Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England: The Hustle and the Scramble 9781501343056, 9781501343087, 9781501343070

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Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

Contextualizing Art Markets This series presents new, original research that reconceives the scope and function of art markets throughout history by examining them in the context of broader institutional practices, knowledge networks, social structures, collecting activities, and creative strategies. In many cases, art market activities have been studied in isolation from broader themes within art history, a trend that has tended to stifle exchange across disciplinary boundaries. Contextualizing Art Markets seeks to foster increased dialogue between art historians, artists, curators, economists, gallerists, and other market professionals by contextualizing art markets around the world within wider art historical discourses and institutional practices. The series has been developed in the belief that the reciprocal relation between art and finance is undergoing a period of change: artists are adopting innovative strategies for the commercial promotion of their work, auction houses are expanding their educational programmes, art fairs are attracting unprecedented audience numbers, museums are becoming global brands, private galleries are showing increasingly ‘curated’ exhibitions, and collectors are establishing new exhibition spaces. As the divide between public and private practices narrows, questions about the social and ethical impact of market activities on the production, collection, and reception of art have become newly pertinent. By combining trends within the broader discipline of art history with investigations of marketplace dynamics, Contextualizing Art Markets explores the imbrication of art and economics as a driving force behind the aesthetic and social development of the art world. We welcome proposals that debate these issues across a range of historical periods and geographies. Series Editor: Kathryn Brown, Loughborough University, UK Editorial Board: Véronique Chagnon-Burke, Christie’s Education, USA Christel H. Force, Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA Charlotte Galloway, Australian National University, Australia Mel Jordan, Royal College of Art, UK Alain Quemin, Université Paris-8, France Mark Westgarth, University of Leeds, UK

Forthcoming Volumes in the Series: Old Masters Worldwide: Markets, Museums and Movements, edited by Susanna Avery-Quash and Barbara Pezzini Reframing Japonisme: Women and the Asian Art Market in Nineteenth-Century France (1853–1914), by Elizabeth Emery Pioneers of the Global Art Market: Paris-Based Dealer Networks, 1850–1950, edited by Christel H. Force Collecting Prints, Posters and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World, edited by Ruth E. Iskin and Britany Salsbury Corporate Patronage of Art & Architecture in the United States, Late 19th Century to the Present, edited by Monica E. Jovanovich and Melissa Renn Théodore Rousseau and the Rise of the Modern Art Market: An Avant-Garde Landscape Painter in Nineteenth-Century France, by Simon Kelly Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa: A Study of Trans-Imperial Cultural Flows, by Zachary Kingdon

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Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England The Hustle and the Scramble Maria Quirk

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Maria Quirk, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Self Portrait, 1889 (oil on canvas) Childers, Emily (Milly) (1866-1922) © Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) U.K./Bridgeman Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Title: Women, art and money in late Victorian and Edwardian England : the hustle and the scramble / Maria Quirk. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Visual Arts, Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2019. | Series: Contextualizing art markets | Based on the author’s thesis (doctoral)–University of Queensland, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019007178 (print) | LCCN 2019007562 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501343063 (ePub) | ISBN 9781501343070 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501343056 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Women artists–England–Economic conditions. | Art–Economic aspects–England–History–19th century. | Art–Economic aspects–England–History– 20th century. | Art and society–England–History–19th century. | Art and society– England–History–20th century. Classification: LCC N8354 (ebook) | LCC N8354 .Q57 2019 (print) | DDC 704/.042–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019007178 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4305-6 ePDF: 978-1-5013-4307-0 eBook: 978-1-5013-4306-3 Series: Contextualizing Art Markets Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Patricia and Michael Quirk.

viii

Contents List of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Series Editor’s Introduction Introduction: Money, Professionalism and Reputation

x xi xii 1

Part One  From Student to Studio 1 2 3

Training for the Market Commerce and Family in the Home Studio Single Ladies and Studio Celebrities

21 38 59

Part Two  Commerce, Enterprise, Display 4 5 6 7 8

Academy Politics Members of the Club Making a Living through Middle-Class Demand Portraiture and Patronage Illustrating Success

Conclusion Appendix 1 Appendix 2 Select Bibliography Index

75 89 114 142 161 191 196 204 212 224

List of Abbreviations FAS

Fine Art Society

NEAC

New English Art Club

RA

Royal Academy

RFSA

Royal Female School of Art

SWA

Society of Women Artists

WIAC

Women’s International Art Club

Acknowledgements This book would not have been produced without the help and support of my family, friends and academic mentors. This book is based on my doctoral thesis, completed at the University of Queensland in 2015. I would like to thank my principal supervisor, Dr Geoff Ginn, who has been a mentor to me since I was an undergraduate student. Geoff ’s relentless optimism, insightful academic guidance and encouragement were hugely valuable to me in the preparation of my dissertation, and he has been a faithful sounding board for me throughout the book-writing process. I also thank my associate supervisors. Dr Sarah Pinto has provided generous, judicious and warm-hearted academic and professional advice and has made herself constantly available to me. Associate Professor Morris Low graciously took on my supervision with enthusiasm and conscientiousness, and I am grateful for his careful and exacting feedback on my work. I extend my thanks to the professional and administrative staff at the University of Queensland’s School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry for their help throughout and since my candidature. I am grateful for the assistance of staff at the Victoria and Albert’s National Art Library and Archive of Art and Design, the Tate Archive, the Glasgow School of Art, the Craft Study Centre, Women’s Art Library and University of Brighton. This book would not have been completed without the moral and emotional support of my family. I thank my sisters, Susie Gore and Roslynn Quirk, for their perpetual interest in my well-being and happiness. My parents, Michael and Patricia Quirk, have been unwavering in their support of this project and myself. Their home has been a haven and their love a bulwark against all the challenges this project has presented and for that I am immeasurably grateful. Lastly, my deepest gratitude and appreciation is extended to Daniel Troy, my partner and champion, whose unconditional support, enthusiasm, patience and relentless belief in my abilities have sustained me for the length of this project.

Series Editor’s Introduction One of the aims of Contextualizing Art Markets is to locate and examine art market transactions within broader networks of knowledge exchange, professional practice and institutional structures. Maria Quirk’s illuminating study of women’s artistic careers in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain makes an important contribution to this network of issues. By tracing the education, aspirations and career trajectories of female artists of the period, Quirk reveals the gendered discourses that shaped both notions of artistic value and preconceptions of how artists should look, behave and be rewarded. Then, as now, an artist’s close affiliation with the market had the potential to distort critical and popular views about that individual’s work insofar as it transformed what appeared to be a vocation into a set of mere business exchanges. Quirk’s case studies reveal a paradox about this idea when applied to female artists at the end of the nineteenth century. For women who faced challenges in obtaining dealer representation or exhibition opportunities, the market was capable of offering a form of validation that circumvented formal and informal professional networks that were dominated by men. One of the most significant contributions of Quirk’s book is to show how women devised strategies for using the market to advance their professional careers and to achieve their personal goals. If many women were denied an art school education or were encouraged into ‘lesser’ arts of portraiture, commercial illustration or domestic decoration, they also devised innovative strategies for working and disseminating their output. Tracing the lives of key figures including Louisa Beresford, Henrietta Rae, Laura Knight and Louise Jopling, among others, Quirk shows how market validation was a means by which women could challenge pejorative notions of ‘amateurism’, ‘feminine accomplishment’ and ‘hobbyism’ and pursue a commercial route to financial independence and professional recognition. She also navigates the topographies of the art world of the period by examining the places in which women trained, worked, socialized and exhibited their works. The physical environments in which creativity flourished are shown to have been crucial markers in developing an artist’s audience and signalling the existence of an identity that found expression beyond the boundaries of the domestic.

