935); Angela Burdett-Coutts, Baroness Burdett-Coutts (1814–1906); Adelaide Maria Guinness, Lady Iveagh (1844–1916); Eliza Maria, Lady Middleton (1847–1922); Harriet Sarah, Lady Wantage (1837–1920); Lady Cecil Scott-Montagu (d. 1919); Mary Dahlgren Paul, Viscountess Astor (1858–d. 22 December 1894). Sophia Murphy, The Duchess of Devonshire’s Ball (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984); Henry Vane, Affair of State: A Biography of the 8th Duke and Duchess of Devonshire (London: Peter Owen, 2004). Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere, The Souls (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1984), 46. Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (London: Yale University Press, 1999), 225. Lillie Langtry, The Days I Knew (1st ed. 1925, North Hollywood: Panoply Publications, 2000), 37. Julius Bryant, Kenwood, Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2003), 200. Wantage’s father had been ennobled. Andrea Geddes Poole, Stewards of the Nation’s Art: Contested Cultural Authority, 1890–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 238; Susan S. Lewis, ‘The Artistic and Architectural Patronage of Angela Burdett Coutts’ (University of London, 2012), 30. On Victorian women and philanthropy, see also Kathleen D. McCarthy, Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy, and Power (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990); F.K. Prochaska, The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain (London: Faber, 1988); F.K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980). See Chapters 2 and 5. Helen Matilda Chaplin Radnor, Catalogue of Pictures at Longford Castle and Categorical List of Family Portraits (2nd ed., 1898); Countess of Radnor Helen Matilda Pleydell Bouverie, From a Great-Grandmother’s Armchair (London: Marshall Press, 1927). See, for example, Scharf, September 1890, SB 122, NPG7/3/4/2/137, p. 41, HAL in Elizabeth Heath, ‘Sir George Scharf and the Early National Portrait Gallery’, 80, 235. See also Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 127. Barbara Bryant, Two Temple Place: ‘A Perfect Gem’ of Late Victorian Art, Architecture and Design (London: Two Temple Place, 2013), 13–15. K.D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press; Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). ‘Fair Women at the Grafton Galleries’, 2. ‘The Journal London Letter,’ Aberdeen Weekly Journal, no. 12264 (22 May 1894): 5. The Duchess of Teck, Burdett-Coutts and Countess Deym were patrons of the 1891 German Festival. Charles Lowe and John Robinson Whitley, Four National Exhibitions in London and Their Organiser (London: T.F. Unwin, 1892), 363. Wanda M. Corn, Charlene G. Garfnkle, and Annelise K. Madsen, Women Building History: Public Art of the 1893 Columbian Exposition (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 2010). The catalogue cost an additional shilling, although the Athenaeum felt this was overpriced and should have been sold for three-pence. ‘Fine Arts: The Grafton Galleries’, Athenaeum, no. 3474 (26 May 1894): 683. The ‘Windsor Beauties’ were eleven portraits of celebrated women at court of Charles II commissioned or at least assembled by Anne Hyde, Duchess of York, c.1662–1665. Julia Marciari Alexander and Catharine MacLeod, eds., Painted Ladies: Women at the Court of Charles II (London; New Haven: National Portrait Gallery; Yale Center for British Art, 2001). Several of these were by artists who were Royal Academicians: Frederic Leighton, Laurens Alma Tadema, E.J. Poynter, P.H. Calderon, J.E. Millais, Luke Fildes, Hubert Herkomer and G.F. Watts. G.F. Watts, Louisa Waterford, 1847; G.F. Watts, Julia Duckworth, c.1870, Charleston Trust.

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26 ‘The Grafton Galleries’, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art; London 78, no. 2032 (6 October 1894): 382. 27 Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Poetry, Pictures, and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture, 1855–1875 (Athens; London: Ohio University Press, 2011), 34–78. 28 Alfred Tennyson, A Dream of Fair Women (Boston: J.R. Osgood and Company, 1880), 47–53. 29 Tennyson wondered whether ‘the gentler mind’ might ‘in some far aftertime’ assume its ‘just and full degree / Of rule’. Linda H. Peterson, ‘Tennyson and the Ladies’, Victorian Poetry 47, no. 1 (2009): 41, https://doi.org/10.1353/vp.0.0040. 30 F.G. Stephens, ‘The Grafton Galleries’, The Magazine of Art, May (1894): 316. 31 Fair Women, 3. 32 ‘The Journal London Letter’. 33 Perry, History’s Beauties, 113–14, 144. 34 Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 147. 35 Florence Fenwick-Miller, ‘The Ladies’ Column’, Illustrated London News, 13 October 1894, 478. See Meaghan Clarke, Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain 1880–1905 (Aldershot; Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 81–114. 36 Alan Staley, ‘“Art Is upon the Town!” The Grosvenor Gallery Winter Exhibitions’, in The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England, ed. Colleen Denney and Susan P. Casteras (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 59–74. Haskell identifes the Burlington Fine Arts Club exhibitions as themed, but devoted to an artist or period or an applied art. Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2000), 94. 37 A.G. Temple, Corporation of London Art Gallery: Catalogue of the Loan Collection of Pictures (London: Blades, East & Blades, 1895), n.p. 38 Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum, 73–83. 39 Helmreich, ‘The Socio-Geography of Art Dealers and Commercial Galleries in Early Twentieth-Century London’; Pamela M. Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, eds., The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 40 Pamela Fletcher has mapped the rapid increase in galleries in the West End at the end of the nineteenth century, alongside the department store. London Gallery Project, accessed 15 September 2019, http://learn.bowdoin.edu/fetcher/london-gallery/. 41 Pamela Fletcher, ‘The Grand Tour on Bond Street: Cosmopolitanism and the Commercial Art Gallery in Victorian London’, Visual Culture in Britain 12, no. 2 (2011): 139, https:// doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2011.575264. 42 Anna Gruetzner Robins and Richard Thomson, Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec: London and Paris 1870–1910 (London: Tate, 2005). 43 This attracted outrage: the ‘aristocratic and exclusive half-crown’ on the ‘Opening Day’ was meant to ‘do duty for the private view’, thereby attracting a very ‘select gathering’, ‘many of whom had lent pictures, miniatures or other interesting objects’ to the exhibition. ‘The Art of the Day’, Sketch, 6 June 1894, 29–30; ‘Fine-Art Gossip’, Athenaeum, no. 3472 (12 May 1894): 621. Given the extensive loans that were extracted from society fgures, it is not perhaps surprising that the Committee was intent on ingratiating themselves with lenders. 44 ‘[G]entle melancholy overhung the room when it was discovered that the social charms of tea, even tea, were not included’. There was an absence of ‘economically minded lady journalists’, who were waiting to see the show until the following shilling day. Joan and Jill, ‘Our Ladies’ Letter,’ Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 26 May 1894, 11. M. Clarke, ‘“Bribery with Sherry” and “the Infuence of Weak Tea”: Women Critics as Arbiters of Taste in the Late-Victorian and Edwardian Press’, Visual Culture in Britain 6, no. 2 (2005): 139–55. 45 Anne Eatwell, ‘Borrowing from Collectors: The Role of the Loan in the Formation of the Victoria and Albert Museum and Its Collection (1852–1932)’, Decorative Arts Society Journal 24 (2000): 21–29. These were displayed in the South Gallery from 1862. 46 Lewis F. Day, ‘French Decorative Art in London’, Art Journal, no. 109 (January 1894): 5–6.

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47 Imogen Hart, Arts and Crafts Objects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 170. 48 Stephens, ‘The Grafton Galleries’, 316. 49 Blanche Lindsay (one of four founding directors) helped to ensure that 25 per cent of the artists had been women and female visitors had dedicated social spaces. Denney, At the Temple of Art, 127–50; Paula Gillett, ‘Art Audiences at the Grosvenor Gallery’, in The Grosvenor Gallery, 39–58; Anne Anderson, ‘On The Golden Stairs: The Spectacle of the Victorian Woman in White’, in The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007, ed. John Potvin (New York: Routledge, 2009), 52–68; Stephen Calloway, Lynn Federle Orr, and Esmé Whittaker, eds., The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860–1900 (London: V&A Publishing, 2011). 50 Emma Ferry, ‘“A Novelty among Exhibitions”: The Loan Exhibition of Women’s Industries, Bristol, 1885’, in Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950, ed. Elizabeth Darling and Lesley Whitworth (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 64; ‘Collection of Portraits of Eminent British Women, as Exhibited at Chicago in 1893: Detailed Catalogue’ (1893), Blackburn Collection, Girton College. The collection [now lost] was made up of engravings and photographs and often the original is unidentifed. 51 Also Florence (1890). Julia Verlaine, ‘Expositions and Collections: Women Art Collectors and Patrons in the Age of the Great Expositions’, in Women in International and Universal Exhibitions, 38–39; Exposition des arts de la femme: Palais de l’industrie: guide-livret illustré (2e édition) (Paris: imp. de A. Warmont, 1892), 122. 52 Hill, Women and Museums 1850–1914, 130–31. 53 Claude Phillips, ‘The “Fair Women” Exhibition’, Art Journal, August 1894, 256. 54 Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum, 7. 55 ‘Fine Arts: The Grafton Galleries’, 684. 56 Claude Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, National Review 23, no. 137 (July 1894): 623. 57 Phillips, ‘The “Fair Women” Exhibition’, 255. 58 See Chapter 3. 59 Andrew Stephenson, ‘Anxious Performances: Aestheticism, The Art Gallery and the Ambulatory Geographies of Late Nineteenth-Century London’, Victorian Review 27, no. 2 (2001): 7. 60 ‘Pall Mall Gazette Offce’, Pall Mall Gazette (Monday, 26 February 1894), issue 9026. 61 Stephens, ‘The Grafton Galleries’, 316. 62 Robins stresses that cartoons are part of the fabric of modernity. Robins, A Fragile Modernism, 84. 63 Kristina Huneault stresses the importance of the hand on hip gesture for showing defance in her analysis of images of working class women. Kristina Huneault, Diffcult Subjects: Working Women and Visual Culture, Britain 1880–1914 (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate, 2002), 209–13. 64 The advertisement was the ultimate synthesis of the themes of the modern city: ‘movement, exchange and the image’. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2000), 58. 65 The writer was mistaken about the Bernhardt artist. The Stroller, ‘Music and Art’, Hearth and Home, no. 163 (28 June 1894): 252. 66 S. Beale, ‘‘Fair Women’ in London’, The American Architect and Building News (1876– 1908); Boston 45, no. 975 (1 September 1894): 85. 67 Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850–1900 (London: Routledge, 2000), 142–43. 68 ‘Fine Arts: The Grafton Galleries’, 684. 69 ‘Historical Relics Exhibited at the Grafton Galleries’, Queen, 16 June 1894, 991. 70 ‘Advertisements & Notices’, The Graphic (London, England), Monday, 7 May 1894, issue 1275a, 47. 71 Louisa Iarocci, ‘“The Art of Draping”: Window Dressing’, in Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling, ed. Louisa Iarocci (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 137–56. 72 Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 9–37; Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for

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73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83

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Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 2000), 122–38; Brenda Assael, The London Restaurant, 1840–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 192–210. Ruth Iskin, Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 6. Nead, Victorian Babylon, 62–73. ‘Fine Arts: The Grafton Galleries’, 683. Claude Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, National Review 1894, 625. ‘From Gallery, Studio and Mart’, Studio 1894, 89. Phillips, ‘The “Fair Women” Exhibition’, 256. A more militant domesticity emerged in the 1880s, in which a woman’s home was her prerogative, and women advisors on decoration in the 1890s captured the middle-class market. For the ‘New Woman’ domesticity meant creativity rather than self-sacrifce. Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2009), 105–14. Bridget Elliott and Janice Helland, Women Artists and the Decorative Arts, 1880–1935: The Gender of Ornament (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). Christine Bayles Kortsch, Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction: Literacy, Textiles, and Activism (London: Ashgate, 2009), 173. Morna O’Neill, ‘Paintings from Nowhere: Walter Crane, Socialism and the Aesthetic Interior’, in Rethinking the Interior, c.1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts, ed. Jason Edwards and Imogen Hart (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 150.

2

‘Feminine Weapons’ Women, Collecting and Connoisseurship

Fair Women conjoined fashionability and modernity in its facilitation of growing female involvement in collecting and cultural enterprise. The exhibition was unusual in the variety of objects it brought together. Large oil portraits were placed alongside an eclectic collection of fans; artefacts that were associated with female rulers and celebrities were shown alongside contemporary jewellery design; and miniature portraits gave visual representation to monarchs, actresses, musician, writers. In date the nearly 1000 objects stretched back as early as the mummy portrait (c.100–200 AD) to the present day, 1894. While the paintings were presented broadly chronologically, the section devoted to ‘Miniatures, etc.’ was grouped according to object type and/ or lender. This chapter initially explores this latter, more amorphous category and the meanings in Victorian culture of its objects. Fair Women’s inclusion of decorative art highlighted women’s historical and contemporary prominence as object keepers. I will investigate Fair Women as a nexus of women’s involvement in collecting and patronage. This was paralleled by the emergence of new approaches to collecting that were as much about expertise as aesthetics. Women were playing active roles as ‘philanthropic citizens’, lending work from their own collections, whilst also involved in the modern art market. Through these objects the female lenders to Fair Women invoked matrilineal genealogies, the creation of public identities, imperial exchange, commerce and fashionability.

Fashionable Objects: Jewels In the decision to display historical and modern jewellery, Fair Women was foregrounding a vital aspect of Victorian culture.1 Brooches, rings and necklaces became an important aspect of almost exclusively female adornment. Although the cost of precious gems was prohibitive for the vast majority, the display of necklaces and brooches on the body crossed social and class boundaries. Machine manufacture had made jewellery more affordable. ‘Sets’ of imitation brooches, bracelets and earrings, while disdained by some such as expert on household taste Mary Eliza Haweis, were widely available: ‘It is food for regret that it has been found possible to manufacture so much cheap work, and to fnd buyers among the vulgar and uncultured masses’.2 Thus, Fair Women visitors may not have owned diamonds and gems of comparable value, but they may have been able to obtain examples that reproduced styles through modern manufacture. Visitors’ aspirational agendas could be realised through costume jewellery. Paste jewels were available, as well as real ones, in nearby gifts shops, giving viewers the chance to express their taste.

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The Fair Women display included a wide range of jewels from rings to necklaces. One example was an agate and gold bracelet decorated with diamonds, rubies, a miniature and hair, while another was a round ocular portrait, a late example of this eighteenth-century phenomenon. These objects combine various aspects of mourning jewellery, notably the incorporation of hair, thereby staging a practice of mourning that is understood to be peculiarly feminine.3 Both objects were associated with Princess Charlotte who died in childbirth in 1817.4 Jewellery often had deeper symbolic or sentimental meaning attached to it, an aspect heightened by Queen Victoria’s preference for mourning jewellery following Albert’s death in 1861. In addition, while the bejewelled portraits memorialised a death that had occurred decades earlier, childbirth remained a common cause of female mortality in the 1890s. Visitors to the exhibition might well have connected these relics to their own more recent familial acquisition of memorial jewellery: the use of hair in jewellery was particularly a feature of the 1850s–1870s and in combination with photographic portraits.5 The memorial bracelet functioned as a metonym for part of the body, standing in for the absent whole person thereby maintaining a physical link. Memorial objects could give a sense of a shared loss between women; they crossed social and class boundaries by perpetuating the myth of a common experience. Sentiment continued to be a vital element of popular imagery and material culture.6 Scholars have demonstrated its signifcance in relation to jewellery, thereby exceeding early twentieth-century assessments of its function as merely a display of material wealth and marker of class. Other forms of jewellery exhibited included ornate eighteenth-century jewellery and objects de vertu resplendent with diamond and faceted gems such as snuff boxes and jewel cases. Not all of these objects were historical, and some had a practical purpose. One of the most extraordinary objects in the show was a set of gold opera glasses designed by the American frm Tiffany. The glasses were adorned with pearls and rose-cut diamonds and their textured surface was produced by ‘engine turning’, a method for decorating metal surfaces used by Tiffany and Fabergé. The glasses were indicative of shifting jewellery markets; Tiffany had achieved international recognition at the 1889 Paris Exposition and had just opened a branch on Regent Street in 1892.7 The opera glasses were almost certainly a set made by Tiffany in 1893, which had been a wedding gift to Duke and Duchess of York from the actor and dramatist Sir Augustus and Lady Harris (Plate 7).8 Margaret Maynard notes that these Royal collections, arranged for public consumption in the Grafton Galleries, were a demonstration of what it was like to be a ‘fair woman’, thereby eliding the notion of femininity with an exposition of the lifestyles of aristocratic beauties and socialites.9 It could certainly be argued that the Tiffany opera glasses offered an economic model of ‘fair womanhood’ that were beyond the reach of most women. However, such objects also staked out a space for women in the West End. Opera glasses, a very modern accessory, epitomised the centrality of women to the overlapping spaces of theatres, galleries and shops on Bond and Regent Street. This is demonstrated in Griselda Pollock’s analysis of Marie Cassatt’s In the Loge (1878): the women holding the opera glasses surveys the world around her and participates confdently in the masculine world of spectatorship. Opera glasses signalled women staking a claim for the spaces of modernity.10 They functioned as ways through which visitors as exhibition-goers and consumers could use objects as a form of cultural and social representation.

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Several objects pointed to recent travel beyond the West End and imperial histories. The exhibition of two groups of objects in 1894 – rock-turquoise earrings and necklaces – are exemplary of the ways in which objects were entangled in power and culture, suggesting elements of agency, alongside tropes associated with ethnography and Orientalism. Geraldine Hervey, the Marchioness of Bristol, was the daughter of Maj.Gen. Hon. George Anson, an inexperienced and unpopular commander-in-chief in India in 1856. Her loans to Fair Women included six chains and a pair of earrings of rock turquoise ‘as worn by women in Cashmere’. Jewellery made of turquoise remains in the Bristol collection including a pair of earrings veined with brown, blue and purple (Plate 8). Objects from Kashmir, in particular shawls, an industry disastrously devastated by British competition, had been widely circulated through exhibitions in the nineteenth century. In this case the emphasis was not on the object as a commodity for British consumption but on its original wearer. The description of the earrings clearly sits within the context of not only celebrations of Indian design, such as the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, but growing concern about ‘authenticity’.11 Indian jewels had historically been transformed to conform to Western taste, but there was growing appreciation of their richness and originality.12 This was linked with attempts to distinguish authentic craft from hybrid or modern Indian objects and the rise in ‘fake’ painted turquoise in Kashmir and associated anxieties about distinguishing one from another. A parallel context was portraiture, both photographic and painted, that attempted to capture images of people in ‘authentic’ jewellery and costume as exemplifed by the photograph of women in Kashmir from Prince Edward’s tour of India in 1875–1876.13 The turquoise jewellery may have related to Geraldine Hervey’s own genealogy, although her father died of cholera before returning from India. The wearing of turquoise jewellery as part of her selffashioning carried a personal resonance and the mythic possibilities of family history.14 In contrast, another object that had probably very recently entered the Duchess of York’s collection was the Indian beaded necklace which had been presented to her by H.H. Maharaja Takhtsingjee of Bhavnagar (1858–1896). He had visited England the previous year when he was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge.15 Maharaja Takhtsingjee had previously lent a collection of twenty-eight pieces of ‘court jewellery’ made principally at Bhavnagar to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886.16 This longer history of his imperial links with London’s exhibition culture is signifcant. Indian jewellery had attracted considerable attention at the Great Exhibition where such objects were ‘exoticized’ to attract bourgeois taste and represented as ‘domesticated for consumption’ and subsequently at exhibitions in Paris and London.17 However, the necklace lent by the Duchess of York was located in a circuit of exchange to do with court cultures and gift-giving; in this case the giver was seen as a modern and model ruler already an active agent in London’s exhibitionary culture.18 The display of the objects served to re-emphasise Maharaja Takhtsingjee’s status and the signifcance of Bhavnagar court jewellery. Nonetheless, these relationships were complicated, constrained by defnitions of exoticism which masked unequal relationships and limitations of Indian rule. Maya Jasanoff suggests that rather than interpret collecting as a transparent expression of imperial power, it can reveal the complexities of empire; it ‘shows how power and culture intersected in tangled, contingent and sometimes self-contradictory ways’.19

Fans to Footwear The large collection of fans on display was a barometer of their continued fashionability. Although generally associated with the earlier period of high aestheticism and

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Japonisme, they remained a fundamental accessory for women in the 1890s. Indeed it was Lady Windermere’s fan that betrayed her hidden presence in Oscar Wilde’s eponymous comedy two years earlier. An elaborate chicken-skin fan with a watch at the rivet was painted with a scene of Hector and Andromache (Plate 9). It was one of eight lent by the Marchioness of Bristol, who had been awarded a gold medal in 1878 for her collection of fans by the Worshipful Company of Fan Makers. Fans had an established exhibitionary history and collectors such as Hervey, who was portrayed holding another fan from her collection, had developed expertise on the construction and attribution of fans as objects for display (Plate 10).21 Hervey was also a fan-maker; the Worshipful Company promoted British fan design and employment for women.22 The performative nature of fans contributed to their appeal as collectable objects in the late Victorian period. Ariel Beaujot has linked the popularity of the fan with concerns over ‘surplus’ unmarried women: it was a tool for middle-class firtation as exemplifed in paintings, such as James Tissot’s Fan (c.1875, Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut), and fan design offered respectable employment.23 In relation to the former, fans were specifcally identifed as dangerous ‘weapons’ in contemporary writing and in art.24 Moreover, department stores such as Liberty’s, which had moved location in 1885 adding a basement Eastern Bazaar, expanded the vogue for purchasing Oriental fabrics and objects in London.25 The Fair Women Committee had amassed not only accessories, but actual items of clothing, textiles and footwear. Some women were identifed as makers including a pillow cover attributed to Princess Elizabeth (Figure 1.10 top right), two embroidered screens by Mary Queen of Scots, and contemporary Irish lace. Others held signifcant provenances, such as the bodice of a dress worn by the Duchess of Rutland when presented at Court in 1780. The ladies column in the Graphic noted that several of the objects displayed in Fair Women had ‘great historic value’: 20

The Duchess of York contributes a watch that once belonged to the Empress Josephine; and among several articles associated with Queen Elizabeth, are a pair of silk-embroidered shoes which she wore, and a violin which she played.26 The objects thus conjoined to give an imagined bodily representation of historical women through material culture.27 For the Victorian visitor the series of objects associated with Queen Elizabeth imparted material aspects of her life and had a modern resonance. The pianoforte, rather than the violin, had been considered a more suitable instrument for women, but several celebrated female violinists had emerged in the late nineteenth century including Wilma Neruda, Lady Hallé. Object association may have underlined Queen Elizabeth’s historical precedent with a debate that was concurrent with the show about female musicianship.28 The violin was further echoed in the late Pre-Raphaelite Veronica Veronese in the Middle Gallery.

Miniatures The categorisation of ‘Miniatures etc.’ to include jewellery, fans, clothing and miniature portraits reinforced the separation of miniatures as ‘minor’ art from large-scale oil painting, a division that has been retained in art history.29 Nonetheless, Beale’s review predicted a revival of miniature painting: ‘it is quite possible it might in London eventually, displace the peculiarly unsatisfactory photography; for whether touched up or left with its exaggerate lines, the latter is not more truthful than the miniature, and far

34

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less beautiful and durable’.30 Colour and durability had modern appeal.31 Although photography was not displaced, Beale’s comments were prescient because the Royal Society of Miniature Painters was established two years later in 1896. 32 In The Yorkshire Herald, the selection of miniatures was specifcally praised: They are extremely various, saints and sinners, empresses and revolutionary ladies, and actresses on all stages being represented. Maria Theresa, Hannah More, Ninon d’Enclos, Marie Antoinette, Madame Vestris, Lady Wortley Montagu, the unfortunate Madame Roland, and the still more unfortunate Princesse de Lamballe, are a sample. These, in light of their historical interest, and quite apart from their beauty, are precious things.33 The term ‘precious things’ emphasised the characteristics of miniatures as treasured and valuable objects as akin to jewels, especially as they were often worn close to the body. The portrait miniatures had a further signifcance; through them, visitors could visually apprehend the identity and life history of the original sitter and/or owner. In the late nineteenth century, historical miniatures of ‘fair women’ had often lost the record and social meaning of their original eighteenth-century exchange. They were recirculated and collected for different reasons, some amongst the less affuent as a cheaper alternative to larger paintings, but also as visual records of great women. In this context they were in dialogue with the portrait photographs of contemporary women found in periodicals, albums and exhibitions. The pattern was replicated in the reception of large oil paintings, such as Holbein’s Christina of Denmark reproduced in the Magazine of Art.34 The emphasis was on her famous rejection of Henry VIII, supposedly responding that had she more than one neck she would marry him, was a model of female independence for female viewers. Jordanna Bailkin has highlighted this aspect of Christina of Denmark’s subsequent popularity, when its ‘rescue’ for the nation coincided with suffrage action.35 The portrait surely held similar appeal for New Women visitors.36

Collectors and Fair Women The Committee’s networks facilitated contributions from a broad range of aristocratic collections that had been formed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition to the Patroness of Fair Women, the Princess of Wales, several members of the Royal Family lent objects. Some objects came from well-known collections such as the Holford collection at Dorchester House. But others came from more recently established collections, newly wealthy members of the middle class who had gained their money through industry or banking, or even collectors on a smaller scale actively working in emerging professions. The recently collected Iveagh loans, included Thomas Gainsborough’s Mrs Sheridan and George Romney’s Emma, Lady Hamilton. Although the Gainsborough has now been reidentifed as possibly Mrs. Henry Boughton, Julius Bryant notes that it ‘enjoyed its fnest hour in 1894’ at the Fair Women exhibition for the (supposed) likeness of the renowned singer Elizabeth Linley Sheridan, which drew attention not only to her celebrity, but also that of her collectors who had just bought the painting for £5,000 in 1889 (Plate 11).37 Other lenders were indicative of the cosmopolitan art world in London at the end of the nineteenth century. For example, the German chemist and collector Ludwig Mond

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35

lent the earliest work in the show: the mummy portrait and two early Renaissance portraits Isabella d’Este and Flora (now titled A Blonde Woman).38 Nor were the objects all from private households; lenders included the Corporation of London.39 There were also commercial interests represented: Messrs. Garrard, the London-based Crown Jewellers, lent an oval mirror with a Byzantine design. Discussions of Fair Women in the contemporary press often praised individual lenders, thereby emphasising their status as collectors. One of the female collectors was Burdett-Coutts, who lent several works including the portraits of her sisters Susan Burdett (later Travanion) and Sophia Burdett (later Otway Cave) by J.J. Masquerier.40 In lending these works Burdett-Coutts highlighted her own genealogy and family alliances, an emphasis that was not lost on the press: The miniature of our gracious Sovereign is exhibited by Baroness Burdett-Coutts, who also has contributed a vastly interesting collection of fne examples of this delicate art including the portraits of the Coutts family, and several valuable historical memorials.41 The well-known miniaturist William Ross had painted much of the Royal Family and had also completed a portrait of Burdett-Coutts in 1847.42 Burdett-Coutts’s family history, in a sense typifed the Committee: a combination of paternal aristocratic and maternal new wealth. Readers of The Strand had been taken on a private ‘tour’ of Burdett-Coutts’s country retreat of Holly Lodge at Highgate the month before Fair Women opened. The author Mary Spencer-Warren reported on a residence flled with ‘curios’, fne art (ranging from Bruegel to Frith) and portraits of eminent Victorian men such as Dickens and the Duke of Wellington.43 Susan Lewis has examined the way in which Burdett-Coutts’s collecting practices enabled her to fashion a sense of self. In this context it is clear that the exhibition of her collection in Fair Women facilitated a very public dissemination and reifcation of her self-fashioning.44 It followed her extraordinarily controversial decision to marry her twenty-nine-year-old American secretary and suggests that she was, in a sense, legitimising herself amidst the whiff of scandal. The portraits were not limited to Queen Victoria and Coutts family members. Two miniatures of Hannah Meredith Brown attest to Brown’s personal relationship with Burdett-Coutts. Brown served as her governess and then companion until her death in 1878. Non-relations in her collection also included signifcant literary women, such as the French letterwriter Madame de Sevigné (1626–1696) and Hannah More (1745–1833), the writer on abolition and female education. Burdett-Coutts had acquired the More portrait a decade earlier.45 More offered an interesting example of a precedent for female activism in Britain. She had been both an Evangelical social reformer and a philanthropist supporting education of the poor. Burdett-Coutts herself mirrored these interests, renowned for her charitable support of education and developments in the East End, she defed convention whilst upholding conservative mid-Victorian values on gender, so it is signifcant that she chose to purchase and exhibit the More portrait. In a report Burdett-Coutts had compiled the year before documenting the extent of women’s professional and semi-professional involvement in philanthropy (she calculated half a million women) More was cited as a model for contemporary women philanthropists.46 In conjunction with philanthropy and reform, Burdett-Coutts’s pivotal role in the arts and culture had been made evident in several group portraits. She was seated at

36 The Exhibition the centre of W.P. Frith’s Private View, Royal Academy, 1881 (private collection) and similarly central to Baroness Burdett-Coutts’ garden party: the International Medical Congress, London, 1881 (Welcome Institute). While these portraits document her importance as a benefactor, her public representations in painting and photography also give clues to her personal collecting practice; this encompassed jewellery and fans as well as paintings. Burdett-Coutts specifed the unique provenance of a Chinese fan reputedly acquired by Lady Katherine Cochrane (1796–1865) in China. (Married to Thomas Cochrane, a naval offcer and radical politician, Cochrane often accompanied her husband on his international extended campaigns.)47 The fan suggested an association with nineteenth-century naval travel and the global circulation of objects through the wives of offcers, rather than a recent purchase in London or Paris. The range of objects Burdett-Coutts lent to Fair Women was selective but diverse, a testament to her distinctive public identity. Interestingly, her prerogative as a Committee member to lend resulted in a seemingly more female-centric and intimate self-presentation than the contemporary Strand article. The latter had tended to view the home in the guise of biographies of illustrious men. As the reviews of Fair Women acknowledged, a major advantage for the Committee was access to large private collections, some of which were their own. But their networks extended, via their patroness, to the Royal collection. Several portraits, were loaned by members of the Royal Family, such as the H. Von. Angeli portrait of Queen Victoria hung most prominently in the Centre Room. The catalogue notes documented the networks of Royal gift-giving. Some of the jewellery lent by the Duchess of York (later Queen Mary) was related to European and family histories, such as an antique gold watch formerly owned by Empress Josephine and an oval portrait miniature of Princess Amelia, while other objects related to contemporary design and fashionability, such as the gold opera glasses. Amongst the individual lenders who were not titled were members of a growing network of women collectors known to the members of the Committee. Several of these women were not British, refecting London’s cosmopolitan cultural networks in the 1890s. However, this further complicated social narratives about aristocratic lifestyles. One object in particular was emblematic of the cultural mixing that was so evident by the 1890s. Alexandra Princess of Wales lent a fan which had been painted by the American socialite Jennie Jerome, Lady Randolph Churchill, and given to her as a gift.48 Churchill was one of several women from families successful in the American industrial boom, who relocated to Britain where they married into family estates, and as a result wielded considerable power both through society position and wealth.49 The fan was symptomatic of the growth of transatlantic networks and cultural patronage. American expatriate lenders included Committee member Mary Dahlgren Astor, who contributed a case of eight fans, and Mary Morton Hartpence Sands (Mrs. Mahlon Sands and mother of the painter Ethel Sands) who lent a number of lace objects. Sands simultaneously patronised contemporary artists: Sargent completed Sands’s portrait that same year.50 Similarly, Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White loaned a French pastel she had presumably acquired while residing in Paris; the Head by Maurice Quentin de la Tour refected an emergent collecting interest: the French Rococo.51 Some of the middle-class lenders were artists, and rather than linked to new wealth, their loans were linked to artistic practice and professional identities.52 For example, the artist Ella Sieveking lent a Dutch Pastel of a Lady dated 1660. This was indicative

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of another revival during the period: artists such as Laura Alma Tadema recreated seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, and for an artist such as Sieveking, the study of Old Masters was part of artistic training. However, Sieveking, the daughter of a physician, also espoused a wider educative purpose for art and culture: she was vice-principal of Morley College, a transformed music hall, gallery and institute for advanced study for working men and women.53 Her loan to Fair Women was revealing on professional, middle-class women’s involvement in charitable work and shared networks. In the case of Sieveking, she was a member of the philanthropic circles of Burdett-Coutts, and her sister Emmeline Sieveking, a landscape gardener, was part of the Garrett circle that combined advocacy for social reform with suffrage.54 Sieveking exemplifes the way in which collecting offered a common interest for cross-class groups of women and it uncovers overlapping informal networks.55 Another middle-class artist was the history painter Henrietta Ward who lent a collection that included a coloured beadwork basket dating from 1662, a box with secret drawers from the reign of Charles II, and miniatures by A. Chalon R.A. and one by her mother Mary Webb Ward, also an artist. By this time Ward, a widow, was supporting her eight children by running a school of art; an independent professional, she was a strong proponent of women’s rights.56 Her collection reinforced the signifcance of her matrilineal artistic genealogy, although her personal history was somewhat tumultuous and involved a fraught relationship with her mother as a result of eloping with the artist Edward Matthew Ward.57 Ward’s loans also exhibited something of the varied kinds of objects a professional woman artist held in her personal collection. Although some objects were clearly historical family objects, such as the miniature portraits, others may have been more recently acquired through social networks that included fgures such as Dickens and Cruikshank, as well as members of the royal family, to whom Henrietta Ward had given lessons as children. These networks and artistic antecedents were later conveyed visually and textually in Henrietta Ward’s memoirs, along with the placement of paintings and decorative objects within her home. For example, a cabinet with concealed drawers, similar to the one in Fair Women, reportedly stood in the centre of her drawing room.58 However, Ward was already a public fgure in the 1890s and the fuidity between public and private for professional artists was evident in the popular press. For late-Victorian women artists the home and studio functioned as public spaces, which became increasingly crucial to self-promotion and celebrity culture.59 In lending her own collection to Fair Women, Ward materially shaped her public identity. Objects from the drawing room of a professional woman artist reenvisioned in the public space of the gallery were in dialogue with the ‘artist at home’ phenomenon. Indeed, Ward’s drawing room and studio full of ‘precious art treasures’ were brought to readers of the Strand four years later.60 The lender Mabel Morrison was married to Alfred Morrison, whose father had amassed a fortune through business (Plate 12). Both were collectors. Mabel Morrison was confned to bed rest, possibly with a prolapsed womb, from 1874 to 1886, but collecting textiles was evidently something she could pursue. For Fair Women she was willing to lend from her collection of miniatures and lace.61 These amounted to thirteen miniatures (including the writer Germaine de Staël and Marie Antoinette); a piece of seventeenth-century Jewish silk used in a synagogue; and nearly twenty lace objects of Spanish, Venetian, French and British origin. Morrison was an established collector of lace and her home had been featured in Mary Eliza Haweis’s Beautiful Houses

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of 1882: ‘The tea-room fascinated us more than any in the house, for here began the lace collection … Some of these are entire altar-fronts of choice Venetian and Spanish point of marvellous delicacy … The world will never again have leisure to perfect a skill so minute, so tedious, and so fascinating’.62 In spite of Haweis’s proclamation about the bygone days of lace-making, Morrison seemed determined to prove otherwise. The pieces were not all historic. Several examples from her collection exhibited at Fair Women were by Charlotte Elizabeth Treadwin, a renowned nineteenth-century lace-maker, such as ‘modern Venetian point’ and a copy of the cap of a Devonshire worthy.63 Lace was a contemporary fashionable fabric (Treadwin produced court dress and costumes for fancy dress balls) and Morrison’s lace also signalled this aspect of her collecting practice.64 She had also amassed a collection of Japanese textiles, and reportedly wore objects she collected. Elizabeth Kramer argues that Morrison and women like her ran the risk of being confated with the surrounding artistic objects in her ‘beautiful’ rooms.65 In contrast, Fair Women moved the textiles out of the home into a public gallery. While ‘House Beautiful’ literature attended to the decoration of body and home, the display of Morrison’s lace collection in Fair Women could also be linked to two other emerging developments: economic support for contemporary craftswomen and connoisseurial interest in lace production. Treadwin had recently died (1890) and Morrison’s collection of her work indicated the value of contemporary lace design and production in Devon, where Treadwin’s workshop was continued by her assistant Ellen Herbert.66 It was a model of what Deborah Cherry terms ‘matronage’ in the context of the way in which Victorian women artists sought out networks of organisations, audiences and buyers.67 Another of Morrison’s concerns was the survival of the industry in Ireland. The ‘Irish Point Lace Apron’ was made at a convent in Youghal. Janice Helland considers the wave of interest in purchasing ‘real’ Irish lace for court and bridal gowns as opposed to imported lace and suggests a further symbolic meaning for female patrons beyond adornment.68 While the collecting of Irish lace had imperial resonances, it also offered a nineteenth-century incarnation of a ‘fair trade’ for Irish women workers. The public display of Morrison’s lace collection helped to establish her pre-eminence as an engaged and knowledgeable collector; her collection was later featured in a 1903 Burlington Magazine article by Margaret Jourdain, which emphasised Morrison’s interest in the revival of Honiton lace by Treadwin and Irish crochet work. Jourdain also noted Morrison’s role as a designer as well as a collector.69 Intriguingly Caroline Dakers posits that Morrison was not interested in her husband’s vast art collection, promptly selling it off after his death in 1897, aside from heirlooms, and indeed she was taken to court by extended family members in 1900 over removing the latter.70 In contrast Morrison’s willingness to lend textiles to exhibitions, suggests a vested interest in them as objects. Morrison was one of several women who lend groups of particular kinds of objects, thereby demonstrating their own knowledge and expertise particularly in the arena of decorative art and design. The Fair Women loans belonging to the writer and horticulturalist Dorothy Nevill numbered nearly thirty objects and indicated her importance as the preeminent collector of scent bottles. The perfume bottles included seven mid-eighteenth-century porcelain examples of Chelsea and Bow porcelain as well as others by Wedgwood, Sèvres and Dresden enamel. The collection included a small selection of boxes, jewellery and a travelling inkstand. Her reminiscences give hints about her acquisition of

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china pieces from dealers (Webb) and sales (Blessington). Nevill had also appeared in Private View of the Old Masters Exhibition, Royal Academy, 1888; while she had not lent works to that exhibition, her appearance in the painting clutching a catalogue signalled her public profle (Plate 6). Nevill was a descendant of Horace Walpole and she further emphasised this collecting genealogy in 1894 by publishing an illustrated volume on Mannington Hall and the Walpoles. Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth has recently documented her early importance as a collector of Sèvres porcelain. Nevill’s reputation as a collector was established through her loan of twenty pieces of Sèvres to the 1862 Special Loans Exhibition of Works of Art at South Kensington. Although early on her husband Reginald was given credit for her collecting, unlike other women she collected on her own. McCaffrey-Howarth argues that although her early life had been tainted by scandal, collecting allowed her to re-establish her social status.72 Displaying the scent bottles at Fair Women underscored her authority on porcelain. They also hinted at a very contemporary aspect of self-fashioning and cosmetics. The cultural meanings of perfume are deep and nuanced, and responses to the scent bottles may have been multi-sensorial. The perfume bottles themselves would have resonated with olfactory memories, as the distinctive nature of scents worn by fashionable women was a sensory aspect of moving through an exhibition space in the late Victorian period.73 Constance Classen has shifted attention to the history and cultural meanings of senses other than the visual, notably smell.74 Nevill kept a museum-like home, with her numerous collections of snuffboxes, ironwork, corset buttons, silhouettes, wax medallions, lockets, eighteenth-century porcelain and pictures. She also kept a vast garden at Dangstein near Petersfeld in Sussex and was friendly with William Hooker at Kew Gardens. She had extraordinary contacts and political knowledge; her lively salon attracted an eclectic personal network of politicians, writers, artists and scientists. Nevill was also a founder member of the Primrose League.75 Arranging a personal museum in the country resembling an eighteenth-century collection of curiosities was not unique to Nevill, but it was a mode of collecting that had historically been more often associated with men.76 Nevill wrote about her own approach to collecting for the Connoisseur in 1902: 71

The word ‘collection’ which appears at the head of this paper seems to me something of a misnomer for such a term is hardly applicable to the various objets d’art which I have in the course of my life gathered together. … it has been my inclination to surround myself with things which appealed to me either by reason of their intrinsic beauty, their historic interest, or reputed rarity. I may add that in many cases I have, I must confess, preferred the curious to the beautiful … collecting has … been a great hobby of mine … I can lay no claim to having ever been a systematic collector.77 According to Nevill her reasons for collecting were tripartite: ‘intrinsic beauty’, ‘historic interest’ and ‘reputed rarity’. However, she valued the latter two characteristics more than the frst, suggesting an echo of an eighteenth-century male collector of ‘curiosity cabinets’ rather than more recent aesthetes favouring ‘beauty’. In spite of her insistence on her ‘hobby’ that lacked a ‘systematic’ method, she went onto position herself as a pioneer of the modern fascination with collecting. She advocated careful research and examination of the objects themselves. Her collection epitomises that of many of the lenders in its amassing of a miscellany of objects, but it also reveals an

40 The Exhibition interest in the public dissemination of collecting through the press and exhibitions such as Fair Women. Part of her collection, Sussex iron frebacks, was left to the South Kensington Museum, upon her death. Jordanna Bailkin highlights the link between Nevill’s bequest to South Kensington and her belief in the educational value of museums.78 Nevill’s earlier participation in loan exhibitions give insight into the longevity of this interest, but also her desire to give public access to another facet of her collecting practice.

Women and Collecting The objects in Fair Women encompassed an array of functions and meanings: imperial networks and gift-giving, European politics, family heirlooms and contemporary fashionability. Julie Verlaine has recently argued that it was great expositions that awakened women’s interest in becoming collectors and patrons of modern art. She suggests that by visiting the expositions, women were encouraged to collect art and expand their collecting horizons.79 The massive popularity of Fair Women, albeit as a themed West End exhibition, similarly foregrounded an expansive range of objects that women might collect. In this case it could be seen to encourage women to collect historic as well as modern objects. As was evident from the displays, women were already growing existing collections and creating new ones. Fair Women was an opportunity for the Committee to tell a story about female collectors. The distinctive nature of each collector/collection was further emphasised in the display and the catalogue where objects were not always numbered individually, but rather grouped together into cases. In Fair Women, collectors’ narratives were made meaningful for the public because several of the objects were never shown before as collections. Thus, the show itself advertised collections, and collectors had agency in creating the narrative and in the process encouraged others to consider their own collecting narratives. In her discussion of collecting as social practice, Mieke Bal addresses the interplay of narrative and collecting. She suggests that collecting comes to mean collecting precisely when a series of haphazard purchases or gifts suddenly become a meaningful sequence. That is the moment when a self-conscious narrator begins to tell its story, bringing about a semiotics for a narrative of identity, history and situation. Hence, one can also look at it from the perspective of the collector as an agent in the narrative.80 The displays in Fair Women effectively facilitated opportunities for collectors to broadcast their knowledge about art objects and about themselves.81 This was exemplifed in the attention given to Morrison’s collection of lace. Terri Baker argues that it is possible to interpret Nevill collecting of Sussex ironwork as participation in the development of a national narrative.82 However, rather than a reclamation of narratives about British history, Nevill’s perfume bottle collection suggests a more cosmopolitan and transnational focus, albeit with an equally serious attention to eighteenth-century porcelain.83 Nineteenth-century women collectors were invariably categorised in cartoons and the popular press as consumers or ‘shoppers’ in opposition to male collectors, seen as ‘serious and creative’. These gendered distinctions are often cited in discussions of Victorian collections.84 However, Fair Women suggests that women’s approaches to

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collecting were not so easily defned. Susan Pearce considers the way collectors construct their relationship with the material world through their collections. Therefore, domestic collections gathered by women can also be interpreted as extensions of the self.85 Collecting enabled women to escape the confnes of domesticity and develop an independent identity as a collector.86 In her analysis of American women collectors, Diane Sachko Macleod suggests that the teleological view of collecting as a premeditated process of selection, classifcation and ordering was the antithesis of the more intimate, subjective and impromptu relationship that existed between women and things in nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. According to Macleod, women perceived their immediate environments as an extension of themselves and the ‘symbiotic relationship between owners and things accounts for women’s partiality for the so-called minor arts –porcelain, glassware, embroidery, carpets, lace – and explains, in part, why they have not been taken more seriously as collections’.87 This had resonance in certain contemporary reviews of the show. It was the association of women with a naïve and haphazard amassing of objects that diminished the exhibition in the eyes of art critics such as Phillips who found the objects ‘imperfectly digestable’.88 The Studio’s description of the exhibition as objects a dowager brings out from the ‘museums of old mansions’ could be seen in the context of an Illustrated London News engraving of a decade earlier which shows this kind of intergenerational sharing as objects spill out of doors in a large armoire (Figure 2.1). Both the review and the print

Figure 2.1 ‘Grandmother’s Treasures’, Illustrated London News 1873, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

42 The Exhibition make clear that the objects belonged in the domestic interior. However, Fair Women broke this association on several levels. For many lenders and visitors, the individual collections of objects had a meaningful sequence, nor were the collectors necessarily subjective. The exhibition suggested narratives that were alternative to viewing the objects as impromptu or intimate extensions of individual women. For a start, women displayed representations of other women. Some examples, such as Burne-Jones’s Circe (1869) and Sandys’s Medea (1869), had been fercely attacked when they were frst shown.89 Medea, one of Tennyson’s ‘fair woman’, depicts an enchantress in the act of incantation. Elizabeth Prettejohn identifes the Medea painting as ‘anachronistic’, transgressive, not nostalgic, ‘where overwhelming female power, including the potential for murder and infanticide comes dramatically to the fore’, compelling the Victorian viewer to confront a past that was different from both the present and the ancient world as they conceived it.90 The increasing popularity of depictions of dangerous women at the end of the century, such as Medea and Circe, has been linked in scholarship to male anxiety about women’s growing sexual and intellectual independence, but women may have had more sympathetic interpretations.91 Intriguingly, Medea was lent by Mary Clabburn Crosse, while the (Wine of) Circe had been purchased after the 1892 Leyland sale (where it sold for the large sum of £1,412 or 1,350 gn. [McLean]) by Gertrude Foster, the daughter of a wealthy northern manufacturer.92 While some of the Fair Women portraits of women were ‘minor’ art, they occupied an intermediary category that prioritised classifcation and indeed biography, nor did their acquisition seem arbitrary. The catalogue noticeably resisted associations with haphazard purchases by emphasising the provenance of objects in addition to their aesthetic qualities. It was possible for collectors to identify and categorise these objects suggesting planned collecting. The catalogue record of the collection of eight pieces of Flemish, French and English lace, as well as a French embroidered dress and fan belonging to Mrs. John R. Holland implied careful selection. The provenance of Holland’s objects was emphasised. For example, the Brussels lace had been made for the Exhibition of 1873, lace came from a dress worn by Queen Victoria in 1842 or a fan ‘once belonging to the Empress Eugenie’. In the catalogue, these ‘minor arts’ were subject to order and classifcation alongside references to more intimate object biographies. The display of women’s collecting in temporary exhibitions could also be interpreted as a site of resistance, both signalling the worth of intimate relationships with objects and a direct engagement with new ways of thinking about collecting as an intellectual endeavour. Some of the lenders seem to have collected in partnership, for example, Lady Cecil (Kerr) Scott-Montagu lent a Chinese fan while her husband lent a lacquer Japanese fan. A large collection of miniatures was contributed by Eleanor Louisa (Hawkes) de Falbe, the daughter of an industrialist and politician, and a similar collection was lent by her third husband, Christian Frederic de Falbe, the Danish Ambassador to London.93 The death of her second husband (John Gerard Leigh) had left her fnancially independent with a life-interest in Luton Hoo. By the time of marriage to De Falbe her children were grown and she had relative autonomy; the couple mingled with members of the Royal Family, and seem to have turned to collecting. Travel within and beyond London in search of objects implied freedom and the development of connoisseurial networks. Macleod has recently analysed the ways in which Victorian women found pleasure in collecting as a couple. For example, Queen Victoria herself

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and Prince Albert enjoyed collecting together for Osborne House; Charlotte Schreiber and her second husband Charles Schreiber travelled across Europe in search of ceramics. Collecting was an enterprise that husband and wife could do together, reinforcing a happy marital union.94 Drawing on the psychological theorists D.W. Winnicott and Melanie Klein, who argued that objects are crucial to the development of the self, Macleod suggests that a theory of ‘collecting-as-play’ offers insight into individual motivations for art collecting.95 These ideas can be usefully applied to Fair Women where a signifcant number of women collected alongside their husbands (while other loans ascribed to husbands of Committee members implied such a partnership). Temporary exhibitions gave public recognition for women’s expertise and some such as Nevill transferred this agency more permanently as a museum benefactor. Although lenders were not benefactors, Fair Women was an example of making meaning material through the appearance of objects in a public gallery. In this case the exhibition did not offer a permanent commemoration, but it was the result of a collaborative endeavour to share collections outside the environs of the family home as in the case of Burdett-Coutts and Ward. The association of historical decorative objects with women implied a link with sentiment and collecting. Objects were vested with particular meanings as they passed through families. Again, these reasons for collecting were intimate, but not necessarily subjective or impromptu; they were often more about the preservation of history and material culture. Daly Goggin and Fowkes Tobin note the often overlooked role of women as memory-keepers for families, local communities and the nation, and call attention to the fact that women often work collaboratively, making, collecting and sharing objects.96 Jane Hamlett shows that the use of objects to mark relationships offered advantages to women enabling control over commemorative practices and draws attention to women’s responsibility for allocating personal effects that were not valuable enough to be specifed in wills.97 Hill develops these insights to explore the ways women made the meaning and relationships of past relatives material through donations to museums.98 While impermanent, exhibitions such as Fair Women were a parallel arena in which family material heritage was given meaning and made public. Other objects in Fair Women were not so much associated with genealogy and inherited collections, but rather recent collecting practice and taste. The prevalence of fans in Fair Women had a direct connection with the terrain of contemporary fashionability. These kinds of objects were not only to be placed in ‘house beautiful’ interiors, their display alongside portraits emphasised their bodily associations and the performative aspects of collecting. Articles on historical and contemporary fans appeared on the pages of women’s magazines and new art periodicals such as the Studio (begun in 1893).99 Fans, jewellery and opera glasses could also have an identifable provenance, and there was precedence for their museological value as objects, in part due to the 1891 donation of a large collection to the British Museum by Charlotte Schreiber. Schreiber’s carefully organised catalogue had just been republished by the British Museum, giving professional imprimatur to the acquisition of fans and their provenance. Eatwell has argued that the growth in women ceramic collectors in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was in part the result of greater access to information and this was increasingly true of other kinds of objects such as fans.100 The inclusion of an abundance of fans in Fair Women was a precursor for what effectively emerged as a boom in ‘fan culture’ in art publishing. The art press was crucial to the circulation of knowledge about fan history and collecting; coverage of Schreiber’s fan collection was transatlantic.101 In sum, the

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women collectors in Fair Women were intervening in a dynamic arena. Collecting and exhibitions were a locus for local, national and transnational object histories, through which women could develop various kinds of expertise including object-attribution, object-making, women’s history, genealogy and networks of exchange.

‘Robbed of Their Chief Ornaments’: Philanthropic Citizens and the Market The Fair Women exhibition was one in a series of ‘loan’ exhibitions in London during the 1890s that gathered works from private collections, including the Royal Academy Old Masters exhibitions, Guildhall Loan collection (1892), early Italian paintings at the Burlington Fine Arts Club (1894) and early Italian art at the New Gallery (1894).102 Lenders to these exhibitions were seen in a diversity of ways. On the one hand they were philanthropic and educational, giving a wider public the opportunity to see objects they would not otherwise be able to see, and it was argued, increasingly in the 1880s, that cultural philanthropy could improve society.103 On the other hand, loan exhibitions – and their lenders – also played a part in an increasingly volatile art market. The economic context for these exhibitions was a market wherein works in venerable private collections were often sold, primarily by members of European aristocracy, to buyers with new money, both within Europe and in North America. It was the latter type of buyer who caused concern in the art press and was directly alluded to in reviews of the show: ‘The drains upon the great private collections of England have been terrible lately; to enumerate those which have been dispersed or robbed of their chief ornaments, would only be to renew the pangs suffered by all art lovers’.104 Several reviewers castigated this recent dispersal of works through transatlantic markets. The works exhibited in Fair Women were enmeshed within this complex pattern of exhibition and selling, and women were active players in the marketplace. Considerable attention was paid in the press to the donors of the paintings in a way that was at least ideologically removed from market forces. In this context the lenders were exemplars of cultural philanthropy and good citizenship: ‘generous owners who have consented to deprive themselves during a whole season of many priceless works of art for the beneft of the public’.105 There was an implied obligation on the part of the owners of works to make them available to the public through loan exhibitions. In tapping into an existing pattern of Old Master exhibitions in London, under the auspices of the Royal Family, Fair Women emphasised the long-established history of women’s involvement in cultural patronage in Britain. It was Queen Victoria who modelled this mantra of cultural philanthropy for collectors in England, taking ‘the higher and more enlightened view that they are only legally absolute owners of their great possessions, but morally remain trustees in respect of them for the whole world’.106 Art collections were not merely for personal pleasure, but functioned as a kind of charitable trust (a frequent model in the present) presided over by morally enlightened ‘trustee’ collectors. In the case of Fair Women, emphasis was placed on Queen Victoria as a fgurehead and model for a network of women collectors and exhibition organisers. Collectors were following her example, wherein the exhibition did more than gather beautiful and fashionable collectables: its higher moral purpose was ‘public’, even global, good. Contemporary female visitors were interpellated in this visual and material enactment of citizenship. While few would own works as valuable as those on display, many were

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involved in some form of cultural philanthropy through organisations, such as the Home Arts and Industries Association and the Kyrle Society, intent on bringing art to the poor.107 However, critical responses to Fair Women made it clear that the show and the members of the Committee were not quite so aloof from the modern art world. The exhibition lenders included fgures associated more directly with the art market. The art dealer William Agnew lent an 1872 picture by the Royal Academician G.D. Leslie titled Lavinia that he had obtained in 1891 at the Christie, Manson and Woods sale of the large modern collection of Charles Matthews.108 The painting had been sold accompanied by the lines from James Thomson’s poem, ‘Thoughtless of beauty, she was beauty’s self’ and Fair Women provided an ideal opportunity for re-exhibiting the work. The dealers Edmond Deprez and Otto Gutekunst, who were taken into partnership with Colnaghi in 1894, contributed drawings by Downman and Cosway, both of which they were presumably hoping to sell.109 Charles J. Wertheimer, the brother of the dealer Asher Wertheimer, was a renowned collector of paintings and decorative art, and his presence as a lender to the show also indicates links to the market and the interest for collectors of ‘fair women’ portraits and objects. Direct references were made to attribution and the art market. While public and private collections, particularly of Old Masters, had tended to be associated with male collectors, dealers and curators, the existence of the Committee demonstrated that women were implicated in the display and circulation of fne art. Most recently, in her study of the Burlington Fine Arts Club exhibitions, Stacey Pierson has noted that while prohibited from membership, women were present as wives of members and as lenders in their own right which ‘in some ways challenges the common characterization of women as partners of collectors, or secondary collectors, rather than primary collectors, particularly as participants in exhibitions of collections’.110 Fair Women can be seen as a turning point in this regard. Women were staking a claim for space that was seen to be dominated by men and were not only ‘gatekeepers’, but ‘buyers’ and ‘sellers’. As a result, the press were increasingly alert to the role of women in the circulation of art objects, and by extension their role in discerning and ascribing value. The Committee itself embodied the dynamic nature of the art market given that several Committee members were owners of newly acquired collections. One Committee member, Radnor, also had direct experience of the art market. The ‘Longford Holbein’, the Ambassadors, had been put on the market in 1890, along with two other works and was bought by the National Gallery.111 Radnor was unwilling to lend any paintings to Fair Women (she did lend four chatelaines); the pictures had probably been sold to the National Gallery to fnance the upkeep of Longford and pay ‘death duties’. Rising art prices, particularly of eighteenth-century portraits, made selling them appealing to aristocratic families under fnancial pressure as a result of the agricultural depression and rising taxation.112 Scholars have suggested that the purchasing of these same works was part of a desire of the wealthy and upper-middle-class elites to collect works from what was seen as a ‘golden age’ of portrait painting to display at least the trappings of a patrician inheritance.113 Indeed Reynolds and Romney were by far the most copious in number with nineteen portraits by the former and twenty-one by the latter included in the exhibition, while Thomas Lawrence numbered nine and Thomas Gainsborough only six. However, the sensationally expensive Iveagh loans were not redolent of imagined family genealogy, as neither sitter was aristocratic: one a singer (Gainsborough’s Mrs Sheridan) and the other an actress (Romney’s Emma, Lady Hamilton). In fact, many

46 The Exhibition of the Fair Women sitters lacked a patrician inheritance, instead they were associated with the stage, sexual independence and anticipated late-nineteenth-century celebrity culture. The works suggest an interplay between historicity and modernity, rather than simply an imagined heritage for the newly rich. The exhibition did coincide with a dramatic increase in books and articles on these artists. Phillips’s more guarded praise of Romney in the National Review may have had something to do with his own luxuriously illustrated volume on Reynolds published in 1894. Hilda Gamlin published a biography of Romney, while Walter Armstrong followed his earlier volume on Gainsborough with a second one in 1898. The visibility and reception of Fair Women must have helped to stoke the collecting fever around these artists.114 Romney’s work fetched unprecedented returns during this period. For example, the bidding for Lady Hamilton as Circe reached £4,842 10s before it was sold privately in 1890. Several more Romney portraits were sold at auction in 1892 and in May of 1894, a two-day auction on behalf of Romney’s descendents raised £9,742.115 Reviews suggest that the success of the exhibition added value to the works that had been shown by putting privately owned works into public circulation. During July of 1894, works belonging to Caroline, Duchess of Montrose, were put up for sale and the fact that both Reynolds’s Mrs Pownall as Hebe and Romney’s Mrs Moody had been in the Fair Women exhibition was duly noted in the press. The Atheneneum remarked gloomily, ‘some noteworthy examples of the English School of painting, belonging to the Duchess of Montrose, will change owners at Christie’s, and we fear, cross the seas, never, perhaps, to return’.116 The Reynolds’s work appeared with the Fair Women exhibition history in the sales catalogue and reportedly sold for £350.117 In her analysis of loans in the early South Kensington collection at mid-century, Ann Eatwell found that the advantage to collectors and dealers of improved provenance for loans that were later sold was not a driving force in the relationship between collectors and the museum.118 However, by the end of the nineteenth century this seemed to be an implicit advantage for lenders to the Fair Women exhibition. Fair Women can be seen as another catalyst in this frenzy for works by Romney and his contemporaries. Barbara Pezzini and Alycen Mitchell have recently charted the complex interplay between art writing and the market in the case of Romney.119 Women played roles in this wider context as ‘curators’ as well as sellers or buyers of work. To add irony to the proclamations concerning vanishing English heritage, women from ‘cross the seas’ were amongst the participants and lenders to Fair Women. But large portraits by Reynolds and Romney were not the only objects from Fair Women that were soon dispersed following the exhibition. As with the Old Master paintings, miniatures featured in the international art market; the Frank Woodroffe collection exhibited was sold three years later and widely dispersed amongst public and private collections (including Pierpont Morgan).120 Charles Wertheimer’s collection of Millais paintings, including Cinderella which had appeared in Fair Women, also changed hands and was acquired by the South African collector Sir Joseph Robinson.121 Whilst the Fair Women Committee did not take an active role in these later sales, the exhibition helped to increase the visibility of a variety of works. In this sense, by gathering a large collection of historic and modern loans the Committee offered pre-sale publicity to the owners who went on to sell their work. The modern art market impinged upon the reception of Fair Women in relation to another contemporary development: connoisseurship. During the 1890s, Old Masters had come under renewed focus in part due to the popularity of the methodologies of

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the Italian scholar Giovanni Morelli, who developed a method for the attribution of artworks founded on research and close observation in order to identify the ‘hands’ of the artist, their individual style. The growing interest in ‘scientifc’ connoisseurship meant that attributions of many works were called into question.122 It was not surprising that art critics raised this issue in their reviews of the exhibition. Roach le Schonix wrote of the Greek or Graeco-Roman portrait of the second century, ‘we would like to be assured that these pictures have not been touched up or improved.’123 The emphasis on portraiture in Fair Women meant that the question of attribution had a serious implication beyond ‘style’ or artist. The catalogue of Fair Women included short biographies of illustrious sitters and thus for reviewers and gallery visitors the identity of the sitter was paramount. This was also refected in the contemporary fascination with biography. The critic George Moore averred that the portrait of Isabella d’Este was of superior quality: a ‘noble portrait ... with her supremely classic features, like the statue of some Roman goddess touched to a glowing animation of peach-bloom cheeks and brilliant hazel eyes’.124 In contrast, Phillips questioned whether the portrait of Isabella d’Este, formerly ascribed to Giorgione, really was ‘the counterfeit presentment of that ardent patroness of the arts, of that indefatigable collector, whom Leonardo da Vinci had portrayed’?125 Similarly, the anonymous reviewer in the Athenaeum, probably F.G. Stephens, observed that it was historically impossible for Holbein to have painted the portrait of Margaret, Queen of Scotland. The reviewer went on to dispute the attribution of several other portraits purportedly by Hals and Rubens, and was even more outraged with the misreading of iconography in a portrait titled Lady Jane Grey, which was, in fact, a Mary Magdalene, ‘whose traditional vase of gold stands on the table’ (Figure 2.2).126 As with Isabella D’Este, paintings were celebrated as likenesses of famous women as much as (if not more than) their supposed attribution to famous artists. Thus, the potential risks in lending works, were not simply to do with transport and care, but could result in a dubious attribution as in the case of Lady Jane Grey. In displaying works of art in temporary exhibitions, Committee members were making decisions that could have both positive and negative effects for lenders. Several of the Committee members, with collections-based knowledge such as Radnor and Wantage, would have been aware of these debates. Women as patrons, collectors and writers were becoming increasingly vocal in this new connoisseurship as it related to not only fne art but also decorative art. The latter was an arena, as was clear in the case of Morrison and Nevill, where women had already established authority and the Grafton Galleries exhibition could help to cement this further. In Fair Women a third expanding market was visible and that was contemporary portraiture. Modern Victorian art had long held appeal, particularly for middle-class patrons, in part due to its avoidance of debates about authenticity, but also because it was possible to engage directly with modernity. It was also an arena, like collecting, where women could marshal their own agency, self-fashioning and independence. Fair Women subtly encouraged self-expression. In displaying a diverse range of objects, ‘precious things’ and ‘feminine weapons’, the exhibition was encouraging collecting as a worthwhile activity for the growing number of middle-class women. The exhibition gave space to women as serious collectors, inscribing values that were to do with ‘intrinsic beauty’ but also attribution and provenance. In so doing the exhibition gave clues and guidance to visitors on how women might collect. The latter was a marked shift from the mocking and comedic representations of frivolous female collectors in the 1870s. It emphasised the centrality of women to exhibition culture, not

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Figure 2.2 Lady Jane Grey by Lucas de Heere [Lady as the Magdalen by the Master of the Female Half-Lengths, c.1525–1550], Fair Women 1894

simply as viewers but also as keepers or ‘curators’ of their own collections. This was a model that had already been taken up by both aristocratic women and newer members of elite society in order to demonstrate their cultural standing. Many of the collectors who contributed to Fair Women had developed independent identities through their objects and collections as exemplifed by Morrison. Finally, the exhibition made clear

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the signifcance of women as collectors and the increasing levels of participation, and indeed intervention, by women in galleries and museums. The display in Fair Women of several large collections lent by single collectors such as Nevill and Morrison emphasised this importance of ordering and categorisation of objects. Here the exhibition documented that motivation to collect was not necessarily simply for the possession of beautiful or aesthetically pleasurable objects, but rather for the pleasure of locating objects and amassing scholarly, historical and connoisseurial knowledge. Fair Women sustained models of philanthropic citizenship and these intersected with women’s investment in philanthropic projects in education. In spite of these higher moral arguments for collecting, Fair Women was not aloof from the modern marketplace. In the case of Old Masters, evidence suggests that the Committee and the works in the exhibition were entangled in the very transatlantic markets that were reviled in the press. However, the emphasis on portraiture shifted the focus from the artist to the identity of the sitter and the accompanying biographies as a primary concern. This played into contemporary interest in women’s history, while the legacy of aestheticism enabled women to establish authority as collectors. Fair Women combined categories which were generally separated in exhibitions. In so doing the exhibition intimated that women were involved in historical as well as contemporary collecting, and decorative as well as fne art.

Notes 1 Charlotte Gere and Judy Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World (London: British Museum, 2010). Fair Women echoed a much earlier loan exhibition of Ancient and Modern Jewellery and Personal Ornaments (1873) held at South Kensington facilitated in part by a committee of women. In the intervening decades, jewellery had remained an important component of national and international exhibitions showcasing contemporary design. 2 Mary Eliza Joy Haweis, The Art of Beauty (London: Chatto & Windus, 1883), 107; Gere and Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria, 190–96. 3 Marcia R. Pointon, Brilliant Effects: Gems and Jewellery as Agency in History, Literature, and the Visual Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 308. 4 See a similar example, Bracelet with nine lockets, one with a miniature of the left eye of Charlotte, Princess of Wales (1796–1817), serpentine border mounted with diamonds and a ruby and human hair, Royal Collection. Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 53; Vanessa Remington, Victorian Miniatures: In the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen (London: Royal Collection Publications, 2010), vol. II, 541. 5 Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography & Remembrance (New York; London: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006), 65–80; Pointon, Brilliant Effects, 308. 6 Meaghan Clarke, ‘On Tempera and Temperament: Women, Art, and Feeling at the Fin de Siècle’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 23 (2016), https://doi. org/10.16995/ntn.767; Focus: Victorian Sentimentality (Tate Britain, 2012). 7 While jewellery did not have the same impact in Paris in 1889 and Chicago in 1893 as it had in earlier international expositions, it did demonstrate the growing signifcance of Tiffany. Gere and Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria, 289–93. 8 Tiffany & Co. were well known for their production of luxury items, but opera glasses of gold were rare – usually the surfaces were mother of pearl or enamel in imitation of eighteenth-century pieces. Here the frm have used engine turning to create a decorative surface on the gold, which has been adorned with scattered diamonds. Kathryn Jones, Gold (London: Royal Collection Trust, 2014), 55. 9 Margaret Maynard, ‘“A Dream of Fair Women”: Revival Dress and the Formation of Late Victorian Images of Femininity’, Art History 12, no. 3 (1 September 1989): 337.

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10 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art, 2015, 109. 11 Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 2007); Julie Codell, ‘Indian Crafts and Imperial Policy: Hybridity, Purifcation, and Imperial Subjectivities’, in Material Cultures, 1740–1920, 149–70. 12 H.G. Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, Our Viceregal Life in India (London: J. Murray, 1890), 270; Bharath Ramamrutham, Usha R. Bala Krishnan, and Meera Sushil Kumar, Dance of the Peacock: Jewellery Traditions of India (Mumbay: India Book House Limited, 2010); Anna Jackson et al., Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts (London: V&A Publications, 2009); Charlotte Gere, Victorian Jewellery Design (London: Kimber, 1972), 236–42. 13 Calcutta, Bombay & Simla: Bourne & Shepherd, Cashmir Females: Prince of Wales Tour of India 1875–6 (vol. 4), Albumen print, Royal Collection. 14 There is also an Indian fan in the Bristol collection. 15 Richard Caton Woodville, The Queen receiving the Indian Princes [the Maharajas of Bhavnager and Kapurthala and Thakoor of Gonda] at the Opening of the Imperial Institute, 10 May 1893, Royal Collection. Gere and Rudoe, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria, 294–301. 16 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886, Empire of India, Special Catalogue of Exhibits by the Government of India and Private Exhibitors (London: William Clowes and sons, 1886), 217. 17 Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2007), 149, 165–69. 18 See also David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire (London: Allen Lane; Penguin Press, 2001); Codell, ‘Indian Crafts and Imperial Policy’. 19 Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850 (New York; [Great Britain]: Knopf, 2005), 6. 20 Whistler continued to advance this trend in the 1890s. David Park Curry, James McNeill Whistler: Uneasy Pieces (New York: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2004). 21 Her surviving library includes Charlotte Schreiber’s fan catalogues, Bristol Collection. 22 She later won a gold medal for a fan she had produced (1897) and was given the freedom of the Company in 1910. Many thanks to Chloe Woodrow, House and Collections Manager, Ickworth. 23 Ariel Beaujot, Victorian Fashion Accessories (London: Berg, 2013), 64; Nancy Rose Marshall, ‘Social Graces’, in James Tissot: Victorian Life, Modern Love, ed. Malcolm Warner and Nancy Rose Marshall (New Haven; London: American Federation of Arts, Yale University Press, 1999), 85, 98–100. 24 Beaujot, Victorian Fashion Accessories, 79–85. 25 Sarah Cheang, ‘Selling China: Class, Gender and Orientalism at the Department Store’, in Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling, ed. Louisa Iarocci (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 117–36. 26 Violet Greville, ‘Place Aux Dames’, Graphic, 26 May 1894, 627. 27 Similarly in the National Portrait Gallery, where these made up nearly half of the women’s portraits collected in the nineteenth century, the collection was shaped by the ‘guarantees of genealogical authenticity which they confer upon the nation imagined as a family’. Perry, History’s Beauties, 36. 28 ‘Who was the frst female violinist?’ The Strad, August 1894, accessed 10 September 2019, www.thestrad.com/cpt-latests/from-the-archive-who-was-the-frst-female-violinist/; Baroness von Zedlitz, ‘A Chat with Lady Hallé’, Cassell’s Family Magazine 1894, 779–84. 29 Marcia Pointon, ‘“Surrounded with Brilliants”: Miniature Portraits in Eighteenth-Century England’, The Art Bulletin 83, no. 1 (1 March 2001): 48, https://doi.org/10.2307/3177190. 30 S. Beale, ‘“Fair Women” in London’, The American Architect and Building News 45, no. 975 (1 September 1894): 85. 31 The majority of miniatures in the show were eighteenth-century or early nineteenth-century examples, but a more recent example was an 1884 portrait of the Princess of Wales by J. Turrell.

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32 George Charles Williamson, Portrait Miniatures: From the Time of Holbein 1531 to That of Sir William Ross 1860: A Handbook for Collectors (London: G. Bell, 1897). 33 ‘The Grafton Galleries’, The Yorkshire Herald and the York Herald, 22 May 1894, 6. 34 F.G. Stephens, ‘The Grafton Galleries’, The Magazine of Art, May (1894): 316–22. 35 Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 118–53; Flaminia Gennari-Santori, ‘Hans Holbein Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan’, in Saved!: 100 Years of the National Art Collections Fund, ed. Richard Verdi (London Hayward Gallery: Scala, 2003), 92–97. 36 Although Stephens claimed she was only too happy to succeed to the throne. Stephens, ‘The Grafton Galleries’. 37 Julius Bryant, Kenwood, Paintings in the Iveagh Bequest (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2003), 200. 38 Mond later donated female mummy portraits to the British Museum and forty-two works to the National Gallery. 39 Miniature portraits of the opera singers Madame Grisi and Madame Pasta. 40 Robert René Meyer, John James Masquerier and His Circle (London: Connoisseur, 1922), 144; Christie, Manson and Woods, Ancient and Modern Pictures & Drawings of the Late Baroness Burdett-Coutts, 1922, 16–17. 41 ‘Fair Women’, Pears’ Pictorial 1, no. 5 (September 1894): 30. 42 Angela Burdett-Coutts, Baroness Burdett-Coutts by Sir William Charles Ross, c.1847, NPG. 43 Mary Spencer-Warren, ‘Illustrated Interviews: The Baroness Burdett-Coutts’, The Strand VII, April (1894): 348–60. 44 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 348; Susan S. Lewis, ‘The Artistic and Architectural Patronage of Angela Burdett Coutts’ (University of London). 45 Catalogue of the Pictures, Miniatures, and Art Books, Collected during the Last Fifty Years by Henry George Bohn (London, 1884), 55. 46 Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts, Woman’s Mission: A Series of Congress Papers on the Philanthropic Work of Women by Eminent Writers (London: Low, Marston & Co, 1893), 5, 134, 364; Andrea Geddes Poole, Philanthropy and the Construction of Victorian Women’s Citizenship: Lady Frederick Cavendish and Miss Emma Cons (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 3–4. 47 Cochrane was a political ally of her father. Thomas Cochrane, The Autobiography of a Seaman. (London: Richard Bentley, 1861); Joseph Allen, Life of the Earl of Dundonald, G.C.B., Rear-Admiral of the United Kingdom, and Admiral of the Red (London: Routledge & Co, 1861). 48 The fan presumably post-dates 1884 when Randolph Churchill and the Prince of Wales resumed their friendship after the Alysford divorce scandal. Jennie Churchill’s liaison with the Prince of Wales may date to before and after the death of her husband in 1895. Celia Lee, The Churchills: A Family Portrait (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 49 Old Titles and New Money: American Heiresses and the British Aristocracy, 25 November 2014–2 August 2015, NPG. 50 Moreover, her daughter, the artist Ethel Sands, was studying in Paris. Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Complete Paintings (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1998), vol. 2, no. 289. 51 Elizabeth Mansfeld, ‘The Edwardian Ancien Régime’, in Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2013), 57–76. 52 Another lender Mrs. Bramley may have been the artist Katherine Graham Bramley, while Mary Clabburn Crosse acquired Medea through artistic circles and families. 53 Geddes Poole, Philanthropy, 128. 54 Elizabeth Crawford, Enterprising Women: The Garretts and Their Circle (London: Francis Boutle, 2002), 252. 55 Ann Eatwell, ‘Lady Charlotte Schreiber and Ceramic Collecting’, in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 133.

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56 Cherry, Beyond the Frame, 154; Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Victorian Women Artists (London: Women’s Press, 1987), 132–46. 57 A reproduction of a portrait miniature of herself as a child by her mother was included in her memoirs. Henrietta Ward, Memoirs of Ninety Years, ed. Isabel G McAllister (London: Hutchinson, 1924), 24. 58 It had belonged to Margerite Gardiner, Lady Blessington, editor of the early nineteenthcentury annuals The Book of Beauty and The Keepsake, containing ‘several of the most subtly-fashioned secret drawers’, Henrietta Ward, Mrs. E. M. Ward’s Reminiscences, ed. Elliott O’Donnell (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1911), 281; Ward, Memories of Ninety Years, 24. 59 Patricia de Montfort, Louise Jopling a Biographical and Cultural Study of the Modern Woman Artist in Victorian Britain (London: Routledge, 2017), 102. 60 R.W. Maude, ‘Mrs. E.M. Ward: Royalties as Artists’, The Strand XVI, October (1898): 266. 61 Caroline Dakers, A Genius for Money Business, Art and the Morrisons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 241. 62 Mary Eliza Haweis, Beautiful Houses: Being a Description of Certain Well-Known Artistic Houses (London: Sampson Low & Co, 1882), 58. 63 Treadwin had won medals at the Great Exhibition and the Exposition Universelle in Paris. 64 Treadwin, Antique Point and Honiton Lace: Containing Plain and Explicit Instructions for Making, Transferring, and Cleaning Laces of Every Description (London: Ward, Lock, 1873); Carol McFadzean, Mrs. Treadwin: Victorian Lace Maker, Designer & Historian (Exeter: Carol McFadzean, 2009). 65 Elizabeth Kramer, ‘From Specimen to Scrap: Japanese Textiles in the British Victorian Interior, 1875–1900’, in Material Cultures, 1740–1920, 129–47. 66 Lara Kriegel, in her study of the Great Exhibition notes Treadwin’s artistic and entrepreneurial innovation, both uplifting the poor women of Devonshire and preserving local craft. Kriegel, Grand Designs, 105. 67 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993), 102–9, 207. 68 Janice Helland, ‘“Caprices of Fashion”: Handmade Lace in Ireland 1883–1907’, Textile History 39, no. 2 (1 November 2008): 193–222, https://doi.org/10.1179/174329508x347089 ; Janice Helland, ‘A Gift of Lace: Queen Mary’s Coronation Train, 1911’, Textile History 49, no. 1 (2 January 2018): 92–111, https://doi.org/10.1080/00404969.2017.1380971. 69 M. Jourdain, ‘Lace in the Collection of Mrs. Alfred Morrison at Fonthill’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 2, no. 4 (1 June 1903): 95. Morrison had designed the wallpaper for the school-room in her house. Haweis, Beautiful Houses, 59. 70 Dakers, A Genius for Money Business, Art and the Morrisons, 246. 71 Dorothy Fanny Nevill, The Reminiscences of Lady Dorothy Nevill, ed. Ralph Henry Nevill (London: Edward Arnold, 1906), 221–24. 72 Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth, ‘Reclaiming Her Scandalous Past: The Sèvres Collection of Lady Dorothy Nevill’, French Porcelain Society Journal 7 (November 2018): 203–8. 73 ‘[S]o strong was the perfume she [Gertrude Campbell] used that I always knew, on coming into a Gallery, if she had been there before me’. Elizabeth Robins Pennell(1929) in Clarke, ‘“Bribery with Sherry”, 141. 74 Constance Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott, eds., Aroma: The Cultural History of Smell (London: Routledge, 1994). 75 Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1999), 121–26. 76 George Edwin Crisp, who loaned jewellery to Fair Women also kept a rather diverse personal collection in his country residence in Suffolk. Sotheby’s, The Varied and Extensive Collections Formed by the Late Frederick Arthur Crisp (London, 1935). 77 Dorothy Nevill, ‘My Collection’, Connoisseur, January–April (1902): 151. 78 Bailkin, The Culture of Property, 247. 79 Julia Verlaine, ‘Expositions and Collections: Women Art Collectors and Patrons in the Age of the Great Expositions’, in Women in International and Universal Exhibitions, 1876–1937, ed. Rebecca Rogers and Myriam Boussahba-Bravard (London: Routledge, 2017), 28.

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80 Mieke Bal, ‘Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting’, in Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Reaktion Books, 1994), 101–2. 81 Myzelev and Potvin, ‘Introduction: The Material of Visual Cultures’, in Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 10. 82 Terri Baker, ‘“The Record of a Life”: Nation and Narrative in Victorian Women’s Collections’, in Contemporary Collecting: Objects, Practices, and the Fate of Things, ed. Kevin M. Moist and David Banash (Scarecrow Press, 2013), 177. 83 This was arguably also true of her metalwork bequest which included a hybrid object, the ‘Bambino Buddha’ brought to Rome from Burmah by a Catholic Missionary (worshipped in Burma as a Buddha and in Rome as Christ), Image of the Infant Christ in Gilt Bedstead, V&A. 84 Rosemary Matthews, ‘Collectors and Why They Collect: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Her Museum of Art’, Journal of the History of Collections 21, no. 2 (1 November 2009): 187, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhp019. 85 Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, Collecting Cultures (London: Routledge, 1999), 13–20, 208. 86 Dianne Sachko Macleod, ‘Art Collecting As Play: Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–1895)’, Visual Resources 27, no. 1 (2011): 20. 87 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940 (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 2008), 6. 88 Claude Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, National Review 23, no. 137 (July 1894): 625. 89 Esther Wood, A Consideration of the Art of Frederick Sandys (Westminster: A. Constable, 1896), 31; Betty Elzea, Frederick Sandys: A Catalogue Raisonné (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2001). 90 Elizabeth Prettejohn, Modern Painters, Old Masters: The Art of Imitation from the PreRaphaelites to the First World War (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2017), 54–55. 91 Images could be read as a recognition of the beauty, seductive appeal and danger of the unknown. Beverly Taylor, ‘Female Savants and the Erotics of Knowledge in Pre-Raphaelite Art’, in Collecting the Pre-Raphaelites: The Anglo-American Enchantment, ed. Margaretta Frederick Watson (Brookfeld; London: Ashgate, 1997), 121–37. Evelyn de Morgan’s Medea (1889) suggests a sympathetic response to contemporary gender politics. Elise Lawton Smith, Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the Allegorical Body (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002), 100–102. 92 ‘Court and Personal’, Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 23 September 1903, 6. Macleod has noted that while female patrons of Pre-Raphaelitism are relatively invisible in historical records, with Aestheticism, women achieved recognition as patrons in their own right. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 215, 289. 93 ‘Will of the Late Madame De Falbe’, Northampton Mercury, 23 March 1900; Charles Lewis Hind, ‘Memoirs of the Moment’, The Academy (23 December 1899): 749. 94 Macleod, Enchanted Lives, 28. 95 Macleod, ‘Art Collecting As Play’, 18. 96 Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, ‘Connecting Women and Death: An Introduction’, in Women and the Material Culture of Death (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 3. 97 Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and Middle-Class Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 182–88. 98 Kate Hill, Women and Museums 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 58–59. 99 See Chapter 6. 100 Schreiber, for example, made concerted attempts, upon donating her collection of ceramics to the South Kensington museum, rigorously to categorise and police the management of her collection. Eatwell, ‘Lady Charlotte Schreiber and Ceramic Collecting’, 133.

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101 ‘Fancies in Fans’ The Collector 1:2 (1 April 1890), p. 90 in Macleod, ‘Art Collecting As Play’, 26. 102 Stacey Pierson, Private Collecting, Exhibitions and the Shaping of Art History in London: The Burlington Fine Arts Club (New York: Routledge, 2017), 39–45. 103 See Chapter 1. 104 Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, 613. 105 Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, 612. 106 Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, 612. 107 On ‘missionary aestheticism’ see Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870–1900: Beauty for the People (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 108 Catalogue of the Highly Important Collection Modern Pictures, Formed by Charles P. Matthews, Esq. Messrs. Christie, Hanson & Woods, June 6, 1891 (London, 1891), 16. 109 Jeremy Howard, ‘A Masterly Old Master Dealer of the Gilded Age: Otto Gutekunst and Colnaghi’, in Colnaghi, Established 1760: The History, ed. Jeremy Howard (London: Colnaghi, 2010), 12–19. 110 Pierson, Private Collecting, 30. Nevill was amongst the lenders to an exhibition of European porcelain in 1873, including a Bow scent bottle which may have the same object she lent to Fair Women. 111 Portrait of a Gentleman (Moroni) and Don Adrián Pulido Pareja (originally attributed to Velázquez, possibly by Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo), National Gallery. 112 In 1894 William Harcourt had introduced a new Estate Duty. Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, 163. 113 Maynard, ‘“A Dream of Fair Women”: Femininity’, 324. 114 Critics had more praise for the British portraiture: ‘the central attention will be on the display of English art of the eighteenth century, which, take it all in all, has only on very rare occasions been surpassed’. Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, 621. 115 Barbara Pezzini and Alycen Mitchell, ‘“Blown into Glittering by the Popular Breath”: The Relationship between George Romney’s Critical Reputation and the Art Market’, Burlington Magazine vol. 157, July, no. 1348 (2015): 467. They also give a helpful context for these prices: roughly ffty paintings a year made over 1,400 guineas at auction. 116 ‘Fine-Art Gossip’, Athenaeum 3281 (14 July 1894): 74. 117 Christie, Manson and Woods, Catalogue of the Collection of Important Pictures, the Property of Her Grace Caroline, Duchess of Montrose (London, 1895), 13; David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2000), no. 1472. 118 There were few references to considerations such as safe storage or provenance in early years. Anne Eatwell, ‘Borrowing from Collectors: The Role of the Loan in the Formation of the Victoria and Albert Museum and Its Collection (1852–1932)’, Decorative Arts Society Journal 24 (2000): 29. 119 Pezzini and Mitchell, ‘“Blown into Glittering by the Popular Breath”’, 465. 120 There was also cross-over with dealers and the market. Algernon Graves lent twentythree engravings which were catalogued in the ‘Miniatures etc.’ section, beginning with Romney’s Beauty and the Arts. 121 Sotheby’s, Important British Pictures (1 July 2004), www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatal ogue/2004/important-british-pictures-l04121/lot.21.html. 122 [Elizabeth Eastlake], ‘Giovanni Morelli: Patriot and Critic’, Quarterly Review 143, July (1891); see also Chapter 5. 123 Roach le Schonix, ‘The Grafton Galleries’, The Antiquary 30 (August 1894): 54. 124 G., ‘A Literary Causerie: At the Grafton Gallery’, The Speaker, 26 May 1894, 585. 125 Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, 615. The attribution to d’Este (Hermitage and London/Mond version) was soon dismissed. Claude Phillips, ‘The Picture Gallery of the Hermitage. I’, The North American Review 169, no. 515 (1899): 454–72; Julia Mary Cartwright Ady, Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, 1474–1539: A Study of the Renaissance (New York: Dutton, 1905), ii, 340. Eighteenth-century Old Masters posed similar problems: ‘it is impossible not to regret the intrusion into the Exhibition of certain

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canvases indubitably not his [Reynold’s], yet sheltered by his great name’. Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, 621. 126 ‘Fine Arts: The Grafton Galleries’, Athenaeum, no. 3474 (26 May 1894): 683–84. It is now recognised as a Magdalen by the Master of the Female Half-Lengths (Netherlandish). See Henry Pierce Bone, after Lady Jane Grey (Althorp), 1844, www.royalcollection.org.uk/col lection/422351/lady-jane-grey-1537-1554, accessed 28 April 2019.

Part II

Modern Fair Women

3

Performing the Modern Woman Actresses, Celebrity Culture and Exhibitions

‘Fair Women in Painting and Poetry’ I do not know how it was, but after the clock had struck six at the Grafton Gallery on the day of the private view, I found myself there still, in deserted rooms … I was uncertain even in what room I stood: but, strange to say, was conscious of the fact that the portraits … were alive.1 William Sharp wrote a rather idiosyncratic ‘review’ of the exhibition for the Portfolio, treating it as an imaginary illustrated narrative. Titled ‘Fair Women in Painting and Poetry’, it foregrounded the contemporary context for the exhibition, in particular the imbrication of fne art and theatre through popular culture in a way central to its reception. The editor, Philip G. Hamerton, saw the show as an opportunity for a ‘clever’ piece of journalism, no doubt because of the show’s resounding success.2 The Portfolio was a high-end periodical, available for 2s 6d, and was renowned for its luxurious reproductions of pen drawings, etchings and autotype photography. In this the Fair Women review was no exception, with reproductions of thirty-two works from the show interspersed throughout the essay. They neither followed a chronology, nor the order of the exhibition catalogue, but rather were placed adjacent to references in Sharp’s meandering text. In his correspondence with Horace Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Sharp referred to the essay as a ‘Fantasy of Fair Women’ and this was essentially its premise.3 Sharp was clearly mimicking Tennyson in his poem ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ in attempting a poetic response to the exhibition. Like Tennyson he took the place of the male writer/dreamer describing the lives of beautiful and illustrious women, thereby seemingly reinforcing a binary between the male artist/ writer and female subject. Yet these binaries began to unravel as the reverie unfolded. Sharp prefaced his essay with a long exposition on ‘types’ of beauty. He claimed that it was doubtless true that many people visited the Grafton Galleries that summer in the hope of fnding their ideal: Their immediate emotion must have been one of cruel disappointment … the ordinary visitor could only at frst wander disillusioned from canvas to canvas, and from room to room, uncertain whether to fnd a damaged ideal in the robust but self-conscious Flora of Palma Vecchio, or in the artifcial and self-conscious court ladies of Lely, or in the lovely and self-conscious “beauties” of Hoppner and Romney; in the imposing but tempersome Corinna of Sir Frederick Leighton, or

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Sharp called the reader’s attention to not only the Renaissance but also the modern sitters. He reported canvassing the opinions of visitors on the greatest works of art, including an unidentifed ‘Fair Woman’, plausibly a sitter. Sharp’s description of his own experience of seeing the exhibition, alongside viewers who happened to be ‘Fair Women’, alerted Grafton Galleries visitors to the very real possibility of mingling in the spaces of the gallery with the celebrated living sitters. Then his narrative shifted rather spectacularly. The gallery closed and was transformed. The modern paintings were ‘actualised’: the sitters descended from their frames and their two-dimensional painted bodies became corporeal and audible. Unlike Tennyson, however, Sharp did not wake before he was able to interact with the legendary woman: Lavinia passed by and he bowed to Cleopatra. He was immersed bodily in the show and the realm of nineteenth-century art found in the Centre Gallery.5 Thus, like the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea, in which the artist Pygmalion created a beautiful sculpture that came to life, the painter’s muses came alive. But Sharp unravelled the supposed distinctions between professional artists and their muse. Unlike the invariably statuesque and static marmoreal Galatea fgures rendered in oil paint admired by their creators, the allegorical fgures in ‘Fair Women in Painting and Poetry’ were animated, mingling with artists and contemporary sitters. The muses transformed into independent women, suggesting that in contrast to the Pygmalion myth refecting and reinforcing Victorian assumptions about gender, Fair Women did otherwise.6 There were parallels to Sharp’s fantasy in the theatre and early flm of around the same time. Gail Marshall has identifed the ‘Galatea-aesthetic’ in Victorian theatre and proposed that late-Victorian actresses challenged this emphasis on ‘the ideal statuesque’.7 The dream sequence in ‘Fair Women in Painting and Poetry’ anticipated the genre of artist-inspired female metamorphosis in early flm, wherein women became animated to the amazement of the artist. While scholars have seen these early magic flms (1896–1912) as expressive of male power, Lynda Nead argues that the conjured women often exerted a ‘powerful, disruptive force’ with unpredictable results.8 Similarly in the Grafton Galleries fantasy, the agency of the women moving around the gallery, speaking and interacting with artists, quite literally undermined their placement ‘on a pedestal’ and disrupted the writer’s – and reader’s – reverie. Moreover, the ‘Dream of Fair Women’ sequence was neither pure fantasy nor purely historical; it was also entangled in the lives of the contemporary sitters who strode around the Centre Gallery. There were points in Sharp’s fantasy ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ when the sitters themselves acted independently. Sharp described Ellen Terry linking arms with Sarah Bernhardt in a social world of their own: ‘I was dazzled by the sheen and glitter of Miss Ellen Terry’s gorgeous Lady Macbeth apparel. She came forward arm in arm with Mme Sara [sic] Bernhardt, laughing consumedly, more in the manner of Rosalind than of the grim spouse of the Thane of Cawdor’.9 Although less terrifying than Lady Macbeth, Sharp identifed Terry with another Shakespearean character renowned for her intelligence and wit as well as beauty, Rosalind.10 In Sharp’s reverie the actresses appeared to be in a private realm removed from the male critics and artists. In fact, this refected a professional reality: Terry and Bernhardt were amongst the women coming together to form sustained theatrical alliances.11

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This exclusive rapport was also a reminder of occasions where they had actually emerged from their picture frames into the gallery, for the physical spaces of the stage and the gallery overlapped. The Grafton Galleries functioned as a special events venue, much like museums today, and tickets were sold for fundraising dinners and performances. Fair Women itself provided an excellent opportunity for philanthropic organisations to garner fnancial aid. It was the setting for a banquet and reception held in July of 1894 at the Grafton Galleries by the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress, while Terry, Bernhardt and others gave a matinee performance in aid of the French Hospital, Victoria Park, Hackney. It was for charity, attendance cost ‘a guinea a head’ and £600 was reportedly raised. The event featured in the Daily Graphic with both Terry and Bernhardt making dramatic gestures as they performed ‘The Danish Whistle’ and ‘La Pluie et le Beau Temps’. Bernhardt appeared in a dress of gold and white brocade, with an over dress and huge Moyen-Age sleeves covered with glittering sequins, which excited immense feminine admiration. In the little piece, with bursts of ennui, boredom, eagerness and surprise, she was sparkling and fascinating as ever, and was greatly applauded at the end.12 Thus, like Terry’s Lady Macbeth, Bernhardt’s performance was made all that more spectacular through her dazzling costume. The month before, the Ludgate Illustrated Magazine reported on a Grafton charity event, where guests ‘evidently derived considerable pleasure’ from ‘examining the types of female beauty adorning the walls, with the magnifcent collection of lace and other curiosities’ along with a matinee performance by Terry and other actresses, organised to save the Royal Eye Hospital from bankruptcy. Subscriptions of £1000 were raised.13 Philanthropy and charitable work offered New Women, such as Terry, an avenue for strengthening their public profle and professional authority.14 Catherine Hindson contends that celebrity actresses transformed the theatre’s connection with fundraising and one vital element was these hybrid society charity matinees.15 Such events were indicative of the diverse ways in which these actors interacted with exhibition culture. And so, in the end Sharp’s fantasy was not entirely far-fetched, the women in the portraits did ‘descend’ from the walls. Sharp’s reverie ironically underlined the real-life performativity and female agency invoked by the exhibition of portraits of Fair Women.