Series Editor’s Introduction

xiii

Importantly, then, Quirk’s book is not simply about gendered discourses and social obstacles that women faced in seeking recognition as professional creative individuals. Rather, it reinserts women’s lives and experiences within a history of the British art market and shows the determination with which individuals navigated complex social and commercial environments for the purpose of gaining public recognition as art professionals. Questions about the impact of gender on financial opportunity and professional success persist in discussions about the contemporary art world and its markets. A brief look at statistics relating to auction house sales, dealer representation, collecting trends and the number of solo shows dedicated to women at major institutions reveals ongoing gender bias. Quirk’s book is not only of interest to readers who seek a better understanding of the ways in which women navigated professional life at the dawn of the twentieth century. Rather, the themes discussed in this work remain pertinent today and are, therefore, capable of stimulating further debate about pressing social and economic issues that continue to shape the art world. Kathryn Brown Loughborough, Winter 2018

xiv

Introduction: Money, Professionalism and Reputation

The most ideal condition … for an artist, is to have to use his or her capacity as a means of livelihood. She who is born in purple and fine linen has a dangerous rival in the student who knows her chance of obtaining food and raiment depends entirely upon the outcome of the work of her own hands.1

On 19 February 1902, Sir Edward Poynter unveiled a memorial to the seventh president of the Royal Academy, Lord Frederic Leighton, on the north side of St Paul’s Cathedral, London. Leighton, who had died six years earlier, served as the Academy’s president for eighteen years and had been an associate and then a full member of the Academy for thirty-two years. Leighton was at the centre of England’s artistic establishment for most of the second half of the nineteenth century, and his wealth and success made him a symbol for an art world that was the most professionalized and commercialized it had ever been. Addressing an audience of artists, collectors, art dealers and art writers about Leighton’s life and achievements, Poynter made a point of noting that Leighton had never been interested in the business side of art and had not needed to make money from his art. He had not, as Queen Victoria termed it, ‘painted for money’.2 According to Poynter, this made Leighton’s work all the more noble and raised the Royal Academy, the peak professional art society in England, to a ‘higher place in the estimation of the public than it had ever occupied’.3 Leighton, an artist who had risen to the very top of the Victorian art world, did not need to demonstrate his artistic or professional bona fides by selling his art. His professionalism was based on critical judgement of his paintings, his education, qualifications, memberships, connections and public duties. His much-photographed studio home and public renown visibly reinforced that status. Leighton’s professional credentials were so solid that validation by the market was unnecessary, even déclassé. The high prices Leighton received for his works were not seen as transactional but rather as recognition for the services he rendered to the broader community. Leighton’s own attitude towards art dealers, commercial galleries and the other infrastructure of England’s art market was

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Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

lofty; he explained to the owners of one established commercial gallery who were visiting his studio, ‘I never enter into discussions about my pictures with gentlemen like yourselves. I have given you my terms – that is enough.’4 He left the room when art dealers perused his pictures and asked his servant to communicate their questions and selections to him, rather than negotiating with the dealers directly.5 While Leighton’s antipathy towards the business side of art created some resentment among art dealers and gallery owners, in general England’s art community took pride in the belief that their official leader ‘painted by choice, a motive unsullied by the need for income’.6 Leighton’s reputation for painting for pleasure and for the refinement and cultivation of himself, his friends and the nation strengthened his professional bona fides. When applied to women artists, however, the attributes that helped secure Leighton his position at the centre of the art establishment were seen as the defining characteristics of amateurism. This is because the expectations or standards for artistic professionalism that developed throughout the eighteenth and, predominantly, the nineteenth centuries were applied differently to women than they were to men. ‘Amateurism in art’ had traditionally been associated with the refining leisure activities of the upper class, and so the term had encompassed both the pursuits of gentlemen who practised art for the purposes of pleasure and cultivation and women’s artistic ‘accomplishments’. However, as (male) artists became increasingly concerned with defining and defending the status of their work by adopting the attributes and behaviours of professional culture, the meaning of the term ‘amateur’ became more feminized and pejorative. It came to be understood as the opposite of professional. Middle-class women in the nineteenth century had access to art education, but they were not generally expected to fully participate in the ‘market economy’ of art.7 It was expected, even encouraged, for women to receive some kind of art education, and it was not unusual for talented students to exhibit work publicly at local and national exhibitions.8 The ubiquity of this female amateur activity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries familiarized the English public to the notion of women making art,9 but it also perpetuated the stereotype that all women artists were amateurs. This made it difficult for middle-class women who used their art to make a living, rather than for personal pleasure, to prove their professionalism and to gain the benefits and respect that accompanied that status. The spectre of amateurism was the biggest threat to women who wanted to work as professional artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Introduction  3

Louisa Beresford, the Marchioness of Waterford, was a contemporary of Frederic Leighton in England’s mid-nineteenth-century artistic community. She was a talented watercolourist who trained under Gabriel Rossetti and exhibited work to acclaim at the Grosvenor Gallery in the 1870s and 1880s. However, she did not exhibit her work at commercial, dealer-run galleries and tended to give it away as gifts to friends rather than sell it to strangers for profit. Writing in 1880, she identified her lack of economic ambition and imperative as the reason she was not regarded as a professional artist. Beresford described her own status as ‘one who would have been an artist if it had been her fate to earn her bread’.10 According to Edward Poynter, Frederic Leighton also ‘had the means which would have enabled him to live a life of ease, in which his art might have taken a secondary place as merely one out of many brilliant accomplishments’. For Leighton, choosing to create art and contribute to the artistic community while eschewing commercial interactions demonstrated his devotion to the higher ideals of professionalism: duty and public service. For Beresford, lack of commercial ambition and imperative cemented her amateur status. As Pamela Nunn explains, by not engaging her work with the commercial art market, ‘she tacitly declared it not worth buying, which in the contemporary society meant not very good, nor serious’.11 The examples of Leighton and Beresford illustrate a significant but under recognized trend in England’s nineteenth-century art world: selling art and engaging with the infrastructure of the commercial art market was the most important means for women to demonstrate and measure their professional status. Because of the widespread assumption of female amateurism, women artists needed to demonstrate their professionalism through the most objective means possible – the art market – to show that they and their work had value. Women did not have the option, as male artists did, of proving their professionalism through the traditional criteria of specialized knowledge, economic disinterest, institutional membership and public service, because these attributes were, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, also accessible and applicable to amateur practitioners. Women who fulfilled those criteria were thus not inevitably judged to be professional. So, while women were aware of the tensions surrounding art and commercialism and perhaps felt them even more profoundly as unnatural occupiers of the commercial realm, exposing their work to the objective validation of the market was the best means to establish their professional intent. And while concerns over the propriety of women’s business interactions were occasionally

4

Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

aired in critical discourse, and by women themselves, in general their place in the market system was accepted, if perhaps not embraced, by those who worked within the art market. For male artists, painting or illustrating without financial reason or ambition was a point of pride and respect. For women, selling art – perhaps the most contentious aspect of professionalism for artists – was the threshold for professionalism. This means that understanding the ways women sold their work and made money is fundamental to understanding women’s broader experience as artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The aims of this book are twofold. The first is to investigate how women painters and illustrators made money in late Victorian and Edwardian England, at a time when the English art world had adopted the ‘dealer-critic’ system for art sales, and was recognized as the most cosmopolitan and commercial art market in the world. The second, interrelated, aim is to illustrate the importance of women’s ability to make money to their status as professional artists and to contrast this experience with the means by which male artists could establish professional recognition. To do this, this volume lays out and examines the networks of people, gatekeepers and institutions that established reputation and facilitated art commerce to provide an explication of the English art ecosystem as it existed at the turn of the twentieth century. Viewing England’s art market from the perspective of the working female artist, it reveals how women strategically navigated the systems of gatekeeping that existed in the commercial art world to produce, promote and sell their work and, it follows, establish themselves as professional artists.