The Modern Actresses: Fashionability and the New Woman Fashion was not necessarily limiting for Victorian women, it offered opportunities for inventiveness and subversion.16 Actresses were intensely aware of its importance. It is clear, as Breward has demonstrated, that the fgure of the popular turn-of-the-century actress helped forge a new cosmopolitan defnition of fashionability premised on the themes of publicity and celebrity.17 Fashion and the theatre became ever more closely intertwined between 1880 and 1914.18 Fashion designers such as Worth were able to capitalize on the publicity garnered through the appearance of their designs on stage and in the press.19 The Grafton Galleries effected an intersection of theatrical and exhibition space, and in part this was achieved through the performative nature of gallerygoing itself. Not only did the exhibition imply the physical movement of audiences between theatre spaces and the galleries of Bond Street, but the actresses themselves reappeared in this second staged venue.

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The representation of actresses through photographs, prints and sketches presented a simultaneous vision of Fair Women that was antithetical to historical notions of womanly virtue for actresses crossed barriers of class and morality.20 Erotic adventures for women mixing in a certain social milieu, such as the Prince of Wales’s circle, resulted in increased status as well as notoriety.21 Photographic reproduction and the new journalism enabled a particularly visual media frenzy around Lillie Langtry, Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry, who were so often interviewed and photographed at the fn de siècle. In publications such as the Sketch or the Graphic fashionability was allied with professionalism and a more seductive femininity, distant from any kind of maternal ideal. Female audiences of mass culture, by amassing this myriad of visual and textual encounters and objects, were thereby encouraged to themselves become active agents in a new modernity. Moreover, these actresses were an international phenomenon moving between London, Paris and America, and attracting a global fan base. Theatre, exhibition-goers and readers further afeld could construct their own ‘catalogue’ of contemporary women; audiences could and did compile and manipulate the material artefacts of popular culture to create their own imaginary world of ‘Fair Women’. The art critic Claude Phillips had archly declared Fair Women distinct from the ‘keepsake loveliness’ found in ‘photographer’s windows at home and abroad’, but on the contrary the two were inextricably bound together.22 Fair Women opened the very year that the New Woman frst appeared in popular novels and plays, although ‘advanced women’ had been present in political and popular culture for some time. According to cartoons of the period, the New Woman was a mannish intellectual, shocking polite society by smoking, riding a bicycle and clutching a latchkey, a crucial attribute that signalled her independence from the family home (Figure 3.1 and Plate 1). The Fair Women exhibition has often been analysed negatively in relation to nineteenth-century ideas about female emancipation. The show’s veneration of the past and imagined ideals of female beauty has been seen as a contradiction or correction to literature that promoted ‘New Women’. What then of the representations of the ‘modern’ woman in Fair Women? By 1894, Langtry, Bernhardt and Terry had iconic status in contemporary culture, and were renowned for their fashionability, professional independence and controversial personal lives, encapsulating many of the debates around the New Woman. Indeed, it has been suggested that these contemporary actresses were New Women avant la lettre.23 Fair Women posited a version of the New Woman that differed from the oppositional categories traditionally ascribed to her in literary fction. In the latter the fctional New Woman was regarded as a ‘modern’ fgure, sexually transgressive and a force for social change, but, nonetheless, writers had little conception of female sexual desire. In novels, such as Sarah Grand’s Heavenly Twins or George Gissing’s The Odd Women, there was invariably a separation between the New Woman and the femme fatale.24 Yet, characteristics of the New Woman and femme fatale often overlapped in visual culture: female independence and professionalism could have both political and sexual overtones.25 The multiple representations of actresses in Fair Women were indicative of diversity and intersecting debates.26 So the exhibition raises a series of questions about how the late Victorian sitters positioned themselves as modern women. Did the portraits and the display actually complicate nineteenth-century narratives about woman as a beautiful object? Did they offer an alternate representation of the New Woman?

Figure 3.1 ‘What we are coming to: A Ladies Smoking Party’, Sketch, May 1894, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

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Lillie Langtry The portrait in the Fair Women exhibition of Lillie Langtry (Emily le Breton) was Watts’s 1880 portrait after her marriage. This was also titled the Dean’s Daughter, as she was the daughter of the Dean of Jersey (Plate 13). She was painted in profle, wearing a small black bonnet with her hair drawn back into her signature bun. Scholars have commented on Watts’s somewhat ambiguous decision to paint Langtry, the mistress of the Prince of Wales, in a demure black outft and hat, so it is interesting that it was this early representation of Langtry that appeared in the Fair Women exhibition.27 In his review Phillips asserted that a comparison of the work with Watts’s other painting in the exhibition, the earlier bust of Bianca, strongly brought about Watts’s ‘inequalities’ as a painter.28 He deemed Langtry a ‘lifeless, invertebrate’ and Bianca ‘beautiful’.29 However, not everyone was so negative, and Phillips’s dismissive comment on Langtry’s appearance in the portrait was viewed within a wider sphere of popular culture. Langtry is often identifed as the frst professional beauty because, in addition to posing for numerous artists, including Whistler, Millais, Frank Miles, Edward Poynter and Burne-Jones, her portrait was widely circulated through photography. Such ‘professional beauties’ became widely recognised as a result of the placement of their photographs in shop windows; their images could be bought and collecting ‘beauty’ photographs was a recognised pastime for women and men.30 Celebrity portraits were collected in albums just like cartes of family members to be shared and faunted, perused and discussed at gatherings. These albums of cartes allowed people to form imaginary worlds that overcame time and space, class and gender.31 Magazines and newspapers refected the confuence of celebrity-driven new journalism and advances in reproductive technology, and provided an important source of crossfertilisation for albums. Patrizia Di Bello has argued persuasively that albums had a considerable creative potential for Victorian women.32 Women used the collecting and display of images in albums to mediate their diverse experiences of modernity. The proliferation of popular press photographs in the last decade of the century offered even greater possibilities for creating albums of celebrity images in a hybridised scrapbook format. The reception and circulation of images relating to Langtry and others were part of a nexus of exchange and ‘curation’ for modern women. Contemporary photographs of Langtry were in marked contrast to Watts’s early painting in Fair Women, her widespread visual representations seemed antithetical to that of a ‘lifeless invertebrate’. During the 1894 Fair Women exhibition season, the Sketch coverage of Langtry typifes both the extent of her appearance in the press and the multidimensional nature of her popularity. She appeared as both a celebrity and fashion icon: in a full-page photograph of her as Aphrodite in A Society Butterfy at the Opera Comique and in May as part of the fashion section, illustrations of her costumes in Act II and Act III appeared (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). Readers read/viewed Langtry in Fair Women alongside their own experiences of popular culture where photographs and engravings of Langtry were continually circulating. In addition, celebrity photographs, as well as painted portraits, represented more than pictures of women, they also circulated a matrix of visual information about what constituted fashion.33 Fashion plates, such as those of Langtry in costume, have been analysed as co-opting women into a system where they exist as passive objects for a male gaze. It is suggested that they turned women into objects of

Figure 3.2 ‘Mrs Langtry as Aphrodite in “A Society Butterfy” at the Opera comique’, Sketch, June 1894, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

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Figure 3.3 ‘Mrs Langtry in Act II and Act III’, Sketch, May 1894, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

consumption. However, recent studies complicate this equation by reading fashion plates as evidence of female self-expression and intimacy. Sharon Marcus argues that the Victorian fashion plate functioned as a ‘respectable version of promiscuity for women, a form of female cruising in which strangers who inspect each other in passing can establish an immediate intimacy because they participate in a common public culture of fashion’.34 Heidi Brevik-Zender draws on Marcus’s analysis to suggest that fashion plates in nineteenth-century France problematised the mass objectifcation of the female body by providing an interstitial space of alternate subjectivities for women.35 In this context, the identity of the actress, Langtry, adds an additional layer of possible interpretations for the fashion plate, and it endorsed the possibility of autonomy and freedom alongside or in contrast to stigma. Fashion plates of actresses were primarily created for women and evoke a feminine experience of modernity. This reading of fashion plates is useful in alerting us to the possibility

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that female viewers of Langtry fashion plates may have complicated heteronormative modes of consumption. The consumption of images of women by women may have existed in a more fuid matrix of gender within the Victorian period and therefore female exhibition-goers to Fair Women, like magazine readers, participated in this ‘common public culture of fashion’. As has already been highlighted, media access to the fashionable sitters represented in the show went far beyond specialist art periodicals and in the case of Fair Women this extended to advertising. The Pears’ Pictorial released an autumn number that focused on Fair Women. Langtry had capitalised on her own celebrity by negotiating a lucrative contract for advertising Pears soap some years earlier. Through her Pears endorsements Langtry functioned as an early brand ambassador. This was a strategic use of advertising to further her own career, one other women envied and strove to emulate.36 The Pears Fair Women issue cost one shilling and a selection of ffty works from the exhibition were reproduced. Not surprisingly amongst the illustrations was Watts’s portrait of Langtry with an effusive commentary: If the hundreds of portraits collected at the Grafton Gallery, by some fortuitous chance uniformly came up to the completely satisfying standard of the above [Langtry], visitors thereto would be lifted out of everyday life, and realise the poet’s visions of ‘fair women’ straightaway; all that has been uttered in fevered rhapsodies might be substantiated.37 The writer then demonstrated the cross-fertilisation of contemporary journalism by quoting from Sharp’s essay: ‘Mr. William Sharp – with the intuition of a poet – has happily summarised its charms “Mr Watt’s fower-sweet and fower-delicate portrait of Mrs. Langtry”’.38 The reference to fowers tied neatly into Pears’s marketing of ‘Lillie’ and soap. A. & F. Pears was intent on galvanising the relationship between art and commerce. Pears is now well-known as a clever patron of late-Victorian art as a result of its use of Millais’s Bubbles as an advertisement to great effect, but the exhibition presented another kind of opportunity for mass marketing.39 The fact that the magazine was profusely illustrated with reproductions from the show, including historical and modern portraits, meant that it was in a sense taking the form of an illustrated catalogue, which the exhibition lacked (Figure 3.4). The Pears’ Pictorial presaged the exhibition catalogue of today, invariably produced by galleries and museums with the help of corporate sponsorship, but in this case the catalogue was entirely produced by commerce. The emphasis in the text of the magazine was on the biographies of the sitters. It was noted that it included ‘slight anecdotic biographical sketches, on the obvious grounds that it is interesting to be placed en rapport with the histories of famous and beautiful women’.40 Unlike a traditional catalogue, purchased at an exhibition, the distribution of the Pears’ Pictorial gave a much wider circulation to the show through its reproductions. It had just begun the previous year and was published quarterly as an advertising magazine for Pears soap. Moreover, it points to the visibility of consumer culture as constitutive of the context within which visitors saw Fair Women. By directly addressing women as spectators, advertising sanctioned women’s modern role as cultural consumers of exhibitions and fashionable products and by extension their occupation of the city as New Women. This form of exposure was not limited to London: the Pears’ Pictorial was transatlantic, published in both London and New York.

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Figure 3.4 ‘Fair Women’, Pears’ Pictorial, 1894, © The British Library Board

The Pears’s ‘catalogue’ of Fair Women had a target audience. It chose to use its brand-ambassador as the focal point of an extensive marketing campaign. The advertisements interpolated Langtry, soap and Fair Women, adding comparative visual examples to Langtry’s ‘fower-delicate’ portrait. It arguably added another layer of meaning to the exhibition through Langtry’s role in consumer culture. The presence of

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the career-minded Langtry suggested that modern ‘fair’ women were not only passive icons that sell commodities, but also active producers, consumers and sellers. A fullpage advertisement in the Pears’ Pictorial for the soap proclaimed the ‘testimony of the nightingale, the lily and the rose’: It is matchless for the hands and the Complexion Ye Nightingale I prefer it to any other soap Ye Lily For preserving the complexion, it is the fnest Soap in the world. Ye Rose41 The fora and fauna punning were made clear with each of the statements signed by the opera singer Adelina Patti (Nightingale), Langtry (Lily) and the actress Mary Anderson (Rose). While Patti and Anderson were not included in the exhibition, like Langtry, they were nevertheless immediately recognisable, having been featured in numerous portraits, and had extraordinary professional earning power.42 Testimonials such as these, common in the 1890s, were a successful advertising form that capitalised on the cult of personality. They had the effect of contriving a personal connection with the consumer.43 An advertisement at the back of the ‘catalogue’ volume was a common Pears’s subject: a baby in a bath.44 However, it linked to the frst advertisement with testimonials again from female celebrities, Langtry, Patti and Anderson as well as Dr Anna Kingsford, ‘as beautiful as she is learned’, doctor, anti-vivisection, vegetarian and women’s rights campaigner.45 Thus Pears deployed a variety of testaments of authority from professional ‘fair’ women as manipulative devices to sell its product – and Fair Women in turn co-opted Pears for its mass appeal and indirect sponsorship. The advertisements also co-opted historical aspects of the show in relation to their own product. One image dated 1789 was a street scene of ‘shopping in sedan chairs in the last century … Queen Charlotte’s visit to Pears’ for soap for her complexion a hundred years ago’ (Figure 3.5).46 This made a direct association with the two sedan chairs on loan to the exhibition from the Royal Collection. Through the 1789 engraving of Queen Charlotte readers were able to link the vibrant red chairs in the show with their functionality as objects. Indeed, the sedan chairs could be seen as precursors to the omnibuses and underground taken by the women who had journeyed to the West End to see the exhibition and perhaps do some shopping. ‘Shopping in sedan chairs’ emphasised a long history of women as fashionable consumers of Pears soap, though there were marked distinctions. The modern shopper was not circumscribed by mode of transport and it was largely middle-class, modern, female consumers in the West End who were the target audience of Pears soap. These bourgeois women with money held considerable power in the overlapping worlds of art and fashion.47 The fnal advertisement on the back of the ‘catalogue’ reinforced Pears’s historical continuity with Langtry. Two prints, the 1784 Georgina Duchess of Devonshire and the 1894 Lillie Langtry, were accompanied by the text ‘Fair Women and Pears’ Soap, twelve decades of fair women have been made fairer by the use of Pears’ soap’ (Plate 14). Thus, Pears again strategically positioned its own product with two of the renowned sitters in the show, one historical and one contemporary. For women in the 1890s this long historical linkage was all the more signifcant because it skipped

Figure 3.5 ‘Shopping in sedan chairs’, Pears’ Pictorial, 1894, © The British Library Board

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generations. Women’s self-representations through portraiture did not recall their Victorian forebearers, but rather the ‘adventurous, confdent women of the eighteenth century’ such as the Duchess of Devonshire, renowned for her political and literary pursuits as well as her fashionability and complicated marital relationships, and not an icon of modest femininity.48 Modern actresses, such as Langtry, symbolised alternative possibilities for performing femininity during the period. Cheryl Buckley and Hilary Fawcett note that women who combined theatre careers with the role of society beauties had substantial iconic power during the period. They identify Langtry, as well as American socialites such as Jennie Jerome, as part of a new and robustly seductive feminine ideal.49 During the 1890s, Langtry was in the process of shifting the focus of her professional career, she had remarried, and was to move into theatre management. While Langtry’s involvement in the Fair Women–Pears marketing campaign was fnancially strategic, it was also indicative of the polyvalent nature of her image. The Pears’ Pictorial reveals the overlapping realms of fne art and feminine modes of consumption in the modern city. Langtry represented a more autonomous femininity that could be realised through the self-expression of the modern female consumer. Contemporary writers expressed anxiety about the women who combined club membership, seeing pictures and shopping typical of Fair Women gallery-goers; these were seen as allies of New Women in the cause for women’s emancipation.50 Moreover, with Pears’ Pictorial, advertising was confated with art writing to give Fair Women international publicity.

Sarah Bernhardt But Langtry was not the only icon that was represented on the gallery wall and through mass-circulating ephemera. Like Langtry, Sarah Bernhardt was a much painted and photographed actor at the turn of the century. She appeared twice in Fair Women, in a sculpture from over two decades earlier and in a more recent portrait sketch by Walter Spindler (Figure 3.6). The marble bust by the French sculptor Prospero D’Epinay (c.1881) was lent to the exhibition by the Prince of Wales, a regular attendee at her performances and with whom she may have had an affair.51 The British artist Spindler had sketched Bernhardt in profle, her curly hair up in its signature style, wisps escaping from a head band, her mouth just open as if she were about to speak.52 The Spindler sketch was more widely circulated than the sculpture, because it was reproduced in the Portfolio as part of Sharp’s reverie. The Portfolio, albeit prefaced by less prominent advertisements marketing art supplies and engraving, similarly capitalised on the success of the exhibition, while targeting a supposedly more ‘artistic’ cultured readership. However, the self-assured actresses who haunted Sharp’s vision of ‘Fair Women in Painting and Poetry’ pointed to the intersection of the elite realms of fne art and mass culture. Scholars have demonstrated the ways in which images of Bernhardt moved between high art and popular culture in Paris, and Spindler’s work signals the ways in which this was replicated in London.53 Although Bernhardt performed in Paris, she regularly did London seasons and the press refected the annual appearances she made in the 1890s. The sketch in the Portfolio was one of many Bernhardt portraits created by Spindler; as well as work in watercolours and oils, he produced illustrations for the popular press, so Victorian viewers would have seen Spindler’s portraits of Bernhardt inside and

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Figure 3.6 Sarah Bernhardt, Walter Spindler, c.1894, Portfolio

outside the Grafton Galleries. Spindler’s illustration in the July Graphic depicted her appearance in Izeyl by Eugene Morand and Armand Sylvestre at Daly’s Theatre in London. The Buddhist story of Izeyl was set in India and the image featured Bernhardt as the courtesan Izeyl standing in her porch alongside a tiger skin watching Prince Siddartha (Figure 3.7). The image and the interpretation of the ancient chronicle in its staging and costumes reinforced themes in imperialist European literature and painting about the East as a timeless site of mystery and exoticism.54 What is most evident in the press coverage of Bernhardt’s celebrated return to the

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Figure 3.7 ‘Madame Sarah Bernhardt in “Izeyl” At Daly’s Theatre’, Graphic, July 1894, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

London stage in 1894 is not only the sheer volume of imagery, but the ways in which it underlined these Orientalist associations by drawing on Bernhardt’s oeuvre. One kind of image that was very visible to London gallery-goers in 1894 was studio photographs of Bernhardt in character; Bernhardt, like Langtry, took on the role of Cleopatra. In fact, during the 1890s there was overlap in their portrayals of Cleopatra and they were both photographed in character. Langtry as Cleopatra, from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in 1891, and Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra in Victorien Sardou’s Cléopâtre. The latter photograph, by the American photographer Napoleon Sarony, was widely circulated on the front of the Illustrated London News in 1892 and reproduced again in 1894 to coincide with her appearance in London. In the studio image, Bernhardt stood, her arm frmly planted on a chair draped in a tiger skin, swathed in a boldly patterned fabric, her bare upper-arms encircled by gold jewellery (Figure 3.8). This photographic portrait was in marked contrast to AlmaTadema’s painted image of Cleopatra on the wall in Fair Women wrapped in leopard skins, seemingly reclining languidly on cushions (Plate 4).55 Whilst both the photograph and painting drew on Orientalising discourse, the former suggested a more active self-representation that resisted narratives about female compliance and acquiescence. Inevitably, interpretations of Cleopatra as ‘fair woman’ were multiple and conficting in contemporary culture. In a Drury Lane pantomime procession titled ‘A Dream of

Figure 3.8 ‘Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra’, Illustrated London News, June 1892, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

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Fair Women’ of 1885, Cleopatra and the Byzantine Empress Theodora were meant to symbolise an earlier more benign East in contrast to contemporary imperial confict.56 In the context of these multiple representations, Cleopatra suggests another nexus of representations of female rulers that supplemented Fair Women. Indeed, Bernhardt as Cleopatra was not her only character portrait that recirculated. A large photographic detail of her in Empress Théodora costume, by W. & D. Downey, renowned as photographers of the Royal Family, was reproduced in the Illustrated London News to coincide with her 1894 London season.57 In the image, Théodora in an extraordinarily ornate costume and gold crown, meets the viewer with a piercing gaze (Figure 3.9).58 In Sardou’s interpretation, Théodora, like Cleopatra, was a dangerous female ruler with an Orientalised identity.59 In the press, Bernhardt became a kind of amalgam of all three Orientalist female characters. While Bernhardt was not in character as Cleopatra or Theodora or Izeyl in Fair Women, these characters were arguably inseparable from her public identity. Emily Apter has identifed Bernhardt–Cleopatra as a confation of ‘acting’ and ‘being’ and argues that not only were women empowered or accorded sexual license through association with dominatrix characterologies attached to exemplary queens or women leaders of the East, but their agency was enhanced by ‘being’ these avatars both on stage and off.60 Sarah Bernhardt actively cultivated this confation, residing in an Orientalised exotic home that was illustrated in the press.61 Mary Bergstein identifes Bernhardt’s home as a ‘self-ascribed example of the Orientalist lens through which she was seen by contemporaries’.62 Bernhardt ‘being’ Cleopatra was also related to her identity as a Jewish woman. Victorian visitors to Fair Women would have been aware of Tennyson’s emphasis on Cleopatra’s racial identity decades earlier in ‘A Dream of Fair Women’: I turning saw, throned on a fowery rise, One sitting on a crimson scarf unroll’d; A queen, with swarthy cheeks and bold black eyes, Brow-bound with burning gold. Scott Trafton identifes Cleopatra as a femme fatale in a racialised no-man’s land with ethnic and racial affliations of Jewish, Oriental, African and White.63 Bernhardt’s Jewishness made these associations in her case doubly apparent; cartoons and texts mocking Bernhardt’s curly hair and exaggerated nose appeared in the press throughout her career. In 1890s Paris and London anti-Semitism was rife; 1894 for example coincided with the Dreyfus affair and Bernhardt joined his defenders. Alisa Solomon suggests that Bernhardt’s cultivation of her own image was no match for prevailing caricatures, but positive as well as negative aspects to her stereotypical signifcation have been identifed.64 Carol Ockman sees contemporary representations of Bernhardt as revealing stereotypes of the belle juive’s masculine power.65 This latter interpretation corresponds with the emphasis in the text that accompanied her image in the Graphic. Here, the writer rhapsodised: ‘She must be made of steel—a model of resistance, energy, and power’.66 Certainly the repetition of representations of Cleopatra and other Orientalist female characters by Bernhardt in the 1890s offer a potent and arguably more ambiguous context in the presence of Fair Women. For European male viewers these images may have corresponded with fantasies of racial otherness and sexual threat, but for European

Figure 3.9 ‘Sarah Bernhardt in London’, Illustrated London News June 1894, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

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women the images might have been seen in the context of sovereignty, sexuality and female desire.67 The circulation of images around Fair Women opens up a more complicated reading of women in the East. Heather McPherson suggests that Bernhardt’s images from this period functioned as a spectacle of the shifting dynamics of art, theatre and female sexuality. Together the images constituted a fctionalised, autobiographical narrative in which Bernhardt ‘actively perpetuated her own legend and incessantly projected her star image’.68 McPherson goes on to argue that Bernhardt exemplifes the ways in which conventional portraiture or an attempt to create a likeness became increasingly problematised as an artistic genre, wherein the multiple images of Bernhardt represented an ‘alternative “popular” aesthetic of theatrical spectacle’, supplanting the outdated portrait d’apparat in a modern world. The contemporary London press of 1894 clearly demonstrates that for viewers in Fair Women the Spindler portrait sketch of Bernhardt was one of multiple recent ‘popular’ theatrical images of Bernhardt. Autumn visitors to Fair Women may have also seen these alongside Bernhardt’s likeness in poster form promoting her appearance in Victorien Sardou’s Gismonda by Alphonse Mucha, where she played the role of another powerful female ruler, the Duchess Gismonda. Bernhardt was both actor and artist, as Griselda Pollock has emphasised, she worked ‘professionally and creatively across the spaces and modes of representation between theatrical imag(in)ings and visual representation in painting and as an artist’.69 This awareness of authoring or ‘curating’ visual representation was reinforced when fve years after the Grafton Galleries exhibition, Bernhardt created a ‘fair woman’ display in Paris dedicated entirely to herself. The display included a diversity of kinds of portraits, including some of herself in character such as Gismonda, Théodora, La dame aux camellias, Hamlet and La Princess loitaine.70 In addition to perpetuating her own legend through powerful characters, the display, part of renovations of the Théâtre des Nations at Châtelet, reinforced the shared spaces of the gallery and stage evident in Fair Women. Whilst Bernhardt fgured in the press as a potent cultural icon, the conjunction of celebrity journalism and visual culture ensured that, like Langtry, she was more intimately accessible to the modern female reader/viewer than her portraits in character suggest. Her portrayals of formidable female characters were interspersed with more informal ‘sketches’, like Spindler’s in the Portfolio. During June in the populist Sketch, Dudley Hardy’s full-page, full-length sketch ‘An Impression of Sarah Bernhardt’ appeared alongside a ‘chat’ with Bernhardt.71 As was more commonplace in the new journalism, readers were given ‘peeps’ into private facets of celebrity lives and the spaces that they occupied. The Graphic carried an image by Paul Renouard of Bernhardt in her dressing room, titled ‘Finishing Touches’, clutching a lipstick and gazing into a mirror in front of a table covered in make-up: unlike the majority of Bernhardt images, this was about the process of becoming Izeyl for the stage (Figure 3.10). While women with mirrors are seen to symbolise vanity, they have recently been read in relation to fashion’s contribution to the construction of female identity. The woman gazing into the mirror therefore illustrates a ‘moment of self-identifcation when a woman sees herself as the active viewer’.72 In this context the range and accessibility of the press coverage of Bernhardt enabled her female fan base to mimic this process and ‘become’ their own fantasy.73

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Figure 3.10 ‘Finishing Touches: Madame Sarah Bernhardt in her Dressing-Room’, Graphic, July 1894, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

Moreover, in Bernhardt imagery beyond the theatre, professionalism and independence were visually reinforced.74 A contemporary photograph of her out of costume casts her as the epitome of a New Woman. Dressed in a pale suit jacket and skirt with a white blouse, accessorised with a black neck tie, she confronts the viewer standing with her hands on her hips (Figure 3.11). To the 1890s reader/viewer these contemporary representations of Bernhardt suggested a modern fashionability conjoined with regal power and confdent sexuality as opposed to nostalgia for an historic passive femininity. Bernhardt was not only a cosmopolitan fgure in terms of her identity, she was an international traveller with repeated trips to the United States, as well as further afeld to Russia and South America, and in 1891 she undertook a world tour which lasted until 1893. While these global peregrinations were indicative of the strategic dissemination of her image and work, they were also aspirational for independent women seeking travel and adventure. Bernhardt’s identity also complicated the notion of the modern ‘fair woman’ as London-based or even distinctly British. The circulation of Bernhardt’s image prefgured and accompanied her bodily presence on various world stages during the early 1890s. Likewise, the dissemination of Fair Women press coverage across American and colonial publishing networks existed in dialogue with this international distribution of images and cosmopolitan identity.

Figure 3.11 Sarah Bernhardt, W. & D. Downey, 1890s, platinotype panel card, © National Portrait Gallery, London

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Ellen Terry In the portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, a dramatic counterpoint was offered to the portraits of Langtry and Bernhardt (Plate 15). While they were relatively small in scale, her portrait was enormous and boldly coloured. Sargent’s painting of 1889 was also contemporary and thus was very familiar to London viewers. It had been shown in the New Gallery to sensational acclaim, followed by Paris in 1890, as well as the Columbian Exhibition in Chicago of 1893. Terry loomed over the viewer, seeming like Bernhardt, a monstre sacré of her time.75 In 1894, the Terry portrait, like those of Langtry and Bernhardt, reappeared in Fair Women and in popular culture. It was engraved by C. Carter and then appeared alongside F.G. Stephen’s review of Fair Women in the Magazine of Art.76 The portrait was also reproduced in the Pears’ Pictorial with effusive praise in the accompanying text. As with Bernhardt, the possibility of reading portraits and theatrical performances as emblematic of feminine power and passion presented an alternative model of female behaviour that may have resonated with some viewers. When not on the wall at Fair Women, the portrait decorated a theatre; it had been purchased by Henry Irving who hung the painting in the Beefsteak Room at the Lyceum. Like Langtry she had been portrayed by G.F. Watts decades earlier. Lady Macbeth contrasted sharply with her portrait as a girl encircled by camellias, marking their short-lived marriage (Choosing, 1864, National Portrait Gallery). Moreover, unlike the portraits of Langtry and Bernhardt in Fair Women, Terry was shown in character. Victorian viewers of the exhibition might well have made the linkage with the nearby painting of Sarah Siddons who was known for her portrayal of Lady Macbeth in the eighteenth century. Paintings of eighteenth-century actresses held particular signifcance in relation to the contemporary art market, but they also offered a genealogy of female success through theatre. In the exhibition, portraits of eighteenth-century female performers were intended to be viewed in conjunction with their biographies offering precedents for modern women that were audacious and ambitious.77 Just as with Langtry, there were visual connections with eighteenth-century sitters. Shearer West suggests Sargent’s version of Terry ‘embodied a sort of Pre-Raphaelite picture in the eyes of the public’.78 Terry made this link herself in a letter to her daughter: I wish you could see my dresses. They are superb, especially the frst one: green beetles on it, and such a cloak! The photographs give no idea of it at all, for it is in the colour that it is so splendid. The dark red hair is fne. The whole thing is Rossetti—rich stained glass effects.79 Terry’s dress was incredibly heavy and constructed of beetle wings, which shimmered in the light; it was designed by Alice Comyns-Carr and made in crochet by Ada Nettleship.80 The signifcance of Pre-Raphaelite historiography was reinforced through art publishing and Henry Tate’s 1894 gift to the nation (his collection included Millais’s Ophelia). The portrait’s association with jewel colours and late Pre-Raphaelitism was reinforced in the painting’s placement in Fair Women. The rich greens of the dress hung in close proximity to another Fair Women painting in the Centre Gallery; Rossetti’s Veronica Veronese offered this visual continuity for late Victorian viewers (Plate 3). Veronica Veronese, the subject in green velvets, composes music and reaches

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for her violin. Just as Terry’s role opened a range of new creative possibilities for both actress and audience, so Terry was like Veronica, a creative agent.81 An interesting facet of Terry’s description of the beetle dress was her assertion that ‘photographs give no idea of it all’. The colour was only transmittable through personal experience, or, as it transpired, through the medium of paint. However, the representation of the boldly coloured beetle dress did not fnd favour with all critics of Fair Women. The Athenaeum declared it a ‘pyrotechnic picture’ and ‘the only very great mistake he [Sargent] has made’.82 The critic, almost certainly former Pre-Raphaelite Stephens, may well have resented its placement alongside what he saw as the ‘brilliant, powerful and original’ Rossetti. The portrait of Terry as self-assured and ‘pyrotechnic’ in the dress was also perhaps jarring for Stephens due to its modernity; the dress was at the vanguard of theatrical costume design. Recently scholars have emphasised the signifcance of Terry’s working relationship with Comyns Carr and Nettleship and her agency in constructing her own image through costume.83 Terry’s work with Comyns Carr also attests to the overlapping nature of art and fashion, as Comyns Carr was a well-known aesthetic fgure. In the painting, the whiteness of Terry’s skin contrasts strongly with her hair and dress. In his review of Fair Women, Phillips took issue with the skin tone, which ‘suffers from excessive chalkiness of the fesh tints’.84 This effect was created by face powder most notoriously in another Sargent painting, Madame X. Susan Sidlauskas argues in her analysis of Madame X, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, that the daily application of make-up actively resisted the artist’s attempts to render her in paint.85 Like Gautreau and like the dressing room illustration of Bernhardt, Terry would similarly have used make-up to create her own individualised persona for performances. The use of stage make-up offered differing signifcations during this period. Stephenson has demonstrated the ambiguity of ‘whiteness’ in Sargent’s portraits, signalling feminine decency and dangerous passions.86 In spite of Phillip’s reservations about the painting of Terry, he added that it was ‘a conception magnifcent in its audacity, showing the popular actress in this overpowering part, not as she was, but as the artist conceived that she might and should have been’.87 Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray have since noted that the scene portrayed, where Lady Macbeth holds the crown above her head, was not in Shakespeare’s text or in Terry’s performance.88 West suggests that Sargent depicted Terry as Lady Macbeth as a type rather than an individual, an ‘embodiment of feminine power and barbarous passion’.89 Terry’s multiple theatrical personae were like Langtry’s and Bernhardt’s ever-present in contemporary popular culture. Her photograph was widely circulated and collected, and her image appeared in the press alongside reviews of her latest plays. In May of 1894, Terry performed in the popular comedy Nance Oldfeld by Charles Reade at the Lyceum, a play about the life of Oldfeld, an eighteenth-century actress. An image of her seated on the back of a couch, hands on hips was reproduced in Black & White, and an oil portrait of her in costume arms outstretched was produced by James Ferrier Pryde (National Portrait Gallery).90 The Pears’ Pictorial was referring no doubt to her contemporary success in the play and perhaps the Pryde portrait when it averred: ‘it would have been further acceptable to her admirers in general – a comprehensive term in the lady’s instance, including the peoples of England and America – if the directors of the Grafton Galleries had been favoured with her portrait as the Queen of Comedy – legitimate successor of the Farrens, Jordans, and famous Comic Muses of the past’.91 Elizabeth Farren and Dorothea Jordan appeared on the wall in the Music

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Room of Fair Women, thus in the Pears’ Pictorial, both Terry and Langtry were linked with their eighteenth-century predecessors. Terry also appeared in other guises, such as the charity events held at the Grafton Galleries. As with her actress colleagues she strategically fashioned her own image. Some of these photographs, out of character, are infected with her professionalism. A photograph by Frederick Hollyer of Terry with her head bent over book, seemingly oblivious to the gaze of the viewer, resonates with New Womanhood (Figure 3.12); the book would become a key signifer of female intellect as evidenced by the books piled high in the Morrow poster for the play The New Woman (Plate 1). In the case of Terry this may be a reference to a very real requirement of her own career; the viewer might have surmised Terry was studying a play script. The photograph resonates with Terry’s personal correspondence with her son. In an April 1894 letter she wrote of needing to study: ‘I’ve a beastly cold in my head. … Well – To study now – for I play a proverb – on the 5 June for Charity’.92 Theatre was also an intellectual endeavour, and Terry’s letters reveal her constant need to prepare for an unremitting schedule of performances and charity events. Images of Langtry, Bernhardt and Terry that circulated in media such as newspapers, magazines and playbills are more diffcult to trace, having been less consistently collected and catalogued in public museums. As Sharp implied, their presence in the exhibition proliferated: on the wall, in the gallery, at charity events, in shop windows, in the newspaper, in advertising and in private albums. Although this more ephemeral context for exhibition culture is elusive, it is crucial to understanding the reception of the exhibition. This wider visual matrix is necessary to an exploration of the possible meanings generated by Fair Women. Langtry, Bernhardt and Terry were cosmopolitan

Figure 3.12 Ellen Terry, Frederick Hollyer, c.1890, platinotype cabinet card, © National Portrait Gallery, London

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fgures at the vanguard of modes of publicity and dissemination; together and individually they strategised and inspired new kinds of fashionability in modern women. The actresses represented in the portraits in Fair Women reveal possibilities for agency that were not available to all women working in the theatre. In Tracy Davis’s analysis of the broader employment patterns and working conditions for women in the theatre she identifes issues such as conficting social and moral codes of respectability for actresses.93 Davis argues that the profession of theatre actress was defeminised by the act of taking up a public career in the theatre. ‘Victorians were required to separate the defeminised actress from her roles’.94 However, characters such as Lady Macbeth offered rather antithetical possibilities for interpretation. Moreover, it could be argued that by the 1890s the very nature of the public careers of actresses enabled ideals of femininity to be visually refashioned. Thus, rather than female audience members imagining themselves enacting roles that ‘every woman artist or not desires to play’, such as Ophelia, they could imagine themselves as the fashionable celebrities who played them.95 This may have involved stepping into the fantasy space where celebrities descended from gallery walls as Sharp’s narrative in the Portfolio implied. The gallery, like the fashion plate, may have functioned as a more intimate public space for women participating in a common culture through the dual mediums of art and fashion. For women the imaginary worlds formed through scrapbooks, albums and walks through gallery spaces held alternative possibilities. In 1894 many women were actively constructing themselves as ‘modern’ women, taking up characteristics of professional independence that these actresses represented. They also offered a model of seductive femininity that would feed into debates about sexual freedom over the next two decades. Actresses had considerable agency in constructing their own public image, and Fair Women is also indicative of their signifcance as cultural mediators. Actresses and their roles as fashion icons opened possibilities for women to similarly participate in self-fashioning. Moreover, these actresses had very public roles that intersected with the business of theatre. Buckley and Fawcett identify the development of a new type of femininity, which while detached from the political idealism of the ‘New Woman’, was ultimately identifed by entrepreneurialism and fnancial independence.96 In their images in Fair Women and in images of them in the popular press and advertising Langtry, Bernhardt and Terry presented this entrepreneurial independent femininity.

Notes 1 William Sharp, ‘Fair Women in Painting and Poetry’, Portfolio, July 1894, 34. 2 The Portfolio had abandoned its generalist coverage the previous year, instead focusing on ‘monographs on artistic subjects’. Philip Gilbert Hamerton, Philip Gilbert Hamerton: An Autobiography (London: Seeley & Co., 1897); James Kissane, ‘Art Historians and Art Critics – IX: P. G. Hamerton, Victorian Art Critic’, The Burlington Magazine 114, no. 826 (1 January 1972): 22–29. 3 ‘In 10 days or so I’ll send you a copy of a monograph on “Fair Women” (delightful subject!) I was asked some time ago to write. The publishers seem to be delighted with it – so I hope it will ‘go’ well. It is in great part what might be called A Fantasy of Fair Women’, William Sharp to Horace Scudder, 20 June 1894, ALS Harvard Houghton, The William Sharp Archive, ed. William F. Halloran, 21 June 2005 (www.ies.sas.ac.uk/research-project s-archives/william-sharp-fona-macleod-archive). 4 Sharp, ‘Fair Women in Painting and Poetry’, 16. See also Kenneth McConkey Memory and Desire: Painting in Britain and Ireland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002), 90.

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5 Pygmalion and Galatea had been depicted by several artists during this period, including by Burne-Jones, Alma Tadema and Ernest Normand. Michael Hatt, ‘Thoughts and Things: Sculpture and the Victorian Nude’, in Exposed: The Victorian Nude, ed. Alison Smith (London: Tate, 2001), 36–49; Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900 (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2007), 58–68. 6 Jane Desmarais observes that the Pygmalion myth served to refect and reinforce assumptions about gender and validate the presence of the nude in High Art. Jane Desmarais, ‘The Model on the Writer’s Block: The Model in Fiction from Balzac to Du Maurier’, in Model and Supermodel: The Artists’ Model in British Art and Culture, ed. Martin Postle, William Vaughan, and Jane Desmarais (Manchester University Press, 2006), 48–50. 7 Gail Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 39–63. 8 Nead, The Haunted Gallery, 90. 9 Sharp, ‘Fair Women in Painting and Poetry’, 47. 10 Terry had written privately in 1894 about her desire to play Rosalind and she took up the character later for her lecture tours. Nina Auerbach, Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 1987), 230–31; Katherine E. Kelly, ‘The After Voice of Ellen Terry’, in Ellen Terry, Spheres of Infuence, ed. Katharine Cockin (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), 65. 11 Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage, 146. 12 ‘The French Hospital: A Brilliant Soirée’, Daily Graphic (19 July 1894), 8. 13 Terry performed the play Nance Oldfeld. Florence May Gardiner, ‘Whispers from the Women’s World’, Ludgate Illustrated Magazine, July 1894, 324. ‘The Royal Eye Hospital. The Lord Mayor’, The Times, 26 May 1894, 9. 14 In 1893 Terry instigated an Autograph Bed scheme for the Queen’s Jubilee Hospital. Katharine Cockin, ‘Ellen Terry: Preserving the Relics and Creating the Brand’, in Ellen Terry, Spheres of Infuence, 134. On medical philanthropy, see also Lynne Walker, ‘Locating the Global/Rethinking the Local: Suffrage Politics, Architecture, and Space’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1/2 (1 April 2006): 126–28. 15 Catherine Hindson, London’s West End Actresses and the Origins of Celebrity Charity, 1880–1920 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), 61. 16 In her analysis of mid-century portraiture and women’s experiences of fashion, Nead has emphasised the pleasures involved for women in fashionable dress. She suggests that crinolines did not necessarily make women into ‘slaves or hedonists’ as we have thought; they were part of an imaginative and sensual world, which paradoxically gave women space to explore desire and identity. Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 13. 17 Christopher Breward, Fashioning London: Clothing and the Modern Metropolis (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 67–68. 18 Christopher Breward, ‘“At Home” at the St. James’s: Dress Decor and the Problem of Fashion in Edwardian Theatre’, in Performance, Fashion and the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today, ed. Fiona Fisher et al. (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 85. 19 Michele Majer et al., eds., Staging Fashion, 1880–1920: Jane Hading, Lily Elsie, Billie Burke (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 28–29. 20 Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 95. 21 This was helped by increased access to birth control. Cheryl Buckley and Hilary Fawcett, Fashioning the Feminine: Representation and Women’s Fashion from the Fin de Siecle to the Present (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), 29. 22 Claude Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, National Review 23, no. 137 (July 1894): 611. 23 Ellen Terry, The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry, ed. Katharine Cockin, vol. 3, (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012), xii, 1–66. 24 Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 6. 25 Many thanks to Gail Marshall for her observations on this overlap. 26 On the plurality of the New Woman in popular culture and her centrality to late-Victorian debates around gender, motherhood, class, race and imperialism, see Chris Willis

Plate 1 The New Woman, Albert George Morrow, poster for the Comedy Theatre, 1894, colour lithograph, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Plate 2 Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, Hans Holbein the Younger, 1538, oil on oak, 179.1 ´ 82.6 cm, © The National Gallery, London

Plate 3 Veronica Veronese, D.G. Rossetti, 1872, oil on canvas, 105.4 ´ 86.4 cm, © Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, USA, Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Memorial/Bridgeman Images

Plate 4 Cleopatra, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1877, oil on panel, 44.5 ´ 46 cm, Mackelvie Trust Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (purchased 1916)

Plate 5 Sedan chair, Samuel Vaughan, 1763, oak, morocco leather, gilt metal, glass, silk, 188 ´ 100 ´ 78 cm, Royal Collection Trust /© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019

Plate 6 Private View of the Old Masters Exhibition, Royal Academy, 1888, Henry Jamyn Brooks, 1889, oil on canvas, 154.5 mm ´ 271.5 cm, © National Portrait Gallery, London

Plate 7 Pair of opera glasses, Tiffany & Co., 1893, gold, enamel, pearls, glass, diamonds, 6.1 ´ 9.7 ´ 5.5 cm, Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2019

Plate 8 Earrings, stone turquoise coloured, veined with brown, blue and purple, 3.5 cm, Bristol Collection, Ickworth © National Trust Images

Plate 9 Hector and Andromache, c.1775–1799, gouache, chicken-skin, ivory sticks with guards set with plaques of agate and paste jewels, 2.8 ´ 28 cm, Bristol Collection, Ickworth © National Trust Images

Plate 10 Geraldine Georgiana Mary Hervey, Marchioness of Bristol, The Hon. Henry Richard Graves, 1870, oil on canvas, 87.6 ´ 68.6 cm, Bristol Collection, Ickworth © National Trust Images

Plate 11 Portrait of a Lady [Perhaps Mrs Henry Broughton], attributed to Thomas Gainsborough, c.1770–1775

Plate 12 Mabel Morrison, Charles Lepec, 1866, enamel on copper, 9.8 ´ 7.9 cm (framed), Metropolitan Museum of Art

Plate 13 Lillie Langtry, George Frederic Watts, 1880, oil on canvas, 66 ´ 53.5 cm, © Watts Gallery Trust

Plate 14 Fair Women and Pears’ Soap, Pears’ Pictorial 1, no. 5 (September 1894), © The British Library Board

Plate 15 Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, John Singer Sargent, 1889, oil on canvas, 221 ´ 114 cm, Tate, © Photo Tate

Plate 16 Eveleen Tennant, John Everett Millais, 1874, oil on canvas, 107.9 ´ 80 cm, Tate, © Photo Tate

Plate 17 Mary Endicott, Mrs Joseph Chamberlain, John Everett Millais, 1890–1891, oil on canvas, 102.4 ´ 134.1 cm, © Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery

Plate 18 Eleanor Sidgwick, James Jebusa Shannon, 1889, oil on canvas, 127 ´ 102 cm, Courtesy the Principal and Fellows of Newnham College, Cambridge

Plate 19 Gertrude Elizabeth (née Blood), Lady Colin Campbell, Giovanni Boldini, 1894, oil on canvas, 184 ´ 120 cm, © National Portrait Gallery, London

Plate 20 Corinna of Tanagra, Frederic Leighton, 1893, oil on canvas, 146.5 ´ 109 cm, © Leighton House Museum, Kensington & Chelsea, London UK/Bridgeman Images

Plate 21 The Dream of Fair Women, James Eadie Reid, 1902, Courtesy of Cheltenham Ladies’ College

Plate 22 Harriet Sarah Loyd-Lindsay, Lady Wantage, P.A. László, 1911, oil on canvas, 138 ´ 112 cm, private collection, Nick Pollard © de Laszlo Foundation

Plate 23 Lillah McCarthy, as ‘Donna Anna’, Charles Shannon, 1907, oil on canvas, 175.5 ´ 119 cm, © The Wilson/Bridgeman Images

Plate 24 Train for a ball gown, Charles Conder, c.1903, 188 ´ 109 cm, watercolour on silk, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Plate 25 Woman Smiling, August John, 1908–1909, oil on canvas, 196 ´ 98.2 cm, Tate Photo Tate © The Estate of Augustus John/Bridgeman Images

Plate 26 Dame Christabel Pankhurst, Ethel Wright, exhibited c.1909, oil on canvas, 162.5 ´ 96.7 cm, © National Portrait Gallery, London

Plate 27 Portrait of a Lady; Mrs Lionel Phillips, Giovanni Boldini, 1903, oil on canvas, 188.5 ´ 153.5 cm, Collection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin

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27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

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and Angelique Richardson, eds., The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002). By removing even her ostrich feather, he sought perhaps to suggest propriety (or advocate for animal rights). Veronica Franklin Gould, G. F. Watts: The Last Great Victorian (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2004), 140. Bianca (1863) has not survived, but it was reproduced: M.H. Spielmann, ‘Mr. George Frederick Watts, R.A.’, The Magazine of Art, January 1897, 207. Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, 624. Lara Perry, ‘The Carte de Visite in the 1860s and the Serial Dynamic of Photographic Likeness’, Art History 35, no. 4 (2012): 728–49, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2012 .00915.x. On two of Langtry’s contemporaries, see Patrizia Di Bello, ‘Elizabeth Thompson and “Patsy” Cornwallis West as Carte-de-Visite Celebrities’, History of Photography 35, no. 3 (2011): 240–49. Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-Visite and the Bourgeois Imagination’, in Image & Imagination, ed. Martha Langford (Montreal; London: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2005), 72–73. Patrizia Di Bello, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 54–71. Kate Flint, ‘Portraits of Women: On Display’, in Millais: Portraits, ed. Peter Funnell (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1999), 194. Sharon Marcus, ‘Refections on Victorian Fashion Plates’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 14, no. 3 (2003): 14. Heidi Brevik-Zender, ‘Interstitial Narratives: Rethinking Feminine Spaces of Modernity in Nineteenth-Century French Fashion Plates’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36, no. 2 (15 March 2014): 96. Catherine Hindson, ‘“Mrs. Langtry Seems to Be on the Way to a Fortune”: The Jersey Lily and Models of Nineteenth-Century Fame’, in In the Limelight and under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, ed. Su Holmes and Diane Negra (New York: Continuum, 2011), 30–32. ‘Fair Women’, Pears’ Pictorial 1, no. 5 (September 1894): 30. ‘Fair Women’, 30. Jason Rosenfeld, Heather Birchall, and Alison Smith, Millais (London: Tate, 2007), 184. It was Pears’s colour supplement in 1887. Laurel Bradley, ‘Millais’s Bubbles and the Problem of Artistic Advertising’, in Pre-Raphaelite Art in Its European Context, ed. Alicia Craig Faxon and Susan P. Casteras (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), 195. By the 1880s the company was spending between £30,000 and £40,000 per annum on advertising. Loeb, Consuming Angels, 9. ‘Fair Women’, 2. ‘Literature’, Glasgow Herald, no. 232 (22 May 1894). ‘Fair Women’, n.p. Paula Gillett, Musical Women in England, 1870–1914: Encroaching on All Man’s Privileges (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 184. Loeb, Consuming Angels, 75, 152. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (London: Routledge, 1994), 208–14. ‘Fair Women’, 32. ‘Fair Women’, 33. Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the Market: Envisioning Consumer Society in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 2001), 155. Perry, History’s Beauties, 113. Buckley and Fawcett, Fashioning the Feminine, 19. Langtry appeared in Sydney Grundy’s The Degenerates (1899). For example, Eliza Lynn Linton, In Haste and at Leisure (1895); Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 92–93. Patricia Roux Foujols, Prosper d’Epinay (1836–1914): Un Mauricien à La Cour Des Princes (Mauritius: L’Amicale Ile Maurice-France, 1996), 90–91. Like Langtry, Bernhardt was known through earlier oil portraits (e.g. Louise Abbema [1875] and Jules Bastien-LePage [1879]). The Spindler sketch seems modelled on the latter.