England’s art world in the late nineteenth century The second half of the nineteenth century was a time of radical change for both the English art market and the role of women in the public sphere. New developments in popular modes of displaying, promoting and selling pictures revolutionized the business side of artists’ careers from the middle decades of the nineteenth century onwards. Although art dealers and commercial galleries had operated in England since the seventeenth century, by the 1880s they had gained a central place in the nation’s increasingly cosmopolitan art world and played a crucial role in the way artists gained exposure and sales.12 These and other organizational developments within the art world responded to the expansion

Introduction  5

and diversification of the art-buying public that began in the middle decades of the century. This phenomenon disrupted both the patronage-based model of selling art and the hierarchies of materials and subjects that had traditionally regulated market value.13 As artists and sellers increasingly courted middle-class buyers within the crowded picture market, new niches and segments within the market were created that catered to and benefited from the tastes of this consumer group.14 The changes England’s art market experienced in this period reflected, and were a consequence of, a broader shift in the European art world towards what Harrison White and Cynthia White first characterized in 1965 as the ‘dealercritic’ system. Initiated by the Impressionists in France and a response to increased demand for paintings from a growing middle class, this new process for selling art saw both art dealers and art critics assume new and significant roles in the art ecosystem. Art dealers took an approach to selling that focused not on individual paintings but on artists’ careers, building long-term relationships with artists and consciously establishing and promoting their reputations. Both dealers and critics played a role in shaping narratives around artists, which were articulated through exhibition catalogues, art periodicals and solo exhibitions. As the art market and the art press become more interdependent and symbiotic, and artists themselves gained greater recognition, fame and status, the relevance of traditional art institutions, including London’s Royal Academy, lessened and the influence and power of dealer-run commercial galleries increased.15 The emergence of the dealer-critic system occurred within the context of, and contributed to, the professionalization of art as a career in England. This process saw artists adopt some of the structures and characteristics of traditional professions such as the law and the church, as a means of controlling who could claim the title of ‘professional artist’. The professionalizing impulse in England was, in part, a response to the growing presence of amateur artists in England’s art schools and exhibitions.16 Because amateur artists were assumed to produce inferior work, and amateurs were now almost universally understood to be women, these regulating structures also served the purpose of excluding women from professional practice. The rules, memberships and qualifications developed during this period as a means of legitimizing art professionalism can be summarized in a few key characteristics: specialized knowledge derived from a thorough art education; membership of a recognized professional society; possession of an artistic studio suitable for the production, display and promotion of art and validation of the unique expertise, talent and service of

6

Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

the practitioner through patronage, commissions and honours. These criteria aligned with the ‘professional ideal’ that, as Harold Perkin notes, emerged in the mid- to late nineteenth century; the power and prestige that accompanied professionalism derived from its restricted status.17 Taken together, these criteria of artistic professionalism formed an image of a serious, industrious expert, who was committed to the practice of their craft. So while male artists’ professional identity in the late nineteenth-century art world was not reliant on their acceptance by the Royal Academy, the traditional bastion of artistic professionalism, it was tied to and measured by a new kind of institutional recognition, based on critical acclaim, honours and memberships at other professional art societies, patronage, public renown and duties and the newly developing cult of reputation. The commercial success of male artists was largely regarded as a by-product of these forms of professional success and recognition; it was not the most important factor in contributing to that recognition. Women artists were a visible and accepted presence in England’s art ecosystem at the turn of the twentieth century, but they were still largely viewed as a distinct and inferior category within it; their categorization as professionals – that is, serious art practitioners who prioritized their work above all else – was complicated by the gendered modifiers of ‘lady’, ‘feminine’, ‘woman’ and ‘amateur’. For a woman artist, the most objective and convincing way of establishing seriousness, commitment and willingness for hard work and for measuring her worth and talents fairly against ‘her brothers of the brush’ was selling art.18 Working for money took women’s artistic practice decisively out of the realm of the subjective, domestic and private and placed it firmly into the public sphere of art commerce. This book explores how women artists made money and, in consequence, achieved professional status, at a time of dynamic change in the art world. In some ways, the emergence of the dealer-critic system, and the new methods of selling that developed during this period, benefited women artists. Women entered art schools in higher numbers than ever before, and the types of art gendered ‘feminine’ in this period, such as flower painting, still lives and travel landscapes, were suited in size and subject matter to middle-class buyers’ tastes and preferences. Women took full advantage of the new opportunities commercial and dealer-led galleries created and actively participated in the new exhibition societies that proliferated from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, which targeted specific segments and tastes within the art-buying public. By

Introduction  7

participating in England’s expanded art ecosystem, both male and female artists became less dependent on the Royal Academy and its summer exhibitions for sales, recognition and opportunities. However, just as they were at the Royal Academy, women were treated differently to men within the new systems for selling and displaying art. They faced gendered criticism from art writers and critics, and while critical opinion was not the determinant of artists’ sales and success, lack of critical enthusiasm did affect women’s ability to secure high profile solo exhibitions, commissions and patronage, in part because many art dealers doubled as critics and art editors. Because of their gender, women artists were more vulnerable to criticism surrounding the commercialization of art, and their work was more likely to be labelled middlebrow, commercial or sentimental, all terms that weakened their already tenuous claims to artistic legitimacy. Selling art was the most obvious way to prove that legitimacy, but women were less likely to receive prolonged interest from art dealers or to attract sustained patronage from art collectors. With a few notable exceptions, women artists’ work sold for less than male artists’ work, and, as a result, women artists had smaller average incomes than their male contemporaries. The nineteenth century saw (male) artists achieve more wealth and status in society than they ever had before. At the upper echelons of the art world, painters like John Everett Millais and Frederic Leighton earned incomes of between £20,000 and £30,000 a year.19 At the height of his portrait career in the 1920s, William Orpen earned close to £40,000 a year.20 A mid-career male artist who achieved moderate success could earn between £1,000 and £2,000 in the 1880s and 1890s regardless of their reception by critics, putting them in roughly the same income bracket as editors of London newspapers, successful barristers and doctors and senior members of the civil service. George Hicks, for example, earned an annual income of £4,076 in 1882, despite the fact that critics generally derided his paintings.21 This is at a time when a ‘comfortable’ middle-class income was defined as being between £160 and £700 per year; a family living on £800 a year could take a house on a pleasant street in London, keep two servants and afford a yearly holiday.22 Both of these figures were far more than women artists typically earned. In 1901, welfare campaigner Emily Hobhouse estimated that the average woman artist earned £115 a year, positioning her alongside bank clerks, curates, junior reporters and telegraphists just outside of the middle class, if she was solely reliant on this income.23 Earnings were often unstable, and they were dependent on portrait commissions, acceptance and then sales at exhibitions and interest from

8

Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

art dealers. This was also the case for male artists, but the evidence demonstrates that men, as a group, earned more, both on sales of individual pictures and in terms of annual incomes. A comparatively minor male artist such as George Bernard O’Neill, who specialized in sentimental depictions of children and rural life, consistently earned around £1,000 a year. This figure represented the peak of the earning potential for a successful and well-known female painter like Louise Jopling, whose income regularly fluctuated between £300 and £1000 in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.24 The fact that women’s art was generally valued and sold for less money than that of their male contemporaries meant that, to make a living, women were more compelled than men to paint ‘for the market’ in saleable and popular genres. This economic strategy reinforced the widespread view that women were ‘naturally’ suited to these commercial, domestic and ‘middlebrow’ modes rather than to more academic or avant-garde styles, and this circular logic ensured that women then did not receive the patronage and support necessary to experiment in those styles. Even more than male artists, women had to occupy a ‘paradoxical position inside and outside the market’,25 balancing accusations of amateurism with market-derived legitimacy, all while maintaining the feminine decorum expected of women participating in the public sphere.

The state of the field This study is interested in understanding how women’s professional identities were formed and demonstrated, by examining their interactions with the networks of people and institutions that established reputation and professionalism in the English art world. Recent gender and art criticism has questioned the value of professionalism as a tool for organizing art history. As Annmarie Adams and Peta Tancred note, the very idea of professionalism is ‘so profoundly masculinist’ that scholars may ‘enter into male priorities by using this term’.26 In their history of women in the architectural profession, Adams and Tancred conclude that professionalism has some usefulness and importance for understanding women’s experiences in the field, but determine to accord ‘considerable thought to the potential significance (or insignificance) of the term’.27 This useful approach was adopted by Patricia Zakreski and Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi, whose Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century is one of a small number of studies of creative women to focus explicitly

Introduction  9

on remunerative work and professionalism. This collection considers the permeable and complicated boundaries between amateur and professional practice and remunerative work.28 In her previous book Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848-1890, Zakreski examined four types of artistic work that middle-class women were involved in – painting, writing, acting and sewing – to argue that the separate spheres paradigm and the amateur/professional divide were more flexible than is sometimes supposed. Zakreski illustrates how women artists self-fashioned their professional identities to present art, femininity and domesticity as compatible, although her focus is primarily on the working lives of female writers.29 These works fit within a recent development in scholarship on gender and culture in the nineteenth century that looks at the intersection of gender roles and creative labour, in which the study of literature has received more attention than the fine arts.30 Although they focus on the North American context rather than the English, Laura Prieto’s At Home in the Studio and Kirsten Swinth’s Painting Professionals along with Janice Helland’s Professional Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Scotland fit into this category by emphasizing the working lives and conditions of women artists.31 Although the concept of ‘art professionalism’ is at the centre of these texts, and the authors reflect on how understandings of professionalism affected, limited or benefited women, they do not focus on the role of selling art to women’s professionalism or address their interactions with the dealer-critic system in detail in the English context. Professionalism as a framework for studying women artists is questioned in Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970,32 a study that continues the feminist project of revising the values and definitions that have marginalized women’s art in traditional canons and histories of art – in this case, the concept of ‘art professionalism’ itself. Rather than simply broadening conceptions of professionalism to include women, editor Kristina Huneault advocates a rethinking of professionalism as the intellectual framework most suited to women’s art history, in part because professionalism itself is linked to processes of marginalization. ‘The un-theorised acceptance of an evaluative division between amateur and professional forecloses opportunities to understand some of the most significant aspects of women’s art production,’ Huneault argues.33 This impulse to broaden definitions of art practice to include amateur artists, women patrons, art critics and muses has been the most common response by art historians to the gendered challenges and history of professionalism.34 The

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Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

problem with this approach, however, is that the activities and experiences of women artists who made money from their work remain under-represented in histories of nineteenth-century art. The scarcity of archival material and sources pertaining to the business side of women artists’ practice has meant that women are marginalized in the growing field of scholarship on the history of the art market and collecting.35 As a result, there is still an inadequate understanding of how a significant portion of the artist population in England made money, and insufficient recognition of the radical action of the women who engaged with the increasingly commercial and professional socio-economics of the art world.

Methodology and sources This study focuses on the social and economic conditions of women artists’ careers, and it is not an art-historical survey of the work individual women produced or the art movements they participated in. Accordingly, I do not include a catalogue raisonné for the artists discussed or offer analysis pertaining to their aesthetic contribution to the period’s visual culture. This book is also not intended to contribute to the theoretical development of feminist art history. My engagement with women as a category for study owes much to Linda Alcoff ’s critique of two major approaches to feminist theory – cultural feminism and post-structuralist feminism – which remains valuable and relevant thirty years after its first publication.36 Highlighting the shortcomings of both of these approaches – summarized as representing the two extremes of essentialism and nominalism – and drawing on the work of Teresa de Lauretis and Denise Reily, Alcoff posits a third approach that positions the subject as ‘nonessentialised and emergent from a historical experience’,37 thereby safeguarding against the impulse to make universal and non-revisable conclusions about women and ‘the feminine’ that are separate from her external, historical position. Alcoff ’s ‘positional definition’ of the concept of woman highlights the external context and situation of a person and shows how her identity and position is defined ‘relative to a constantly shifting context’ and the objective economic conditions, cultural and political institutions and ideologies of her surrounds.38 Women are not solely and passively defined by these external elements, but they provide a location from which women can interpret and construct their own values and characteristics. Alcoff ’s conclusion that ‘being a “woman” is to take up a position within a moving historical context

Introduction  11

and to be able to choose what we make of this position and how we alter this context’39 is a usefully non-essentialist means of understanding the women artists discussed in this book. Their working experiences were shaped by the social and economic conditions and circumstances of the period, but the ways in which they responded to and changed that context were individual and specific. The challenge of understanding these specificities is made more difficult by the current state of the archive relating to women artists’ professional and commercial interactions. As Jacques Derrida stated, history is shaped by ‘archivization’ – the process by which certain items and memories are preserved for posterity and others are not. This process is influenced by social, political and gendered forces and reflects the values of a particular place and time. It is important to recognize the contingent nature of archival research, because, as Derrida claims, archives produce as much as they record history.40 This is particularly pertinent in the study of women artists, whose activities, experiences and opinions have not traditionally been regarded as worthy of preservation in national and cultural repositories. Most of the artists I refer to are not part of England’s conventional artistic canon and the records available to researchers reflect this status. The direction of this study is determined by the primary material that is available and by recognizing and interpreting the gaps that exist in that material and what those silences mean. Personal and institutional archives, where available, are combined with artists’ own writings in the form of memoirs, autobiographies, published interviews, self-authored articles and letters to gain insight into individual experience. Some of these materials are inherently performative, dedicated to the task of self-fashioning the writer’s public persona, but this mode of writing captures how women wanted to be perceived and the means by which they projected and constructed their professional identities. Short biographies of the women artists discussed throughout the book are provided in an appendix to this volume. The biographies and career paths of these individual artists are not considered in isolation, but in relation to the social and artistic context from which they emerged, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s maxim that each artists’ ‘individual trajectory must be understood as a particular way of traversing the social space’.41 Women’s interest and art periodicals are relied upon to reflect contemporary debates on the nature of artistic professionalism, developments in the business of art and attitudes towards women’s participation in art education and business. Contemporary art criticism is used to help determine how individual women