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53 Carol Ockman and Kenneth E. Silver, Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama (New Haven; London: Jewish Museum; Yale University Press, 2005). Mary Louise Roberts, ‘Acting Up: The Feminist Theatrics of Marguerite Durand,’ in Jo Burr Margadant, ed., The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 197; Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 165–219. 54 Following Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), considerable scholarship has addressed inconsistencies and counternarratives in Orientalism. Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth-Century Art and Society (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991); Julie F. Codell and Dianne Sachko Macleod, Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998); Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts, eds., Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2002); Reina Lewis, Rethinking Orientalism Women, Travel and the Ottoman Harem (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004); Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones and Mary Roberts, Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Mary Roberts, Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Julie F. Codell and Joan DelPlato, Orientalism, Eroticism and Modern Visuality in Global Cultures (London; New York: Routledge, 2016). 55 See also Alma Tadema’s larger-scale Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra (1883). Rosemary Barrow, Lawrence Alma-Tadema (London: Phaidon, 2001), 116; A. Inglis and J. Long, Queens & Sirens: Archaeology in 19th Century Art and Design (Geelong: Geelong Art Gallery, 1998). 56 Edward Ziter, The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 194. 57 Clement Scott, ‘Sarah Bernhardt in London’, The Illustrated London News, 23 June 1894, 775. 58 Elena Boeck, ‘Archaeology of Decadence: Uncovering Byzantium in Victorien Sardou’s Théodora’, in Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity, ed. Roland Betancourt and Maria Taroutina (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 102–32. 59 Juliet Bellow, Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Farnham; Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 161. 60 Emily S. Apter, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 139. In contrast, Charmaine Nelson argues that sculptor Edmonia Lewis strategically resisted racial associations in her depiction of the Death of Cleopatra (1876) with a European rather than black physiognomy. Charmaine Nelson, ‘Edmonia Lewis’ Death of Cleopatra: White Marble, Black Bodies and Racial Crisis in America’, in Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (Aldershot; Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 223–43. 61 Alice Meynell, ‘Madame Sarah Bernhardt’, Art Journal, 1888, 134–39. 62 Mary Bergstein, In Looking Back One Learns to See: Marcel Proust and Photography (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014), 168. 63 Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 135. 64 Alisa Solomon, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theatre and Gender (London: Routledge, 1997), 98; Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York; London: Routledge, 1997), 37. 65 This contrasted with Langtry’s visual and semantic associations with whiteness. 66 ‘Madame Sarah Bernhardt in “Izeyl” At Daly’s Theatre’, Graphic, 7 July 1894; Robert Sherard, ‘Sarah Bernhardt’, Graphic, 7 July 1894. 67 Griselda Pollock, ‘Louise Abbema’s Lunch and Alfred Stevens’s Studio: Theatricality, Feminine Subjectivity and Space around Sarah Bernhardt, Paris, 1877–1888’, in Local/ Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (Aldershot; Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 115. 68 Heather McPherson, The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 78.

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69 Pollock, ‘Louise Abbema’s Lunch and Alfred Stevens’s Studio: Theatricality, Feminine Subjectivity and Space around Sarah Bernhardt, Paris, 1877–1888’, 117. 70 John Stokes, ‘Sarah Bernhardt’, in Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in Her Time, ed. John Stokes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 27. 71 Dudley Hardy, ‘An Impression of Sarah Bernhardt’, Sketch, 27 June, 1894, 457. 72 Brevik-Zender, ‘Interstitial Narratives’, 97. 73 Bernhardt, like Langtry, endorsed products for women, such as Récamier cream for the American cosmetics entrepreneur Harriet Hubbard Ayer. 74 For Bernhardt, the Fair Women exhibition also coincided with a move into theatre management. Between 1893 and 1899 she ran the Théâtre de la Renaissance and afterwards founded the Théàtre Sarah Bernhardt. 75 Jean-Michel Nectoux, Stars et monstres sacrés (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1987). 76 F.G. Stephens, ‘The Grafton Galleries’, The Magazine of Art, May (1894): 321. 77 Gillian Perry, ‘Painting Actresses’ Lives’, in The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011). 78 Shearer West, ‘Painting and Theatre in the 1890s’, in British Theatre in the 1890s: Essays on Drama and the Stage, ed. Richard Foulkes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 142. 79 Ellen Terry, The Story of My Life (London: Hutchinson & Co Hazell, Watson & Viney, 1908), 207. 80 Emma Slocombe, ‘Lady Macbeth at the Lyceum’, The National Trust Historic Houses & Collections Annual 5 (2011), 4–11. 81 Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage, 125. 82 ‘Fine Arts’, The Athenaeum, no. 3481 (14 July 1894): 71. 83 Keremi Gawade, ‘Fashioning Aestheticism: Ellen Terry, Photography and Fashion’, in Ellen Terry: The Painter’s Actress, (Guildford: Watts Gallery), 2014, 69–71; Alice Comyns Carr, Mrs. J. Comyns Carr’s Reminiscences, ed. Eve Adam (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1925), 211–12. 84 Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, 624. 85 Susan Sidlauskas, ‘Not Beautiful: A Counter-Theme in the History of Women’s Portraiture’, in Re-Framing Representations of Women: Figuring, Fashioning, Portraiting, and Telling in the ‘Picturing’ Women Project, ed. Susan Shifrin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 183–98; See also Aileen Ribeiro, Facing Beauty: Painted Women & Cosmetic Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 281. 86 Andrew Stephenson, ‘“A Keen Sight for the Sign of the Races”: John Singer Sargent, Whiteness and the Fashioning of Angloperformativity’, Visual Culture in Britain 6 (Winter 2005): 207–25. 87 Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, 624. 88 Ormond and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, vol. 1, 187. 89 West, ‘Painting and Theatre in the 1890s’, 142. By this time Terry had achieved renown as a Shakespearean performer and would follow the career pattern of both Bernhardt and Langtry, managing the Imperial Theatre in 1903. 90 Elizabeth Heath, ‘Dame Ellen Alice Terry (1847–1928), Actress’ Later Victorian Portraits Catalogue, NPG, www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/personextended?linkid=mp04 458&tab=biography. Terry would later recreate the Oldfeld role in suffrage plays. 91 ‘Fair Women’, 30. 92 Ellen Terry to Edward Gordon Craig, Friday April 1894, Ellen Terry, The Collected Letters of Ellen Terry, 3:21. 93 Tracy C. Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), 69–86. 94 Davis, Actresses as Working Women, 105. 95 Mary Jean Corbett, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiographies (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 107. 96 Buckley and Fawcett, Fashioning the Feminine, 28.

4

(Re)Envisioning New Women Eveleen Myers and Gertrude Campbell

Just as Fair Women placed celebrated actresses as icons of independence and fashionability, so too these aspects of modern womanhood were presented by other ‘fair women’. Two ‘fair women’ in the Centre Gallery intervened directly in contemporary art: the photographer Eveleen (Tennant) Myers and art writer Gertrude Campbell. While Myers and the ‘ultra-modern’ Campbell were not theatre-world celebrities, they held sway in social and cultural networks. More importantly their portraits and the context of their display in Fair Women, when considered alongside their work, give insights into the representation of modern womanhood and the possibilities for their professional agency. Myers’s and Campbell’s portraits will be a starting point for an analysis of the ways in which these women (re)envisioned a version of ‘fair womenhood’ infected with modernity and gender politics.

Eveleen Myers: A ‘Fair Woman’ behind the Lens In Fair Women, Eveleen Myers appeared in a red dress, holding a basket of ferns (Plate 16). The portrait had been completed two decades earlier by John Everett Millais when Myers was eighteen. The portrait is striking: the bold red dress with sheer sleeves contrasts dramatically with her dark eyes framed by her hair falling in ringlets beneath a black hat. Jason Rosenfeld observes: This work is a likeness as well as a meditation on a woman ensconced in and at one with nature. She is shown as vibrantly au courant, with her chic hat, fashionable velvet choker and deep red dress. She holds a basket of ferns and wears an arrestingly discordant light blue strand necklace.1 The production of the portrait reportedly required eighty to ninety sittings because of Millais having to rework the portrait.2 An early pencil sketch shows Myers in the same hat, but only as a partial fgure in three-quarter profle.3 This required repeated visits to Millais’s studio. The experience of this close working relationship clearly had a personal signifcance for Eveleen Myers. In her photograph album a small lone image of a house stands out from a limited selection of exterior shots of family homes and holiday locations. It is annotated, ‘Where Millais painted portrait of EM’.4 She had already been painted as a girl by G.F. Watts in 1869 (Delaware Art Museum) and Watts would complete a second portrait of Myers as an adult, similar to the Millais in that she was out of doors, walking with a parasol (Tate, 1880). But Rosenfeld sees Millais’s portrait of Myers as distinctive: ‘there is a feeling of being

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present before the subject, and the subject in this case is aware of the viewer’s gaze; whereas in Watts’s there is a sensation that what is seen is something that could easily be a vision of a person in a private, unreachable reverie’.5 It may have been this sense of direct engagement with the viewer that still appealed to viewers of the portrait in 1894. Interestingly in all three of these portraits Myers was dressed in red tones, but the red in the Millais is a particularly pure shade, called ‘Etna’ after the volcano still erupting in Sicily at the time. It must have stood out amongst the other paintings in the Centre Gallery.6 Indeed Millais’s use of ‘unusual’ colour was commented on by Claude Phillips in his review of Fair Women for the National Review.7 Here Phillips may not simply have been referring to the extraordinary vibrancy of the piece, but also the use of the red pigment; the colour red did not often appear in women’s portraits of the period, probably because it had associations with exoticism and ‘scarlet women’.8 However, for Phillips this did not detract from its overall brilliance and it was compared favourably with Millais’s ‘trivial’ Cinderella hung nearby in the Centre room.9 The latter, a forlorn image of a seated girl and broom in grey tones (modelled by Beatrice Buckstone, the granddaughter of an actor), perhaps contrasted rather sharply with Myers’s portrait.10 When not on the wall in Fair Women, the Millais portrait hung in the home of her mother, Gertrude Tennant, who had been friendly with the novelist Gustave Flaubert in Paris, and hosted a salon in Whitehall, London. Eveleen Myers’s sister Dorothy Tennant had also modelled for Millais in a painting titled No! (1875), in which a fashionable young woman stands beside a table reading a letter presumably from a suitor and takes up her pen to write a rejection.11 The painting, emphasising the independence of young women in the marriage market, was well received at the Royal Academy where it was exhibited along with the Millais portrait of her sister. Such was the fame of the Millais portraits that, as young women, the Tennant sisters were introduced as the ‘Misses Tennants painted by Millais’.12 The two sisters remained close and both went on to develop close ties with the art world. Dorothy Tennant pursued a career as an artist, studying at the Slade and in Paris, while the Millais painting was reproduced and circulated in an engraving. Eveleen Tennant married the classicist and spiritualist F.H. Myers in 1880. She had three children between 1881 and 1886 and moved to Cambridge.13 However, Eveleen Myers maintained the unusual and varied Tennant familial circle after her marriage, frequently attending the London salon independently, with or without her children.14 In this way she retained a degree of autonomy from her husband both socially and politically. In 1888, inspired by a childhood visit to Julia Margaret Cameron, she had set up a photography studio at Leckhampton House in Cambridge with its own developing and printing facilities. By the time of the re-exhibition of the Millais portrait in 1894, the gaze of Eveleen Myers had been redeployed from sitter to portraitist. Myers combined role as portraitist and portrayed offers further possibilities for interpreting Fair Women as active cultural agents. The display of Myers’s Fair Women portrait was in dialogue with an aspect of her work that has garnered little attention, her own parallel series of photographs of ‘fair’ or ‘great’ women. Myers’s work offers representations of female intellect and cultural authority. These present an alternative visual context for Fair Women, one produced by one of the sitters. I’ve already mentioned that photography continued to overlap with late-nineteenth-century celebrity culture, with an ever-increasing demand for photographic portraits. While in his review of Fair Women Phillips dismissed its popular counterpart, Victorian ‘photographer’s windows … irrespective of art and irrespective

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of historical interest’, cartes-de-visite, cabinet cards and photographic reproductions were actually crucial objects of exchange and circulation in the very fashionable networks which organised the exhibition (many are extant in public and private collections).15 Moreover photography was an already established career path for women by the 1890s. The innovative portraits and ‘subject pictures’ by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) were celebrated and reproduced. Myers was seen at the time as continuing Cameron’s legacy – she similarly photographed her children, producing ‘fancy subjects’ as well as portraits of ‘great men’. Although Myers’s photographs were not displayed in Fair Women, they were reproduced and circulated through the press and shown in commercial London galleries such as Thomas McLean’s Gallery.16 Myers’s portrait of Robert Browning was featured in the Magazine of Art in 1890, and during her career she would photograph a number of renowned male politicians and scientists of the day, including Joseph Chamberlain, Arthur James Balfour, W.E. Gladstone and Francis Galton (Figure 4.1).17 A letter from Galton in 1894 thanking her for the ‘two most artistic photographs’ and inviting her to the Ladies Soirée at the Royal Society indicates their rapport and her inclusion in an intellectual and social milieu.18 Myers was also fnancially strategic about her career. She registered copyright of her photos at the Stationers Offce, as had Cameron, and thus indicated her interest in the business of photography. It ensured she retained the rights over the circulation and reproduction of her photographs. This was particularly prudent in the case of the portraits of her sister, who suddenly became a household name as a result of her marriage to the African explorer Henry Morton Stanley (who located Dr. Livingstone).19 Eveleen Myers crossed the divide between fashionable sitter and portraitist. For Myers, Fair Women is emblematic of this shift and her ability to do arguably both. Myers’s work unsettled Phillips distancing of Fair Women from photography. Moreover, Myers’s oeuvre from the 1890s, largely unknown today, gives remarkable insight into her position in a network of political and intellectual women and men. In Myers’s combination of portraitist and portrayed, she demonstrates the agency of ‘fair’ woman in 1894. Myers gained critical acclaim for her work in the 1890s.20 She was included in the photo journal the Sun Artists Series in 1891. Each luxury issue was comprised of an essay on the featured artist and a series of four photogravure plates; Henry Peach Robinson and Julia Margaret Cameron had already been featured, among others. These journal issues were evidently collectable objects which could be bound into a portfolio. The photogravures included in the Myers issue were a combination of portraits and tableaux or subject pictures. The essay accompanying her work was written by John Addington Symonds, the writer and advocate of sexual reform. In the essay he began with a discussion of photography as either ancillary to the fne arts of painting, sculpture and architecture or as a rival, suggesting that photographic nudes and Cameron’s ‘subject-photographs’ were the latter.21 Symonds went on to argue that Myers could be considered stylistically alongside the Cameron photographs, because her work showed her ‘true aesthetic feeling’, rather than appearing similar to a ‘tableau vivant’. In this way, Myers’s work was distinct from the Victorian popular entertainment of performing ‘living pictures’ which were often photographed (something that would also have resonated with Sharp’s imagined ‘living pictures’ at Fair Women). Moreover, according to Symonds, Myers was apparently a ‘fne artist’ rather than an orchestrator of tableaux. The illustration for this argument was Myers’s photograph titled Rebecca (1891) (Figure 4.2). The Genesis story of Rebekah had been

Figure 4.1 Sir Francis Galton, Eveleen Myers, 1890s platinum print, © National Portrait Gallery, London

Figure 4.2 Rebecca at the well, Eveleen Myers, 1891, sepia photogravure, © National Portrait Gallery, London

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depicted in engravings by Holman Hunt and Leighton. In contrast to both of these, Myers focussed on the single fgure of Rebekah holding a water jug, leaving out the male characters in the story and emphasising a monumental study of the female fgure rather than the narrative. In particular Symonds praised her study of drapery, reminiscent of the folds of a Greek chiton. Myers’s choice of subjects and attention to fabric and tone did align her work with that of Cameron and the aesthetic concerns of late Pre-Raphaelitism. Although she was working in black and white rather than colour, her composition of a single fgure with an attribute mimicked or was in dialogue with works such as Veronica Veronese that appeared in Fair Women. In this sense Myers’s ‘fancy pictures’ seemed to pursue the aesthetic ideals of feminine beauty. These artistic parallels were similarly reinforced in an article on fgure photography which appeared in the Magazine of Art in 1891 entirely illustrated with six photographs by Cameron and Myers, three by each artist.22 Extant correspondence indicates that Myers, like Cameron, actively promoted her own work by gifting ‘subject pictures’ to friends and acquaintances. One letter from a recipient of such a gift was illustrated with a sketch of Myers’s photograph of her own son Leo as an angel: ‘You do not know how much I appreciate your photograph of your son as a small angel. I had it framed in a black and gold oval frame with his head high up in the frame, leaving him plenty of room to look down on the world! Like this [sketch]’.23 Clearly Myers ascribed value to the images as ‘artistic’ photographs. Unlike Cameron, vast collections of Myers’s work have not survived. Instead her photographs remain extant in her own albums in the National Portrait Gallery. These fragile, but carefully compiled pages reveal her attempt to document and catalogue her own photographic corpus. Some of these were clearly intended for public circulation through exhibitions or reproduction, while others were probably for private exchange and distribution. But, aside from a limited number of small annotations, the labelling within the albums is absent leaving more questions than answers. Myers’s albums reveal aspects of her own engagement with self-fashioning and artistic exchange. Within them are also placed several portraits of Myers herself. Her more intimate family portraits include one of her reading in the sitting room alongside her children c.1890 (Figure 4.3). The table in the foreground is covered with books as is practically every fat surface. All of the empty chairs in the background seem to be accompanied by tables piled with books. The smaller children are intent on a game and writing, while the elder boy writes atop a large stack of books. The carpets and plush fabric of the drapes look rather sumptuous and Myers’s sleeves and scarf are au courant, but otherwise she wears a rather unassuming skirt. Around the room are several photographs in frames, some of which may be her own photographs. Why did Myers choose to depict herself in this fashionable and book-flled interior? Was she signalling herself as the matriarch of a family of intellectually curious children in a university town? Or was this just a way of getting the children to sit still for the group photograph? At about the same time Myers herself sat for a series of studio photographs which can also be found in her album. These present a similar representation of herself as a reading woman. Dressed in a fashionable day suit with puffed sleeves and wide lapels, she appears engrossed in a book. Such tailor-made outfts of the 1880s and 1890s came to form the template for respectable dress for the professional woman, the New Woman and the suffragette.24 So these studio portraits should be seen in the context of the proliferation of popular images mocking the ‘advanced’ reading woman, but there was also a visual space for the intellectual and fashionable reading woman (such as

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Figure 4.3 Eveleen Myers; Silvia Constance Myers; Harold Hawthorn Myers; Leopold Hamilton Myers, probably Eveleen Myers, mid-1890s, © National Portrait Gallery, London

Ellen Terry). In another portrait, she looks to the right with her hand still on the book. In a surprising fnal shot she gazes upwards seemingly laughing (Figure 4.4). This group of photographs present a deliberately modern fgure with the accoutrements of a New Woman. While obviously posed, these shots are somehow more personal and suggest a degree of informality. The photographer is thought to have been her friend Cyril Flower, 1st Baron Battersea, a Liberal politician (who photographed a wide circle of contemporary fgures) whom she also photographed, thereby reversing roles.25 Her involvement in constructing the photographs seems almost certain. What was their purpose? Were these intended to be circulated more widely as part of her public persona as a professional photographer? These somewhat informal studio photographs of Myers differ markedly from her cropped focussed portraits of female sitters.

Myers’s ‘Fair Women’: Imperial, Intellectual and Political Networks Myers’s corpus of photographs of female sitters reveal a multifaceted engagement with the representation of modern women. Within the albums she compiled of her own artwork emerge a coterie of ‘advanced’ women, who, like the celebrity actresses, were actively involved in the construction of their own portraits. Their identities ranged across the felds of culture, education and politics. Several of her sitters were women who also circulated in painted portraits of ‘fair women’ of the period, such as Margaret Stuyvesant White (Sargent, 1883, Concoran) and Madeline (Wyndham) Adeane (Sargent, 1899, Metropolitan). Myers’s photographs did not necessarily supplant fne art portraits of the kind shown in Fair Women; in some cases there seems to be a direct connection between the two. Millais’s portrait of Mary Crowninshield

Figure 4.4 Eveleen Myers, possibly Cyril Flower, 1890s, platinum print, © National Portrait Gallery, London

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Endicott Chamberlain, the third wife of Joseph Chamberlain, was contemporary with one by Myers (Figure 4.5 and Plate 17). Chamberlain’s hairstyle is identical in both images, with the face slightly elongated, her fashionable pale blue dress is visible as she sits holding a cup of tea on her lap. The portraits indicate Mary Chamberlain’s movement, shortly after her arrival in Britain, between the studio of the Royal Academician and the studio of his former sitter. Her diaries record dinner at Myers’s mother’s in

Figure 4.5 Mary Chamberlain, Eveleen Myers, platinum print, 1890s, © National Portrait Gallery, London

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February 1890, two sittings with Millais in March, a photograph with Myers at 12 pm on April 30, and further sittings with Millais in May.26 But, while a portrait by Millais held public signifcance as a result of its appearance in the Royal Academy in 1891, the portrait by Myers signalled membership of a more private network of politicians, artists and other luminaries, the people who attended soirées at the home of Gertrude Tennant, including Joseph Chamberlain and Gladstone. Like Myers, Mary Chamberlain was already experienced in political circles for she was daughter of William C. Endicott, secretary of war for U.S. President Grover Cleveland. In contrast to society portraiture, Myers favoured carefully crafted close observation: photographs are cropped to focus on the face and neck. In his analysis of portraiture, Richard Brilliant singles out the importance of the face; he sees it as ‘suffcient’ in establishing the identity of the sitter.27 Though he is not specifcally addressing gender, it is interesting that for Myers the cropped head is ‘suffcient’ for female sitters. This style of artistic modernity was still infected with fashionability and she clearly discussed appropriate dress with her clients before sittings. Her correspondence suggests portraits were planned ahead of time and sartorial questions were asked by some of her sitters.28 For Myers, portraiture was a process of collaboration. Thus, on the one hand the photographs were informed by painted portraits of ‘fair women’ and on the other hand they offered a more easily exchangeable and cheaper alternative for many women. Photographs had another function for professional women in establishing and promoting their reputation.29 As a photographer, Myers became an intermediary in the fascination that surrounded her sister’s marriage in 1890 (Figure 4.6). As a result of the celebrity union in Westminster Abbey of Dorothy Tennant and Stanley, Myers’s portraits of her sister in profle appeared in the Daily Graphic and engraved versions appeared elsewhere in the press. The small print beneath the reproduction read ‘reproduced by special permission of the author’s sister’.30 Although the newspaper illustration was about the lavish Tennant–Stanley July wedding, it also drew attention to Myers’s photographic practice. The portrait reappeared in the autumn as the frontispiece for Tennant’s illustrated volume Street Arabs; Dorothy Tennant’s sympathetic portrayal of children (street children reportedly attended her wedding) refected contemporary concern for East End poverty.31 Myers’s albums reveal that she was also appointed as her sister’s personal photographer for the wedding and honeymoon (in her album she noted: ‘she insisted on mother and me Eveleen Myers coming with her!’32). The Myers photographs include several taken of the couple at Melchett Court, Hampshire. In one of these images her sister is seated in an artistic dress beside Stanley (because she towered over him), while ‘Sali’, Saleh Bin Osman, in a fez, stands arms crossed behind them. Bin Osman was a Wangwana boy, who having been indispensable to Stanley on the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1887–1889), had become his servant and come with him to Europe (Figure 4.7).33 In these photographs, empire and fashionability are confated and recreated anachronistically on the grounds of an English country house. The photographs appear to endorse Stanley’s account of the controversial expedition, In Darkest Africa (1890), as a rescue rather than territorial annexation. However, they visually document Bin Osman’s presence and point to the human implications of Stanley’s trips to central Africa.34 Decades earlier Cameron had photographed Prince Déjatch Alámayou, son of Eithiopian Emperor Tewodros II, and Captain Tristram Speedy who returned to Britain after the Abyssinian Expedition of 1867–1868.35 Cameron’s photograph of Captain Tristram Speedy in Abyssinian dress was pasted

Figure 4.6 Dorothy (née Tennant) Stanley, Eveleen Myers, published 1890, carbon print, © National Portrait Gallery, London

Figure 4.7 Sir Henry Morton Stanley; Dorothy (née Tennant), Lady Stanley and ‘Sali’, Eveleen Myers, 1890, platinum print, © National Portrait Gallery, London

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into Myers’s album (together with a note about his visit with her sister Dorothy). Myers was evidently aware of Cameron’s precedent, but it is diffcult to know whether Myers thought her Melchett photographs echoed these earlier works.36 Jeff Rosen has suggested that Cameron’s late photographs taken in Sri Lanka, ‘disclose the intermixture of fear and desire, mimicry and difference, and obedience and independence in the imagery, expressing the artists’ constant struggle with their status as colonialist outsiders’.37 Myers’s Melchett shots retain a distance from the sitters that is not evident in her artistic single-subject portraits. Trevor Hamilton observes that Myers was not entirely in agreement with her own husband’s moderately imperialist views.38 Her photographs perhaps reveal a degree of ambivalence about her colonialist role as photographer and her flial obligation to honeymoon en famille. Myers’s coterie of sitters reveals other women who, like her sister, were intent on conveying artistic and cultural identities. The artist and sculptor Effe Stillman, daughter of the artist Marie Spartali Stillman for example was among her sitters; the portrait is approximately contemporary with Stillman’s own exhibition of portrait medallions in the 1892 and 1893 Autumn Exhibitions at the Walker Art Gallery.39 Myers’s photographs include a rather elite circle of intellectual women involved in culture and politics. There was a visual precedence for such portraits. Cherry has highlighted the signifcance of portraiture by and for women in the Victorian period, such as the earlier portrait by Emily Mary Osborn of Barbara Bodichon for Girton College. The portraits found in new libraries and colleges not only provided role models, but also ‘framed subject positions for women to take up and enact’.40 Myers’s self-assured female sitters similarly posited intellectual subject positions for ‘great’ women, comparable to her ‘great’ Victorian portraits of men. The classical scholar Agnata Frances (Ramsay) Montagu Butler had achieved a frst in the classical tripos (ahead of all the male students) and was parodied in Punch, with a cartoon of her boarding a ‘Ladies Only’ rail carriage.41 After her marriage to the master of Trinity College Cambridge, Butler continued work on her edition of Herodotus, published in 1889 (coinciding with the birth of her frst son). In a second Punch image, she was depicted busily writing at her desk, distracted by a less intellectual friend, while a nurse held the new baby.42 Myers’s photograph, in contrast, presents Montagu Butler in an elaborate gown with a ftted bodice, richly embellished with lace and pearls (Figure 4.8).43 The choice of a white or pale dress was commonly held to be most fattering to women in the medium of black and white photography, but it was also strategic. Butler, as a young woman who was now acting as host in a college dominated by men (until 1979), must have been actively seeking to combine fashionability and intellect.44 What is also notable about Myers’s photograph of Butler is its close composition. Unlike her subject pictures or indeed much of the studio photography undertaken by her contemporaries, Myers’s photographs were not set up with elaborate props, and backdrops are not visible. Her studio was noted at the time for its remarkable lack of ‘properties’. Marie Belloc described her studio in 1896: ‘It contains only a couple of plain screens, a few chairs, and a plain wooden negative cupboard, with, of course, a large camera’.45 Myers portrait of Butler, eschewing back-clothes and potted palms, demonstrated the detailed study now possible in the medium and signalled the sitter’s own modernity. Myers’s work seemed to be more intent on conveying character. This psychological facet of her work was emphasised in Symonds’s 1891 essay, wherein he compared her work to that of Watts: ‘A good photographic portrait has greater documentary value, deeper psychological veracity, than the best of paintings. That is

Figure 4.8 Agnata Frances Butler, Eveleen Myers, 1891, platinum print, 1891, © National Portrait Gallery, London

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because the painter or the sculptor does not depict the man he has to represent, but what he thinks he feels about the man’.46 In this context Symonds was referring to Myers’s portraits of Browning and Gladstone, but her portrait of senior female fgures in Cambridge take the same closely focussed approach. Another of the intellectual women was Anne Jemima Clough, a strong promoter of girl’s education and principal of Newnham College (Figure 4.9). Clough was notoriously unconcerned about

Figure 4.9 Anne Jemima Clough, Eveleen Myers, 1890, platinum print, © The British Library Board

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her appearance. She wears dark colours; her hair, which had been perpetually silver, highlighted above her lined forehead. Clough is looking down as if reading, although the book is not visible in the image. In a portrait painted of Clough by the artist W.B. Richmond a decade earlier, she was similarly portrayed, but her brow and facial features were softened with brushstrokes. In a contemporary portrait by James Jebusa Shannon, Clough wore an academic gown, which may be what she is also wearing in Myers’s portrait, thereby denoting her status as the frst principal of Newnham. The Richmond painting followed the convention for learned women to be depicted with literary instruments, but for Myers’s portrait this was not possible, as she retained the closely cropped format of the portrait head. In fact, as we have seen already, this seems to be a part of her practice, at least for photographs taken within her home studio. Although Myers’s contemporary, studio photographer Alice Hughes, produced predominantly portraits that echoed society portraiture, she deployed a different approach for the temperance campaigner and journalist Frances Willard. Like Myers she followed a closely cropped format for a portrait of the bespectacled Willard that was published in the 1893 Men and Women of the Day. In these portraits of advanced women, Myers and Hughes both seem to be seeking to translate the focussed ‘great men’ format visible in paintings, such as G.F. Watts’s Hall of Fame series of eminent Victorians. Differing expectations for the medium may have enabled female photographers to take risks in their portrayals of intellectual women.47 Another well-known Cambridge intellectual who was photographed by Myers was the principal of Newnham College who followed Clough, Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick (Figure 4.10). In the simply posed portrait head, Sidgwick gazes directly back at the viewer. In this respect it is distinct from several of Myers’s portrait heads of women in profle. The portrait head is free from fashionable accessories or dress, garbed in black with only a fne line of white lace at her collar. Sidgwick’s piercing gaze emphasises the intellectual and professional status of the sitter. In 1894, Sidgwick was appointed to the Bryce Commission on Secondary Education, one of the frst women to serve on a royal commission.48 Sidgwick had helped Rayleigh improve the accuracy of experimental measurement of electrical resistance before shifting her research to psychical phenomena, becoming a member and later president of the Society for Psychical Research. The society had prestigious social status and its members included many intellectuals, artists and writers, including Myers’s husband.49 In addition, Sidgwick was a member of the select discussion group, the Ladies Dining Society (active 1890–1914), formed to retaliate against husbands dining at college (and Myers photographed another member Caroline Jebb).50 An oil portrait was also done of Sidgwick by James Jebusa Shannon, commissioned for Newnham as a gift from students and friends of the college (Plate 18). Myers’s portrait adopts a similar frontal pose, but it is bold and austere in comparison. Sidgwick and Myers both moved between political and intellectual circles. Myers also photographed Eleanor Sidgwick’s brother, Arthur Balfour (Prime Minister 1902–1905). Myers’s portrait photograph of Sidgwick is distinct from Myers’s several portraits of Sidgwick’s husband, the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, which were reproduced as photogravures, or indeed one of him standing with the medium Eusapia Palladino wearing an academic gown. His face in profle, Henry Sidgwick gazes past Paladino while Eleanor Sidgwick’s gaze directly meets the viewer. Myers presumably photographed Henry Sidgwick and Palladino as part of the publicity for their psychical research work, although Myers’s album annotations reveal that she found Palladino

Figure 4.10 Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, Eveleen Myers, 1900s, platinum print, © National Portrait Gallery, London

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excruciating: ‘oh! so trying’. Myers’s photograph of Eleanor Sidgwick suggests a separation from her husband’s career and a seriousness and status more akin to contemporary portraits of professional women. It is clear that Myers was a working photographer, engaged in all aspects of the process of photograph development. In Symonds’s essay, he concluded by noting that Myers in taking up photography, had applied herself assiduously to not only the aesthetic side, but also to ‘its less attractive mechanical processes’. Myers was friendly with the photographer and instrument-maker Albert Dew-Smith. She turned to him for technical advice and he served as a frequent sitter in her early work including the experimental photograph of him as a saint.52 In a later interview in the Woman at Home Myers claimed, ‘I even loved the smell of the chemicals’.53 Her photographic practice, in a studio surrounded by the odour of chemicals, seems in some ways entirely removed from Millais’s Fair Women image of her wearing a fashionable red dress posing in a garden with a basket of ferns. However, in a self-portrait c.1900, she returned to formally engage with the Millais portrait. Myers stands at the foot of garden steps in three-quarter profle in a long pale dress embroidered with a dark fora pattern on the underskirt and puffed sleeves. A train extends behind the dress and she holds a bouquet of ferns echoing the pattern on the dress (Figure 4.11). There was precedent for this kind of replication in Myers’s album which included studio photographs that reproduced G.F. Watts’s portrait of Dorothy [Tennant] (Tate, c.1880) holding her pet squirrel.54 It follows that Myers was acutely aware of the iconic power of not only the painted likenesses of her sister, but its photographic equivalents. In the self-portrait with ferns, Myers created her own artistic self-representation two decades later, a kind of clever restaging for those aware of the reference. Myers’s surviving work reveals that she actively challenged photography’s ‘beauty show’ role through the subjects she chose, the close-up portrait format, and her active engagement with both the ‘aesthetic’ and ‘scientifc’ aspects of photography. 51

‘Winsome, but Ultramodern’: Gertrude Campbell In the Fair Woman portrait painted by Boldini in 1894, Gertrude Campbell sits perched on a chair, with a self-assured gesture and intense gaze, dressed in a black evening gown, with her dark hair loosely swept up into a bun (Plate 19). Her pale skin contrasts sharply with the black dress and dark background, the only colour in the piece is provided by three fresh roses that adorn her bodice. She appears about to spring into action, sliding off her chair to step into the space of the gallery. Unlike other contemporary works in the exhibition, this work was shown for the frst time at Fair Women and it was one of the most controversial in the show. The Sporting Times proclaimed its newness: ‘the latest portrait of all being an extraordinary fn de siècle production by Boldini of Lady Colin Campbell, only quite recently completed’.55 The Bristol Mercury found it disturbing: ‘There is an even more up-to-date portrait painter, whom we are asked, as a trial of faith, to accept as the actual culmination of latter-day portraiture, viz., Mr. Boldini, whose startling presentment of Lady Colin Campbell – lent by the lady herself – was painted expressly for this exhibition’.56 And Phillips deemed Boldini ‘the lower variety of fn-de-siècle portraiture’, with the Campbell portrait an ‘unfortunate example of Boldini at his worst’, ‘even more aggressive, more reckless, in manner than usual’.57 It seemed to be so disliked because of Boldini’s avant-garde bravura technique: his method involved rapid brushstrokes and fuid handling of paint.

Figure 4.11 Self-portrait, probably Eveleen Myers, c.1900, platinum print, © National Portrait Gallery, London

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The Athenaeum implied that there was also a problem with the impropriety of the modern sitters. In October of 1894 the Athenaeum reviewed the Society of Portrait Painters exhibition which had been forced to set up in the New Gallery. [T]he visitor will fnd a larger proportion of beauties admirably painted in oil than is to be discovered in the Grafton Gallery’s collection of “Fair Women”. The greater number, too, are, of course, modest women, which is more than could be said for many of those whose portraits cover the walls of the Grafton Gallery.58 The review was intended as a damning indictment of not only the representations of female beauty found in Fair Women, but the behaviour of the women represented. However, in commenting on the immodesty of the female sitters, the critic, probably F.G. Stephens, revealed what disturbed him most about Fair Women. For Stephens the exhibition was not looking back nostalgically to models of demure feminine propriety. On the contrary it was a celebration of alternative models of femininity as epitomised by Campbell and the actresses. Anna Gruetzner Robins has argued that Campbell was the ‘embodiment of the New Woman’.59 Indeed the portrait received considerable attention in Sharp’s narrative dream reverie where he declared Campbell ‘winsome but ultramodern’. He also renamed her ‘Serpentina’ an allusion to her curved pose, one that reviewers had similarly applied to images of Bernhardt, a signature feature echoed in the sinuous lines of Art Nouveau.60 This is doubly referenced when Campbell is mistaken by Sharp for Lamia, the mistress of Zeus, who appears serpentine in mythology.61 Thus, like Bernhardt in Sarony’s Cleopatra, she temporarily adopts the role of seductive and monstrous woman. Intriguingly, in Sharp’s dream, it was Leighton’s Greek poet, Corinna of Tanagra (Plate 20), who was eager to leave Sharp in order to speak to Boldini’s Lady Colin Campbell: [n]ow you must forgive me. I wish to speak to a lady who is also, I understand, a daughter of the Muses, or at any rate is one who has earned repute by her pen. Her father-in-art, M. Boldini, has just informed me that I must meet my only possible rival.62 Here Sharp emphasised that it was Campbell’s pen that has earned her repute. Moreover, he was making a link between the two women, ancient and modern, that suggested a certain learned seriousness to Campbell’s writing rivalling that of a poet.63 Soon, ignoring Sharp and Boldini, the two women were ‘in animated conversation, the one tall and as dignifed as the Venus of Milo, the other no longer with her garments so twisted about her as to suggest that she had girt herself for a dance, but now a ftting rival to her companion’.64 Unbeknownst to the reading public, Sharp’s attention to the Campbell portrait in the Portfolio was the result of their collegial working relationship. At the time of the exhibition, Sharp and Campbell were planning to collaborate on a novel and suggested to Horace Scudder that a further collaboration ‘an article on “Copartnery,” by Lady Campbell and myself, would be sure to attract attention. We have already discussed it, and intend to do it. We wd. treat of famous instances in Copartnery … I do not think any article has been ‘a collaboration affair’ before. And an article on Copartnery by two collaborators would ‘take’, I am sure’.65 Neither of these projects came to fruition. Sharp’s association of the ‘tall and dignifed’ Venus de Milo with both Corinna of Tangara and Campbell can be understood as a double reference to corporeality.