12

Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

artists were perceived within the art world at a specific time, but critical opinion is not relied upon to understand women’s art or its value. Newly developed online databases and projects have assisted me in charting women’s interactions with the commercial art market. The structure of this book charts women artists’ interactions with eight categories of institutions, actors and spaces that made up the interconnected network of England’s commercial art world. Taken together, these eight chapters explicate how women artists sold their art at this crucial point in the history of the English art market and mount an argument as to the centrality of those selling practices to the formation of women’s professional identities at the turn of the twentieth century. The book’s chapters are divided into two sections. The first three chapters examine the effect of women’s educational, family and studio arrangements on their ability to sell art and their professional status. In broad terms, this section focuses on the inward-facing, material conditions of artists’ lives, and the extent to which these were mediating and determining factors of women’s commercial success. While specialized training was a key criterion for professionalism in the period for male artists, and women campaigned for their right to access equal training to men, I argue that there was not a strong association between the attainment of prestigious educational qualifications and women artists’ market value. The type of art education that had the clearest link to remunerative employment was specialized and apprenticeship-style training, which became more popular for women at the end of the nineteenth century. Women artists’ family and domestic arrangements and workspaces reveal more about how they negotiated and accessed the business side of art. Chapters 2 and 3 examine how women accessed two categories of working spaces: studios that were shared with family or located inside the home, and independent studios that functioned as showrooms and social hubs. At its most fundamental level, a studio was a functional physical space that contained the material artefacts and conditions needed to produce art. Studios’ ancillary purposes – as showrooms, meeting places and entertainment spaces – were viewed by the art-literate public as almost as important as their practical, productive uses, but women’s access to studios was often determined by factors outside of their control, including family arrangements and financial constraints. I argue that studio space dedicated to their own artistic pursuits supported women’s internal self-identification as artistic professionals, and that they were important sites of art commerce. The type of art women could produce, and how they marketed it, and themselves, to potential buyers, was determined in part by their studios,

Introduction  13

which were spaces that endowed credibility and validity in an industry marked by its ambiguous professional boundaries. The book’s second section traces what happened when art works left the relatively private and subjective space of the art studio. It focuses on the public facing aspects and factors of women’s careers, explicating how women navigated the web of exhibition societies, art dealers, publishers, critics, patrons and commercial galleries that made up England’s art ecosystem, and draws conclusions about the strategies women used to navigate these systems of gatekeepers to sell their work. Chapters 4 and 5 examine women’s interactions with the professional societies that conferred and monitored professional status throughout the art world. Chapter 4 argues that traditional professional societies such as the Royal Academy continued to hold value for many women as a marker of establishment acceptance long after their relevance in the art world had been challenged by new exhibiting groups, while Chapter 5 charts women’s interactions with newer, more specialized societies. The gradual liberalization of professional art societies’ policies towards women’s participation did not extend to women’s involvement in the management of those societies, a position that reflected a deeply rooted reluctance to allow women to judge male artists’ work from a position of authority. But societies were, for many women, the most important link to the business side of art and their greatest chance for socially acceptable self-promotion. Their interactions with professional societies did not bring them visibility and legitimacy in the art world that was equal to that of men, but expanding organizational opportunities and their links to art commerce did enable more women to operate as artistic professionals than ever before and to access the artistic infrastructure necessary to be taken seriously as individual participants in Britain’s art ecosystem. The last three chapters examine spaces of art commerce: art dealerships and commercial galleries, commissions and private galleries and publishing houses. For women to sell enough art to make a living they had to participate in the complex and interlocking structures and spaces of the art market and, in turn, have their worth, prestige and professional status legitimized by the actors and mechanisms that operated within the art marketplace. Women were engaged with new developments in the increasingly middle-class focused market for art; many built reputations and earned a livelihood by selling art through the commercial market system and benefited from its business-like approach to art and artists. However, sexual difference remained a disadvantage for women

14

Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

artists attempting to sell art in this period, in part because of the public and mercantile nature of the physical spaces the art market inhabited. Chapter 8 focuses specifically on the women who made a living through commercial and press illustration by examining their interactions with spaces of publishing and advertising. Women benefited hugely from the development of these fields, which were a major feature of England’s popular visual culture from the 1860s onwards. In these occupations, the ‘natural’ characteristics that were seen as inhibiting women’s creativity and success in fine art helped rather than hindered their attainment of consistent artistic work. Engaging in the specialized, consumer-focused work that characterized illustration and accessing the spaces and people that provided this work, including publishers, stationery firms, editors and agents, provided women with a better chance of earning a stable living through artistic practice than perhaps any other avenue to artistic professionalism. This study begins where women’s own negotiations with professionalism started: the art school.

Notes 1 Louise Jopling, ‘On the Education of the Artistic Faculty’, in Education and the Professions, ed. Janet E. Hogarth (London: Chapman and Hall, 1903), 118. 2 Quoted in Paula Gillett, Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 47. 3 ‘Memorial to Lord Leighton’, The Times, 20 February 1902. 4 Leighton quoted in Jeremy Maas, Gambart, Prince of the Victorian Art World (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1975), 173. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 54. 7 Janice Helland, The Studios of Frances and Margaret Macdonald (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 54. 8 Gordon Fyfe, Art, Power and Modernity: English Art Institutions, 1750-1950 (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), 85. 9 Frances Borzello, A World of Our Own: Women as Artists (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 82–3, 126. 10 Quoted in Augustus Hare, The Story of Two Noble Lives Being Memorials of Charlotte, Countess Canning and Louisa Marchioness of Waterford (London: G Allen, 1893), 3:361. 11 Pamela Nunn, ‘The Mid-Victorian Woman Artists: 1850–1879’ (PhD thesis: University College London, 1982), 259.

Introduction  15 12 See Anne Helmreich, ‘Traversing Objects: The London Art Market at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, in Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present, eds. Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplede (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 136–41; Patricia De Montfort, ‘‘The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition’, in Marketing Art in the British Isles, 147–59. 13 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 230–44. 14 Julie F. Codell, ‘From Culture to Cultural Capital: Victorian Artists, John Ruskin and the Political Economy of Art’, in The Political Economy of Art: Making the Nation of Culture, ed. Julie F. Codell (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2008), 27–33. 15 Harrison White and Cynthia White, Canvases and Careers: Institutional Change in the French Painting World (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1965). 16 As Diepveen and Van Laar note, the professionalizing impulse is built on exclusion. Leonard Diepveen and Timothy Van Laar, Artworld Prestige: Arguing Cultural Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 44. 17 Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society (London: Routledge, 1989), 4; Diepveen and Van Laar, Artworld Prestige, 44–5. 18 Codell, The Victorian Artist, 114; John Oldcastle ‘Our Living Artists. Elizabeth Butler’, Magazine of Art (1879): 260. 19 Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 5; William Gaunt, The Pre Raphaelite Tragedy (London: Cape, 1942), 185. 20 Bruce Arnold, Orpen: Mirror to an Age (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), 432. An important note here is that inflation rates during the second half of the nineteenth century were low, and England experienced periods of deflation during the last decades of the nineteenth century. This meant that incomes and purchasing power does not increase dramatically during this period, and fair comparisons can be made between prices and incomes throughout this period. 21 Rosamond Allwood, George Elgar Hicks: Painter of Victorian Life (London: Geffrey Museum, 1983), 52. 22 L.G. Chiozza Money, Riches and Poverty (London: Methuen, 1905), 41–3.; G Colmore, ‘Eight Hundred a Year’, Cornhill Magazine, June 1901. 23 Emily Hobhouse, ‘Women Workers: How They Live, How They Wish to Live’ Nineteenth Century 47 (1900): 473; G. Colmore, ‘One Hundred and Fifty a Year’, Cornhill Magazine, June 1901. 24 Dianne Sachko Macleod Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 240; Cherry Deborah. Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993), 201. 25 Jennifer Ruth, Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2006), 22.

16

Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

26 Annmarie Adams and Peta Tancred, Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 122. 27 Ibid., 123. 28 Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski, ‘Introduction: Artistry and Industry,’ in Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artisty and Industry in Britain eds Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Farnham: Ashgate 2013), 2. 29 Patricia Zakreski, Representing Female Artistic Labour: 1848–1890 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 30 Martin A. Danahay, ‘The Work of Gender in Nineteenth Century Culture’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 43, no. 1 (2010): v. 31 Laura P. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalisation of Women Artists in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Janice Helland, Professional Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Commitment, Friendship and Pleasure (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 32 Janice Anderson and Kristina Huneault, eds. Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012). 33 Huneault, ‘‘Professional as Critical Concept and Historical Process for Women and Art in Canada’ in Rethinking Professionalism, 8. 34 For example, Rosemary O’Day’s response to historians who ‘sought to place women artists in the context of male “professional art” ’ is to look at the activities of amateur women artists practising in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ‘Women and Art’, Huntington Library Quarterly 71, no. 2 (2008): 325. 35 See Niel de Marchi and Hans J van Meigroet, eds. Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe 1450–1750 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006); Jeremy Warren and Adrianna Turpin, eds. Auctions, Agents and Dealers: The Mechanisms of the Art Market, 1660–1830 (Oxford: Beazley Archive, 2008). Stephen Bann, Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, eds. The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). 36 Cultural feminists, Alcoff argues, attempt to correct patriarchal characterizations of women by constructing a counter, female-focused culture by which to re-appraise and re-define women’s activities and characteristics. Cultural feminists do not challenge the process of defining women in essentialist terms; they only challenge the role of men in that defining. Post-structuralist feminist thinkers meanwhile, ‘reject the possibility of defining women as such at all’. By deconstructing the concept of woman, this group argue that all attempts to define or characterize

Introduction  17 women, feminist included, are misguided, as they fail to challenge the discourse of power and the cultural mechanisms that shape human subjectivity and ‘perpetuate sexism’. Linda Alcoff, ‘Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory’, Signs, 13, no. 3 (1988): 407, 415. 37 Ibid., 433. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 435. 40 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16. 41 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Invention of the Artist’s Life’, Yale French Studies, 73 (1987): 87n6.

18

Part One

From Student to Studio

20

1

Training for the Market

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the number of art schools in England increased significantly and rapidly. ‘There are schools of art without end’, marvelled The Girl’s Own Paper in 1892.1 The art writer Tessa Mackenzie found it difficult to produce a catalogue of London art schools in the mid1890s because the art education landscape was constantly changing and growing.2 One reason for the swell in art schools during this period was increased demand from women, who were seeking to gain the skills needed to earn a living through art or to occupy their time in a productive way that was in line with societal expectations of appropriate female behaviour. As this demand was met with the establishment of new schools by both male and female art teachers, the ease with which women could access art training and the choice and variety of schools that were available to them increased. By the 1880s it had never been easier for women to begin their education in fine or illustrative art. The purpose of this chapter is to examine what effect, if any, the different types of education that were available to women by the end of the nineteenth century had on women’s ability to sell their work. I argue that the presence of female amateur students in England’s art schools meant that educational qualifications did not legitimize women artists’ professional intentions, and ongoing gendered bias meant that education did not facilitate women’s entry into art societies or art dealers’ lists, as it had the power to do for male students. Attendance at a prestigious art school did not have a measurable impact on women’s market value. The type of education that was most closely linked with ongoing remuneration was apprenticeship-style training, which prepared women for specific and in-demand roles within the art marketplace.

22

Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

Education and the professional ideal The expansion of educational opportunities for aspiring women artists should have made it easier for women to achieve professional status and to be recognized as serious actors within the art market.3 Education and training was a key pillar in traditional understandings and definitions of professionalism, for both art and other occupations.4 From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards, art academies controlled access to what was considered ‘legitimate’ artistic training, which, H. T. Nicely explains, was a ‘necessary ingredient for professional success’.5 These institutions, which included London’s Royal Academy schools, reorganized methods of art training to establish objective and measurable standards of practice, and they gained a monopoly on the specialized knowledge expected of professional artists. It was through professionally focused, academic training that artists gained access to life study, which was considered central to artists’ education and practice in the nineteenth century. Familiarity with the human body was typically seen as private, mysterious or forbidden by those outside of the field, and so possession of this knowledge formed an important part of artists’ claims to professionalism.6 As properly trained specialists, they were sanctioned to practice the normally taboo activity of observing the human figure and benefit from the technical and artistic advantages that accompanied that study in a way that amateur artists, or those studying outside legitimate educational institutions, could not.7 Theoretical and technical knowledge acquired from a formal and controlled learning environment helped artists secure expert, or ‘serious’ status in the eyes of the public.8 The expanding field of art education in the nineteenth century saw a fragmentation and specialization of art training, a process which lessened the Royal Academy schools’ monopoly on legitimate art education but increased the expectation for artists to acquire specific qualifications to practise in their chosen artistic occupation. The relationship between standardized training and professionalism was appealing to women artists in the mid- to late nineteenth century, who agitated for equal access to all areas of art education. Professional training purported to judge individuals on their talents, in line with ‘empirical, rational and objective standards’.9 If women could access suitable training, and achieve success according to the criteria of that program, it followed that their qualification would be judged and respected on its merits, and the individual would be deemed to hold the necessary specialized knowledge and expertise to practise art professionally. But the educational route to professionalism did not deliver on this objective and meritocratic promise.