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Figure 4.12 ‘The New Woman’ George DuMaurier, Punch, 1895, Punch Cartoon Library/ TopFoto

In the Boldini painting, the length of the body and its almost Amazonian proportions are emphasised; the limbs and torso appear elongated in relation to the head. Scholars have noted that Boldini fattered female sitters by painting them in similar poses. However, in the case of Campbell, this was also a comment on her stature: she was renowned for her height, reportedly towering above others at exhibition openings.66 This was akin to the stature of the New Woman as emphasised in Punch. While in some cartoons they appeared as diminutive older women, in others their bodily presence was emphasised. In the image of New Women smoking in a sitting room, they are seated, like the fgure of Campbell, and appear Amazonian in scale in contrast to the male fgure slinking out the door to have tea with the servants (Figure 4.12).67 Campbell was also acclaimed for her sporting abilities and had written articles on fencing as well as fshing. In this respect she possessed the physical attributes of New Womanhood.68 While Campbell had an active New Woman lifestyle, she also benefted, like Myers, from direct ties with the art world of the 1890s. Campbell was both sitter and critic, and as such can be variously positioned in relation to female beauty during the period. She wrote about the paintings and portraits she saw for the World where she was friends with its music critic, George Bernard Shaw.69 She was generally in favour of artists associated with ‘the modern’ trends in contemporary art, and had also been painted by Whistler.70 In 1885 Campbell had been involved in a highly publicised divorce case. She had petitioned for divorce on the grounds of cruelty – that he had infected her with syphilis – but in turn her husband had cited her adultery with four co-respondents.71 One might think that the case would have marked Campbell as

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marginal fgure in the late-nineteenth-century art world, but on the contrary she was able to establish a highly successful career. In spite of her status as a scandal-tainted Irish woman, she maintained a professional reputation as a journalist and art writer. Campbell descended from the wall of Fair Women on several occasions and deployed her ‘pen’. Not only is she listed amongst the attendees at the ‘private’ private view before the exhibition opened, but she reviewed the exhibition as part of her regular column for the World.72 Here the exhibition was a resounding success: It was a kind, if unpremeditated, act on the part of the directors of the Grafton Gallery to postpone opening their exhibition till the middle of May, and thus give a start to the rival shows at Burlington house and the New Gallery. For there is little question that the two latter exhibitions would have been at a total disadvantage if all three had happened together. Seldom, if ever, has so complete and representative a collection been brought together as that of “Fair Women,” which is now to be seen in Grafton Street. The idea was a brilliant one … The committee deserve the greatest credit for having unearthed so many beautiful works by old masters that the public has never seen before.73 Campbell’s readers learnt that the exhibition was superior to the annual shows at both the Royal Academy and the New Gallery. Moreover, she emphasised the prowess of the committee members in acquiring the works from private collections. The review was of course pseudonymous; she signed her column as QED. On the modern pictures she made a rather different critique: If there is a fault to be found with the collection, it is that there are not enough representative modern pictures and portraits. One room at least should be reserved for them; instead of this, the committee have mixed them up in the third room with those of the last century and the effect is not happy. To pass suddenly from the superb, to the somewhat indifferent Rossetti, “Veronica Veronese,” is to jump from one class of ideas to another with unpleasant rapidity. The two fght furiously, and the modern affectations get the worst of it before the harmonious simplicity of truth to Nature of the older work.74 Veronica Veronese and the Duchess of Devonshire fought ‘furiously’, and therefore the modern works should have been granted their own space. The vivid green velvet fabrics and red hair of the sitter, Alexa Wilding, in the Rossetti must have been startling alongside the warm ivory and gold tones of the infant on the knee of Reynold’s Duchess of Devonshire.75 Perhaps surprisingly she alluded to the responses to her own newly completed portrait: ‘with the exception of the portrait by Boldini, over which, as being la derniere note in the gamut of art here represented, opinions for and against wage furious war, all these excellent examples of living painters have often been seen before’.76 No doubt, because her signature was known at least to her colleagues she did not enter the debate herself; however, she did emphasise the painting’s exceptional au courant status. She later heralded the autumn rehang of Fair Women for the World, where she noted that so many pictures had been added it could almost be called a new exhibition.77 Her own portrait, however, remained for the entirety of the run. Campbell’s journalistic responses to the exhibition were not limited to the World. In 1894, she began her own journal, The Realm, with William Earl Hodgson, published

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on Saturdays as a rival to the Saturday Review. The journal dealt with art, music, literature and drama. In addition to editing the journal and probably writing a considerable portion of the text anonymously, Campbell contributed the theatre reviews, signing herself ‘GB’. A mysterious ‘X’ contributed a late review of the Fair Women exhibition after its rehang titled, ‘La Femme Passe—Vive La Femme!’. The unnamed author alluded to ‘Boldini’s seductive “Serpentina” – as a much-discussed portrait was named by a friendly but captious critic’.78 (The personal association with Sharp’s reverie would have been unknown to readers unaware of her editorship.79)

Self-Fashioning and the New Woman Not only was Campbell known for her regular appearances at exhibition press views and private views, but through popular journalism and publishing she established herself as a paragon of fashionability. Like Myers, her portrait had already been exhibited and her photographic portraits circulated in the popular press, revealing different sides to her public persona. An early portrait was reproduced in 1884 for the Catholic Merry England, alongside an article documenting her philanthropic work in the East End of London.80 Her head in profle, dressed in a high collar, the portrait and accompanying article, written pseudonymously by her friend Alice Meynell, was calculated in all likelihood to offer support to Campbell in advance of her impending divorce trial. After the trial Campbell was not deterred from the public realm of journalism. On the contrary, like the women actors who were her contemporaries, she was very aware of tactics of self-fashioning. An 1892 article on ‘Art Critics of Today’ included an engraving of Campbell standing in a gallery clutching a catalogue. The article contained a group portrait of male and female art critics, but she was the only woman to be allocated a separate portrait sketch. This is indicative of her professional signifcance: by this point Campbell was providing two regular columns for the World – the Art Column as well as ‘A Woman’s Walks’ – while contributing to various other periodicals such as the Art Journal and National Review. The following year Campbell was included in a luxury series of 182 Cabinet Portraits by the court and celebrity photographer W. & D. Downey accompanied by short biographies.81 The biographical essay, no doubt informed by Campbell herself, emphasised that she had ‘begun her writing career before her marriage’ and made only a brief reference to her judicial separation from Lord Colin Campbell. In the adjacent portrait she stands in a dress of pale fabric with leg-of-mutton sleeves, a gathered waist and bodice, and a high lace collar holding a feathered fan (Figure 4.13).82 This was contemporary with her two volumes advising readers on the perils of correct etiquette and fashion. In the preface to Etiquette of Good Society, which she edited in 1893, she quoted Goethe, ‘there is no outward sign of good manners but has a deep foundation in morals’.83 While visually the two versions of Campbell by Boldini and W. & D. Downey, a year apart, appear detached, they are indicative of the ways in which Campbell was able to present a complex and multifaceted version of New Womanhood. The year before Fair Women, Campbell had written a piece for the English Illustrated Magazine on the merits of smoking for women. The pages of Punch in the 1890s would have one believe that the radical New Woman wore suits and smoked.84 Campbell presented an altogether different alternative. She constructed an image of this new symbol of emancipation that was more aligned with a painted portrait, perhaps even her own. ‘[A] low voiced woman welcomes him rising out of the billowing

Figure 4.13 Gertrude, Lady Colin Campbell, W. & D. Downey, 1893, © National Portrait Gallery, London

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silken cushions of the sofa, a cigarette just removed from her lips’.85 This sensuous fantasy image of a domestic interior avoided the associations of smoking with mannishness.86 Moreover, her arguments in the article were double-pronged, not only suggesting that women could smoke in the company of men but also that the relaxing effects of smoking for women would aid in quelling marital discord.87 But smoking was not only to be done in the home, it was also an aspect of a public persona; Campbell herself had smoked Russian cigarettes since before her marriage. Another indicator of New Womanhood was the bicycle. In Cycling Illustrated Magazine, Campbell was pictured in her sitting room, an initiative particularly relevant for the author of articles and volumes on domestic décor (Figure 4.14).88 The photograph is undated, but it may have predated the Boldini portrait, which is not visible. Framed on the right by a large jardinière, the surfaces of the room surrounding her are covered in textiles, paintings, prints and photographs. One can perhaps imagine her amongst the billowing silks here – the addition of the tiger skin seems more reminiscent of contemporary portraits of Sarah Bernhardt than of the average middle-class interior. Griselda Pollock has read Louise Abbéma’s painting of Bernhardt’s home interior as a break from the ‘Woman at Home’ image, where instead women are ‘situated within their own self-fashioning and self-affrming environments where colonial collecting is used by European women to declare their own world-making’.89 In this example Campbell seems to deploy photography to similarly present her own self-fashioning and ‘world-making’ through colonial objects. Like Bernhardt, another

Figure 4.14 ‘Lady Colin Campbell,’ Cycling Illustrated, c.1896

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aspect of Campbell’s biography and professional career was its internationalism. Her biographer in 1893 began: Lady Colin Campbell is a citizen of the world. … She knows her Nile, and in Paris she passes, by long familiarity, as a Parisian, speaking French as perfectly as she speaks her native English and her almost native Italian; for wherever Lady Colin Campbell went she took with her the observing eye and the listening ear. Endowed with the faculty, as well as the opportunity, to see and hear, she has been doubly favoured, with the result that she is essentially cosmopolitan in temper.90 The eclectic objects in the interior combining pot plants, Persian carpets and animal skins are visible signs of feminine subjectivity and expression. At frst glance the photograph’s emphasis on her stylish sitting room negates the purpose of the article. The attraction of Campbell to the magazine was that like numerous women during the 1890s, Ella Hepworth Dixon and Elizabeth Robins Pennell among them, Campbell had taken to cycling (and was already a seasoned writer on the topic). In the interview Campbell highlighted the independence of action afforded by the bicycle and its potency in female emancipation. She advocated the dubious foreign French practice of wearing knickerbockers rather than the dangerous British cycling skirts.91 These perambulations, like her ‘walks’ around Britain and Europe, were a source for her journalism and became embedded in her public identity as a peripatetic modern woman. In fact, the photograph subverts stereotypes of cycling women that appeared elsewhere in the popular press by asserting Campbell own brand of fashionable and cosmopolitan new womanhood. Scholars have read the Boldini portrait as the very icon of the femme fatale, because of Campbell’s infamous divorce case. The portrait has conventionally been dated to 1897, two years after the death of her husband in 1895. This mistaken chronology has meant that the portrait has been interpreted as Campbell emerging from his shadow into public life, albeit on a rather spectacular scale with a cutting-edge portrait. But this underestimates her public profle and journalistic authority in the 1890s.92 The fact that the portrait was frst exhibited in 1894 indicates a completely different narrative: while her husband was still alive, she had already rebuilt her career as an art journalist and the coup de grâce was ensuring that her portrait by Boldini hung amongst the Fair Women at the Grafton Galleries. Thus, the signifcance of the portrait and its exhibition in 1894, implies a more complicated dynamic between artist and sitter. Boldini’s links with Campbell as a sitter, gave him entrée to Campbell’s professional and social networks.93 In addition to acting as a cultural mediator for the artistic milieu in London, multilingual and able to communicate with the Paris-based Boldini, Campbell led a cosmopolitan existence, moving physically between Britain, France and Italy. As discussed earlier, lenders to Fair Women could be identifed as tastemakers through the display of their own accoutrements. Campbell was one of these women. In addition to her portrait, Campbell lent one other work, which does not survive, to Fair Women: a fan by Eugene Morand with an original sonnet, signed by Armand Silvestre. In the context of Fair Women this is an intriguing object for several reasons. Firstly, it appeared in the End Gallery of smaller works and was mounted on the wall. All of the other fans in the exhibition were displayed in cases and included in the catalogue section ‘Miniatures, etc.’. The display of the fan was in keeping with the way newly

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produced artistic fans were displayed, framed, often behind glass, in domestic interiors. Thus, the Grafton Galleries extended the drawing room, in this case Campbell’s, into the gallery. Secondly, the fan connected to contemporary French theatre in London and Paris. The play Grisélidis had premiered in 1891 with music by Jules Massenet. Morand’s home was a gathering place for artistic elites, such as Rodin, Wilde and Bernhardt (whose portrait hung in the same room). The object signifed Campbell’s position within a cosmopolitan Parisian circle.94 The fan’s musical affliations also resonated with Campbell’s own frequent appearance as an amateur singer at charity events. The inclusion of so many fans in Fair Women and the display of Campbell’s fan in the End Gallery is indicative of what Pamela Gerrish Nunn has seen as the surprising transformation of the fan from a decorative to a fne-art object between 1860 and 1920.95 In contrast to any of the fans displayed in the exhibition, the Morand fan had been recently completed by a modern artist experimenting in a different medium, one that crossed, like several Fair Women, between the worlds of art and theatre.96 Like Campbell’s portrait, the Morand fan was representative of a very contemporary fashionability. As Sharp’s reverie in the gallery came to an end, the spell was broken: The lovely glow waned; the fgures became confused; there was even, it appeared to me, an unseemly scramble in front of a score or so of frames. The swish of a long serpentine black dress came right across my eyes, as I staggered against the dissolving shadow of M. Boldini. Then all was darkness, and I knew no more.97 The consistent reappearance of the ‘swish of a long serpentine black dress’ in the press proffered a version of New Womanhood that was ‘au courant’, fashionably dressed and accessorised with a theatrically personalised fan. Although Fair Women was, at least according to Phillips, distinct from photographer’s windows, it pointed to the constant interplay of the two media in contemporary portraiture, in several cases actioned by the sitters themselves. Photographs became crucial to the identity of the New Woman and late-nineteenth-century gender politics. Women, such as Campbell, actively contributed to these contemporary debates while at the same time regularly publishing their own critical responses to exhibition culture. The representations and careers of all fve case studies of modern women intersected with late-Victorian debates around gender, race, class and empire, and at the same time they show how the exhibition underlined a possibility for New Womanhood, as both independent and transgressive. Fair Women had a ripple effect in art publishing and exhibitions, and the following chapter will consider its effects and entanglements within this wider context over the ensuing decade. While not explicitly aligned with suffrage, ‘fair women’ was a theme that appealed to female writers and exhibition organisers intent on representing celebrated and fashionably modern women.

Notes 1 Jason Rosenfeld, John Everett Millais (London; New York: Phaidon Press, 2012), 155–56. 2 Rosenfeld, John Everett Millais, 158–59; John Collier, The Art of Portrait Painting (London; New York: Cassell and Co., 1905), 61. 3 Judy Oberhausen and Nic Peeters, ‘Eveleen Tennant Myers: From Model to Portraitist’, Understanding British Portraits, accessed 11 September 2019, www.britishportraits.org.

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uk/research-papers/eveleen-tennant-myers-from-model-to-portraitist-by-judy-oberhausen -and-nic-peeters/. Thanks to Nic Peeters and Judy Oberhausen for early Myers expertise. Ax68659, NPG. Rosenfeld, John Everett Millais, 155–56. Kate Flint, ‘Portraits of Women: On Display’, in Millais: Portraits, ed. Peter Funnell (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1999), 196. Claude Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, National Review 23, no. 137 (July 1894): 624. See Alison Matthews David, ‘Aestheticism’s True Colors: The Politics of Pigment in Victorian Art, Criticism and Fashion’, in Women and British Aestheticism, ed. Kathy Alexis Psomiades and Talia Schaffer (Charlottesville; London: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 188. Sargent was a notable exception. Kenneth McConkey, ‘The Theology of Painting: The Cult of Velazquez and British Art at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, Visual Culture in Britain 6, no. 2 (2005): 189–205. Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, 624. Its triviality may have also had to do with its ‘popular’ appeal after reproduction in the Graphic. This resulted in later confusion that Millais’s portrait of Myers was the companion Yes!, John Everett Millais, TGA 9915, Tate Archive. David Waller, The Magnifcent Mrs. Tennant: The Adventurous Life of Gertrude Tennant, Victorian Grande Dame (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2009), 192. Leopold (b. 1881), Silvia (b. 1883) and Harold (b. 1886). Trevor Hamilton, Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life after Death (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009), 59. Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, 611. Judy Oberhausen and Nic Peeters, ‘Eveleen Meyers (1856–1937): Portraying Beauty. The Rediscovery of a Late-Victorian Aesthetic Photographer’, The British Art Journal 7, no. 1 (2016): 96. W.M. Rossetti, ‘Portraits of Robert Browning - III.’, The Magazine of Art, January 1890, 265. (See also Pall Mall Budget engraved 13 Feb 1890.) She has been connected with the artistic Linked Ring, but there is no evidence to support this. Margaret Florence Harker, The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement in Photography in Britain, 1892–1910 (London: Heinemann for the Royal Photographic Society, 1979). F. Galton to EM, 9 March 1894, Trinity/Myer/25/151, Papers of Frederic William Henry Myers, Trinity College Library Cambridge. June of 1890: ‘Photograph of Miss Dorothy Tennant, half length, head on hand, profle’ and ‘Photograph of Miss Dorothy Tennant, bust, looking up, profle’. Myers Copyright Records, Copyright Offce: Entry Forms 1837 to 1912 (Public Record Offce: COPY 1): COPY 1/6, f786, NPG. Eveleen Myers was included in Edwardian Women Photographers (NPG 1994), curated by Terence Pepper. More recently she was included in Painting with Light (Tate 2016), although she was absent from the catalogue. Her ‘subject’ pictures are considered as examples of late-nineteenth-century pictorial photography. John Addington Symonds, ‘Mrs. F. W. H. Myers. With a Descriptive Essay’, Sun Artists, 1891, 51–53. P.H. Emerson, ‘The Artistic Aspects of Figure Photography’, The Magazine of Art, January 1891, 310–16. The illustrations included ‘Tired Travellers’ a similar fgure of a woman holding a jug with a small child. Louisa Longley to EM, Trinity/Myer/23/3, Papers of Frederic William Henry Myers, Trinity College Library Cambridge. This tactic of gifting photographs had similarly been deployed by Cameron. Kimberly Wahl, Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform (Durham: University of New Hampshire, 2013), 165–66. Ax68616, NPG. Cyril Flower and Frederic Myers were possibly lovers. Hamilton, Immortal Longings, 23; Constance Battersea, Reminiscences (London: Macmillan and Co., 1922), 407. Mary Chamberlain also attended Myers’s sister’s wedding in July 1890 and continued sittings for Millais. Mary Chamberlain Diaries, Chamberlain Family Collection,

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Modern Fair Women Cadbury Research Library, Special Collections University of Birmingham. See also Joseph Chamberlain to Sir J.E. Millais, 23 February 1890, MA 1485 K 165, Millais Papers, Pierpont Morgan Library Dept. of Literary and Historical Manuscripts. Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion, 1991), 115. ‘I will come in a semi-low gown. I presume black is the best colour’. Countess of Cromer, Lady Katharine Baring to EM, n.d. after 1901, Trinity/Myer/24/111, Papers of Frederic William Henry Myers, Trinity College Library Cambridge. See Patricia de Montfort, Louise Jopling: A Biographical and Cultural Study of the Modern Woman Artist in Victorian Britain (London: Routledge, 2017), 84–91. Daily Graphic, 14 July 1890; Illustrated Weekly Telegraph, May 24, 1890. Dorothy Stanley, London Street Arabs (London: Cassell & Company, 1890). The painting Street Arabs at Play (1890) was purchased by Lord Lever (and used to advertise Sunlight Soap). See Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870– 1900: Beauty for the People (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Ax68486, NPG. Tim Jeal, Stanley: Africa’s Greatest Explorer (London: Faber & Faber, 2011), 173–74. By autumn Stanley was grappling with responses to stories of atrocities conducted by members of the expedition. Myers’s other portraits of fgures celebrated for their roles in imperial campaigns, some of whom were associates of Stanley, were more conventional portrait photographs. Her photograph of the diplomat and Sinologist Thomas Wade was reproduced in 1895. Horace Rumbold to EM, 16 November 1895, Trinity/Myer/25/115, Papers of Frederic William Henry Myers, Trinity College Library Cambridge. Ax68630, NPG. Marta Rachel Weiss and Grégoire Pujade-Lauraine, Julia Margaret Cameron: Photographs to Electrify You with Delight and Startle the World (London: MACK, 2015), 68–69. The photograph is annotated in her album, ‘great friend stayed, Dolly Stanley brought him stayed too’, NPG. Jeff Rosen, ‘Cameron’s Colonized Eden: Picturesque Politics at the Edge of Empire’, in Intrepid Women: Victorian Artists Travel, ed. Jordana Pomeroy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 123; Jeff Rosen, Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘Fancy Subjects’: Photographic Allegories of Victorian Identity and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 266–301. Hamilton cites Myers’s 1899 correspondence with the Dutch psychologist Frederik Van Eeden on the unjustness of the war in South Africa. Hamilton, Immortal Longings, 58. ‘Effe (Euphrosyne) Stillman’, Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011, accessed 19 March 2015, http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=ann_12695 57422. Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850–1900 (London: Routledge, 2000), 197. George du Maurier, ‘Honour to Agneta [sic] Frances Ramsay! (Cambridge, June 1887)’, Punch, 2 July 1887. George du Maurier, ‘A Pardonable Mistake’, Punch, 7 December 1889. Ax68777, NPG. Mary Beard has commented that in Butler’s painted portrait, by Ida Baumann, she appears as a slightly fuffy young bride, although the wall of books belies her intellectual endeavour. While perhaps not ‘fuffy’ the brushstrokes do convey the fashionable chiffon fabric, in contrast the focus and tonal range of Myers’s platinotype mean that Butler appears more severe than the painting. But like the portrait artist, Myers seems to have been attempting to create an image of Butler that was fashionable as well as intellectual. Mary Beard, ‘The Struggles of Clever Women’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 January 2017, www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/mary-beard-women-classical-scholars/. Ax68773, NPG. In a similar portrait the American intellectual and socialite Caroline Lane (Reynolds), Lady Jebb, wore a ftted bodice decorated with lace as well as two strings of pearls and a choker. Jebb was another member of the Cambridge social network in which Myers circulated. Jebb’s husband was an academic and liberal MP in the 1890s. Marie A. Belloc, ‘An Interview with Mrs. F.W.H. Myers’, Women at Home, June 1896, 762. Myers’s friendship with Symonds (and had also done his portrait) may account for his bold assertions, but they do suggest to the reader of Sun Artists that Myers’s photographic

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practice engaged with both photographic fne art and academic portraiture. Symonds, ‘Mrs. F. W. H. Myers. With a Descriptive Essay’, 54. Perry has noted that when photographs, as opposed to paintings, were used in collections of portrait images of notable women, they did not invite the same critical language. Lara Perry, History’s Beauties: Women in the National Portrait Gallery, 1856–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 174. Ax132923, NPG. Cherry, Beyond the Frame, 207. Ethel Sidgwick, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick: A Memoir (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1938), 115. Ax68508, Ax68510, NPG. EM to HS, 27 September 1888 Myer/6/141; EM to HS 26 April [1888], Myer/6/135, Papers of Frederic William Henry Myers, Trinity College Library Cambridge. Belloc, ‘An Interview with Mrs. F.W.H. Myers’, 765. Caldesi, Dorothy Tennant, Ax68431, NPG. ‘Fair Women at the Grafton Galleries’, The Sporting Times, no. 1600 (19 May 1894): 2. ‘The Grafton Gallery’, The Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 17 May 1894, 6. Phillips, ‘“Fair Women” at the Grafton Gallery’, 624. ‘The Society of Portrait Painters’, Athenaeum, no. 3495 (20 October 1894): 535. Anna Gruetzner Robins, A Fragile Modernism: Whistler and His Impressionist Followers (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2007), 79. Carol Ockman and Kenneth E. Silver, Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama (New Haven; London: Jewish Museum; Yale University Press, 2005), 29. The serpentine fgure has been linked to Oriental dancing, but Gundle observes this requires some qualifcation in the case of Boldini’s sitters who were engaged in potent and continuous self-fashioning. Emily Apter, ‘Figura Serpentinata: Visual Seduction and the Colonial Gaze’, in Spectacles of Realism: Gender, Body, Genre, ed. Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 163–78; Stephen Gundle, ‘Mapping the Origins of Glamour: Giovanni Boldini, Paris and the Belle Époque’, Journal of European Studies 29, no. 3 (1 September 1999): 283, https://doi.org /10.1177/004724419902900303. William Sharp, ‘Fair Women in Painting and Poetry’, Portfolio, July 1894, 43. As discussed in Chapter 1, Beale similarly drew attention to the statuesque Corinna. The professional model was Marie Lloyd. Martin Postle, ‘Leighton’s Lost Model, The Rediscovery of Marie Lloyd’, Apollo 143, February (1996): 27–29. Sharp, ‘Fair Women in Painting and Poetry’, 45. Leighton’s painting had been completed the previous year for the Royal Academy exhibition. William Sharp to Horace Scudder, 20 June 1894, ALS Harvard Houghton, The William Sharp Archive. Ed. William F. Halloran, 21 June 2005, www.ies.sas.ac.uk/research-pro jects-archives/william-sharp-fona-macleod-archive. M. Clarke, ‘“Bribery with Sherry” and “the Infuence of Weak Tea”: Women Critics as Arbiters of Taste in the Late-Victorian and Edwardian Press’, Visual Culture in Britain 6, no. 2 (2005), 139–55. Thanks to Gowan Dawson for this observation. Various crusaders were advocating increased physical activity for women, medical discourse was increasingly concerned with the well-being of women’s bodies, while rational dress campaigners emphasised the need for freedom of movement for women. Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics among the Late Victorians: Science, Fiction, Feminism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Stanley Weintraub, ‘Shaw’s Goddess: Lady Colin Campbell’, SHAW The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies 25, no. 1 (2005): 241–56, https://doi.org/10.1353/shaw.2005.0027. In the untraced picture, exhibited at the Society of British Artists alongside her own landscape painting, she was wearing a gown of ‘white chiffon and lace’. Pennell records Campbell trying to fnd it after Whistler’s death. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, 27 November 1903, Diary 20. 4. Harry Ransom Center, University of Austin, Texas. Campbell was granted a legal separation from her husband. For a cogent analysis of the trial and the visual context of her Whistler portrait, see Robins, A Fragile Modernism, 72–79. ‘Our London Correspondence’, Glasgow Herald, 18 May 1894.

118 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84 85 86 87

88 89

90 91 92

93 94 95 96 97

Modern Fair Women Q.E.D., ‘In the Picture Galleries: The Grafton Gallery’, World, 30 May 1894, 29. Q.E.D., ‘In the Picture Galleries’, 30. Q.E.D., ‘In the Picture Galleries’, 30. Q.E.D., ‘In the Picture Galleries’, 30. Q.E.D., ‘In the Picture Galleries’, World, 26 September 1894, 26. X, ‘The Graphic Arts: The Grafton Finale’, The Realm, 30 November 1894, 100. Sharp also contributed to the Realm, William Sharp to J. Stanley Little (1 December 1894), ALS Princeton, The William Sharp Archive. His Gypsy Christ (1895) was dedicated to Lady Colin Campbell. John Oldcastle, ‘The Story of a Penny Dinner’, Merry England 4, no. 2 (December 1884): vi. W. Downey and D. Downey, The Cabinet Portrait Gallery: Photographs (London: Cassell & Co, 1890). The performative effect of a similar sequined ‘peacock’ fan was revealed in the press: ‘Lady Colin Campbell evidently believes in the use of a fan, for she made the most of a very lovely one that she carried’. ‘A Lady’s Letter from London’, Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 10 April 1897, 751. Lady Colin Campbell, ed. Etiquette of Good Society (London: Cassell & Co., 1893), i. Penny Tinkler, Smoke Signals: Women, Smoking and Visual Culture in Britain (Oxford: Berg, 2006). C. [Gertrude] Campbell, ‘A Plea for Tobacco’, English Illustrated Magazine, October 1893, 83. It could be argued that it anticipated the development of gender-targeted cigarette advertising over the next decade. Heckles were raised by the inception of the Ladies Literary Society (1889), which included journalists and writers, where women networked, ate and smoked. Linda Hughes, ‘A Club of Their Own: The New Woman Writers, and Fin-de-Siècle Authorship’, Victorian Literature and Culture 35, no. 01 (March 2007): 233–60, https://doi.org/10.1017/S10601 50307051509. F.M. Gardiner, ‘Chats with Cyclists: Lady Colin Campbell’, Cycling World Illustrated 1, no. 21 (5 August 1896): 492. Griselda Pollock, ‘Louise Abbema’s Lunch and Alfred Stevens’s Studio: Theatricality, Feminine Subjectivity and Space around Sarah Bernhardt, Paris, 1877–1888’, in Local/ Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland ( Aldershot; Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 110. Downey and Downey, The Cabinet Portrait Gallery, 75. Lady Colin Campbell, ‘The Tempestuous Petticoat’, Cycling World Illustrated 1, no. 1 (18 March 1896): 9–10. Gundle, ‘Mapping the Origins of Glamour’, 288. Bernhardt similarly combined elements of the femme fatale and the femme moderne as exemplifed in her portraits by Clairin and Mucha. Heather McPherson, The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 103–6. Barbara Guidi, ‘Catalogue of the Exhibition’, in Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris, ed. Sarah Lees (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 192. G. Woolliscroft Rhead, History of the Fan (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1910), 286. Pamela Gerrish Nunn, ‘Fine Art and the Fan 1860–1930’, Journal of Design History 17, no. 3 (1 January 2004): 251. Morand went on to become an important cultural fgure in Paris serving as curator at the Louvre and as director of the École des Arts Décoratifs. Sharp, ‘Fair Women in Painting and Poetry’, 47.

Part III

Fair Women Redux

5

Reinventing Fair Women Women, Exhibitions and Art Writing

Although the exhibition closed at the Grafton Galleries on December 1 in 1894, Fair Women reappeared in a variety of guises: as a memorial catalogue, an illustrated volume, a mural, copycat exhibitions in America, and as part of large-scale popular exhibitions at Earl’s Court. These displayed various facets of the theme of Fair Women, notably exemplary women from history and imaginings of the ‘modern woman’ as fashionable, independent and professional. The success of the original Fair Women made obvious the economic beneft of launching temporary exhibitions with a gendered theme, and the beneft of women’s involvement. The individuals involved in Fair Women resurfaced as exhibition organisers at the turn of the century as part of a growing group of women ‘curators’. Fair Women also highlighted the role of women as ‘serious’ collectors and connoisseurs, implicated in a resurgent vogue for collecting both Old Masters and decorative art. This parallel development was most evident in the art press. New art journals dedicated space to female collectors (including members of the Committee). Importantly the exhibition revealed the development of networks made up of women collectors, critics and exhibition organisers.1 What emerges in the ripple effect of Fair Women is an array of independent and interrelated outcomes. These were not unifed responses and they suggest an interplay of images and ideas rather than a causal relationship. On the one hand, these developments did capitalise on nostalgia and grand manner portraiture (although as already discussed the two were not necessarily equivalent). But on the other hand, Fair Women was a category through which women could intervene in exhibition culture. For sitters and visitors, Fair Women held possibilities for female agency in identity formation through self-fashioning, a theme which continued to intersect with contemporary fashionability and a growing interest in women’s life histories. This is not to say that Fair Women was solely responsible for changing exhibition culture, but its effects were wide-ranging and transformative. Women were able to deploy the category of ‘fair women’ in a multiplicity of sites and thereby intervened in debates around the representation of women and women’s history.

Cataloguing ‘Fair Women’ The popularity of the show and its critical dissemination presented an opportunity for the production of a new kind of illustrated catalogue. Giles Waterfeld has suggested that the art museum catalogue at the end of the nineteenth century generally followed two different formats. Philanthropic projects saw the catalogue as a means of instructing and morally improving the working class. The second more academic approach, providing short informative texts about objects, had been established in institutions

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such as the National Gallery.2 Neither of these types of catalogue were initially illustrated. Up until this period the catalogue was not conventionally seen as a visual exhibition record; high-quality reproductions of paintings and photographs were a rather recent phenomenon and costly to produce.3 In a break from these formats, the Grafton Galleries produced an offcial illustrated catalogue in November, at the end of the run of the Fair Women exhibition. Billed as a ‘memorial catalogue’, it took the form of a sumptuous volume illustrated by collotype reproductions of some of the portraits, taken by Henry Herschel Hay Cameron, the youngest son of Julia Margaret Cameron. Fair Women’s large bound folio of forty reproductions continued the focus of the original catalogue emphasising the lives of women rather than the artists. Each page opened to reveal a large photographic reproduction on the right-hand side which faced elegantly printed text detailing the biography of the sitter. Some of these were also accompanied by reproductions of objects, such as fans, a clock and the sedan chair, from the exhibition, although these were not labelled. Had the volume included all of the works in the exhibition, the labour involved in photographing objects (some of which had already been returned), and the cost would have been prohibitive; but the production of the bound volume was evidently following the lead of Pears with its illustrated magazine in an effort to make further proft from what had already been a fnancially successful exhibition. The accompanying texts emphasised the exemplary nature of the ‘fair women’ represented. For example, readers were reminded that Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, was a ‘learned woman’, translating texts from Hebrew, French, Italian, German, Latin and Greek, and Christina, Duchess of Milan, was ‘renowned for her intelligence as a politician’ and avoidance of decapitation by Henry VIII (Figure 5.1; Plate 2).4 Even

Figure 5.1 Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, [unknown woman], Marc Gheeraedts [d. 1621], Fair Women 1894

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the Duchess of Devonshire, featured in a portrait by Reynolds was noted for her intermingling of style and politics. She reportedly set the fashion for discarding the ‘hideous hoop skirt’ and invented ‘the Gainsborough’ hat: ‘Independently of her personal charms, she was no ordinary woman, but exceedingly accomplished and well informed. … She was determined to secure the return of Fox in the Westminster Elections of 1784’ (Figure 5.2).5 For the modern reader she was given an identity that was both fashion icon and radical political campaigner. Nor were the works chosen primarily of titled women: the biography of the actress and writer Mary Robinson highlighted her work as a writer and criticised her abandonment by George IV (Figure 5.3); the volume similarly decried the abandonment of Emma Hamilton by the nation to die in poverty.6 The memorial volume’s focus followed an emphasis on the lives of women that could been seen in the contemporary press and the wealth of Victorian collective women’s biographies such as Lucy Bethia Walford’s Twelve English Authoresses (1892) or Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s Some Eminent Women of Our Times (1889, 1894). Alison Booth has suggested that these collective biographies, unlike novels, history and advice texts, did not endorse conservative gender ideology. In fact they differed quite dramatically: standards of feminine conduct were waived and conventions of rank or wealth tended to be subverted.7 Booth makes a claim for biographical collections as instrumental in the creation of modern subjectivities. This can usefully be applied to the Fair Women catalogues: the biographical components of the catalogues

Figure 5.2 Georgina Duchess of Devonshire, and her daughter, Reynolds [1784], Fair Women, 1894

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Figure 5.3 Mary Robinson as “Perdita”, Reynolds [1782], Fair Women, 1894

likewise subverted conventional standards of female behaviour with their emphasis on the independence and intelligence of the subjects. This was made more evident in its inclusion of modern alongside historical ‘fair women’. While the ‘ultra-modern’ Campbell was absent from the memorial catalogue, the modern works photographed included a study in chalk by G.F. Watts of Countess Somers (Figure 5.4). The accompanying biographical text shifted away from the portrait to emphasise the public platform of one of her daughters, Isabelle Somerset (Lady Henry Somerset). It declared Isabelle Somerset is ‘one of the most ardent advocates of temperance, and brilliant female orators of our time’.8 Somerset led an independent lifestyle, having caused scandal by successfully suing her husband for custody of their child in 1878.9 She also had close transatlantic ties and in October of 1894 published an article in the North American Review titled ‘The Renaissance of Women’ where she advocated a new role for modern women in public society and governance: The arts and crafts that centred for centuries in the home have expanded until they have become the possession of the world, and man has taken them under his supervision. Why, then, should not women keep her native place in the world’s economy by the regulation of the wider home which has now spread outside the four walls of her own house, and which we call society and government … in that larger family circle that we call a nation?10

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Figure 5.4 Countess Somers, G.F. Watts [1850s], Fair Women, 1894

Somerset explicitly alluded to the friction around male appropriation of the decorative arts and sought to make competing claim for women’s role in the wider realm of politics. Many women identifed with this social purity strand of feminism through which Somerset sought to combine temperance and suffrage.11 While the catalogue did not explicitly espouse Somerset’s views, the matrilineal emphasis recognised modern ‘platform’ women.

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The exhibition prompted several articles and volumes by women that explored notions of beauty both historically and in the present. In 1896 a series titled ‘Studies of Fair Women’ was carried by the popular illustrated magazine, The Idler. The Idler photographs by W. & D. Downey included various unnamed sitters in theatrical dress and fashionable headwear, evoking the kind of powerful and trendsetting women portrayed in the exhibition.12 In the same year, Emma Sarah Williamson published a volume of Victorian portraits of women titled The Book of Beauty.13 The Book of Beauty was a bold assertion of female authority over the category of ‘fair women’. It attempted a counternarrative of ‘modern’ beauty that encompassed conservative and progressive ideals of ‘fair womenhood’. Williamson claimed it was conceived in order to silence the critics of the modern portraits in the exhibition of Fair Women. In an article for the Lady’s Realm, titled ‘A Dream of Fair Beauty’, Williamson described how the inception of the luxurious white, gold embossed Book of Beauty came to her at a private view; this echoed Sharp’s reverie, but at the same time emphasised the place of modern women in exhibition spaces.14 The plates were a combination of photogravures of oil paintings, watercolours and photographs by Alice Hughes, who operated a studio in Bloomsbury.15 This ‘modern’ catalogue of ‘fair women’ reinserted sitters who had not appeared in the illustrated Fair Women catalogue, such as Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (Sargent) and Lady Eden (Herkomer), alongside a plethora of sitters drawn primarily from the wider circles of Committee members. Like the Committee the women came from primarily aristocratic or newly wealthy backgrounds and had varying social and political allegiances. One emphasis was contemporary fashionability, but this encompassed the artistic coterie of Violet Manners who contributed new portraits of Mrs. H. Lindsay; Lady Randolph Churchill and Lady Katherine Thynne. Other reproductions included Manners by J.J. Shannon and Churchill (now Cornwallis-West) by Harper Pennington. The volume was published with the aid of a list of subscribers, many of whom belonged to these overlapping networks of art and culture. Kathryn Ledbetter has seen Williamson’s effort as replicating earlier annuals that emphasised women’s physical beauty.16 It can be read in this context as a panoply of portraits of patrician women to be viewed by women as objects of desire. But it gestured to the modern woman in multiple ways. Its exhibitionary context suggests a series of competing discourses around gender and identity. For a start, in attempting to rebut the criticism of contemporary women in the exhibition, Williamson was also mimicking the celebratory conceptions of individual women articulated by the Fair Women curators. Notably the portraits were autographed by the sitters. The signature had emerged in the eighteenth century as a way of materially authenticating portraits of ‘great’ men.17 In contrast, Williamson deployed the signature to materially authenticate the identities of the ‘fair’ women. The portraits were accompanied by a diversity of signed literary texts. Some subverted narratives about female beauty, such as one by Katherine, Duchess of Leeds, who critiqued the emphasis on the artist’s vision in contemporary portraiture.18 Another was the journalist and writer Ella Hepworth Dixon. Her short epigraph, ‘This is the fate of all. In youth, to desire happiness – in the middle years, to seek peace – and, in the end to pray for indifference’ may have been interpreted as both a refusal to enter into a gender-specifc debate and a cynical comment on modern womanhood.19 Dixon was the author of one of the best known New Woman novels, Story of a Modern Woman of 1894, whose main character was supposedly based on Gertrude Campbell.20

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Neither the ‘memorial’ catalogue nor Williamson’s volume were overtly supportive of New Womanhood. However, they did offer a celebratory narrative about ‘fair women’ that distanced itself from straightforward objectifcation and nostalgia. The two catalogue-style efforts that followed the Fair Women exhibition also presented ways in which women co-opted and enacted professional and intellectual positions. These offered possible interruptions and disruptions to a received narrative about women. In sum, these various attempts at ‘cataloguing’ Fair Women complicated the ways in which female portraiture was ‘curated’ and attempted to recalibrate the ways in which female beauty was measured.

Transatlantic Fair Women The Fair Women exhibition also had immediate repercussions in America. The Graphic announced: the ‘exhibition in London has so taken American fancy that a similar collection is being arranged at the New York Academy of Design’.21 This loan exhibition combining historical and contemporary portraits of women opened in November of 1894. Titled Portraits of Women, it was organised to raise money for the St. John’s Guild and the Orthopaedic Hospital.22 The male Executive Committee was followed by a Ladies Committee and a long list of over one hundred ‘Patronesses’.23 As in London, the Astor name reappeared, along with other wealthy American women such as Alice Vanderbilt, Helen Phelps Stokes and Fanny Pierpont Morgan.24 The press picked up on the parallels between the two exhibitions. The similarities were considerable, and the involvement of so many women indicated that in New York as in London, women had a strong presence in cultural philanthropy.25 There were works by Reynolds, Romney, Lawrence and Gainsborough, as well as a few earlier examples such as Lely, and over half of the nearly eight hundred works were miniatures. There were obvious European market links, but in 1894 the apparent draining of European collections was less apparent.26 The portraits included a larger proportion of American and modern sitters. The show featured a formidable collection of portraits of gilded age women, such as the recently married sportswoman Hope Goddard Iselin, by miniaturist Fernand Paillet (160 lent by the collector Peter Marié). The portrait of the artist Dora Wheeler Keith, daughter of the designer of the Chicago Women’s Building Candace Wheeler, by Amanda Brewster Sewell, was re-exhibited after its bronze medal in Chicago. While the catalogue consisted of simply a list of sitters and artists with no biographical details, it was referenced in biographical terms in Godey’s Ladies Book in a series of illustrated articles titled ‘Fair Women’. The author, Lena M. Cooper, initially reviewed the portraits and miniatures in the exhibition, drawing particular attention to the American sitters, but in the articles that followed she enumerated celebrated women in history and literature. Moreover, her comments emphasised the gains of modern womanhood: What a change from the early ages, for woman to-day holds her rightful place. How dreadful to think of the time when women were little better than slaves; when they received not the slightest recognition; when education for them was deemed unnecessary; when duties of the household were their highest aims!27 Cooper suggested that modern ‘fair women’ were educated and working outside the home. Thus, at least in this example from the women’s press, the exhibition was

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Figure 5.5 Louisa Baylies, Fair Women from Vogue, 1894

received in a way that echoed the connections Fair Women at the Grafton Galleries had made with women’s history and the New Woman. Fair Women permeated elsewhere in American fashion journalism. Vogue produced a volume in 1894 titled Fair Women from Vogue (advertised in the late 1890s for $3) consisting of photographic portraits of contemporary society women.28 Through the volume, Fair Women’s close integration of fashion and art was reimagined for Vogue’s American readers in a modern context. Amongst the frames were young debutantes,

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daughters of the same circle of East Coast women who visited exhibitions in New York as well as Europe. Vogue had been launched in 1892 as a weekly society gazette and this ‘unique collection’ was a clever attempt at re-presentation in a luxury format. Acknowledgement was made of the Astor coterie of exhibition ‘Patronesses’ who also funded the journal: ‘photography has rarely, if ever, been so generously aided by art and liberal money expenditure’. The text revealed a degree of anxiety about targeting a domain reserved for fne artists. The portraits, such as the example of Louisa Baylies, were called ‘artistically rendered pictures’ and appeared in ornate albumlike ‘frames’, in this case signed by the illustrator Margaret Armstrong (Figure 5.5). The Fair Women from Vogue overlapped with the New York exhibition’s list of both Patronesses and sitters. Another was Amy Bend, who featured in three Portraits of Women and soon married the art collector and dealer Cortlandt Field Bishop. Thus, the frames and portraits helped to launch the next generation of cultural patrons. However, as Alison Matthews David observes in her analysis of early Vogue, the younger generation of Vogue readers had a more complex role as bearers of class status through fashionability.29 The focus was shifting, from European couture to American department stores and from debutante to the ‘college-girl’ featured elsewhere on its pages, as it attempted to appeal to both camps. Like Emma Sarah Williamson’s Book of Beauty, Vogue offered contradictory ideals of femininity. Nonetheless, the portrait loan exhibition would continue to have resonance on both sides of the Atlantic.30

Woman’s Exhibition 1897 and 1900 In London Fair Women was followed three years later by a large display of women’s work for the Victorian Era exhibition at Earl’s Court. It was similarly organised by an Honorary Committee made up of titled women, such as the Duchess of Devonshire who was president, as well as other working women such as the artist Henrietta Rae.31 The emphasis here was not only on portraiture, but on women artists and designers. Rae had already served on the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition Hanging Committee in 1893, and in 1897 successfully orchestrated the participation of well-known artists in the ‘Women’s Section’. The planning did not go on behind closed doors, rather the contemporary press reported on curatorial meetings, revealing not only the names of individuals, but also the loans they had secured and the contents of specifc sections.32 As with Fair Women the presence of the committee members meant that the show was seen as a fashionable enterprise in the press. Hearth and Home described the dress of the committee members seated on the stage at the opening: Lady H. Bentinck in the most exquisite costume of silver grey imaginable, Lady Mackenzie of Tarbat was in black, with a grey and black brocade cape, and a black bonnet with yellow roses, and Miss Tessa Mackenzie, who, as secretary of the Women’s Section of the Victorian Era section has done such yeoman service, was in black and white, with crimson roses in her hat.33 But fashionability was combined with professional practise. MacKenzie’s ‘yeoman service’ on the Applied Art section resulted in a varied selection of objects encompassing numerous decorative objects. Twelve photographs by Myers were hung between six photographs by Cameron and fve frames of photographs by Hughes. The catalogue did not give the titles of the photographs, but their inclusion sought to highlight the

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artistic merit of female photographers. Alongside these was stained glass by Mary Lowndes, as well as exact copies of Early Renaissance Old Master paintings by the art writer and artist Christiana Herringham. While this grouping of objects seems entirely disparate, the list of lenders revealed one patron was the suffrage campaigner Millicent Garrett Fawcett. Fair Women had highlighted the role of women as important collectors of decorative art and their role as ‘keepers’ of major collections of Old Masters, but by 1897 the overlapping networks of artistic production and consumption and the women’s movement were more evident.34 In 1900, the Women’s Section of the Victorian Era exhibition was replicated at Earls’ Court on a far grander scale. This commercial venture was dedicated entirely to women under the auspices of exhibition producer Imre Kiralfy. The Woman’s Exhibition had an expansive Honorary Committee of seventy-nine that included many of the titled women lenders to Fair Women, as well as working women artists, such as Rae, Manners and Henrietta Ward; writers such as John Oliver Hobbes; and the actress Ellen Terry; with Tessa MacKenzie acting again as secretary.35 The composition of the committee was mocked by a columnist in Outlook who suggested that they all be put in a room together whereupon they would disagree on politics, fashion and art. The imagined recording on ‘aurophone’ – Harburton in battle with Manners over dress, Asquith with Argyle over politics, Burton and Somerset over temperance – emphasised their differences, but the obverse was also revealing. Like the Committee for Fair Women, it represented a confuence of aristocratic and wealthy middle-class ‘ladies’ alongside professional women.36 As a group they subscribed to varying political interests and gender politics, but united to generate an exhibition celebrating women’s achievements. The Saturday Review wondered if the exhibition was in fact proposed at the International Congress of Women held in London in 1899.37 The participation of women activists suggests such a link, notably Ethel Tweedie, who was on the International Council of Women, as well as Louise Jopling, Terry, Somerset and Mary Jeune. The exhibition itself was vast, with 1300 pictures by women and 3500 objects, the sections were numerous and internationally diverse. It was divided into Fine Art, Applied Art, Historical and Loan, and Commercial and Industrial organised by subcommittees.38 The catalogues for the Earl’s Court shows were far more extensive than merely a list of exhibitors; they were modern-looking and colourful, with maps, Pears advertising, and reproductions of photographs of the exhibition rooms, train timetables and omnibus routes, priced at 6d. The Times gave due credit: ‘a good catalogue has been prepared by Francis Howard, Miss Tessa Mackenzie, and others’.39 However, like many international exhibition catalogues they lacked illustrations of objects, and while the show appeared to be a success it was rivalled in the public attention by the international Paris Exposition of 1900. The Woman’s Exhibition encompassed, like Fair Women, historical and contemporary portraiture, and in direct homage to its predecessor, paintings, prints and photographs of ‘fair celebrities’ were shown alongside decorative objects. The Art Journal remarked on the ‘hundreds of celebrated women’ alongside ‘rare and costly fans, old lace, embroidery, gloves’.40 Of the historical and modern ‘fair’ women, a number were New Women and in fact familiar fgures reappeared. Jopling had loaned her own portrait by Millais as well as her portraits of professional women in her friendship circle, Marion Terry (Ellen Terry’s sister) and Lady Colin Campbell.41 Walter Spindler’s, in

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this case, painted portrait of Sarah Bernhardt was described as one of the most ‘striking’ items in the gallery. Gender politics were overtly represented in a portrait of the suffrage campaigner Frances Power Cobbe by Florence Graham. The Jopling circle and Cobbe were juxtaposed with women who defed convention in their personal lives but remained anti-suffrage. For example, the likeness of the writer John Oliver Hobbes (Pearl Craigie) by Herbert Schmalz was hung alongside a case of autographs that included both Hobbes and Burdett-Coutts.42 The exhibition, as in the Pear’s advertisement and the Book of Beauty, deployed the signature as a way of confrming identity and offering insight into the character of ‘fair women’. In the Applied Art and Handicraft section, collectors and makers showed modern work, and once again lace from the collection of Morrison took central stage: ‘Among the best things are Mrs. Alfred Morrison’s examples of modern lace’ the Times declared.43 However, the Arts and Crafts designer Lewis F. Day was damning of the modern work by women ‘not so much in advance of their grandmothers’. He felt the exhibition lacked ‘reticence, refnement – taste, in short; as for the colour of 1900, it is an offence to the cultivated eye’.44 Thus, at least for Day, the emphasis on historical objects and techniques was not representative and the show lacked contemporary women designers. This was not entirely the case; there were several pieces by artists linked with the Glasgow School of Art and other contemporary designers such as Edith Swinhoe and Alice Maynard who had set up an embroidery business in Campden Hill.45 But what was clear was that the exhibition had a strong association with philanthropic craft wherein middle-class and aristocratic women, such as Morrison, succeeded in making Scottish and Irish products fashionable.46 Amongst the contributors was Alice Hart, founder of the Donegal Industrial Fund, who had masterminded an Irish village for the Columbian Exhibition and her Bunbeg Woollen Mill products were featured in the Woman’s Exhibition.47 By extension the exhibition seemed determined to promote an international representation of women in part due to its sponsorship by the Ladies National Silk Association. Its president was the Duchess of York and membership included Burdett-Coutts and other infuential women. It was formed with the purpose of promoting British manufacture (as opposed to French). Irish, Honiton and Leek producers were shown, while Warner and Sons installed a ‘Kashmir Exhibit’ focused on the source of their brocade textiles.48 Silk had a complicated imperial history, but the exhibition foregrounded the benefcial collaboration between Indian producers/designers, the English silk industry and the Arts and Crafts Movement.49 In this global context of ‘fair womankind’, two women collectors were given their own display space. Hart travelled widely with her husband, the medical journalist Ernest Hart (d. 1898). In 1894 Hart had travelled to India, Burma and China. The trip was followed by publications on Burma and a solo show at Dowdeswell Galleries (1896) of her pastel studies of the Far East.50 Hart was made responsible for a display dedicated to ‘Japanese womankind and their occupations’, for which she loaned an entire section of ffty-two Japanese prints, and enlisted the help of well-known collectors in gathering lacquer, bronzes and porcelain, eighty-one of the just over one hundred objects which were her own.51 The collection refected the continued overlap of collecting patterns, Aestheticism/Japonisme and the Arts and Crafts, but also the opportunities for greater numbers of women travellers to establish expertise as collectors and writers.52 The catalogue text, possibly written by Hart and/or Joseph

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Grego, reiterated Orientalist notions of ‘fair womankind’ in the East as both exotic and dangerous. The emancipatory possibilities of travel and the collecting/wearing of Japanese textiles (allied with fantasies of witchery and sexual allure) would continue to appeal to women in the Edwardian period.53 Women from Japan, India and Egypt performed in a pageant of ‘Women in All Nations’ at the Empress Theatre which reinforced the link with Orientalist fantasy. In the pageant and elsewhere in the exhibition Orientalism overlapped with turn-of-the-century ethnography. This was part of Kiralfy’s spectacular exhibitionary pattern at Earl’s Court, which encompassed not only pageantry but also ‘ethnographic’ display. The Woman’s Exhibition was no exception. The installation of the variably titled ‘Dinka’ or ‘Amazon’ Village peopled by women offered a ‘positive’ imperial fantasy of matriarchy, but as Annie Coombes has noted it failed to rupture derogatory stereotypes.54 Like Hart, Tweedie’s collection of Icelandic objects, such as a seventeenth-century musical instrument, clothing and jewellery, was couched in educational terms about cultures unfamiliar to the Victorian visitor.55 Tweedie’s bankrupt husband had died four years earlier and she had turned to travel writing for income. Thus, the exhibition was in fact a canny strategy in self-promotion, encouraging visitors to purchase her adventurous and somewhat transgressive travel guides where she rode ‘man fashion’. Most recently she had highlighted the equality of the sexes in Finland and at the International Congress of Women.56 The catalogue encouraged visitors to view these ‘souvenirs’ alongside Tweedie’s portrait by Herbert Schmaltz (1894) which had already appeared as the frontispiece to her books. In this light the intrepid collectorwriter was both modern and fashionable in a bold red dress with a wide white lace collar; her memoirs emphasised the importance of its display in 1900 amongst ‘Eminent Woman’.57 The ‘souvenirs’ suggested a more serious side of ethnographic collecting to her journeys. She amassed a considerable collection and later donated to several public museums including the V&A and British Museum.58 Hart’s collection similarly ended up in the British Museum. She may have had an ulterior motive in displaying her collection, because the Japanese prints and paintings were sold to the British Museum soon after the exhibition.59 In addition to the women identifed as ‘curating’ individual sections and collections, women were very present as staff. A contemporary newspaper noted: ‘With the exception of the Great Wheel and the Water Chutes the entire Exhibition is regulated by women. They are in charge at the turnstiles and the various sideshows, and waitresses have superseded waiters at all the dining and tea rooms’.60 Several papers commented on the novelty of an exhibition work force that was entirely female.61 The daily programme proclaimed that the employment of women in bars and buffets was ‘intended to promote the employment of women’ and added ‘it is hoped that the kindly consideration of the public will be given to this effort to open the door for a new departure of so much interest in the present social conditions’.62 There were also other kinds of working women. In a portion of the Royal Galleries, women were making lace, carving, embroidery and metalwork.63 In sum, ‘modern’ ‘fair women’ were ubiquitous, while not always overtly political there were evident links with the international women’s movement, and women were present as staff, curators, collectors, artists and designers. As if in response to the re-creation of Fair Women at Earl’s Court, an article in the Strand in December 1900 sought ‘the most beautiful women in painting’ in an attempt to disprove the ‘Lady Directors’ of Fair Women – the Committee’s – assertion six years earlier that there was ‘no fxed standard by which such pictures could be judged’.64

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Frederick Dolman’s approach was to ask primarily Royal Academicians, who were of course male, if there was indeed a fxed standard for judging ‘fair women’, thereby frmly placing women back into the role of object of the male artist’s gaze. While Dolman’s article seems a step backwards, other contemporary developments on both sides of the Atlantic suggested he did not have the fnal word on the theme. In 1902 Williamson produced a follow-up Book of Beauty with further portraits including several women active in art and culture.65 That same year the Copley Society in Boston held a loan exhibition: Portraits and Pictures of Fair Women. Amongst the modern sitters were the collector and interior designer Elsie De Wolfe (Boldini) and the president of Bryn Mawr College M. Carey Thomas (Sargent).66 In Britain, Fair Women was visually redeployed by those advocating women’s education. Dorothea Beale, the headmistress of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, commissioned a mural, The Dream of Fair Women, which appeared in a proscenium arch in the school hall. The painting by James Eadie Reid was completed in 1902, and included portraits of the Greek Alcestis, Penelope (wife of Odysseus), Savitri (from Indian legend) and the Egyptian Queen Hatasu (Plate 21).67 Clare Willsdon observes that while this may invite a feminist reading as an appropriation of masculine chivalric ideology, the mural was perhaps intended to cultivate the feminine attributes of taste and sensibility, and to associate the authority of ‘High Art’ with the controversial world of women’s education.68 Fair Women had opened possibilities for aligning historical female protagonists and gender politics through fne art. Beale’s mural seemed to capitalise on this potential by introducing historical fgures such as Savitri and Hatasu, less associated with an emancipated sexuality, perhaps deemed more appropriate for young women. In 1894, Fair Women had given prominence to women as collectors of a diversity of kinds of objects, many of them decorative. As a result the exhibition had left itself open to derision, as was clear in the responses of certain art critics to the dowager’s ‘armoire’. But the exhibition had hit upon a successful formula, combining portraiture with decorative art, precisely because it interested the vast numbers of visitors scoffed at by Phillips. Fair Women focused on fashionability, and subsequent exhibitions, such as the Woman’s Exhibition, attempted to replicate a mixing of kinds of objects in order to appeal to the same viewing public. The display and collecting of these objects by women also implied various kinds of expertise in relation to technique, provenance and attribution.