Training for the Market

23

The most significant shift in women’s art education in the second half of the nineteenth century was access to life study. Access to the nude model was regarded as a marker of professional study during this period, and women artists in the middle decades of the nineteenth century argued that this educational barrier was preventing them from pursuing the full spectrum of artistic genres and subjects.10 The foundation of the Slade School of Art in 1870 was a turning point for women’s access to the model in an institutional setting; the Slade offered co-educational classes for the study of the half-draped model and a single-sex class for the female nude.11 Throughout the 1880s and 1890s other art schools matched the Slade’s policy on women’s life study. The Royal Academy schools, considered the institution most resistant to pedagogical change, was the last major art school to grant its female students access to the nude model in 1903. With the Slade’s policies in place, and the last major educational barrier to women’s fine art practice seemingly removed, Art Journal claimed that women had achieved open and equal access to the art profession; ‘it thus rests with themselves to prove how far their power matches their aspirations’.12 The gradual liberalization of women’s access to education did little to change long-established critical and popular opinions about women’s ‘natural’ artistic aptitudes and the value and commercial judgements that accompanied them. It also did not act as a bulwark against accusations of incompetence or amateurism. While access to high-level training and life study endowed women with the knowledge and experience they needed to work in traditionally prestigious genres, including history painting and neo-classicism, women who exhibited work in those genres remained susceptible to gendered critiques of their skill. The fact that women could access life study, and still not reach the top ranks of the profession, was seen as a sign of women’s ‘innate’ lack of genius. In 1899, the Saturday Review claimed that the ‘experiment’ of equal education ‘has been tried, girls in vast numbers have studied art under the same conditions as men … and practically nothing has come from it’.13 In 1900, The Athenaeum noted that it was ‘remarkable that the practice of [women] painting nude figures from the life … has not had the effect (which should be its justification as well as its aim) of regulating, elevating and chastening the style and taste of those who devote themselves to it’.14 Not only did art education at an established institution not vouch for women’s seriousness, but any perceived failures in women’s art after they had received that training could be positioned as proof that, even with a thorough education, women still lacked the ‘natural’ creativity and inventive power to create great art. This critical rhetoric demonstrates the deeply embedded ideology of sexual difference that underpinned attitudes towards women artists

24

Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

and their work, which was justified in the language of biological determinism. Education, it was argued, could not ‘supply the place of a kind of inventive gift’.15 One reason for the continued prevalence of ideas of gender difference in art schools was the presence of ‘female accomplishment’ students. The large number of women ‘dilettantes’ enrolled in England’s major art schools encouraged a presumption of amateurism on the part of educators that damaged the reputation and advancement of would-be professionals.16 The multitude of ‘female accomplishment’ students bolstered the art school sector economically; their fees provided livelihoods for the men and women who ran private art schools and worked as tutors, and helped support large, independently funded institutions such as the Royal Female School of Art. Despite this, the gatekeepers of the education establishment derided their presence. The changes to the Royal Academy schools’ admission processes in 1890 were, in part, motivated by a desire to limit the number of women students who were perceived to be amateurish. The reforms decreased the number of stippled drawings applicants submitted and added a requirement for drawings from the life, including a life-sized head and arm. ‘The first advantage [of the reforms] will be the exclusion of the ordinary run of the lady students, as only the best of them will be equal to the new and more painter-like test,’ enthused one commentator.17 Women who passed the new admission test would be allowed access to a partially draped female figure, in an attempt to improve the standards of female students. Although these reforms were justified as a means of improving student standards and adapting to educational developments, they were also a response to the high success rate of female students under the previous system, which some in the art world found disconcerting.18 The Magazine of Art ascribed women’s success in the RA schools to the fact that the application process was suited to their ‘mimetic’ and dexterous artistic temperament. Stippling rewarded artists who were patient and technical rather than creative or vigorous, and so the result was work, ‘which was especially well adapted to female genius, carried in a large majority of women, while of those students whose latter successes did credit to their Academy training, by far the greater proportion were men’.19 The changes to the rules would result, it was hoped, in the admittance of a smaller number of female students, which would be in proportion with their subsequent success rate as artists.20 Among women artists and supporters of female professionalism, the changes to the RA schools’ admission processes were welcomed. The inclusion of life



Training for the Market

25

drawing in the schools’ application prompted new preparatory schools to open, which broadened female students’ access to models. Harold Copping and Percy Short, for example, founded a drawing studio on Great Ormond Street to provide training in life study to women preparing for RA admission. The women’s magazine Myra’s Journal called the development ‘a distinct boon to earnest lady art students’.21 By the second year of the new protocols women applicants were performing as strongly as they had under the previous system; more than half of the successful candidates in 1891 were women.22 These results could have been interpreted as proof of women applicants’ proficiency, regardless of their professional or amateur intentions, but the achievement did not dispel criticism of female hobbyists and their damaging influence on the educational environment. The disparaging views aired in the art press about the presence of women hobbyists in art schools offset the advantages offered to women by the expansion of educational opportunities and access to life study.23 The reputation of accomplishment students frustrated women aspiring to professional status. Artists who struggled to be taken seriously as potential professionals throughout their schooling, including Louise Jopling, Henrietta Rae and Laura Knight, wrote disparagingly of the influence female hobbyists had on general attitudes towards women students. Rae complained that these women lacked perseverance, and only painted ‘prettily and correctly’ – no doubt because they were encouraged to do so – which reflected badly on women artists. She was determined not to be categorized as a ‘woman artist’ because the label connoted diffidence and idleness.24 It was only women who were obliged to study art to earn an income who, Rae argued, had the necessary ‘seriousness’.25 Rae’s biographer suggested that women who achieved success in art did so despite their male-controlled art education, flourishing instead through ‘sheer force of will and talent’.26 So while professionally successful women artists like Rae, Louisa Starr, Helen Allingham and Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale attended the Royal Academy schools, there is no evidence that Academy-trained women artists garnered higher prices for their work or received less gendered commentary from art critics. And while many female Academy students did exhibit at the RA’s annual summer exhibition as students and enjoyed productive relationships with the Academy throughout their careers, there is no strong evidence that Academy-trained women received better treatment at its exhibitions than non-Academy-trained women. From the mid- to the end of the nineteenth century there was a strong correlation between male artists who attended the RA schools and the membership of the RA. In

26

Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

1860, for example, three quarters of the Academy’s membership were former students at the school.27 For aspiring male artists, studying at the RA schools represented institutional legitimization, and it was a gateway to the economic, social and professional benefits of Academy membership.28 As the Academy resisted electing any women to its membership in the nineteenth century, this route was not available to female students. A similar pathway to institutional recognition and economic benefit existed for male students at the Slade School of Art. The Slade acted as a ‘nursery’ for a type of male artist who was interested in new, impressionist-inspired styles and who eschewed the traditionalism of the Royal Academy. The Slade has a close relationship with the New English Art Club (NEAC), founded in 1886 as an alternative exhibition venue to the RA, and many male Slade students found a quick route to NEAC membership. These ‘Slade advantages’ facilitated artist Augustus John’s ‘emergence as a star’, for example.29 Augustus John’s sister, Gwen John, also attended and excelled at the Slade School, and exhibited at NEAC to complimentary reviews. However, her career was not fast-tracked via membership to the society, and her friends, rather than collectors or dealers, usually purchased her early NEAC pictures for low prices. David Fraser Jenkins describes John’s immediate post-Slade career as ‘kind of a secret’; despite receiving the same education as her brother, John’s talent was only recognized by those close to her who were ‘in the know’.30 Despite her lacklustre reception at NEAC and the small prices she commanded for her work, Gwen John was the only student out of the ‘outstanding’ class of women who attended the Slade in the mid-1890s to achieved lasting recognition as a painter. Gwen did not marry and resided in Paris for most of her working life, and she was supported through parts of her career by the patronage of American art collector John Quinn, who was encouraged by Augustus to support and invest in Gwen’s work. Augustus John identified the ‘burdens of domesticity’ as the reason why the talent of so many other women around him ‘came to naught’.31 The Slade’s drawing master Henry Tonks remarked on the same phenomenon in the 1930s: ‘After the twenties their [women’s] good work seems to stop. Possibly their powers have not really diminished, but marriage, children or some other interest has interfered.’32 But, as Hilary Taylor points out, the limited careers of this female Slade generation points to the myriad of challenges that women artists faced after they completed their art education, of which the demands of marriage and family were only one. ‘So great was the unspoken difference between the opportunities and expectations of women