Collecting Objects: Establishing Expertise Fair Women and the later Victorian Era and Woman’s Exhibition articulated the role of women as not only ‘gate-keepers’ of collections, but also as discerning collectors and ‘curators’. This new emphasis on the collector was intertwined with developments in the press. The decade 1893–1903 coincided with a boom in the periodical press and shifts in its emphasis towards decorative art, collecting and connoisseurship. It also led to the demise of the great Victorian art periodicals the Magazine of Art (1904) and the Art Journal (1912). The Studio (1893) tuned into the burgeoning market for applied art, whilst for the Connoisseur (1901) and the Burlington Magazine (1903), collecting and connoisseurship was foremost on the agenda. All three of these new journals were clearly aimed at an engaged readership that included many women (this is exemplifed in a Studio image featuring a fashionably dressed woman reading through stacks of the journal). Moreover, it can be argued that the involvement of women in exhibition

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culture as organisers and visitors was implicitly bound up in these new developments in art journalism. Lenders to Fair Women, including Wantage, Nevill, Burdett-Coutts and Morrison, were featured in articles in these new magazines on ‘great’ collectors. Additional articles were dedicated to specifc kinds of objects, including those more often associated with women producers and consumers such as lace, as well as painted portraiture. Writers emphasised the seriousness of collecting as an occupation and commented on issues around attribution and the art market. The art press offered another forum in which women could solidify this expertise not only as collectors but also as art writers. In fact Frances Sitwell’s 1889 Art Journal series on representations of women in Renaissance and modern painting could be seen as an art historical antecedent for the exhibition.69 Women had a long-established precedent for art writing in Britain. Anna Jameson’s writings of the 1830s and 1840s were still widely read and referenced, as was the work of Elizabeth Eastlake and Emilia Dilke. By the 1890s there was a plethora of professional women journalists contributing articles and columns to both the art press and popular newspapers. Many of these art writers were effectively New Women, pursuing professional careers. The majority of them were freelance and there was an economic beneft to working for the new art press which was relatively well-paid. The fact that many of the articles on female collectors were written by women indicates the continued relevance of overlapping cross-class networks within the art world. Women art writers were actively involved in shaping new discourses around connoisseurship. An important forum for this material was the Connoisseur. With its articles on a diverse range of collectable objects and a section titled ‘In the Saleroom’, it offered the kind of empirical and market-based knowledges required by the serious modern collector.70 It added ‘the collector’ as a new category to its stable of articles. This was related to the late-Victorian rise of artist biography paralleled by the new journalism’s use of celebrity profles and interviews. The Connoisseur format followed that of articles on the ‘artist’s studio’, invariably accompanied by photographs which gave readers a ‘peep’ into a private collection. Temporary exhibitions relied on the efforts of ‘philanthropic citizens’, many of them women, to lend their vast collections so that the wider public could access it. It was of course through temporary exhibitions that these women had disseminated knowledge about their collections; the article gave the reader a personalised insight into a collector’s taste and ‘galleries’ at home. The series on the collections belonging to Harriet Wantage exemplifed this format (Figure 5.6). Her collection was primarily of Old Masters amassed with her late husband, but the writer Lady Victoria Manners emphasised Wantage’s more recent collecting of nineteenth-century art by Watts, Alma Tadema and Frank Dicksee.71 Indeed, Wantage, whose lifespan encompassed both the Victorian and Edwardian periods (and beyond), was an important cultural fgure. A wealthy benefactor with artistic priorities, she was called upon to contribute to the National Gallery’s purchase of Titian’s Portrait of Ariosto in 1904 and was a member of the Council for the National Art Collections Fund (NACF) founded in 1903. Andrea Geddes Poole sees inclusion of women in the NACF’s organisation, which also included Christiana Herringham, Jane Harrison and Eugénie Sellars, as sending a profoundly challenging signal to the aristocratic arts establishment.72 Late-nineteenth-century temporary exhibitions indicate that women had already made incursions into an analogous forum which no doubt paved the way for the NACF; it was through both buying and lending that women like Wantage established their status and expertise as fne arts patrons.

Figure 5.6 ‘Lady Wantage’s Collection of Pictures’, The Connoisseur, 1911

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The articles featuring Wantage’s collection underline the attendant interconnections with the art press, and the fact that Herringham, Harrison and Sellars were all writers/scholars as well as contributors to exhibitions and patrons testifes to the value of these links.73 This patronage had been pictorially documented in Private View of the Old Masters Exhibition, Royal Academy, 1888, but Wantage’s later two portraits by the fashionable portrait painter Philip de László, completed in the same years as the Connoisseur article series on her collection, indicate an ongoing interest in contemporary art and the visible representation of her own identity. In the frst formal version Wantage sits regally on an ornate chair in the drawing room at Lockinge hung with her painting collection (Plate 22). J.M.W. Turner’s Whalley Bridge and Abbey can be seen on the wall behind the sitter. She wears a black evening dress trimmed with lace and rests her hands on her walking stick. The portrait became the frst painting by de László to be accepted to the Royal Academy Exhibition in 1911. The Turner in the background signals Wantage’s continued role as a benefactor and lender to Old Master Exhibitions.74 In the smaller sketchier de László painting she wears a veil, crucifx and is clutching a prayer book, reportedly having just returned from church, but the fact that de László donated it to the National Gallery in 1913 recognises her signifcance as benefactor.75 Her appearance in these three paintings indicates both the range and longevity of Wantage’s patronage, as well as a frst-hand awareness of exhibition culture. Like Nevill’s Connoisseur article it is made clear that she did not lack discernment – this model of collecting, which had been visible in Fair Women, was more than ‘gate-keeping’. Wantage was active in the creation of her own public representation through lending objects and commissioning portraiture. The collection at Belvoir Castle, the home of Violet Manners, had also featured in the Connoisseur.76 She continued to occupy a rather unique status amongst the aristocracy as artist, patron and exhibition ‘curator’. Manners’s position at the centre of a cultural network was benefcial to her own extended family. The author of the article and the ones on Wantage (whose portrait Manners had also done) was a relative, Victoria Manners (her father had been John Manners, the 7th Duke of Rutland). The Belvoir series took a scholarly approach to the Flemish and eighteenth-century British collections, quoting from primary sources such as manuscripts, the German art historian Gustav Waagen discussing provenance and recent exhibitions. The articles clearly benefted from access through familial networks to important collections, such as that of Wantage (and larger volumes on Angelica Kauffman and Johann Zoffany were published in the ensuing decade). Nonetheless they positioned women within an elite group of celebrated collectors. Women became particularly vocal, both as collectors and writers, in the development of these new modes of connoisseurship in the Connoisseur, as well as the Burlington Magazine. As Rees-Leahy has shown, the early Burlington was fundamental to the formation of the discipline of art history particularly when it lacked an institutional affliation in the early twentieth century. Old Masters were to become a primary focus of the Burlington Magazine; the names most frequently associated with these shifts are Morelli, Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson.77 However, the Burlington’s original Consultative Committee included several women active in debates around connoisseurship.78 One of these was Herringham, who had considerable familiarity with the science of Early Renaissance painting, having translated Cennino Cennini’s treatise on painting in 1899 and analysed methods of reproducing early tempera techniques. Herringham

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also weighed in on debates around authenticity and the market. In relation to a collection of eighteenth-century portraits by Reynolds and Henry Raeburn, she wrote: ‘If picture-collectors would realize how easy it is to detect modern repaints and restorations, £4000 would not have been paid at Christie’s recently for Lord Tweedmouth’s Simplicity, formerly by Joshua Reynolds, now not, except for the general design and a portion of the hand’.79 Julia Frankau, also on the Consultative Committee, was an authority on eighteenth-century prints, having published a book on the topic in 1900.80 In an article in 1903 on fve portraits by the artist John Downman, A.R.A., held at the British Museum, she recounted her own hunt in ‘dingy solitude’ for the ‘drawings I have excavated from their mausoleum,’ but went on to assert their importance, as specimens by a long-forgotten artist, now sought after by ‘great American millionaires’. Frankau, who came from a family prominent in literary and theatrical circles, was also a successful novelist, publishing under the pseudonym Frank Danby.81 Frankau had already addressed this aspect of the art market in the frst year of the Connoisseur with ‘Prints and their Prices,’ wherein she identifed colour engravings as a ‘limited, narrow market,’ with ‘no elements of stability’. Interestingly, Frankau wrote this piece in response to an article by the print dealer Frank T. Sabin.82 The rise of commercial galleries coincided with the shift from the big established journals to new specialist magazines, and writers such as Herringham and Frankau were acutely aware of this interconnection.83 While the Connoisseur fully embraced the mechanisms of the market, The Burlington intersected commercial, academic and institutional interests.84 Therefore, the art press, like temporary exhibitions, gave women a voice in art-world debates and scholarship. An important element, often missing in accounts of this foundational period, is the attention given to a wide range of material culture. Articles in the Connoisseur and the Burlington Magazine were not limited to painting and prints, but encompassed art historical analyses of lace and needlework, jewellery and other kinds of ‘decorative art’ objects. One woman who wrote voluminously on the history of decorative art was Emily Gatliff Jackson. For example, her series of articles on the history of lacemaking and types of lace objects appeared in the Connoisseur, and she also wrote one on the subject for the early Burlington as well as serving on its frst Consultative Committee.85 Jackson’s articles and a volume titled A History of Hand-made Lace (1900) were catalysts for other women writers, such as Mrs. R.E. Head and Margaret Jourdain, who profled Mabel Morrison in 1903, to contribute to the feld of lace and needlework; the new art press facilitated specialisations grounded on an historical understanding of the object and technique.86 Like Hart, Jackson offered her own substantial collection of lace for sale to the South Kensington Museum.87 Her example suggests that women were active agents in the correlation between collecting and writing about collecting.88 The emphasis on female biography and illustrious women evident in Fair Women also continued through art writing. The Fair Women catalogue had proclaimed that the sitter Dorothy Sidney (Van Dyck) was ‘distinguished above all women of her time for her mental and physical charms, and celebrated as “Sacharissa,” in Waller’s poems’.89 The biography of Sidney had been published the year before by Julia Cartwright and she would go on to make a career out of writing articles and biographies on illustrious women. Cartwright was at the forefront of empirical methods of art historical research, travelling to Italy to access archives, and later published tomes on two other Fair Women: Isabella D’Este and Christina of Denmark. Cartwright’s corpus suggests that the impact of art publishing on exhibition culture worked both ways, and moreover they jointly reinforced the contemporary fascination with illustrious

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women with characteristics more aligned with modern womanhood. In Cartwright’s case these women echoed her own professional independence and advanced views on female education.90 There was a dramatic response to the potential sale of Holbein’s Christina of Denmark in 1909. The painting was only saved for the nation when a mysterious female donor emerged at the eleventh hour. Harriet Wantage’s name was among those suggested as the mystery saviour of Christina of Denmark.91 The association of women with ‘uninformed’ collecting was challenged by the emergent art press.92 It offered spaces for women to write about both contemporary and historical art objects and build networks with collectors, museum professionals and dealers. As a result, women were prominent contributors to the masses of material that appeared on collectors and collecting. Their scholarly approaches to both decorative and fne art challenged assumptions about the frivolous interests of women collectors at the fn de siècle.93 As Fair Women drew to a close in 1894, a furry of publications and exhibitions in North American and London sought to replicate the theme of ‘fair women’, some more provocatively than others. The emphasis in the Woman’s Exhibition was on women’s accomplishments, celebrity and material culture, and the involvement of professional ‘New’ women as organisers and workers was more far more marked than its predecessors. Many women were becoming increasingly concerned with fair representation and taxation alongside the benefts of growing professionalisation. In 1900 it was impossible to view an exhibition of women’s work as entirely removed from this political context. So was the Woman’s Exhibition the successful culmination of efforts begun by the Committee, enabling women to contribute to exhibition culture on a grand scale? Yes and no. The Earl’s Court exhibitions of 1897 and 1900 reopened the egalitarian debate: Did separate shows of women’s work help or hinder women’s professional careers?94 Marianne Stokes, though she was on the Fine Arts sub-committee, chose not to exhibit.95 Perhaps as a result of this continued anxiety about ‘woman’s’ exhibitions, successful women artists such as Cecilia Beaux and Olga Boznańska, exhibited at Earl’s Court in 1900 as well as at non-gender-specifc exhibitions. It was one of the latter, the International Society, that would organise the Edwardian revival of Fair Women.

Notes 1 On the mutual dependence of the art market and the art press in the context of Victorian London, see Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, ‘The Periodical and the Art Market: Investigating the “Dealer-Critic System” in Victorian England’, Victorian Periodicals Review 41, no. 4 (2008): 323. 2 Giles Waterfeld, The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Britain, 1800– 1914 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 238–40. 3 A related development was the production of commercially produced specialised bound volumes sold along with more ephemeral keepsakes or souvenirs at large international expositions. Sam D. Albert, ‘The Nation for Itself: The 1896 Hungarian Millennium and the 1906 Romanian National General Exhibition’, in Cultures of International Exhibitions 1840–1940: Great Exhibitions in the Margins, ed. Marta Filipová (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), 127. 4 Grafton Galleries, Fair Women: Reproductions by the Collotype Process of Some of the Principal Works Exhibited at the Grafton Galleries in 1894 (London: Blades, East & Blades, Fine Art Printers, 1894), 12, 18. The same publisher had produced an illustrated catalogue with more limited text for the Guildhall loan exhibition in 1892. 5 Grafton Galleries, Fair Women, 38.

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6 Grafton Galleries, Fair Women, 32, 46. The modern actress was absent in the memorial catalogue, but these celebrated fgures were already evident in the work of the volume’s photographer. A contemporary interview with Hay Cameron in the Studio was illustrated with his portrait of the actress Mary Anderson as Perdita (not Reynolds’s version). G.W., ‘Photographic Portraiture: An Interview with Mr. H. H. Hay Cameron’, Studio 9, December (1894): 88. 7 Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present, (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 12. 8 Grafton Galleries, Fair Women, 80. 9 Somerset’s campaigns as president of the British Women’s Temperance Association extended to prostitution and suffrage. Using both ‘platform and pen’ she edited the feminist Woman’s Signal journal and became, along with the American Frances Willard, a member of the socialist Fabian society. 10 Isabel Somerset, ‘The Renaissance of Woman’, The North American Review, October (1894): 491. 11 Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (London: Penguin, 1995), 51–52. 12 ‘Studies of Fair Women’, Idler 10, no. 5 (December 1896): 600. 13 Emma Sara Williamson, The Book of Beauty. Late Victorian Era. A Collection of Beautiful Portraits, with Literary, Artistic and Musical Contributions by Men and Women of the Day (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1896). 14 E. Williamson, ‘A Dream of Fair Women,’ Lady’s Realm 1:3 (January 1897): 250–57. 15 Williamson alluded to this overlapping context writing of the ‘magnifcent value now given by the illustrated papers, and by the development of photography, which has flled shop windows with so many presentments of our prettiest and most interesting women’. Williamson, Book of Beauty, v. 16 Kathryn Ledbetter, British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 56. 17 Marcia R. Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in EighteenthCentury England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 66–67; A.N.L. Munby, The Cult of the Autograph Letter in England (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1962). 18 Williamson, Book of Beauty, 114 19 Williamson, Book of Beauty, 57. 20 Anna Gruetzner Robins, A Fragile Modernism: Whistler and His Impressionist Followers (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2007), 72. 21 ‘Scraps’, Graphic, 13 October 1894, 442. 22 The Guild reportedly cared for 46,000 poor women and children in 1894. ‘St. John’s Guild’ The Peterson Magazine, vol. 109–110, p. 1137. National Academy of Design, Portraits of Women (1–24 November 1894). 23 National Academy of Design, Portraits of Women (1–24 November 1894). The Ladies Committee (Mrs. Robert B. Potter, Mrs. Henry Winthrop Gray, Mrs. John A. Lowery, Mrs. Charles de Rham Jr., Mrs. J. Hobart Warren, Mrs. Adulf Ladenburg, Mrs. M. Dwight Collier) was made up of women involved in charitable work. In addition to the Executive Committee (Henry Marquand, Robert Waller, James Speyer, Charles Barney, William King, Walter H. Webb, Osgood Welsh) there was an Artists’ Committee (Francis Lathrop, J. Carroll Beckwith, William M. Chase, William A. Coffn, R. Swain Gifford, Benjamin Porter, Stanford White). 24 Generationally these women had more in common with American women collectors of the nineteenth century, than those linked with ‘Art and Activism’ at the turn of the century. Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940 (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 2008), 45–133. 25 Macleod, Enchanted Lives, 164. 26 Flaminia Gennari Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces: Old Master Paintings in America, 1900–1914 (Milan: 5 Continents, 2003). 27 Lena M. Cooper, ‘Fair Women’, Godey’s Magazine (1892–1898); New York, January 1895, 53.

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28 Fair Women from Vogue: Being a Collection of Portraits of Ladies of New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Other American Cities: Originally Published in Vogue (New York: Fashion Co., 1894). 29 Alison Matthews David, ‘Vogue’s New World: American Fashionability and the Politics of Style’, Fashion Theory 10, no. 1–2 (1 March 2006): 22–23, https://doi.org/10.2752/1 36270406778051049. 30 There were portrait loan exhibitions again in 1895 and 1898. Barbara Dayer Gallati, ed., Beauty’s Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America (New York: The New-York Historical Society in association with DGiles Limited, 2013), 19–21. 31 Victorian Era Exhibition, Earl’s Court: Catalogue of Woman’s Work (London: Riddle & Couchman, 1897). The Honorary Committee: Duchess of Devonshire (President), Julia Marchioness of Tweedale (Vice-President), Duchess of Sutherland, Countess of Ellsmere, Countess Cowper, Countess Cadogan, Countess of Warwick, Countess of Selbourne, Lady George Hamilton, Lady MacKenzie of Tarbat, Henrietta Rae, Lady Jeune (Hon Sec), Miss T. MacKenzie (Sec). 32 ‘Woman’s Work in the Victorian Era’, Morning Post, 3 March 1897, 4. 33 ‘People, Places and Things’, Hearth and Home, 3 June 1897, 171. 34 Lowndes later founded the Artists’ Suffrage League. 35 Woman’s Exhibition, 1900, Earl’s Court: Offcial Fine Art, Historical and General Catalogue, (London: Spottiswoode, 1900). Others include Eugénie Sellars Strong(archaeologist), Mary Paget (American heiress who had in February organised a Masque of War and Peace at the Haymarket which raised £7000 for widows and orphans of the Boer War), Fanny Ronalds (American singer and socialite) and Margot Asquith. 36 ‘Comments of a Countess’, Outlook, 1900, 146. 37 Saturday Review, 16 June 1900, 742. 38 The Historical and Loan Sub-Committee: Lady Jeune (writer and philanthropist), Pearl Craigie (novelist), Lucy Clifford, Henrietta Ward and Madge Kendal (actress and theatre manager); Fine Art Sub-Committee: Feodora Gleichen, Henriette Ronner, Marchioness of Granby, Marianne Stokes, Cecilia Beaux, Annie Swynnerton, Anna Lea Merrit, Ward and Mary Seton Watts; Applied Art and Handicraft: Countess of Bective, Countess of Mayo, Hon. Mrs. Percy Wyndham, Evelyn Mary Benson (collector), Elinor Hallé (artist). 39 ‘Art at the Woman’s Exhibition’, The Times, 10 July 1900, 14. The secretaries were Joseph Grego, Francis Howard and Tessa MacKenzie with S. Laing Moffat listed as curator. For both Howard and MacKenzie the Woman’s Exhibition was a springboard to the organisation of further exhibitions. MacKenzie went on to organise the Women’s Section of the International Exhibition in Glasgow in 1901 and Howard was amongst those responsible for the three exhibitions of Fair Women discussed in Chapter 6. 40 E.F.V., ‘The Woman’s Exhibition’, Art Journal, July 1900, 219. 41 [now lost] See Louise Jopling catalogue, Louise Jopling: A Research Project, University of Glasgow, www.louisejopling.arts.gla.ac.uk/catalogue/display/?catno=47 5&rs=4&q=campbell&p=search; and Miss Marion Terry, www.louisejopling.arts.gla.ac. uk/catalogue/display/?catno=361&rs=2&q=terry&p=search. 42 This display format had a precedent at the National Portrait Gallery. See Heath, ‘Sir George Scharf and the Early National Portrait Gallery,’ 140–65. The ‘fair women’ portraits were shown alongside a collection of seventy-eight fans, tapestries and twenty-seven reproductions of studies supposedly ‘taken from life’ of international costume by E.T. Parris, c.1832. 43 ‘Art at the Woman’s Exhibition’, 14. 44 Lewis F. Day, ‘“Woman’s Work” at Earl’s Court’, The Manchester Guardian, 10 May 1900, 12. 45 ‘Embroidery has lately been revived as an occupation for women, and of this the exhibition contains an interesting exhibit. Among the pioneers of this branch of women’s work are the Misses Edith Swinhoe and Alice Maynard.’ ‘Women and Her Work’, The English Illustrated Magazine, August 1900, 464. 46 Janice Helland, ‘Translating Textiles: “private palaces” and the Celtic Fringe 1890–1910’, in Fashion, Interior Design, and the Contours of Modern Identity, ed. Alla Myzelev and John Potvin (Surrey; Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 85–104.

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47 Bunbeg Woollen Mill and by hand ‘under’ her ‘direction’ from Donegal and Armagh, Woman’s Exhibition, p. 196. See Janice Helland, British and Irish Home Arts and Industries, 1880–1914: Marketing Craft, Making Fashion (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007), 24–75, 93–197. 48 Woman’s Exhibition, 195. 49 Brenda M. King, Silk and Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 16–17. 50 Gleeson White, Catalogue of Pastel Studies of the Glories of the Sky and Sea in the Far East, by Mrs. Ernest Hart (London: The Dowdeswell Galleries, 1896). 51 Woman’s Exhibition, 110. 52 It was not unusual for Victorian women artists, collectors and writers to travel. Dianne Sachko MacLeod, ‘Introduction: Women’s Artistic Passages’, in Intrepid Women: Victorian Artists Travel, ed. Jordana Pomeroy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 1–10. 53 Christine M. Guth, ‘Dress, Self-Fashioning and Display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’, in Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice, ed. Charlotte Nicklas and Annebella Pollen, 2016, 113–26. 54 In the ‘Women of All Nations’ twenty-four countries were represented and in the Dinka village women did spear exercises. ‘Women and Her Work’, 459–65; Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1994), 100. 55 ‘Mrs Alec Tweedie having favoured the Executive by the loan of personal ornaments, portions of costumes, relics and belongings illustrative of Icelandic womankind and their customs’. Woman’s Exhibition, 100–101. 56 Mrs. Alec (Ethel) Tweedie, A Girl’s Ride in Iceland, 2nd edition (London: HCox, 1894); Mrs. Alec (Ethel) Tweedie, Through Finland in Carts (London: A& C Black, 1897); Mrs. Alec (Ethel) Tweedie, Thirteen Years of a Busy Woman’s Life (London; New York: John Lane, 1912), 116. 57 Tweedie, Thirteen Years of a Busy Woman’s Life, 146. She recorded her expansive professional networks on signature tablecloths. Ethel Tweedie, Signature Tablecloths, 1887–1915, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Mrs. Alec (Ethel) Tweedie, My Table-Cloths; a Few Reminiscences (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1916), 172. 58 Ceremonial drinking bowl, late nineteenth century, birch, carved and painted, Norway, V&A; Powder fask, 1650–1700, horn, incised, with an iron collar, Norway, V&A. 59 Hart was a member of the Japan Society along with her husband. Mrs. Ernest Hart, ‘Impressionism in Japanese Art’, Transactions and Proceedings of The Japan Society, London, vol. V (1900), pp. 245–58. In spite of reservations about its value the Hart collection was purchased for £250 in 1902. John Hatcher, Laurence Binyon: Poet, Scholar of East and West (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 77. These were not the only collections with subsequent links to the market, large loans were given by dealer/collectors such as Frank Sabin and Grego, and many objects were marked with a ‘for sale’ asterisk. The costume collection of Charles and Henry Green had already been promised to the exhibition when Henry Green died in 1899, therefore the sale at Christie, Manson and Woods was postponed until after the close of the Woman’s Exhibition. 60 J.K., ‘Our London Correspondent’, The North China Herald and Supreme Court and Consular Gazette, 20 June 1900, 116; E.F.V., ‘The Woman’s Exhibition’. 61 This was not entirely novel; there was already a precedent for women working in museums, particularly as cleaners and volunteers. Kate Hill, Women and Museums 1850–1914: Modernity and the Gendering of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 31–37. 62 Woman’s Exhibition, 14. 63 ‘Women and Her Work’, 462. 64 Frederick Dolman, ‘The Most Beautiful Women in Painting,’ Strand Magazine 20:120 (1900: Dec), p. 720. 65 Sitters included Mary Harmsworth (wife of press baron Alfred) by Manners and the singer Mabel Batten by Sargent. Emma Sara Williamson, The Book of Beauty-Era King Edward VII (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1902), 133, 203.

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66 This exhibition was following a relatively new strategy for the organisation to hold loan exhibitions as a way of generating income. Comprised of approximately one hundred historical works (ranging from Bellini to Raeburn) and an equivalent number of modern pictures, the Copley Society exhibition was not a tremendous success unlike its predecessors. Society records suggest it was in part to do with timing and the high costs of arranging the loans and catalogue. Minutes of meetings, 1879–1969; Annual Reports, 1888–1900, Minutes of Loan Exhibition Committee, 01-594, Copley Society records, 1879–1981, Archives of American Art. The Society, founded in 1877 by Alice S. Tinkham as the Boston Art Students’ Association, had recently taken a more serious moniker. Jean N. Oliver, ‘The Copley Society of Boston’, The New England Magazine, 1904, 605. 67 Beale’s choice might be contrasted with Burne-Jones’s 1870 stained glass depiction of Chaucer’s Good Women for the all-male Peterhouse. Carter contends the windows were a defensive depiction of a ‘good woman’ as compliant to male authority in love and life. Veronica Carter, ‘The Good Women of Peterhouse: Patriarchal Community, Femininity and University Reform’, Journal of Design History 28, no. 2 (1 May 2015): 113–27, https://doi.org/10.1093/jdh/epv013. 68 Clare A.P. Willsdon, Mural Painting in Britain 1840–1940: Image and Meaning (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000), 282. 69 Frances Sitwell, ‘Types of Beauty in Renaissance and Modern Painting’, Art Journal, January 1889, 5–11; March 1889, 70–76; May 1889, 148–53; December 1889, 343–51. 70 Kristin Mahoney, ‘Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Collecting in The Connoisseur: An Illustrated Magazine for Collectors, 1901–1914’, Victorian Periodicals Review 45, no. 2 (13 July 2012): 175–99, https://doi.org/10.1353/vpr.2012.0021. 71 Lady Victoria Manners, ‘Lady Wantage’s Collection of Pictures’, The Connoisseur, 1911, 10. 72 H. Rees-Leahy, ‘“For Connoisseurs”: The Burlington Magazine 1903–1911’, in Art History and Its Institutions, ed. Elizabeth Mansfeld (Routledge, 2002), 240, 245; Andrea Geddes Poole, Stewards of the Nation’s Art: Contested Cultural Authority, 1890–1939 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 106. 73 All three were already experienced in the art world (organising exhibitions and lecturing in museums). 74 She had lent in 1902, 1903, 1907 and 1910. In 1908 she donated £500 towards the purchase of Frans Hals A Family Group (from Lord Talbot of Malahide), Reports of National Gallery 1910, p. 4 (130). 75 See Philip de László Catalogue Raisonné; Bailkin, The Culture of Property, 253. 76 Lady Victoria Manners, ‘Notes on the Pictures at Belvoir Castle’, The Connoisseur, 1903, 3–13, 67–74, 131–36. 77 Rees-Leahy, “‘For Connoisseurs’”, 231–45; Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘Out of the Nineteenth Century: Roger Fry’s Early Art Criticism’, in Art Made Modern Roger Fry’s Vision of Art, ed. Christopher Green (London: Merrell Holberton in Association with the Courtauld Gallery, Courtauld Institute of Art, 1999), 31–44; Joseph Connors, Louis Alexander Waldman, and Dietrich Seybold, eds., Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage (Florence: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 2014). 78 M. Clarke and Francesco Ventrella, eds., ‘Women’s Expertise and the Culture of Connoisseurship’, Visual Resources 33, no. 1–2 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1080/019737 62.2017.1308623. 79 Christiana J. Herringham, ‘The Tweedmouth Pictures’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 7, no. 28 (1 July 1905): 335–56. See Christie, Manson and Woods, Catalogue of Highly Important Pictures of the Early English School and Works by Old Masters, the Property of the Rt. Hon. Lord Tweedmouth (London, 1905), 16. A version in Waddesdon, National Trust: Joshua Reynolds, Miss Theophila Gwatkin (1782–1844) as Simplicity, c.1785, oil on canvas, The Rothschild Collection. See Mary Lago, Christiana Herringham and the Edwardian Art Scene (London: Lund Humphries, 1996); Hannah Spooner, ‘Pure Painting: Joseph Southall, Christiana Herringham and the Tempera Revival’, The British Art Journal 4, no. 2 (2003): 49–56; Meaghan Clarke, ‘“The Greatest Living Critic”: Christiana Herringham and the Practice of Connoisseurship’, Visual Resources 33, no. 1–2 (3 April 2017): 94–116, https://doi.org/10.1080/01973762.2017.1282658.

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80 Julia Frankau, Eighteenth Century Colour Prints: An Essay on Certain Stipple Engravers and Their Work in Colour (London: Macmillan, 1900). 81 Julia Frankau, ‘A Note on Five Portraits by John Downman, A. R. A.,’ Burlington Magazine 1 (1903): 122; Todd M. Endelman, ‘The Frankaus of London: A Study in Radical Assimilation, 1837–1967’, Jewish History 8, no. 1–2 (1 March 1994): 117–54. 82 Julia Frankau, ‘Engravings: Prints and their Prices. A Small Collection’, Connoisseur 1 (November 1901): 181. 83 Anne Helmreich, ‘The Death of the Victorian Art Periodical’, Visual Resources 26 (September 2010): 242. 84 Barbara Pezzini, ‘The Burlington Magazine, The Burlington Gazette, and The Connoisseur: The Art Periodical and the Market for Old Master Paintings in Edwardian London’, Visual Resources 29 (September 2013): 154–83. 85 Emily Jackson, ‘Lace and Needlework: The Evolution of Alençon Lace’, Connoisseur 1 (1901): 219–23; Emily Jackson, ‘Ecclesiastical Lace Ancient and Modern: A Comparison. Part I’, Burlington Magazine 4 (1904): 54–64. 86 Emily Jackson, A History of Hand-Made Lace (London: L.U. Gill; New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1900). The artist and writer Lady Marian Alford, instrumental in the Royal School of Needlework at South Kensington, was a precursor of this boom. On contemporary production, see Janice Helland, ‘“Caprices of Fashion”: Handmade Lace in Ireland 1883– 1907’, Textile History 39, no. 2 (1 November 2008): 193–222, https://doi.org/10.1179/1 74329508x347089. 87 In 1905, the V&A agreed to purchase a blue embroidered border and two pieces of old brocade from the thirty-two items held at the dealer Walcots Antique Furniture, Lace, China, Silver, Glass and Prints. See Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Nominal File E. Nevill Jackson: MA/1/J29. 88 After 1905, Jackson turned her attention to a wide variety of other decorative subjects including china collecting, bookplates, door knockers, toys and silhouettes. When the New York Historical Society declined to purchase her albums of the early American silhouettes for £10 per fgure, she sold them individually in addition to copies she had made as ‘photo facsimiles’; the entire set could be purchased for £800. Emily Jackson Photograph Collection of Édouart’s American Silhouette Portraits. New York Historical Society Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architectural Collections, PR 101. 89 Julia Mary Cartwright Ady, Sacharissa: Some Account of Dorothy Sidney, Countess of Sunderland, Her Family and Friends, 1617–1684 (London: Seeley, 1893), 38, http://arc hive.org/details/sacharissasomea01adygoog. See (original at Penshurst) http://www.nati onaltrustcollections.org.uk/object/996358. 90 Hilary Fraser, Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 112–13. 91 Helen Rees-Leahy, ‘Desiring Holbein Presence and Absence in the National Gallery’, Journal of the History of Collections 19, no. 1 (1 May 2007): 75–87, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/ fhm005; Patricia Rubin, ‘“The Outcry” Despoilers, Donors, and the National Gallery in London, 1909’, Journal of the History of Collections 25, no. 2 (7 January 2013): 253–75, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhs011. 92 On gender and collecting, see Sarah Cheang, ‘The Dogs of Fo: Gender, Identity and Collecting’, in Collectors: Expressions of Self and Other, ed. Anthony Shelton (London: Horniman Museum and Gardens, 2001), 55–72; Anne Anderson, “‘Chinamania”: Collecting Old Blue for the House Beautiful c. 1860–1900’, in Material Cultures, 1740– 1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting, ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 109–28. 93 Julie Codell, ‘The Art Press and the Art Market: The Artist as “Economic Man”’, in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, ed. Pamela M. Fletcher and Anne Helmreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 128–50. 94 This was alluded to by Francis Howard who also praised the ‘genius’ of Swynnerton, Boznańska, Beaux and Thérèse Schwartze. Howard had been a founding member of the International Society and there was clear overlap in his choice. Woman’s Exhibition, 1. 95 She had a show at the Fine Art Society that year.

6

International Fair Women The Edwardian Revival 1908–1910

At the end of the Edwardian Era, Fair Women was reincarnated annually by the International Society of Sculptors, Painters & Gravers (International Society). The exhibitions all called Fair Women, which took place at the New Gallery (1908 and 1909) and the Grafton Galleries (1910), mimicked the original 1894 exhibition by combining historical and contemporary art. However, these were not organised by a committee of women. Did the International Fair Women operate purely as a ‘blockbuster’ theme, essentially hijacked by the International Society, and therefore slough off any association with female cultural patronage or gender politics? By 1908, many women were involved in the international women’s movement and in Britain suffrage groups, including the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and Women’s Freedom League (WFL).1 In this context scholars have seen the later Fair Women as conservative and backward-looking. Similarly, in art history, the 1910 Fair Women display is positioned as the ‘anti-modern’ sensationally superseded by the Grafton exhibition that followed it, Manet and the Post-Impressionists.2 The timing of Fair Women was indeed contentious and resulted in debate in the press around its portrayal of modern womanhood. Angus Trumble and Andrea Wolk Rager have drawn attention to the Edwardian period’s marked dualities, encompassing ‘nostalgic longing and revolutionary modernity’.3 The same could be said of the Fair Women International Society exhibitions, where a closer exploration suggests an array of dualities combining both old and new. Historical accounts of the exhibitions evident in the International Society records and the mass media reveal a ‘fair women’ narrative that was both contested and complex. What this chapter will do is consider the International Society’s decision to stage Fair Women and then explore the exhibitions chronologically through a selection of objects from each show. An analysis of the objects, lenders and their networks will demonstrate that the show resonated, like its predecessor, with contemporary fashionability and modernity, and, perhaps surprisingly, women as collectors and patrons were well represented. The portraits and objects indicated a degree of continuity, but also transformation in the lives and identities of ‘fair women’.

Reviving Fair Women The International Society set itself up in 1898 as a radical group with its rejection of the Royal Academy (members were not permitted) and ‘non-recognition of nationality’. The society evolved after its president Whistler’s death in 1903; Auguste Rodin became

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president while John Lavery continued to undertake many of the main duties for the society in London as vice-president. The society was a forum for leading independent artists from Europe, America and the British Empire who were invited to contribute to exhibitions, and this remained true of the Fair Women shows. The group had developed valuable and unrivalled networks among dealers, collectors and art institutions; Stephenson has identifed its signifcance in fostering an Edwardian cosmopolitanism.4 The International Society was an important exhibition venue for women artists and included among its members the American artists Beaux and Elizabeth Shippen Green and the Polish artist Boznańska.5 While the International Society continued to identify itself as an alternative to the Royal Academy, its ‘outsider’ status was tempered by members who were not, such as Sargent, a Royal Academician, and Charles Holroyd, director of the National Gallery. Moreover, new commercial galleries and rival groups sprang up, such as the Carfax Galleries (1899), the Leicester Galleries (1903), Chenil Gallery (1905) and the Allied Artists Association (1908).6 The political context of the women’s movement in the process of fomenting mass agitation makes the International Society’s decision to redeploy the title Fair Women seem extraordinary, yet the phrase and indeed exhibition concept had remained continuously in the popular press since 1894. Not only had exhibitions bearing the same title, run in London and America, but Sharp’s Portfolio volume Fair Women in Painting and Poetry had been reprinted in London (1905) and New York (1907). Moreover, the theme was inseparable from another issue for the International Society: money. The International Society had in fact carefully considered its decision to revive Fair Women, seeking advice from the directors of the Grafton Galleries about the profts gained in 1894. It was learnt that these were considerable: £8000. Finance had been an overriding concern for the International Society since the lacklustre response to its frst exhibition of ‘advanced’ art under Whistler’s presidency.7 Exhibitions were a particularly crucial way of gaining not only publicity and sales for its membership, but also income through entrance fees, catalogues and events. Despite a move to the sumptuous New Gallery, from the Prince’s Skating Rink, the International Society’s exhibitions were still not economically successful. Hence, the idea of running a second exhibition, immediately following the annual open exhibition, on the theme of ‘fair women’. Thus, the decision was at least in part, if not entirely, economic rather than aesthetic. This was imperative as it turned out because by January of 1908, society funds had been depleted to the extent that it was necessary to borrow money from private individuals to pay the frst term of rent at the New Gallery.8 Fortunately, the Fair Women experiment was such a fnancial success that it was run annually for the following three years. All three Fair Women exhibitions were broadly similar. They featured sculptures, paintings and prints by International Society members as well as a selection of historical loans shown alongside modern decorative objects (primarily fans and jewellery).9 Subjects represented ranged from aristocratic and wealthy women to professional actresses, artists and writers. Given that, unlike in 1894, the International Society had the additional motive of selling work, historical loans were more limited and tended to be primarily nineteenth-century paintings and prints, although some earlier works appeared in the later iterations. The accompanying one shilling catalogues provided limited information (artists, titles and lenders). The International Society was approached to produce a luxury illustrated catalogue, but this never came to fruition because of cost.10 However, like the earlier version, the press responded with illustrated feature articles, making the exhibition visible to a far wider audience.

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As in 1894 the experience of viewing Fair Women was combined with a multiplicity of spaces dedicated to commerce, pleasure and leisure. The diaries of the patron Ottoline Morrell exemplify this, interspersing shopping (Sloane Street, Worth, Poiret, Selfridges) with visits to galleries (Tate, Royal Academy, New English Art Club, Grafton, Chenil) and opera.11 Edwardian London was a thriving and expanding centre for fashion, wealth and tourism. Commercial spaces drew clientele from an everwidening social spectrum. The location of the New Gallery (today Burberry’s fagship store) on Regent Street was coterminous with new developments such as Selfridges (opened in 1909 modelled on Marshall Field’s in Chicago) and Piccadilly Circus (with its underground station). Many of these spaces were occupied by women.12 Equally women as consumers of culture were strikingly evident in the press, and Alfred Harmsworth, owner of the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, Times and Observer, was only too aware of their economic import. In 1909 he warned his editor, Marlowe, of the Daily Mail to ensure the continuing femininity of the journal’s pages, as competition for women readers intensifed from the rival Daily Express. Harmsworth allegedly claimed: ‘Women are the holders of the domestic purse-strings. They are the real buyers. Men buy what women tell them to’.13 The overlapping category of women as patron, collector and fashionable consumer was a consistent context for Fair Women, particularly in the popular press. The history of early twentieth-century modernism in Britain has tended to focus on the groups of artists that emerged during this period. Several of these new groups, such as the Camden Town Group, would exclude female artists from the outset. In contrast, the International Society was well-suited to opportunities for women, as from its inception it had included female members and exhibitors. However, Joanna Meacock suggests the inclusive nature of the International Society was potentially undermined by presenting women as mere objects of prettiness for the male gaze.14 Nevertheless, portraiture was an arena in which women artists had demonstrated considerable success. As in the case of the earlier Fair Women, the ‘pedestal’ was simultaneously subverted by women who used portraiture to engage in modernist debate. Women were active in Fair Women in various guises, not only as portraitists, but also as patrons, committee members and lay members. Lisa Tickner has examined the ‘assumption of masculinity’ in British modernism and pinpoints the irony that modernism’s freeranging masculinity required an emancipated femininity to support it. She suggests there were opportunities afforded by particular groups and practices for women’s participation.15 In this context Fair Women can be seen as a microcosm of a much wider recognition of the signifcance of ‘modern women’ as cultural mediators at the onset of the twentieth century.16

Fair Women Reconfgured at the New Gallery The New Gallery consisted of a great central hall overlooked by a second balcony exhibition space. There were three additional rooms: West, South and North. The 1908 Fair Women exhibition of 418 works made clear to the Edwardian visitor its associations with its literary and visual predecessor by displaying John Everett Millais’s pen and ink drawings of Queen Eleanor and Cleopatra for Tennyson’s ‘A Dream of Fair Women’. Moreover, individual portraits and sitters rematerialised in the new Fair Women. Visitors were greeted in the North room by the Millais portrait of Eveleen Tennant and Sarah Bernhardt was represented in a wash drawing by

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the illustrator Edmund J. Sullivan. The Connoisseurs (G.J. Pinwell, c.1870s, Tate), depicting three women critically considering a small fgurative sculpture, resonated with women’s collecting.17 In difference to the earlier exhibition, Old Masters were entirely absent. Instead the re-display of nineteenth-century works made use of the International Society’s French contacts and a recent show of Portraits de Femmes 1870–1900 in Paris.18 Cases displayed jewellery, but these were contemporary pieces by male and female designers associated with the Art and Crafts Movement.19 The majority of recent sculptures, paintings, prints and drawings were for purchase. The new Fair Women had shifted quite dramatically into the modern period. The organisation of Fair Women was devolved to a subcommittee of men. Nonetheless, several aspects of the exhibition and extant records of its planning suggest that gender politics were not entirely absent. For a start, the Swedish feminist Ellen Key was approached about giving a lecture at the exhibition.20 With Key, the International Society seemed to wish to position the exhibition in the context of the international women’s movement. Key wrote on a variety of topics ranging from ethics and education to biographies of notable Swedish women. She held radical liberal views and was a suffragist, but was also infuenced by evolutionary science.21 Key agreed to speak, but her lecture was postponed to the following year because of her busy schedule. It is interesting that the International Society did not approach a British speaker, thereby avoiding alignment with a national group. Nor was the International Society wedded to the tradition of aristocratic patronage. The actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Mary Anderson were proposed as suitable candidates to open the show, although in the end it was the American Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough (who had recently separated from the Duke of Marlborough) who presided. Women did continue to be vital as lenders to Fair Women. The International Society approached a range of female private owners, although not always successfully: Clara Bischoffsheim’s portrait by Millais was not in the frst exhibition (although it appeared later).22 In contrast with the earlier Fair Women exhibition, women lent works from their own modern collections. Vanderbilt herself had personally commissioned PaulCésar Helleu to produce a series of etchings; Fair Women gave her a space to publicly exhibit her Helleu collection. Thus, the loans were more about modern collecting than familial histories. There were other signifcant new patrons and celebrities who were willing to lend, including the French mezzo-soprano Blanche Marchesi and the London-based salonnière Mary (Smyth) Hunter. Marchesi was not only a collector but was also a fund-raiser for the National Gallery’s acquisition of French Impressionist painting (Figure 6.1, top right).23 Hunter was the sister of the composer Ethel Smyth and her networks encompassed music, literature and art. Friendly with Rodin, she was triply represented in the show (by Rodin, Prince Paul Troubetzkoy and Antonio Mancini).24 For these female patrons, therefore, the exhibition conjoined self-fashioning with public patronage. Members of the 1894 Committee lent work, most notably Violet Manners who, in addition to contributing her own work, lent an extraordinary portrait of herself by J.J. Shannon. Dressed in a dramatic costume of gauze-like fabrics, her head encircled by a halo of white and silver, Manners held a sketchpad and pencil on her lap, her eyes fxed on the viewer/artist with a piercing gaze. As a practising artist, her accoutrements signal that she is an active sitter clearly in the act of sketching back; it was also reproduced in the Illustrated London News feature on the exhibition (Figure 6.2, top left).25 By this point her work had achieved considerable acclaim.

Figure 6.1 ‘Four Beautiful Portraits at the Fair Women Exhibition’, Illustrated London News, 1908, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

Figure 6.2 ‘Four Beautiful Studies from the Fair Women Exhibition’, Illustrated London News, 1908, © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

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A volume of her portraits was published in 1900 and a display of one hundred of her works was shown at the Grafton Galleries in 1902 (three were acquired by the Musée du Luxembourg).26 The Duchess of Portland and Cornwallis-West (Churchill) also exhibited portraits of themselves. The latter’s loan of her portraits by Sargent and Manners coincided strategically with the publication of her autobiography.27 A younger generation of female lenders to the International Society’s Fair Women were untitled, conjoining wealth and professional careers, to become signifcant cultural players. Patterns emerged of existing networks of artistic patronage that were evident in the 1890s as well as new interconnections particularly of matronage. Two lenders in the jewellery section were women who owned work by the American designer Florence Koehler, who had relocated to London. The American artist and photographer Sarah Choate Sears lent two Koehler necklaces and a pendant. Sears was a widely travelled and exceedingly wealthy collector of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. Friends with Mary Cassatt, she was in the vanguard of contemporary photography, with membership of the Linked Ring in London and Photo-Secession in New York.28 A second case contained Koehler’s work, owned by Emily Crane Chadbourne. Stunning blue and green jewels she made for Chadbourne at this time survive: a gold, emerald, sapphire and enamel ring; and gold, sapphire, pearl, emerald and enamel pendant composed of four rectangular gems and alternating pearl clusters framing an oval cabochon.29 Chadbourne’s loans evidenced an intimate network of American women artists working abroad; Chadbourne had travelled to London with Koehler and they shared a studio.30

New Women and Femme Fatales in 1908 It transpired that over a decade later, the ‘fair woman’ as urban New Woman had not disappeared. Instead she had multiplied and was present in the gallery in various guises. In an extraordinary twist, George DuMaurier’s Punch cartoons of the 1890s had moved from the press to the gallery walls. In ‘Sexo-Mania’ a New Woman writer questioned her publisher about a notice advertising the licentious nature of her book, while in another cartoon a group of travelling women attempted to negotiate with a French customs offcer.31 Both cartoons poked fun at the New Woman, but at the same time visually remarked on her independence, meeting publishers and travelling without male companions. Elsewhere in the exhibition was a different, more seductive New Woman. On the balcony in the gallery was Helleu’s image of a woman languidly smoking on a sofa, the Cigarette (Figure 6.3).32 This print had appeared as an illustration in the Studio in 1895. The image would have offered a visual counterpoint to cartoons of masculine New Women and illustrates the fashionable woman smoking on the ‘billowing silken cushions of a sofa’ described by Campbell in 1893. It was the Helleu/Campbell smoking woman ‘type’ that would proliferate in the Edwardian period. This new combination of fashionability and modernity imbricated with popular culture was evident in portraits by Charles Shannon. The Sculptress, completed in 1907, was the British sculptor Kathleen Bruce (Scott) standing, sculpting tool in hand, before a small clay model of a female fgure, while her profle refected in a mirror behind her. The Central Hall displayed Bruce’s sculptures of women and children including a portrait of the actress May Martyn (wife of Nigel Playfair) evidencing her female friendships through theatrical and literary circles.33 Visitors could link the artist

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Figure 6.3 Cigarette, Paul Helleu, c.1895

at work on one of her pieces with the sculptures themselves. Miss Lillah McCarthy in the Dress of Donna Ana, was the actress who played the handsome and enigmatic female character who possesses the ‘Life Force’ in Shaw’s Man and Superman; in her memoirs McCarthy declared that the character was a ‘new woman’ and made a ‘new woman out of me’ (Plate 23).34 Shannon’s representations of these professional women suggested a contemporary continuity with the earlier Fair Women. However, some reviewers of Fair Women in 1908 were disturbed by the exhibition, not by the popular cartoons of the emancipated New Woman, but by her current depiction as a sexualised independent woman. The Athenaeum reviewer declared ‘a moral fimsiness besets all the modern ladies’ in the West Gallery. The ‘modern ladies’ in the West Gallery included Bruce and McCarthy (as well as the actresses Mrs. Patrick Campbell and Marie Tempest), and the portraits of Manners and Hunter. In contrast was the Hon Mrs. Wyndham by G.F. Watts (frst shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, 1877): ‘Here is, at any rate, the presentment of a lady who looks a worthy ancestress for a noble family, and by its amplitude and tranquillity of pose it remains an impressive portrait’.35 The biography of Madeleine Campbell Wyndham belied the grand manner illusion of eighteenth-century grandeur.36 But by 1908 she was an established collector and therefore, at least according to the Athenaeum, appeared to be a ‘worthy ancestress’. The criticism implied that the parameters of ‘fair womanhood’ excluded women who did not adhere to her ‘type’. Certainly two portraits of American women in the North Gallery were associated with shock as opposed to tranquillity. Sargent exhibited his notorious portrait of

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Madame X, titled simply Portrait, which had rarely graced gallery walls since it caused a furore in Paris in 1884, remaining in the artist’s studio.37 It retained this history of scandal and sensation. Like the ‘modern’ women in the West Gallery, the characterisation of Sargent’s works by the Athenaeum had implications for the sitter as well as the artist: ‘the bulk of his exhibits made to appear vulgar’.38 Similarly, Evelyn Thaw, who appeared in a portrait by Harrington Mann, was quite literally a modern ‘femme fatale’ and the subject of widespread public fascination since her husband’s trial for the murder of her lover was contemporary with the exhibition. The details of the scandalous personal life of Thaw, an American chorus girl and artist’s model, had been splashed across the press.39 Thaw had been among the ‘Gibson Girls’ who represented an American version of New Womanhood, and the display of herself as ‘fair woman’ must have been calculated to enhance the reputation of both sitter and artist. Thaw was a celebrity who moved between popular and elite culture.40 In spite of the response of some critics, the freedom and independence of the ‘modern’ sitters may not have repulsed modern female gallery-goers. Bohemian identities, often aloof from political engagement, would come even further to the fore in the ensuing Fair Women shows of 1909 and 1910. While the rest of the press was broadly laudatory, the radical British weekly The New Age published a provocative review titled ‘An Exhibition for Quakers and Turks’. In it G.R.S. Taylor, who was associated with the Fabian Society, explained: ‘it seemed a little strange that the most modern of art clubs – the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers – should have planned its exhibition at the New Gallery on the social lines of George Fox and King Solomon’. However, Taylor’s challenge to the segregation of the portraits according to gender was not about equal representation of women artists but rather a critique of class. He continued with a sideswipe at ‘carriage-folk’ who had the opportunity for ‘culture study’, leaving the rest to ‘get their pictorial art from bill posters’. His tone was also mocking about the superfciality of sitters, suggesting that a mixture of good and bad work would be appreciated by the ‘ladies themselves’, ‘for have they not invented and maintained the chaperone system for this very purpose? Was it not at the root of Cinderella’s determination to go to the ball with her ugly sisters, when she could easily have slipped off to another dance by herself?’41 Contrary to Taylor’s assumption, the exhibition had already reached the masses, although not via ‘bill posters’ but rather through the popular press. In fact, the exhibition prompted the Daily Mirror, a very successful illustrated morning newspaper, to stage a competition for ‘England’s fairest’, to which 15,000 photographic portraits of women were submitted and Lavery was named on the jury.42 Although the participation of the International Society in the coverage appears to have been an opportunistic publicity stunt, it further unravelled Phillips’s 1894 proclamations concerning the separation of fne and popular portraiture.43 The sheer numbers of women that participated in the Daily Mirror version of ‘fair women’ underlines the popular engagement of women in the theme. In sum, the 1908 exhibition was a success and would have considerable impact on the International Society for the remainder of the decade. It was welcomed by many artists who determined that Fair Women was strategically a more effective place to sell or promote their work than the annual show that preceded it.44 There were reportedly 22,714 visitors to the exhibition, and the accounts indicate that the income from Fair Women shows more than tripled that of the International Society’s regular exhibition, earning approximately £1433.45 In choosing the theme of Fair Women and including decorative objects specifcally allied with female adornment, the International

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Society decisively oriented the exhibition towards a female viewer and consumer.46 The International Society theme in 1908 was a very public acknowledgement of the centrality of women to exhibition culture and most importantly the market. After Fair Women closed in 1908, the New Gallery then opened its own annual summer exhibition. There was a marked similarity between the two exhibitions. The three galleries downstairs were hung with pictures, but the balcony and part of the Central Hall were devoted to decorative art and jewellery. The reinvention of the New Gallery’s annual show as a space for fne art and decorative art was not missed by the art critic Elizabeth Robins Pennell. Writing in the Nation, she opined that this was the result of the recent decline in the market for contemporary art: ‘The days are at an end when the initials R.A. and A.R.A were accepted as a guarantee of excellent. In the sixties, seventies and eighties, the City Man, who collected … had no greater ambition than to become the possessor of the huge “pictures of the year”’. Instead the New Gallery’s solution was, Pennell suggested, market-driven: These things sell better than pictures, and are fast becoming indispensable in the larger exhibitions of London and Paris. … this new departure may mean an artistic as well as a fnancial improvement in the regular summer exhibition at the New Gallery.47 Her observation implied a shift in consumption wherein the buying had moved away from academic pictures; the ‘City Man’, perhaps aided or even replaced by a fashionable woman, was interested in other kinds of objects. For Pennell this would result in an ‘artistic’ as well as fnancial progress. She was in part deriding Royal Academy painting, but also, perhaps unintentionally, commenting on the similar shift in the International Society Fair Women shows. Pennell was a Lay Member of the society (her husband was on the Fair Women subcommittee), therefore she was party to and at least an indirect participant in International Society planning strategy. Her pointed comments were refected in International Society accounts the following year. Amongst the purchases were: ‘show cases for jewellry [sic] exhibits at £7.0.0, which will relieve the society of certain expenditure in future’.48 Clearly the display of jewellery in cases was something the International Society intended to continue, although strictly speaking it was not included in the organisation’s title.

Fair Women 1909: Nostalgia, Orientalism and Modernism Scholarship has pinpointed the laudatory reviews of Fair Women in 1909 as a turning point for the career of Augustus John; however, less attention has been given to the remainder of the exhibition. The planning for Fair Women and its realisation suggests it was a site for a complex series of political and cultural debates. In the West and North rooms of the Gallery there were 110 oils. Interspersed with modern paintings were works by Lely, Gainsborough, Reynolds, Winterhalter, Courbet, MarisMonticelli and Morisot. While this can be read as a nostalgic Edwardian longing for the past, the display included a number of works that departed from a model of ‘fair womanhood’ grounded in the eighteenth century. The close proximity of the Duchess of Devonshire (Reynolds) and Lady Colin Campbell (Boldini) in the West room replicated the confrontation of the images of the eighteenth century and nineteenth century in 1894.49 Contemporary portraits were again wide-ranging including titled women

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such as Lady Helen Vincent by Franz Von Lenbach and Princess Radziwell, the Polish author known for her scandalous writing and lifestyle, by de László, as well as artists and actresses, such as Anna Alma Tadema by Laurens Alma Tadema, Bruce as Lady in the Winged Hat by Shannon and a youthful Ellen Terry in Head of a Girl by Watts.50 Emergent lenders/patrons included Catherine (Kate) Cranston, who lent a piece by Margaret MacDonald MacIntosh from the Glasgow Sauchiehall Tea Rooms; the Indian collectors Ratan Tata and Lady Navajbai Tata, who had recently purchased a house in Twickenham; and the Irish dealer and collector Hugh Lane, who lent fve Old Masters, suggesting that they too would soon enter nascent collections.51 Intriguingly, the exhibition was intended to include a series of photographs of Fair Women in the South Gallery. This inclusion would have been in diametric opposition to aspersions in 1894 about photography. Moreover, it would have reinforced the confation of the two mediums for portraiture that was occurring in the press as exemplifed by the Daily Mirror contest.52 The International Society minutes do not record why this photography proposal was abandoned, but rather than a sudden aesthetic rejection of photography, it seems more likely that negotiations to secure collections of photographs happened to coincide with the death of the painter and designer Charles Conder. Therefore, instead it was determined that a ‘memorial’ section dedicated to his work should be provided, given his close relationship with International Society members and patrons.

Nostalgic Self-Fashioning and Silk In the Edwardian period silk fans increasingly bridged and resisted artistic categories. The 1909 show emphasised not only the fashionability of fans as collectable ‘decorative’ objects but their contemporaneity. The fans offer clues about the imbrication of nostalgia and modernity, as well as the signifcance of female patronage as exemplifed by the artist Mary (Halford) Davis. Davis and her husband, Australian-born Edmund Davis, were part of an Edwardian circle of artists and wealthy patrons that included Conder.53 The Davises held elaborate costume parties in their Holland Park home, which Conder also decorated. Conder’s oils and watercolours on silk on the walls of Fair Women may have suggested vignettes and encounters possible in these Bohemian circles. The Fair Women pieces by Conder, and those of Mary Davis’s sister Constance Halford, have been seen as illustrations of ‘society fgures [who] wanted to live out their historical fantasies in social gatherings’.54 Scholars have identifed Conder’s work as neo-Rococo, which would suggest that its inclusion echoed Fair Women’s association with a revival of eighteenth-century style. However, more recently, attention has shifted to the ways in which Conder’s work was implicated in Edwardian modernity, gender fuidity and patronage.55 Fair Women was a nexus for a coterie in which women were key players as patrons and collectors including not only Davis but also Amy Halford (her sister), the wealthy Canadian Stella Maris (Conder’s widow), Ottoline Morrell and the artist Florence Humphrey. Humphrey, who had run an art school in the 1890s and was friendly with various artists including Max Beerbohm, George Moore and Walter Sickert, lent a blue and pink silk train which Conder had painted for her to wear at a Chelsea Arts Ball. The display of the train highlighted early twentieth-century experimentation with performance and self-fashioning and emphasised the embodied phenomenological experience of silk for its female owners.56 While many of these fragile textiles do

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not survive, a similar train owned by Humphrey is in the V&A collection: ‘it was to be lined with chiffon … and hung like a Court train from the shoulders’ (Plate 24). This would have been a spectacularly glamourous object to have falling from Humphrey’s shoulders.57 Although not of patrician heritage, in Humphrey’s restaging and transformation of court dress she signalled a kind of artistic authority; her sartorial presence made her easily identifable at the centre of an experimental coterie.58 Morrell had similarly sought out one of Conder’s fashionable silk dresses and soon became an important supporter of Conder. Her collection made up a large proportion of the Conder display. The famboyant Morrell became a pivotal fgure in the art world and offered an alternative model of culturally productive independence.59 This interest in costume and self-fashioning suggests a resonance with the group of late aesthetic women associated with the 1894 Fair Women. Where Kimberley Wahl argues that aesthetic dress was valuable in creating the conditions for social change and for providing an alternative route for the enhancement of female pleasure, power and agency, this Edwardian attention to famboyant dress invited creative women to explore notions of embodiment and sartorial play.60 The Conder section of Fair Women presented women with possibilities for imaginative reinterpretation of court dress and fashionable accessories.

‘Gypsy Gioconda’ and a ‘Persian Augustus John’ In art history the Fair Women exhibition of 1909 has been equated with the ‘arrival’ of Augustus John; his Woman Smiling, which was displayed in the West Gallery, was described by Charles Holmes as ‘a gypsy Gioconda’ (Plate 25).61 In the painting a woman seated in a dark red dress gazes back at the viewer out of the corner of her eyes; her hands are placed below her hips with elbows pointed outwards in a pose reminiscent of New Women portraits of a decade earlier. While Holmes was making a bold comparison with early Florentine painting, the dark hair and darker skin of the sitter was read in the context of contemporary Orientalising stereotypes of gypsy women and reiterated the association of Fair Women with exoticism. The sitter was Dorelia (Dorothy) McNeill, an art student, who became John’s mistress, and together they eschewed urban life for a ‘gypsy’ caravan.62 But for several critics it was the juxtaposition of paintings in the West Gallery that stimulated discussion. Also displayed was a Persian painting titled Roubadah, Princess of Cabul, c.1800; it was quite large in size, and done in oil by the artist ‘Omar Meherab’ (Figure 6.4). The Daily Mail, in a review titled ‘Congress of Fair Women’, declared: Nothing could be more stimulating and illuminating than the long wall in the west room, where Courbet’s ‘Jeune Fille cueillant les Fleurs’ hangs peacefully beside Reynolds’s ‘Anne Countess of Ormond, and the Child’, the brutal realist beside the assiduous eclectic searcher for beauty; or Omar Meherab’s ‘Roubadah, Princess of Cabul’ – A Persian Augustus John’s ideal of womanhood in sumptuous Eastern attire – next to the German Franz von Lenbach’s ‘Portrait’ of clay and earth.63 The scale, medium and location of Roubadah, Princess of Cabul enabled critics to read the piece within European frameworks of visual literacy; viewers could see it alongside modern works that were comparable in size and also done in oil, hence its status as a ‘Persian Augustus John’.64 The Daily Mail’s review implied a kind of

Figure 6.4 Roubadah, Princess of Cabul, Omar Meherab, c.1800 [reproduced in 2nd National Loan Exhibition: Woman and Child in Art, London, 1914, as Unknown Persian painter, Portrait of a Woman, probably by the author of a portrait of Fath ‘Ali Shah Qajar, c.1810]. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

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international congress or dialogue between the diverse female sitters represented in the paintings.65 In this context the Persian painting held particular fascination for critics. Laurence Housman, writing in the Manchester Guardian, offered a detailed analysis: Very curious, very interesting, in certain respects even beautiful, is the full-length portrait of ‘Roubadah, Princess of Cabul’, by Omar Meherab; stiff and archaic as the contemporary portraits of Queen Elizabeth, and not dissimilar in handling, it has yet a human interest and invention of character and gesture far in advance of its staid technique; the black and gold mantle, the fowered skirt, the scarlet gloves are brave material for a fne decorative effect, but the real interest lies in the upper half of the panel, where with stiff yet naturalistic movement the left hand lifts the veil and reveals the slanted face and long Semitic eyes.66 While Housman offered an analysis that drew on imperial discourses which situated Persian art as archaic, he also saw the Princess of Cabul as analogous to Elizabeth I, a powerful British female monarch.67 Houseman was one of a group of artists and writers who was interested in material histories of the region and critical of imperial interventions.68 He drew attention to the painting’s formal qualities, diverging from the Orientalist tones of the Daily Mail. He praised its ‘invention’ and decorative effect, both of which were characteristics valued in contemporary avant-garde painting. Like its earlier predecessors, Fair Women in 1909 was entangled in imperial histories. However, responses to the exhibition suggested that the West Gallery was seen to redefne portraits of ‘fair women’ in a transnational context, as opposed to an inward-looking conception of ‘fair women’ as eighteenth century and British.69 Yet for some, Fair Women, however experimental or international, seemed out of sync with contemporary gender politics.

‘A Dream of Handsome Men’ and ‘A Suffragette’s Wish’ The spectacular and colourful banner processions of June 1908 aimed to present a range of historical and contemporary women to indicate the diversity of women’s accomplishments and assuage fears that they would vote as one. Up to half a million attended the demonstration in Hyde Park. Women were arrested in London for agitations against the House of Commons and in September of 1908, details of the frst case of forcible feeding in Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, were released.70 Therefore, as Janice Helland cogently argues, the escalating intensity of the movement meant that by 1909, Fair Women had become a contested and contesting category.71 The Fair Women versus suffrage debate was played out in the press. The year started with the proposition in the press for an ‘exhibition of masculine beauty’. ‘A Dream of Handsome Men’ was mockingly written invoking a long familiar theme on the pages of Punch, where the ridiculed outcome of female emancipation was a swapping of roles.72 Romney remained intensely popular in the art market, and in this case he was held up as the ultimate parody of an exhibition of handsome men, although he had in fact been unrepresented in the preceding Fair Women.73 In February the Daily Mirror reported on the opening of Fair Women under the subtitle ‘A Suffragette’s Wish’. This was a reference to Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s opening speech which was quoted at length:

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Fair Women Redux In this exhibition I fnd the most conquering and subjugating type is that of the elemental womanly woman—the model woman. Strange it is that the woman of the gentle, forgiving type should be the one that is the most potent on these walls, as she is the most potent in the history of mankind. Far be it from me to venture upon the thin ice of politics. Being myself a modern of moderns in the woman question, I was taken round this gallery by my youngest suffragette. I asked her casually whether she would like to enter Parliament, ‘No Father,’ she replied, ‘I want to be a fair woman!’74

Beerbohm Tree’s ‘youngest suffragette’ was his daughter, the painter and actress Iris Beerbohm Tree. There was in fact a family genealogy that may have had some bearing on her answer. Her sister, Viola Tree, had already been on the wall as a ‘fair woman’. Her portrait by Sargent had appeared in the 1908 exhibition. Iris Beerbohm Tree’s supposed statement cannot be read without irony. Although not directly linked with the suffrage movement, she had studied at the Slade and would become renowned for fouting convention and a radical bohemian lifestyle, often joining forces with the writer Nancy Cunard.75 Sharing a fat with Cunard, where they could smoke, drink and concoct outrageous outfts, Tree was intent on pursuing sexual freedom, not enacting the ‘gentle, forgiving type’.76 Iris Beerbohm Tree’s supposed response to her father suggests contemporary defnitions of ‘fair’ woman were in fux and open to multiple interpretations. They also suggest that at least some female viewers may have read the exhibition rather differently. The Daily Mirror quickly published a response the next day titled ‘The ‘Fair Woman’ of the Future’. It called for portraits of the ‘modern woman’: [I]n the New Gallery to have strayed into a past time. These portraits, even when they are superfcially modern and ‘smart’ are, in their spirit nothing but anachronisms, nothing but chronological errors. … We are in the age of suffragettes … For, even when the modern woman has nothing to do (which happens rarely), she does so with an air of energy and intense preoccupation, Mr. Sargent it is true, has occasionally shown us these unquiet people … But we want more of that. We want portraits of women making appointments to meet somewhere at 4:30; portraits of women waiting for cabs to be called, writing letters, telephoning, telegraphing, hurrying here and there, clamouring for votes, having a good time, and fair and charming, in spite of it all. In short, we want portraits, Academy painters – of the woman of to-day – of the woman who is going to have a vote to-morrow.77 The return to Old Masters made the exhibition’s nostalgia more marked, so it is in a sense not surprising that in 1909 ‘fair women’ garnered the response of a suffrage-supporter.78 Interestingly, the writer, ‘W.M.’, was critical of the exhibition ‘straying into a past time’, but did not reject all modern portraits of women. Sargent was deemed to convey ‘an air of energy’ in modern woman. Boldini similarly suggested motion or as A. Cassandra Albinson notes ‘movement stilled’.79 While Gertrude Campbell was too ill in 1909 to spring out of her chair, many in her friendship circle, such as Jopling and Meynell, were active suffrage supporters.80 The gulf between ‘fair women’ and ‘modern’ women ‘clamouring for votes’ was also identifed in the New Age, where Taylor declared the exhibition ‘reversion to an extinct social order … but … neither Miss Christabel Pankhurst nor King Solomon

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shall be heard in argument on this point’. Interestingly, an attempt to unite ‘fair’ and ‘modern’ was hung nearby at the Women’s Exhibition organised by the WSPU.82 Christabel Pankhurst was depicted by Ethel Wright in a luminous, pale green, foorlength dress, posed dramatically in mid-speech with one arm gesturing to the viewer (Plate 26).83 The portrait could be read as a visual reply to W.M.’s demands for ‘Fair Women of To-Day’ with an ‘air of energy and intense preoccupation’. Originally intended for the Royal Academy (rejected), the painting is indicative of Pankhurst’s recognition of the political value of self-representation through fne art. This circulation of similar postcard images of Pankhurst by the photographer Lallie Charles suggests that one of her methods for ‘being heard’ was the redeployment of ‘fair women’, thereby subverting the frequent portrayal of hysterical campaigners in masculine dress.84 And other women were encouraged to do the same. Among the ffty stalls at the Women’s Exhibition was one in which visitors could commission portraits from women artists.85 A committee of women was not entirely absent from International Society Fair Women shows, but instead the women were charged with orchestrating Costume Balls to accompany the exhibitions. These enabled the sitters, as in 1894, to descend from the wall, but the balls also engaged with the Edwardian popularity of costumed performance. Records of these ephemeral events are limited. Nonetheless, it is clear that Fair Women committee members, patrons, artists and sitters reappeared (several of whom had been Devonshire Ball attendees). The 1909 committee included ‘Princess Hatzeldt, the Duchess of Rutland [Manners], Countess of Warwick, Lady Margaret Campbell, Lady Palmer, Lady Grove, Mrs. Charles Hunter and Mrs. H. Sturgis’.86 Phillip Athill notes that in 1898 Whistler expressed outrage at attempts to draw in the public with ‘string bands’ and ‘greasy teas’.87 However, Fair Women balls were very successful events: in 1909 costing 15 shillings a ticket for an evening of food and dance with music by Pritchard’s Band. Their income outweighed pictures sale commissions.88 The Fair Women ball was recreated on a large scale by the Daily Mirror, which in 1909 staged yet another photography competition as well as a loan exhibition of women’s dress and accessories. This photography contest, ‘A Vision of Fair Women’, encouraged women to submit entries of themselves dressed as to represent ‘any celebrated woman of history, any one or more of the famous paintings of fair women or any woman in literature … embracing all fair women of history’.89 It was in this way that the original intention of the International Society to include photographs in the 1909 Fair Women was realised, albeit morphed into a kind of participatory enterprise. By 1909, the fve shilling Kodak Brownie was targeted at female buyers; portraiture was not only about collectible celebrity images but also as a participatory illustration of self-fashioning that was more widely accessible to professional and amateur women photographers.90 Like the Costume Ball performed re-creations of celebrated women, the photography competition was another site in which women could perform ‘greatness’. Deborah Sugg Ryan argues that spectacle, a form of lived experience itself deriving from both high and popular culture, was a major part of leisure activities in modern Britain in 1908.91 The performances and spectacles of Fair Women directly overlapped with suffrage activism. The Fair Women Costume Ball was contemporaneous with the Pageant of Great Women by suffragist playwright Cicely Mary Hamilton and directed by Edith Craig (daughter of Ellen Terry). Performed in venues across the country in 1909 and 1910, it featured ffty-two great women. These women replicated several of 81

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the historical fgures that were featured in Tennyson’s poem, and the actors included sitters who were featured in Fair Women from 1894, Ellen Terry and Lillie Langtry.92 There were also new Fair Women included in the production; Lillah McCarthy took the role of ‘Justice’.93 Therefore Fair Women sitters were amongst those simultaneously shifting the debate about the representation of female exemplars to feminist performance and politics. Lisa Tickner has commented on the Edwardian fascination with pageantry which the suffragists fused with politics. While she admits the relationship between two was ‘important but elusive’, she sees these attempts as a ‘later and rather feeble diffusion of the nineteenth-century firtation with medieval chivalry’.94 The Fair Women nexus adds another layer to this elusive relationship and its widespread diffusion. The context of women’s experiences and the suffrage productions suggest contestation, but also a growing awareness of possibilities for female agency through self-representation and exhibition culture.

The Return to the Grafton Galleries in 1910 Suffrage protest had no discernible effect on the International Society’s plans for a third revival of Fair Women in 1910. Fair Women remained an extraordinarily popular and remunerative theme not only in London, but also in Paris where, as Pennell wryly observed, the International Society had been followed by two further ‘fair women’ exhibitions charging double the standard price of admission.95 Even the show which immediately preceded Fair Women at the Grafton Galleries, the International Society of Women Artists, mimicked the formula of historical and modern work for sale by members and many of these were indeed portraits of women.96 In 1910 the interior of the Grafton Galleries had a ‘modern’ update; grey or dull reddish gold walls offered a more neutral background for the pictures.97 ‘Modern’ sitters and patrons included Ethel Tweedie; connoisseur and collector Angela Mond; American artist, interior designer and patron Rue Winterbotham Carpenter; as well as an eighteen-year-old Victoria Sackville-West.98 But in many ways it was closest to the original 1894 show with a larger number of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century artists represented and a return to a summer run (26 May until 31 July).99 The distinction between contemporary artists and historical ‘loans’ was also made clearer in the Fair Women catalogue through short biographical paragraphs, although these focused on artists rather than sitters, thereby losing emphasis on exemplary women in history. What is perhaps most surprising about the fnal Fair Women was that, although it was once again controversial, this had nothing to do with gender politics, at least not directly. Instead controversy came from within the art world.

‘The Bravura of the Décolleté’: The Reception of Modern Portraiture This last Fair Women exhibition in 1910 was reviewed for the New Age by the artist and critic Walter Sickert in a piece which lambasted in particular the works of the renowned Edwardian portraitists Sargent and Boldini.100 In a veiled reference to earlier Fair Women shows, Sickert sought to attack from a perspective of style rather than the politics of the pro-suffrage writers in 1909. Here he attacked the show for the coterie of bravura portrait painters and their portrayal of ‘fashionable fic-fac’, most ostentatiously by ‘the wizard of Ferrara’, Boldini. His characterisation of the work as ‘wriggle and chiffon’ has more recently been held up by scholars as a marker of the

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rift between Edwardian portrait artists and Sickert as a spokesperson for the Camden Town Group, which was founded in 1911. The year 1910 has also been retrospectively labelled as groundbreaking in relation to British modernism, because later that year at the same Grafton Galleries the frst Post-Impressionist exhibition, organised by Roger Fry, was opened. Fair Women included the recent Sargent portrait of Almina Wertheimer in a white dress with a long, ivory-patterned jacked trimmed in gold. On her head is a pale green turban and she holds a sarod, a musical instrument from North India. The painting was replete with bravura brushstrokes and the depiction of gauzy fabrics.101 Sargent had a close relationship with the Wertheimers, a wealthy Jewish family in London, and welcomed the dynamism of the daughters as sitters.102 Albinson observes that Edwardian portraiture ‘fused memory, fantasy and history’ and as such was a powerful site of collaborative self-fashioning.103 Almina Wertheimers’s self-fashioning referenced contemporary artistic culture, but the image also suggests her own agency. For Wertheimer, like Bernhardt, being ‘Oriental’ could imply power as well as fantasy. The ‘wizard of Ferrara’ had contributed the portrait of another woman whose identity was not so easily fxed within the metropole. The Portrait of a Lady, lent by Dublin municipal gallery, was picked out in the Queen as startling if not shocking to country visitors: In this case, not only is the dress very décolleté, but the whole fgure is rendered with an approach almost to caricature and vulgarity … the painter appears determined to secure an intense vivacity at all costs.104 The unnamed sitter was Florence Phillips (Plate 27). The portrait had been completed in 1903 when Phillips, the daughter of a South African land surveyor, had been living in England.105 The portrait seemed to be shocking because of both the revealing dress and ‘vivacity’ of the socially and culturally ambitious Phillips. She sat for the Boldini portrait in Paris, combining the sittings with purchasing couture clothing. She was interested in contemporary art and became a very signifcant patron. She bought works by Orpen (an International Society member), Rothenstein, Sickert and Steer, as well as by Pissarro, Monet and Sisley.106 Phillips had since given up her opulent Tylney Hall in Hampshire, where the portrait hung in the ballroom, and returned to Johannesburg. Phillips gave the portrait to the Dublin City Gallery as a token of her growing friendship with the curator and scholar of modern British art, Hugh Lane. Lane had helped her to shape her plans for an art gallery in Johannesburg.107 Contemporary with Fair Women was a show at the Whitechapel Gallery titled Twenty Years of British Art that included the ‘nucleus’ of the Johannesburg collection.108 Therefore her collecting ambitions were doubly present in the capital.109 The Grafton Galleries, as with the much earlier Fair Women exhibition, featured women who had considerable sway as art patrons. And female ‘patronesses’ also, once again, organised an evening of entertainment to accompany the exhibition.110 The list of women was diverse including the familiar Manners and Hunter, as well as Mary Harmsworth and Adèle Meyer, a wealthy art collector who was also a suffragist and social reformer.111 Amongst the performers was Tempest, who, like Bernhardt and Terry, was very adept at self-fashioning.112 She had already appeared enigmatically refected in paint (Souvenir de Marie by William

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Nicholson) in the 1908 Fair Women and by the late Edwardian period photographs and interviews of her frequently circulated in the popular press.113 Breward notes that she insisted on personal control of her wardrobe and pronounced that women ought to have a large share in the designing of stage dresses.114 Thus, in its fnal incarnation, Fair Women in a sense replicated the original, interweaving more radical self-fashioning, independence and public performance with conservatism and nostalgia. The history of the Fair Women exhibitions before and after the fn-de-siècle is uneven and contentious. While they avoided direct engagement with suffrage politics, it is clear that the theme had a wide-ranging and continuous resonance. A crucial aspect of Fair Women was a network of female artists and patrons. The importance of women as cultural advocates was highlighted by Marchesi in her reminiscences: How many women are there in England who take a real interest in art and artists, who live thrilled by the new events in the painting, sculpture and singing world? … There are a few ladies in London who are really connoisseurs of music, painting and literature. Mrs. Charles Hunter, the sister of Dr Ethyl Smyth, the gifted composer, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Lady Henry Bentinck are three ladies I must mention for having worked really in doing personal propaganda work and furthering modern painting, foreign as well as British, in England.115 For Marchesi, Hunter, Morrell and Bentinck were ‘connoisseurs’. These were of course women in her own network and friendship circle; nonetheless, Marchesi does acknowledge the often-hidden work and patronage of consortiums of women. The engagement of these women among others in the ‘propaganda work of furthering modern painting’ made Fair Women a recurring success. Analogously, through Fair Women and its attendant events, women strategically used portraiture and exhibition culture to solidify their roles as cultural icons and tastemakers. Fair Women was clearly a successful theme for the International Society and one that was repeated, along with familiar faces. Stella Tillyard points out that in reviews of the later 1910 Post-Impressionist exhibition, several newspapers implied that the majority of visitors were women. This was exemplifed in a fctional Westminster Gazette dialogue, in which the wife sandwiched the Post-Impressionists between a suffrage meeting and a Shaw play. It was partly a way of ‘striking a triple blow’ against women, fads and modern art. But Tillyard also notes that it is likely there were more women present than expected, in part because of a modicum of independence, but in part because Post-Impressionism drew on the language of aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts Movement.116 In this context Lisa Tickner observes: The collapse of the arts and crafts movement ‘left two important groups without an aesthetic cause consonant with their beliefs’: wealthy upper middle and upper class patrons … and liberal educated classes who went to exhibitions … [C]ritics were men … The consumers who bought it were principally (upper class) women … Lady Ottoline Morrell, Countess Drogheda, Lady Tree, Duchess of Rutland [Manners], Lady Cunard, Lady Diana, Lady Margery [sic] Manners and the wives of the Belgian and German ambassadors.117 In fact, the dominance of female visitors at the Post-Impressionist shows at the Grafton Galleries was a point of spatial continuity; many of these same women had been

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present at the previous Grafton Galleries show Fair Women. The Executive Committee included Morrell, and Fry asked Manners to be on the Honorary Committee.118 Moreover, some of these women, like ‘the wife’ in the Westminster Gazette, occupied and performed in all three spaces: the gallery, the suffrage meeting and the Shaw play. The run of Fair Women had reinforced their role as sitters and patrons in the consumption of culture as Tillyard notes, but also its orchestration. While Sickert mocked the portrayal of women by Edwardian portraitists, it was these same women that reappeared as if by magic within the spaces of the Grafton Galleries.

Notes 1 Diane Atkinson, Rise up, Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (London: Bloomsbury, 2018). 2 On the response to the Grafton Post-Impressionist exhibitions (1910, 1912), see Anna Gruetzner Robins, Modern Art in Britain, 1910–1914 (London: Merrell Holberton, 1997). 3 Angus Trumble and Andrea Wolk Rager, eds., Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2013), 6–7. 4 Andrew Stephenson, ‘Edwardian Cosmopolitanism ca. 1901–1912’, 270–73; Andrew Stephenson, ‘Introduction: Edwardian Art and Its Legacies’, Visual Culture in Britain 14, no. 1 (2013): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2013.750826. Members included American, Canadian, Dutch, German, Italian and Spanish artists in 1908. Recently Stephenson has examined the shifting and contested value of the term c.1900. Andrew Stephenson, ‘Locating Cosmopolitanism within a Trans-Atlantic Interpretive Frame: Critical Evaluation of Sargent’s Portraits and Figure Studies in Britain and the United States c.1886–1926’, Tate Papers, no. 27, Spring 2017, accessed 29 July 2018, www.tate.org.uk/ research/publications/tate-papers/27/locating-cosmopolitanism. 5 Shippen Green was one of a group of American women illustrators who helped shape the public perception and popular image of the New Woman. Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 160–61. 6 Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, eds., The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Anne Helmreich, ‘Dynamic Networks of Circulation and Exchange in Edwardian Art’, Visual Culture in Britain 14, no. 1 (1 March 2013): 36–54, https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2013.750793. 7 The visitors to the Prince’s Skating Rink in Knightsbridge were limited to about 160 per day. Philip Athill, ‘The International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers’, The Burlington Magazine 127, no. 982 (1 January 1985): 26. 8 Minutes of Council Meetings Book III, 4 January 1908, TGA 738.3.48, International Society, TGA. 9 The larger presence of sculpture was a result of a request for support from the Society of British Sculptors for Fair Women (3 February 1908, Royal Society of British Sculptors: Minutes of Council Meetings, vol. 1), http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/organization.php?i d=msib2_1219747847. 10 Minutes of Council Meetings Book III, 3 March 1908, TGA 738.3.65; 18 March 1908, TGA 738.3.67, TGA. 11 Morrell Papers Add MS 88886/6/6, British Library. 12 Christopher Breward, ‘Popular Dressing 1890–1914’, in The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk, ed. Edwina Ehrman, Caroline Evans, and Christopher Breward, Fashioning London, 61–63; Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 2000). 13 Northcliffe (Tom Clarke, Northcliffe in History: An Intimate Study of Press Power, London: Hutchinson, n.d., p. 149) quoted in D.L. LeMahieu, A Culture for Democracy: Mass Communication and the Cultivated Mind in Britain between the Wars (New York; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 34.

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14 Cecilia Beaux, Lady Butler, Mary Davis, Amy Draper, Mary Sargent Florence, Lady Glenesk, Bessie MacNicol, Clara Montalba, Henrietta Rae, Marianne Stokes, Winifred Thompson, Suzanne Valadon, Helen Walton and E.M. Ward were all represented at the opening exhibition. Joanna Meacock, ‘Introductory Essay: The Exhibition Society’ Exhibition Culture in London 1878–1908, accessed 22 January 2018, www.exhibitionc ulture.arts.gla.ac.uk/essays.php?eid=02. 15 Lisa Tickner, ‘Men’s Work? Masculinity and Modernism 1905–1915’, in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith P.F. Moxey (Hanover; London: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 56. 16 Andrew Stephenson, ‘Strategies of Display and Modes of Consumption in London Art Galleries in the Inter-War Years’, in The Rise of the Modern Art Market, 98–127. 17 And G.F. Watts’s portrait of an actual connoisseur, the art historian Elizabeth Eastlake (now lost). Elizabeth Eastlake, The Letters of Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake, ed. Julie Sheldon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), 131. 18 Jacques-Emile Blanche and Francis Howard were delegated to invite suitable loans from the Paris show, 738.3.29, 6 June 1907; Catalogue Des Portraits de Femmes (1870 à 1900) Exposés Par La Société Nationale Des Beaux-Arts Dans Les Palais Du Domaine de Bagatelle Du 15 Mai Au 14 Juillet 1907 (Paris: L. Geisler, 1907). 19 J. Paul Cooper, Henry Wilson, Florence Koehler, Georgie Gaskin and Charles Ricketts. International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, A Catalogue of the Pictures, Drawings, Prints and Sculpture in the Exhibition of Fair Women, New Gallery, February and March 1908 (London: Ballantyne & Co., 1908). 20 738.3.60, International Society, TGA. 21 Thorbjörn Lengborn, ‘Ellen Key (1849–1926)’, Prospects: The Quarterly Review of Comparative Education (Paris, UNESCO: International Bureau of Education), vol. XXIII, no. 3/4, 1993, p. 825–37. 22 738.3.35 11 July 1907, International Society, TGA. 23 Marchesi organised a Sunday afternoon beneft concert. Frank Rutter, ‘Frank Rutter, Impressionists at the Grafton Gallery 1905, ‘Art in My Time’, 1933, 101–120,’ in Impressionists in England: The Critical Reception, ed. Kate Flint (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 114. 24 Her money came from her husband’s mining fortune. She was also an important patron for Sargent. 25 In this room Manners and her daughters were multiply represented. 26 Marion Margaret Violet Manners, Portraits of Men and Women (Westminster: A. Constable & Co., 1900); Frank Rinder, ‘Some London Exhibitions’, Art Journal, August 1902, 263. 27 J. Cornwallis-West, The Reminiscences of Lady Randolph Churchill (London: Arnold, 1908). 28 Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art: 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 105–7; Erica E. Hirshler et al., A Studio of Her Own Women Artists in Boston, 1870–1940 (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), 59. 29 Florence Koehler, Pin, c.1905, Metropolitan Museum of Art, gift of Emily Chadbourne; Melanie Holcomb, ed., Jewelry: The Body Transformed (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, with Yale University Press, 2018), 176–77. 30 Morrell described staying with Chadbourne in Paris the following year. She was ‘curious’, almost ‘entirely silent’, bought many dresses and a Matisse bronze. Morrell Papers, Additional Manuscripts, British Library, ADD MS 88886/6/7, pp. 15–16. Roger Fry, ‘A Modern Jeweller,’ The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 17, no. 87 (1 June 1910): 169–74. 31 ‘Sexo-Mania’, Punch, Saturday, 23 March 1895, 138; ‘A Declaration Indeed!’, Punch, 18 April 1896, 186. 32 The cigarette, the ultimate signifer of the New Woman in 1894, had rarely found its way into fne art portraits of women until the twentieth century. Drypoints by Helleu of elegant smoking women were a notable exception. 33 Bruce was launching her career after four years in Paris (Académie Colarossi 1902–1906), exhibiting as ‘K. Bruce’. Louisa Young, A Great Task of Happiness: The Life of Kathleen

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52 53 54 55 56

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Scott (London: Macmillan, 1995), 125. Bruce married the celebrated Polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott in September of 1908. Lillah McCarthy, Myself and My Friends (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1933), 63. ‘“Fair Women” at the New Gallery’, The Athenaeum, no. 4193 (7 March 1908): 296. Caroline Dakers, Clouds: The Biography of a Country House (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). It had previously appeared at the Carfax Gallery in 1905, but following the International Society it was shown in Berlin, Rome and San Francisco. Ormond and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Complete Paintings, vol. 1, 113–114. ‘“Fair Women” at the New Gallery’, 296. He was accused (but successfully pleaded insanity) of murdering the architect Stanford White in New York. There were numerous visual representations of her in American and British newspapers. ‘The End of the Thaw Trial’, Penny Illustrated Paper, 8 February 1908, 88. However, the portrait was seized later that year by a Sherriff as a result of her non-payment of a millinery bill of $253.25. The Evening World (New York), 25 September 1908, 5. G.R.S.T., ‘Art: An Exhibition for Quakers and Turks’, New Age, no. 7 March (1908): 177. Another jury member Maud Porter had not exhibited at the International Society; her sitters had included Craigie, Woman’s Exhibition (1900). ‘Popularity of Beauty Award’, Daily Mirror, 1 April 1908, 4. The theme was divisive. The landscape artist Alfred Withers protested. Both Gilbert and Sargent indicated they would prefer to exhibit works in Fair Women. 738.3.76, 14 October 1908; 738.3.87, 18 December 1908, Minutes of International Council Meeting, TGA. 1908 1st Exhibition £461.10.6 (3 March 1908, 738.3.64); Both exhibitions £1894.5.4 (14 April 1908, TGA 938.3.70); 1909 1st Exhibition £470.12; Fair Women Exhibition £1269.2.6. (738.3.59), International Society, TGA. Contemporary furniture was provided by Waring and Gillow, ‘purveyors of fashionable furniture and applied arts’. [N.N.], ‘Art,’ Nation 86, no. 2236 (May 7, 1908): 430–31. Honorary Secretary’s Report, TGA 738.4.133, International Society, TGA. Campbell had so loved the portrait that she had been unwilling to lend the picture to an 1895 exhibition in Berlin, but she was willing to relinquish so it could be redisplayed in Fair Women. Alma Tadema was reproduced in a full-page illustration in the Art Journal, noting, ‘who since the picture was painted has herself won artistic laurels’. May 1909, p. 148. Janice Helland, The Studios of Frances and Margaret Macdonald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 134; Richard E. Spear, ‘Colonial Collectors: The Tata Bequests of Nineteenth-Century European Paintings in the Mumbai Museum,’ The Burlington Magazine 150, no. 1258 (1 January 2008): 15–27. Morna O’Neill, Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). The Edwardian period was marked by a saturation and global circulation of celebrity photography. Trumble and Rager, Edwardian Opulence, 7. Mary Davis studied at the Ridley Art School, and exhibited at the Royal Academy and Paris Salon. Ann Galbally, Charles Conder: The Last Bohemian (Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2004), 161. Barbara Penner, ‘The Conder Room: Evidencing the Interior’s Dissolution,’ in The Edwardian Sense, 127–33. See also Trumble and Rager, Edwardian Opulence, 257–70. There was precedence in late-nineteenth-century aristocratic activity. Decorative performance played a major role in court rituals, ‘fancy dress’ balls and garden parties. Janice Helland, ‘The Performative Art of Court Dress’, in Women Artists and the Decorative Arts, 1880–1935: The Gender of Ornament, ed. Bridget Elliott and Janice Helland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 96, 100. Galbally, Charles Conder, 243. Pezzini notes Humphrey the artist is erased or indeed undermined in the archive, catalogued as an ‘enthusiastic attender of fancy dress balls’. Barbara Pezzini, ‘New Documents Regarding the Carfax Gallery: “Fans and Other Paintings on Silk by Charles Conder”, 1902,’ The British Art Journal 8, no. 2 (2012): 25.

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59 While Morrell herself was a member of the British aristocracy, she was contemporary with an emergent second generation of American New Women who similarly placed great emphasis on ‘self-fulflment’ and the ‘famboyant presentation of self’. Dianne Sachko Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940 (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 2008), 179; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 177. See Morrell’s later narration of self through photography. Inga Fraser, ‘Body, Room, Photograph: Negotiating Identity in the Self-Portraits of Lady Ottoline Morrell,’ in Biography, Identity and the Modern Interior, ed. Penny Sparke and Anne Massey (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013), 81. 60 Kimberly Wahl, Dressed as in a Painting: Women and British Aestheticism in an Age of Reform (Durham: University of New Hampshire, 2013), 166. 61 ‘Here at last Mr. John has “arrived” in painting as defnitely as he has long ago in his drawings.’ Roger E. Fry, ‘The Exhibition of Fair Women’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 15, no. 73 (1 April 1909): 17; C.J. Holmes, ‘Two Modern Pictures,’ The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 15, no. 74 (1 May 1909): 81; Lisa Tickner, Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 65–66. 62 Tim Barringer observes that John’s fantasy enabled him to represent an open, active, even aggressive, female sexuality. Dorelia’s and John’s transgressive play-acting can be seen as a ‘kind of insular blackface minstrelsy, an inhabit of an alien body’. T.J. Barringer, ‘“That’s the Life for a Man like Me”: Rural Life and Labor in Edwardian Art and Music’, in Edwardian Opulence, 146–47. 63 ‘Congress of Fair Women’, February 20, 1909, 3. 64 It was relabelled at the National Loan Exhibition (1913): Unknown Persian painter, Portrait of a Woman, probably by the author of a portrait of Fath ‘Ali Shah Qajar, c.1810, given to John Malcolm the British envoy to Persia. On Fath ‘Ali Shah Qajar, see Tim Stanley, Palace and Mosque: Islamic Art from the Middle East, (London: V&A Publications, 2004), 72. 65 It was closely followed by the fourth Congress of Women in Amsterdam, which emphasised women’s history and called for enfranchisement, and over 1200 women from 21 countries attended. Jane Beckett, ‘Engendering the Spaces of Modernity: The Women’s Exhibition, Amsterdam 1913’, in Women Artists and the Decorative Arts, 1880–1935, 160. 66 Laurence Housman, ‘The International Society: A “Fair Women” Exhibition’, The Manchester Guardian, 22 February 1909, 6. Unlike many of the pieces associated with the Orientalist fascination with veiling (and unveiling) in depictions of women in this case the agency for unveiling is with the sitter. 67 This period also coincided with a questioning of colonialist assumptions about women in South-Asia, and Housman’s involvement in the suffrage movement suggests he was aware of this reassessment. Christiana J. Herringham, ‘Other Countries,’ Women’s Progress, February 8 (1907): 236–37. 68 An exhibition of ‘Mohammedan Art’, which included paintings as well as carpets, had been held at the Whitechapel Gallery three years earlier. The attention given to the painting suggests it was part of a wider art historical trajectory that would see in 1910 both the inception of the India Society and a larger scale exhibition of Mohammedan art in Munich. Andrea Lermer and Avinoam Shalem, eds., After One Hundred Years: The 1910 Exhibition ‘Meisterwerke Muhammedanischer Kunst’ Reconsidered, Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 82 (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2010); Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 220–25; Sarah Victoria Turner, ‘Crafting Connections: The India Society and the Formation of an Imperial Artistic Network in Early Twentieth-Century Britain’, in India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1858–1950, ed. Susheila Nasta (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2013), 96–114. 69 Scholars have questioned the supposed inward-looking nature of British art at this time. Morna O’Neill and Michael Hatt, eds., The Edwardian Sense: Art, Design, and

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81 82

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Performance in Britain, 1901–1910 (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2010); Julie F. Codell, ed., Transculturation in British Art, 1770–1930 (Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington: Ashgate, 2012); Grace Brockington, ed., Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle (Oxford; New York: Peter Lang, 2009). June Purvis, ‘The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes in Edwardian Britain,’ Women’s History Review 4, no. 1 (1 March 1995): 103–33. Helland, The Studios of Frances and Margaret Macdonald, 138. E.V., ‘A Dream of Handsome Men’, The Observer, 17 January 1909, 6. Barbara Pezzini and Alycen Mitchell, “‘Blown into Glittering by the Popular Breath’: The Relationship between George Romney’s Critical Reputation and the Art Market’, Burlington Magazine 157, no. 1348 (July 2015), 471. ‘Dream of Fair Women’, Daily Mirror, 22 February 1909, 4. Peter Brooker, Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 103–4. Both Morrell and Iris Beerbohm Tree were featured in paintings of the artistic haunt the Café Royal. W.M., “The ‘Fair Woman’ of the Future’, Daily Mirror, 23 February 1909, 7; Helland, The Studios of Frances and Margaret Macdonald, 136. Helland, The Studios of Frances and Margaret Macdonald, 137. A. Cassandra Albinson, ‘Maximum Exposure: Modernizing the Grand Manner Portrait for the Edwardian Age’, in Edwardian Opulence, 82. While the centrality of movement to modern city life has conventionally been read through Georg Simmel, Nead draws attention to the ways in which motion was diverse and varied. Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900 (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2007), 9–12. Nevertheless, one respondent deplored the ‘nervous strain’ and ‘hurry’ of modern women: A Lover of Painting, ‘Through “the Mirror,”’ Daily Mirror, 24 February 1909, 7. References to physiognomy were infected by contemporary socio-biological arguments about race and empire. Andrew Stephenson, ‘“A Keen Sight for the Sign of the Races”: John Singer Sargent, Whiteness and the Fashioning of Angloperformativity’, Visual Culture in Britain 6 (Winter 2005): 207–25. G.R.S.T., ‘Art: Fair Women and Others’, New Age, no. 18 (March 1909): 427. The decoration of the vast space was overseen by the artist Sylvia Pankhurst. Like the International Society, the WSPU opened the exhibition with a woman speaker, the physician and mayor of Aldeburgh Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. The exhibition was fnancially very successful raising £5000. ‘England’s Suffragette Martyr’, Harper’s Weekly, 1909; Rosie Broadley, ‘Painting Suffragettes: Portraits and the Militant Movement’, in Suffrage and the Arts: Visual Culture, Politics and Enterprise, ed. Miranda Garrett and Zoë Thomas (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 159–84. A wax bust of Pankhurst had been unveiled at Madame Tussauds in 1908. Lisa Tickner, The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907–14 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1987), 85, 93. Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928 (London: Routledge, 2003), 12, 108, 632. ‘Costume Ball at New Gallery’, TGA 738.10.26, International Society, TGA. Ironically the 1898 exhibition made a loss of £900. Athill, ‘The International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers’, 26. Ball and Dinner: £134 12s and Commission on Picture Sales: £125 7s 11d. 10 December 1909, TGA 738.10 International Society, TGA. ‘A Vision of Fair Women’, Daily Mirror, 9 April 1909, 5; ‘Facts and Fashions of Interest to Women’, Daily Mirror, 12 April 1909, 10. Margaret Denny, ‘Royals, Royalties and Remuneration: American and British Women Photographers in the Victorian Era’, Women’s History Review 18, no. 5 (1 November 2009): 14–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612020903282183; C. Jane Gover, The Positive

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94 95 96 97 98 99 100

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102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

Fair Women Redux Image: Women Photographers in Turn of the Century America (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 14–16. Deborah Sugg Ryan, ‘Spectacle, the Public and the Crowd: Pageants and Exhibitions in 1908’, in The Edwardian Sense, 43–71. Cicely Mary Hamilton, A Pageant of Great Women (London: Suffrage Shop, 1910). Emmeline Pankhurst told McCarthy that her 1906 performance as ‘Ann Whitfeld’ in ‘Man and Superman’ had given her political inspiration. Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement, 394; Katharine Cockin, ‘Cicely Hamilton’s Warriors: Dramatic Reinventions of Militancy in the British Women’s Suffrage Movement’, Women’s History Review 14, no. 3–4 (1 December 2005): 527–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/09612020500200437. (Restaged by Anna Birch, Glasgow, 2015). Tickner, The Spectacle of Women, 56–58. N.N., ‘Art: “Fair Women” in Paris’, Nation 10 June 1909, 88:2293, 589. ISWA did more to focus on the work of women artists (both historical and contemporary), but the shows revealed commonalities in their networks (e.g. lenders Marchesi and Hunter). N.N., ‘Art: A New Exhibition of Old Masters’, Nation 28 October 1909, 89:2313, 416. Trumble and Rager, Edwardian Opulence, 240. TGA 738.10.28, International Society, TGA; ‘Appeal for “Fair Women”’, Daily Mail, 21 April 1910, 6. Walter Sickert, ‘Wriggle and Chiffon’, New Age, no. 9 (June 1910): 129–30. Anna Gruetzner Robins, ‘Walter Sickert: Art Critic for the New Age’, in Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt, Jennifer Mundy (eds.), The Camden Town Group in Context, Tate Research Publication, May 2012, accessed 26 July 2016, www.tate.org.uk/art/research-public ations/camden-town-group/anna-gruetzner-robins-walter-sickert-art-critic-for-the-newage-r1104325. In the earlier review, Sickert was critical of Sargent’s recent landscapes, but conceded on the Wertheimer portraits. Walter Sickert, ‘Sargentolatry’, New Age VII, no. 3 (19 May 1910): 56–57; Walter Sickert, Walter Sickert: The Complete Writings on Art, ed. Anna Gruetzner Robins (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002), 232–35. Kathleen Adler, ‘Sargent’s Portraits of the Wertheimer Family’, in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Linda Nochlin and Tamar Garb (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995). Albinson, ‘Maximum Exposure’, 170. Martin Hardie, ‘Fair Women’, Queen, 11 June 1910, 1044. Jillian Carman, Uplifting the Colonial Philistine: Florence Phillips and the Making of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2006). Anne Gray, The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia; London, 2004), 144. Trumble and Rager, Edwardian Opulence, 161–62. On Hugh Lane and collecting for the gallery, see O’Neill, Hugh Lane, 115–55. The catalogue explained that a special feature of the exhibition was ‘the nucleus of a collection of modern pictures now being formed by Sir Hugh Lane for the Johannesburg Gallery’. Twenty Years of British Art (1890–1910) (Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1910), 1. Twenty Years of British Art (1890–1910), 35. ‘Costume Ball at New Gallery’, Thursday, 7 July 1910, TGA 738.10.31, International Society, TGA. Ellen Ross, Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860–1920 (University of California Press, 2007), 52–55, https://doi.org/10.1525/california/9780520249059.0 01.0001. ‘Patronesses: Duchess of Marlborough, Duchess of Rutland, Duchess Sutherland, Lady Helen Vincent, Lady Barrymore, Lady Northcliffe, Lady Paget, Lady Meyer, Lady Mond, Mrs. Charles Hunter, Mrs Ronalds’. TGA 738.10.32, International Society, TGA. P.G.K., ‘“Fair Women” Exhibition’, Daily Mail, 3 May 1908. (In Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane it is dated to 1912). See also Jan Marsh, ‘Dame Marie Tempest (Mary Susan Etherington) (1864–1942)’, Later Victorians Catalogue, NPG, www.npg.org.uk/collection s/search/personextended?linkid=mp04445&tab=biography.

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114 Breward, Fashioning London, 89–93. 115 Blanche Marchesi, Singer’s Pilgrimage (Boston: Small, Maynard and Co., 1923), 107–8. 116 S.K. Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism 1900–1920: Early Modernism and the Arts and Crafts Movement in Edwardian England (London: Routledge, 1988), 102–3. 117 Tickner, ‘Men’s Work?’, 61; Tillyard, The Impact of Modernism, 39. 118 On the commercial context, see Anna Gruetzner Robins, ‘Marketing Post-Impressionism: Roger Fry’s Commercial Exhibitions’, in The Rise of the Modern Art Market, 85–97.

Epilogue

Virginia Woolf’s retrospective observation ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’ is persistently cited to posit 1910 as a breaking point between old and new, Victorian and modern.1 Fletcher reads Woolf’s declaration as a symptom of the self-conscious awareness of living in a moment of transition rather than a fact.2 The tremendously successful Fair Women exhibitions at once refect and defne this period of transition as representative hybrid phenomena. They coincided with nearly two decades of intense political and social struggle, and were more entangled in this context than has heretofore been realised. Although portraits of women were swept aside as ‘fashionable fic-fac’ in 1910, the representation of women had a longer exhibitionary history at the Grafton Galleries. It is invariably the responses of male artists (and male artist-critics such as Sickert and Fry) which have been most documented in art history. Fair Women exhibitions were crossover spaces. In 1894, and in later incarnations, sitters emerged from their portraits as formidable, sovereign individuals suggesting an invocation of gender and culture aligned with modernity. The theme of representing women continued to be crucial in gender politics. The suffrage cause capitalised on the public interest in portraiture and biography as a way of promoting exemplary women. Modern portraits, generally photographic, became part of the cult of personality around suffrage leaders.3 Fair Women gave prominence to the presence of women in galleries. Many of these women were visiting temporary exhibitions alongside other activities such as theatre and shopping in the West End; responses in the press indicated that the theme was understood within this wider orbit of contemporary fashionability. Temporary exhibitions were also spaces in which women could take on other ‘curating’ roles generally ascribed to men in public institutions, thereby developing a kind of professional expertise. Loan exhibitions allowed women to capitalise on existing networks and display their own collections. There were points of continuity in the female patrons who would become important facilitators and benefactors for British modernism. The collectors were also diverse in their interests: Marchesi had amassed an important collection of French impressionist work, Wantage and Bentinck continued to loan work and support national collections, and Manners was incredibly productive. Women were important as instigators and patrons within exhibition culture beyond Britain. In spite of the apparent cultural quake in 1910, the theme of Fair Women did not immediately fade into the background along with the Victorians. Just a short stroll away from the Grafton Galleries in 1910 was an exhibition of 500 Fair Women at the photography studio of Lallie Charles. The celebrated actress Marie Tempest was one

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of many women who featured in Charles’s oeuvre; her ‘international’ exhibition sitters overlapped with those in Fair Women.4 Charles was particularly prescient because it was in photography that the theme was rejuvenated in several forms in the ’20s and ’30s. The Book of Fair Women with photographs by E.O. Hoppé appeared in 1921 and was followed by Cecil Beaton’s Book of Beauty a decade later.5 Tickner has drawn attention to the 1904 installation by Vanessa Bell (Woolf’s sister) of a series of photographs by her aunt Julia Margaret Cameron at Gordon Square; these portraits of her mother hung opposite eminent portraits of Victorian men in an act of memorialising, while staking a claim to a matrilineal artistic heritage.6 Her mother, Julia Stephen, had of course appeared in the original Fair Women in a painted portrait by G.F. Watts and a portrait of Bell by Charles Furse hung on the wall in the 1910 Fair Women.7 The interweaving network of Fair Women sitters, artists and ‘curators’ includes Woolf herself who co-edited Famous Men and Fair Women, a volume of Cameron’s photographs in 1923.8 Nearly a decade later Bell and Duncan Grant were commissioned by Kenneth Clark to produce a dinner service.9 The resulting extraordinary collection, Famous Women (twelve ‘Actresses and Dancers’, twelve ‘Queens’, twelve ‘Women of Letters’, twelve ‘Beauties’), is strikingly familiar. Operating as a kind of exhibitionary coda, the majority of the sitters, both historical and modern, had appeared in the Fair Women exhibitions that preceded it. So, in fact there was more of a link between the Victorians and the moderns than Woolf suggests: Fair Women of the past – and Fair Women of the modern.

Notes 1 Virginia Woolf, ‘Character in Fiction’, Criterion 2/8, July (1924): 409–30. 2 Pamela Fletcher, “Victorians and Moderns”, in Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, ed. Angus Trumble and Andrea Wolk Rager (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2013), 99. In many ways the narrative of a break in 1910 was scripted by the modernists themselves. Rachel Teukolsky, The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 192. 3 Although the relative freedom and independence of women in galleries was subsequently restricted as a result of militant suffrage action. 4 Selections were reproduced in Tatler (29 June 1910), 351–53. ‘Englishwoman Second’, Daily Mirror, 22 June 1910, 4. Thanks to Georgina Mind for Charles discussions. 5 Hoppé Portraits: Society, Studio and Street (17 February–30 May 2011), NPG. Intriguingly Pears also revived the theme. It sponsored a ‘Palace of Beauty’ at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. In a sort of re-enactment of Fair Women, actresses were hired to personify ten famous historical women in a series of rooms. 6 Lisa Tickner, ‘Mediating Generation: The Mother–Daughter Plot’, Art History 25, no. 1 (1 February 2002), 26, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8365.00301. Myers had carefully inserted a Cameron photograph of Stephen in her own album, beside which she had written ‘beautiful woman’. Ax78675, NPG. 7 The Furse portrait was later destroyed. See Darren Clarke, ‘The Politics of Partnership: Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, 1912–1961’, University of Sussex, 2013, p. 121. 8 Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry, eds., Victorian Photographs of Famous Men & Fair Women (London: L. & V. Woolf, 1926). 9 Letters between Bell and Jane Clark indicate that it was Jane Clark who took on the job of managing the commission with Bell. Hana Leaper, ‘The Famous Women Dinner Service: A Critical Introduction and Catalogue’, British Art Studies, issue 7, 30 November 2017, https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-07/hleaper.

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Index

Page numbers in italics reference fgures. Aberdeen Weekly Journal 10, 14 actresses 83; Bernhardt, Sarah 71–79; fashionability 61–63; Langtry, Lillie 64–71; Terry, Ellen 80–82 ‘advanced’ women xiii, 62 advertisements 69 Agnata Frances Butler (Myers) 101 Agnew, William 45 Alámayou, Prince Déjatch 97 Albinson, A. Cassandra 161 Alexandra Princess of Wales 36 Ambassadors (Holbein) 45 Anderson, Mary 69, 147 Angeli, H. Von. 36 Anna Alma Tadema (Tadema) 154 Anne Jemima Clough (Myers) 102 Aria, Eliza Davis ix–x Armstrong, Margaret 129 Armstrong, Walter 46 Art and Crafts Movement 147; Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society 16 Art Journal 24, 130, 133–134 Asquith, Margot 130 Astor, Mary Dahlgren Paul 6, 10, 36 Athenaeum 17, 21, 23, 46, 81, 107, 151 Athill, Phillip 159 Bailkin, Jordanna 40 Baker, Terri 40 Bal, Mieke 40 Balfour, Arthur 103 bankers 8, 10 Baylies, Louisa 128, 129 Beale, Dorothea 133 Beale, Sarah Sophia 21, 33 Beaujot, Ariel 33 Beautiful Houses 37–38 Beaux, Cecilia 138 beetle dress 80–81 Bell, Vanessa 171 Belloc, Marie 100

Bend, Amy 129 Bentinck, Lady H. 70. 129, 162 Berenson, Bernard 136 Bergstein, Mary 75 Bernhardt, Sarah 60–62, 71–79, 107, 146, 147 Bianca (Watts) 64 Bin Osman, Saleh 97 Bischoffsheim, Clara 147 Bishop, Cortlandt Field 129 Bishop, Henry 3 Blackburn, Helen 16 Boldini, Giovanni 105, 108, 161 The Book of Beauty (Williamson) 126, 133 The Book of Fair Women (Hoppé) 171 Booth, Alison 123 Boughton, Mrs. Henry 34 Boznańska, Olga 138 Brevik-Zender, Heidi 66 Breward, Chris xii Bristol Mercury 105 Brooks, Henry Jamyn 15 Brown, Hannah Meredith 35 Browning, Robert 90 Bruce, Kathleen 150 Bryant, Julius 34 Buckley, Cheryl 71 Buckstone, Beatrice 89 Burdett, Sophia 35 Burdett, Susan 35 Burdett-Coutts, Angela 6, 8, 11, 35–36, 131; Angela Burdett-Coutts, Baroness BurdettCoutts 9; Baroness Burdett-Coutts’ garden party: the International Medical Congress, London, 1881 36 Burlington House 15 Burlington Magazine 38, 133–134, 136–137 Burne-Jones, Edward 12, 42, 64 Butler, Agnata Frances (Ramsay) Montagu 100–101

Index Cameron, Henry Herschel Hay 122 Cameron, Julia Margaret 90, 97, 171 Campbell, Gertrude 88, 105–114, 158; Gertrude, Lady Colin Campbell (Downey) 111; ‘Lady Colin Campbell’ (Cycling Illustrated) 112; Lady Colin Campbell (Boldini) 107, 130, 153 Campbell, Lady Margaret 159 Carpenter, Rue Winterbotham 160 Carter, C. 80 Cartoons 18; ‘Light Side of Nature’ (May) 20; Our Own “Dream of Fair Women” 19; Punch 150 Cartwright, Julia 137–138 Cassatt, Mary 150 Catalogue of Pictures at Longford Castle and Categorical List of Family Portraits (Radnor) 10 cataloguing ‘Fair Women’ 121–127 Chadbourne, Emily Crane 150 Chamberlain, Joseph 97 Chamberlain, Mary Crowninshield Endicott 94–96 charity events, Grafton Galleries 61 Charles, Lallie 159 Chaucer, Geoffrey 14 Cherry, Deborah 38 Christabel Pankhurst (Wright) 159 Christina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan 122, 137–138; Christina of Denmark (Holbein), 34, 138 Churchill, Lady Randolph 36, 126 Cigarette (Helleu) 150–151 Cinderella 46, 89 Circe (Burne-Jones) 42 Clark, Kenneth 171 Classen, Constance 39 Cleopatra (Alma Tadema) 12, 68; Cleopatra (Bernhardt) 73–75; Cleopatra (Tennyson) 14 Clough, Anne Jemima 100–103 Cobbe, Frances Power 131 Cochrane, Lady Katherine 36 Cochrane, Thomas 36 Codell, Julie xiii collecting 133–134; fans see fans; jewels 30–32; narrative and 40; women and 40–44 collectors 23, 34–40, 44–49, 131–136, 147, 154–155; women and 40–44 Columbian Exhibition 131 Committee, Fair Women 6–11 Comyns Carr 81 Comyns-Carr, Alice 80 Conder, Charles 154 Connoisseur 39, 133–137, 147 Cooper, Lena M. 127 Countess Bathurst (Lawrence) 12

193

Countess of Crawford 6 Countess of Dudley 6 Countess of Ilchester 6 Countess of Radnor, Helen Matilda Chaplin 6, 10, 45 Countess of Warwick 159 Countess of Westmoreland (Manners) 8 Countess of Wharncliffe 6 Countess Somers (Watts) 124, 125 Craig, Edith 159 Crane, Walter 25 Cranston, Catherine 154 Croft, Eleanor 6 Croft, Thomas Denman 3 Crosse, Mary Clabburn 42 cultural philanthropy 44–49 Cunard, Nancy 157–158 Cycling Illustrated Magazine 112–113 Daily Express 146 Daily Mail 146, 155 Daily Mirror 152, 154, 157–159 Dakers, Caroline 38 Daly Goggin, Maureen 43 Danby, Frank 137 Davis, Edmund 154 Davis, Mary (Halford) 154 Davis, Tracy 83 Day, Lewis F. 131 de Falbe, Christian Frederic 42 de Falbe, Eleanor Louisa (Hawkes) 42 de Heere, Lucas 48 de László, Philip 136, 154 De Wolfe, Elsie (Boldini) 133 Dean’s Daughter 64 decorative objects 13, 16, 21; Fair Women 1908 153 Denney, Colleen xiii D’Epinay, Prospero 71 Deprez, Edmond 45 D’Este, Isabella 137 Dew-Smith, Albert 105 Di Bello, Patrizia 64 Dicksee, Frank 134 Dilke, Emilia 134 ‘Dinka’ 132 divorce, Campbell, Gertrude 113 Dix, Gertrude 24 Dixon, Ella Hepworth 126 Dolman, Frederick 133 Dora Wheeler Keith (Sewell) 127 Dorothy (née Tennant) Stanley (Myers) 98 Downey, W. & D. 75, 110, 126 Downman, John 137 ‘A Dream of Fair Beauty’ (Williamson) 126 ‘A Dream of Fair Women’ (Tennyson) 13–14, 75, 146

194

Index

‘A Dream of Fair Women’ (Sharp) 60 The Dream of Fair Women (mural) 133 ‘A Dream of Handsome Men’ 157 Duchess of Devonshire 6, 123, 129 Duchess of Devonshire (Reynolds) 109, 153 Duchess of Montrose 46 Duchess of Portland 6, 150 Duchess of Sutherland 6 Duchess of York 32, 33, 131 DuMaurier, George 108, 150 Eastlake, Elizabeth 134 Edwardian Era 144–146, 150, 153–155 Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick (Myers) 104 Ellen Terry (Hollyer) 82 Elliott, Bridget 24 Emma, Lady Hamilton (Romney) 34 Endicott, William C. 97 English Illustrated Magazine 110 Etiquette of Good Society 110 Eveleen Myers (possibly Flower) 95, 146 Eveleen Myers; Silvia Constance Myers Harold Hawthorn Myers; Leopold Hamilton Myers (probably Myers) 94 Eveleen Tennant 146 ‘An Exhibition for Quakers and Turks’ 152 exhibitions: Columbian Exhibition 131; Fair Women 3–29, 146–162 ‘Kashmir Exhibit’ 131; Loan Exhibition of Women’s Industries 16; Old Master exhibitions 15; Portraits and Pictures of Fair Women 133; Portraits of Women 127–129; Twenty Years of British Art 161; Victoria Era 129–130; Woman’s Exhibition 130–132, 138 Fair Women 3–29; Fair Women 1908 146–153; Fair Women 1909 153–159; Fair Women 1910 160–162; Fair Women ball 159 ‘Fair Women’ (Pears’ Pictorial) 68 Fair Women from Vogue 128 ‘Fair Women in Painting and Poetry’ (Sharp) 59–60, 145 ‘The ‘Fair Woman’ of the Future’(Daily Mirror) 158 Famous Women 171 Fane, Sibyl (Countess Westmoreland) 6 fans 32–33, 36, 43; Campbell, Gertrude 113–114; Fair Women 1908 154 fashion plates 64–66 fashionability xii; New Women 61–63 Fawcett, Hilary 71 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett 123, 130 femme fatale 62; Campbell, Gertrude 113; Fair Women 1908 150–153 ‘femme nouvelle’ xiii

Fenwick-Miller, Florence 14 ‘Finishing Touches’ (Renouard) 77–78 Fletcher, Pamela 15, 170 Flower, Cyril 94 Foster, Gertrude 42 ‘Four Beautiful Portraits at the Women Exhibition,’ Illustrated London News 148 ‘Four Beautiful Studies from the Fair Women Exhibition,’ Illustrated London News 149 Fowkes Tobin, Beth 43 Fox-Strangways, Lady Susan 21 Frankau, Julia 137 Frith, W.P. 36 Fry, Roger 136, 161 Furse, Charles 171 Gainsborough, Thomas 34, 45 Galton, Francis 90 Gamlin, Hilda 46 Garb, Tamar xiii Gascoyne-Cecil, Georgina 10 gender politics 131 gendered nature of decorative art 24 Georgina Duchess of Devonshire, and her daughter (Reynolds) 123 Gismonda 77 Gissing, George 62 Gladstone, William Ewart 10, 97 Godey’s Ladies Book 127 Grafton Galleries x, xii, 15–16, 61; catalogues 122; Fair Women 3–6; Fair Women 1910 160 Graham, Florence 131 Grand, Sarah 62 ‘Grandmother’s Treasures’ 41 Graphic 21, 75; ‘Finishing Touches’ (Renouard) 77–78; ‘Madame Sarah Bernhardt in “Izeyl” At Daly’s Theatre’ 73 Grego, Joseph 131–132 Grosvenor Gallery 15–16 Grove, Lady 159 Guildhall Corporation 15 Guinness, Adelaide Maria, Lady Iveagh 6–7, 45 Guinness, Edward Cecil 7–8 Gutekunst, Otto 45 ‘gypsy Gioconda’ 155 Halford, Amy 154 Halford, Constance 154 Hamerton, Philip G. 59 Hamilton, Cicely Mary 159 Hamilton, Emma 123 Hamilton, Trevor 100 Hamlett, Jane 43 Harmsworth, Alfred 146 Harmsworth, Mary 161

Index Harrison, Jane 134, 136 Hart, Alice 131 Hart, Ernest 131 Haskell, Francis 15, 17 Haweis, Mary Eliza 30, 37–38 Head (La Tour) 36 Head, R.E. 137 Head of a Girl (Watts) 154 Hearth and Home 129 Heavenly Twins (Grand) 62 Helland, Janice 24, 157 Helleu, Paul-César 147, 150 Helmreich, Anne 15 Herbert, Ellen 38 Herringham, Christiana 130, 134, 136 Hervey, Geraldine 6, 32–33 Hill, Kate x, 16, 43 Hindson, Catherine 61 historical relics 21 Hobbes, John Oliver 130–131 Hodgson, William Earl 109 Holbein, Hans 34, 47 Holland, Mrs. John R. 42 Hollyer, Frederick 82 Holmes, Charles 155 Hon Mrs. Wyndham (Watts) 151 Honiton lace 131 Hoppé, E.O. 171 Hothfeld, Lady 6 Housman, Laurence 157 Howard, Francis 130 Hughes, Alice 103, 126 Humphrey, Florence 154–155 Hunter, Mary (Smyth), 147 Hunter, Mrs. Charles 159, 162 The Idler 126 Illustrated London News 41, 73, 147; ‘Four Beautiful Portraits at the Women Exhibition’ 148–149; ‘Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra’ 74; ‘Sarah Bernhardt in London’ 76 The Image Breakers (Dix) 24 In Darkest Africa 97 Indian jewels 32 International Congress of Women 132 International Society of Sculptors, Painters & Gravers (International Society) 144; Fair Women 144–146; Fair Women 1908 146–150; Fair Women 1909 153–159; Fair Women 1910 160–162 ‘Irish Point Lace Apron’ 38 Irving, Henry 80 Isabella d’Este 47 Iselin, Hope Goddard 127 Iveagh, Lady 6–7, 45 Izeyl 72

195

Jackson, Emily Gatliff 137 Jameson, Anna 134 Japanese womankind 131–132 Jerome, Jennie 36; Cornwallis-West, J. 150; Lady Randolph Churchill (Manners) 126 Jeune, Mary 130 jewels 30–32; Fair Women 1908 153; jewellery 150 John, Augustus 153, 155–157 Jopling, Louise 130 Jourdain, Margaret 38, 137 J.T. Wimperis and Arber 3 Kashmir, jewellery 32 ‘Kashmir Exhibit’ 131 Katherine, Duchess of Leeds 126 Kauffman, Angelica 136 Key, Ellen 147 Kilmurray, Elaine 81 Kingsford, Anna 69 Kiralfy, Imre 130 Klein, Melanie 43 Koehler, Florence 150 Kramer, Elizabeth 38 ‘La Femme Passe--Vive La Femme!’ 109 la Tour, Maurice Quentin de 36 lace 37–38, 42, 131, 137 Ladies National Silk Association 131 Lady Agnew of Lochnaw (Sargent) 126 Lady Eden (Herkomer) 126 Lady Hamilton as Circe (Romney) 46 Lady Helen Vincent (Von Lenbach) 154 Lady in the Winged Hat (Shannon) 154 Lady Jane Grey (de Heere), 47–48 Lady Katherine Thynne (Manners) 126 Lady Macbeth (Sargent) 80 ‘Lady Wantage’s Collection of Pictures,’ Connoisseur 135 Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde) 33 Lady’s Realm 126 Lane, Hugh 154, 161 Langtry, Lillie 6, 62, 64–71, 160 Lavery, John 145 Lavinia (Leslie) 45 Lawrence, Thomas 11–12, 45 le Schonix, Roach 47 Ledbetter, Kathryn 126 ‘Legends of Good Women’ (Chaucer) 14 Leigh, John Gerard 42 Leslie, G.D. 45 Lewis, Susan 35 ‘Light Side of Nature’ (May) 20 Loan Exhibition of Women’s Industries 16 loan exhibitions 15–17 ‘Longford Holbein’ 45

196

Index

Lowndes, Mary 130 Ludgate Illustrated Magazine 61 MacIntosh, Margaret MacDonald 154 Mackenzie, Tessa 129, 130 Macleod, Diane Sachko 41 ‘Madame Sarah Bernhardt in “Izeyl” At Daly’s Theatre’ 73 Madame X (Sargent) 81, 152 Magazine of Art 133–134 Maharaja Takhtsingjee 32 Man and Superman (Shaw) 151 Manchester Guardian 157 Mann, Harrington 152 Manners, Violet 6–8, 33, 126, 130, 136, 147, 150, 159, 161; Duchess of Rutland (Violet Manners) 7 Marchesi, Blanche 147, 162 Marchioness of Bristol, Hervey, Geraldine 6, 32–33 Marchioness of Granby (Violet Manners) 6, 10 Marchioness of Salisbury 6 Marcus, Sharon 66 Margaret, Queen of Scotland 47 Marion Terry 130 Maris, Stella 154 Marshall, Gail 60 Martyn, May 150 Mary Chamberlain (Myers) 96 Mary Queen of Scots 33 Mary Robinson as “Perdita” (Reynolds) 124 Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Gheeraedts) 122 Masquerier, J.J. 35 mass marketing 67 matronage 38 Matthews, Charles 45 Matthews David, Alison 129 May, Phil 20–21 Maynard, Alice 131 Maynard, Margaret 31 McCaffrey-Howarth, Caroline 39 McCarthy, Lillah 151, 160 McNeill, Dorelia (Dorothy) 155 McPherson, Heather 77 Meacock, Joanna 146 Medea (Sandys) 42 Meherab, Omar 155–156 memorial catalogue 122–123 Meyer, Adèle 161 Meynell, Alice 110 Middleton, Lady 6 Millais, John Everett 88–89, 97, 105, 146 miniatures 13, 33–34 Miss Georgina Lennox, Lady Apsley (Lawrence) 11–12

Miss Lillah McCarthy in the Dress of Donna Ana (Shannon) 151 Mitchell, Alycen 46 modern womanhood 127, 158 Mond, Angela 160 Mond, Ludwig 34–35 Montagu, Mary Wortley 7 Moore, George 47 Morand, Eugene 72, 114 Morelli, Giovanni 47, 136 Morgan, Fanny Pierpont 127 Morrell, Ottoline 146, 154–155, 162 Morrison, Alfred 131 Morrison, Mabel 37–38, 48–49, 137 Mrs. H. Lindsay (Manners) 126 ‘Mrs Langtry as Aphrodite in “A Society Butterfy” at the Opera comique’ 65 ‘Mrs Langtry in Act II and Act III’ 66 Mrs Moody (Romney) 46 Mrs Pownall as Hebe (Reynolds) 46 Mrs Sheridan (Gainsborough) 34 Mucha, Alphonse 77 Myers, Eveleen (Tennant) 88–94, 129; ‘fair women’ 94–105 narrative, collecting and 40 National Portrait Gallery xiii National Review 17, 23 Nead, Lynda 60 neo-Rococo, Conder, Charles 154 Neruda, Wilma 33 Nevill, Dorothy 38–40, 49 New Gallery 15, 146; Fair Women 1908 146–150 New Woman xiii, 18, 24; Campbell, Gertrude 110–114; Fair Women 1908 150–153; fashionability 61–63; The New Woman 82; ‘The New Woman’ (DuMaurier) 108 No! (Millais) 89 North American Review 124 nostalgia 158; fans 154 novelty 13–14 Nunn, Pamela Gerrish 114 objectifcation of women 64, 66 Ockman, Carol 75 The Odd Women (Gissing) 62 Old Master exhibitions 15 Old Master paintings 46–47 O’Neill, Morna 25 opera glasses 31 Ormond, Richard 81 Osborn, Emily Mary 100 Our Own “Dream of Fair Women” 18–19 Pageant of Great Women 159 Paillet, Fernand 127

Index Palladino, Eusapia 103 Palmer, Bertha 11 Palmer, Lady 159 Pankhurst, Christabel 159 parody 20–22 Patti, Adelina 69 Pearce, Susan 41 Pears’ Pictorial 67–71, 81–82 Pears soap 67–71 Pennell, Elizabeth Robins 153 Pennington, Harper 126 perfume bottles 38–39 Perry, Lara xiii, 14 Persian art 155–157; ‘Persian Augustus John’ 155 Pezzini, Barbara 46 philanthropic citizens 44–49 Phillips, Claude 17, 23, 24, 41, 45, 47, 62, 64, 81, 89, 105, 133 Phillips, Florence 161 photographs: Langtry, Lillie 64; Terry, Ellen 81–82 photography 33–34, 154; Myers, Eveleen (Tennant) 89–94 pianoforte 33 Pierson, Stacey 45 Pointon, Marcia xii Pollock, Griselda 31, 112 Poole, Andrea Geddes 134 Portfolio 59, 71 Portrait of a Lady (Boldini) 161 Portrait of Ariosto (Titian) 134 Portraits and Pictures of Fair Women 133 Portraits de Femmes 1870–1900 147 Portraits of Women 127, 129 portraiture xii–xiii Prange, Francis Gerard 3 ‘precious things,’ miniatures 34 Prettejohn, Elizabeth 42 Prince Albert 42 Prince of Wales 71 Princess Charlotte 31 Princess Elizabeth 33 Princess Hatzeldt 159 Princess Radziwell (de László) 154 Private View, Royal Academy, 1881 (Frith) 36 ‘Private View Day at the New Gallery: the Crush in the Central Hall’ xii Private View of the Old Masters Exhibition, Royal Academy, 1888 (Brooks) 15, 39, 136 Propert, J. Lumsden 23 Punch 100, 108, 150, 157 Queen 21–22 Queen Charlotte 69 Queen Victoria 31, 36, 42–43

197

Radnor, Helen Matilda Chaplin 6, 10, 45 Rae, Henrietta 129 Raeburn, Henry 137 Rager, Andrea Wolk 144 Ramsay, Allan 21 The Realm 109 Rebecca at the well (Myers) 92 Rees-Leahy, Helen x, 136 Reid, James Eadie 133 Rembrandt exhibition 15 ‘The Renaissance of Women’ (Somerset) 124 Renouard, Paul 77 Reynolds, K.D. 10, 17, 45–46, 123, 137 Ribeiro, Aileen xii Robins, Anna Gruetzner 107 Robinson, Mary 123 Robinson, Sir Joseph 46 rock turquoise 32 Rodin, Auguste 144 Romney, George 17, 34, 45–46, 157 Rosen, Jeff 100 Rosenfeld, Jason 88 Ross, William 35 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 11–12, 80–81 Roubadah, Princess of Cabul (Meherab) 155–156 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 15 Ryan, Deborah Sugg 159 Sabin, Frank T. 137 Sackville-West, Victoria 160 Salisbury, Lady 11 Salisbury, Lord 10 Sands, Mary Morton Hartpence 36 Sandys, Frederick 42 Sarah Bernhardt (Downey) 79, 131 Sarah Bernhardt (Spindler) 72 ‘Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra,’ Illustrated London News 74 ‘Sarah Bernhardt in London,’ Illustrated London News 76 Sargent, John Singer 80–81, 151, 158, 161 Saturday Review 130 scent bottles 38–39 Scharf, George 10 Schmalz, Herbert 131, 132 Schreiber, Charles 43 Schreiber, Charlotte 43 Scott-Montagu, Lady Cecil 6, 42 The Sculptress (Shannon) 150 Sears, Sarah Choate 150 Self-portrait (probably Myers) 106 Sellars, Eugénie 134, 136 Sèvres porcelain 39 Sewell, Amanda Brewster 127 Shannon, Charles 150–151 Shannon, James Jebusa 10, 103, 126, 147

198

Index

Sharp, William 59–60, 82, 107, 114, 145 Sheridan, Elizabeth Linley 34 shopping 21; ‘Shopping in sedan chairs,’ Pears’ Pictorial 69–70 Sickert, Walter 160 Siddons, Sarah 80 Sidgwick, Eleanor Mildred 103–105 Sidgwick, Henry 103 Sidlauskas, Susan 81 Sidney, Dorothy 137 Sidney, Mary 122 Sieveking, Ella 36–37 Sieveking, Emmeline 37 signatures, sitters 126 silk 131, 154–155 Sir Francis Galton (Myers) 91 Sir Henry Morton Stanley; Dorothy (née Tennant), Lady Stanley and ‘Sali’ (Myers) 99 Sitwell, Frances 134 Sketch 63–66 skin tone, Terry, Ellen 81 smoking women 110–112, 150 A Society Butterfy (Langtry) 64–65 Solomon, Alisa 75 Somerset, Isabelle 124–125, 130 Speedy, Tristram 97 Spencer-Warren, Mary 35 Spindler, Walter 71–72, 130 Sporting Times 10, 105 Stanley, Henry Morton 90, 97 Stephen, Julia, Mrs. Leslie Stephen (Watts) 13, 171 Stephens, F.G. 16, 47, 80, 107 Stephenson, Andrew 17, 145 Stillman, Effe 100 Stokes, Helen Phelps 127 Stokes, Marianne 138 Story of a Modern Woman (Dixon) 126 The Strand 35, 132 Street Arabs (Tennant) 97 The Stroller 20–21, 23 ‘Studies of Fair Women’ 126 Studio 23, 41, 133–134 Sturgis, Mrs. H. 159 suffrage movement 157 ‘A Suffragette’s Wish’ 157 Sullivan, Edmund J. 147 Sun Artists (Series) 90 Swinhoe, Edith 131 Sylvestre, Armand 72 Symonds, John Addington 90, 93, 105 Tadema, Laura Alma 37, 134, 154 Tata, Lady Navajbai 154 Tata, Rata 154 Tate, Henry 80

Taylor, G.R.S. 152, 158 Tempest, Marie 161, 170 Tennant, Dorothy 89, 97, 99, 100 Tennant, Gertrude 89 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 13–14, 75; Cleopatra, Queen Eleanor 146 Terry, Ellen 60–62, 80–82, 130, 154, 160 Thaw, Evelyn 152 Théodora 75 Thomas, M. Carey 133 Thomson, James 45 Tickner, Lisa 160, 171 Tiffany 31 Tillyard, Stella 162 Times 131 Trafton, Scott 75 Treadwin, Charlotte Elizabeth 38 Tree, Herbert Beerbohm 157–158 Tree, Iris Beerbohm 157–158 Tree, Viola 157–158 Trumble, Angus 144 Turner, J.M.W. 136 turquoise jewellery 32 Tweedie, Ethel 130, 132, 160 Twenty Years of British Art 161 Vanderbilt, Alice 127 Vanderbilt, Consuelo 147 Verlaine, Julie 40 Veronica Veronese (Rossetti) 12, 80–81, 109 Victoria Era exhibition 129–130 Victorian fashion plate 66 violins 33 ‘A Vision of Fair Women’ 159 ‘Visitors at the Loan Collection at the Guildhall at Guildhall Exhibition’ xi Vogue 128–129 Von Lenbach, Franz 154 Wahl, Kimberley 155 Walford, Lucy Bethia 123 Wantage, Harriet Sarah 6, 8, 15, 134, 136 Ward, Henrietta 37, 130 Ward, Mary Webb 37 Waterfeld, Giles 121 Watts, G.F. 10, 64, 88–89, 103, 124, 151, 154 Werheimer, Almina 161 Wertheimer, Asher 45 Wertheimer, Charles J. 45, 46 West, Shearer 80 West End 23 Whalley Bridge and Abbey (Turner) 136 Wharncliffe, Lady 6 ‘What we are coming to: A Ladies Smoking Party’ 63 Whistler, James McNeill 144–145, 159 White, Gleeson 23

Index White, Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd 36 Willard, Frances 103 Williamson, Emma Sarah 126, 133 Willsdon, Clare 133 Winnicott, D.W. 43 Wolfe, Catharine 25 Woman Smiling (John) 155 Woman’s Exhibition 130–132, 138 Woman’s Work 138 women, collecting 40–44

‘Women in All Nations’ 132 Women’s Exhibition 159 Woolf, Virginia 171 Worshipful Company of Fan Makers 33 Wright, Ethel 159 Wyndham, Madeleine Campbell 151 The Yorkshire Herald 34 Zoffany, Johann 136

199