Training for the Market

27

and men, even at the Slade’, Taylor explains, ‘that it would seem that under no circumstances could these women have practised as artists in a way comparable to their male colleagues.’33 It is significant that a number of women who forged respected and commercially successful careers in fine art did not follow the conventional, ‘professionalising’ educational route of attending the RA schools or the Slade but instead relied on private tuition, lessons from family members, private or regional art schools or overseas study to cobble together artistic training. The women who were seen as strong contenders for Royal Academy membership, for example, who included Elizabeth Butler, Louise Jopling, Lucy Kemp-Welch and Ethel Wright, were not Academy educated. Similarly, the first two women to be elected to the Academy in the twentieth century were not educated at the Academy. Annie Swynnerton, elected as an associate of the Royal Academy in 1922, travelled in Rome and Paris to access the life study that was barred to her at the Manchester School of Art. Laura Knight, the first woman granted full Academy membership in 1936, studied at the Nottingham School of Art. Society portraitist and genre painter Louise Jopling received her training at Charles Chaplin’s atelier in Paris, where she benefited from personalized tuition in an atmosphere that was supportive of female talent. She later attended classes at Leigh’s School of Art (later Heatherley’s Art School) to improve her knowledge of life drawing.34 Elizabeth Butler, one of the most successful women artists of the late nineteenth century both in terms of sales and critical attention, also benefited from specialized, atelier-style training in Europe. After two years at the South Kensington schools Butler trained with Giuseppe Bellucci in Florence, and it was during this period that she began gravitating to the military subjects that would bring her commercial success and public renown. Jo Deveraux notes that the rendering of movement visible in Butler’s sketches from this period echoes the vigour, motion and vitality of her later military paintings.35 Ethel Wright, a successful portraitist and regular RA exhibitor, studied privately with artist Seymour Lucas and then attended the Académie Julian in Paris. It was Wright’s view that women gained more from European training than they did from attending large art schools in England; the atmosphere in France was invigorating and simulating and fostered courage and energy in artists, compared to the timid, cautious, slow and safe approach encouraged in England.36 Atelier-style training of a different type benefited Edith, Kate, Mary and Jessica Hayllar, who were taught to paint by their father, the genre artist James Hayllar, in a purpose-built studio at the family’s home, Castle Priory, Berkshire.

28

Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

Their education took the form of a long apprenticeship, during which their father supplied equipment, studio space and supplies as well as technical instruction and mentorship. As all four of the Hayllar sisters were expected to contribute to the family’s income through art, James Hayllar provided a comprehensive education that provided his daughters with proficiency in painting, watercolours and modelling. James’s style of training was highly practical and calculated according to the market conditions and preferences of the day. He encouraged his daughters to paint in a realist style and focus on the domestic, narrative subjects that he also specialized in, because they were ‘suitable for exhibition and readily found purchasers’.37 He ‘never let anything pass that was not quite correct in form or relation to its surroundings’, noted Jessica Hayllar. ‘This intensive means of training the eye enabled the pupil to dispense with months of time spent in waste and paper and paint, and begin to do things worth exhibiting.’38 The practical, commercially orientated training the Hayllar sisters received did not include life study, and the family largely relied on each other to act as models, but this did not hinder their artistic practice. Their paintings, which recorded the gentle rituals of middle-class female domesticity, were praised for their highly finished realist style and attention to light and perspective. And while not considered technically or intellectually challenging, the domestic images that the Hayllar family produced had a broad popular and commercial appeal in late Victorian England. In the first year she exhibited publicly, Edith Hayllar’s small oil painting Crumbs from a Rich Man’s Table sold for £15.15, and the prices the sisters commanded increased as their careers progressed. Jessica Hayllar sold her oil painting Fresh from the Alter for the respectable sum of £210 at the 1890 Royal Academy summer exhibition. The fact that female amateurs could access professional grade art training, including life study, diluted the seriousness of art schools’ professional purpose for women and the specialized knowledge of the human body artists could claim to hold. As a result, admittance to art school and the knowledge of the figure acquired there could not be held up by professional women painters as a marker of their professional credentials or separate them from the highly visible amateur multitude. Although many women who later achieved success as artists attended the Royal Academy schools, the Slade and other respected art schools, and benefited from the technical education and social connections they provided, these educational qualifications themselves did not prove the seriousness of their intent or act as a gateway to the economic benefits of Royal Academy or NEAC membership, as it did for male artists.



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Market-specific training For women like the Hayllar sisters, who wanted or needed to practice in a specific, market-orientated artistic medium or style, such as portrait painting, illustration or fashion drawing, it was often small, specialized schools or apprenticeshipstyle studentships that provided the best professional training and experience. And, as the number of aspiring painters continued to increase in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the quantity of exhibiting groups and galleries competing for the public’s attention and patronage ballooned, young artists of both genders were increasingly encouraged to pursue education in practical and specialized categories of art. It was only when a girl had ‘training for the branch of art which she intends to devote herself ’ that she had ‘good prospects of doing well’, according to the women’s broadsheet Hearth and Home.39 Most female-orientated advice columns and career manuals addressing the artistic professions advised girls to acquire one or two years of general art training at an institution like the Royal Female School of Art or the National Art Training School before seeking out additional instruction in a discipline suited to their skills.40 The number of speciality art schools and apprenticeship programs catering to young women increased significantly in the last decades of the nineteenth century as a response, in part, to new consumer demands and developments in various fields of design. Schools and studios were founded to train students in art forms such as press and fashion illustration, which became increasingly in demand from the 1870s onwards as printing technologies improved. These speciality art schools tended to focus on practical training in remunerative disciplines. Illustrated newspapers, advertising and fashion catalogues created significant demand for technically trained illustrators and engravers, and illustration was regularly recommended to women seeking to support themselves through art. The Girl’s Own Paper, for example, advised readers who required an income ‘not to go in for painting’ and instead to pursue training in fashion or magazine illustration.41 Although fashion illustration, in particular, was generally considered an unambitious and imitative field of art, specialist training and knowledge of current modes and techniques were still demanded of applicants, and the ‘expense of lessons’ was recommended.42 ‘You are quite wrong in imagining that your general knowledge of drawing, however good, is sufficient,’ chided one advice columnist addressing press illustration. Along with the ‘certain style’ demanded of illustrators, familiarity with methods

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Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

of reproduction was often required of artists working in magazines and newspapers.43 Training in these methods was offered at small studio schools such as Robert Santer’s School of Art on High Street Kensington, the Rossetti Studio in Chelsea and Henry Blackburn’s studio on Victoria Street.44 Blackburn, the editor of Pictorial World and owner of London Society magazine, championed the entry of women into illustration and set up his school to provide professional training in pen and ink drawing through a short course of instruction. After ‘one or two months instruction [ladies] should be able to draw sufficiently well to turn their knowledge to account’, noted Hearth and Home, and, because of Blackburn’s own reputation in the industry, editors sought out his pupils for employment and commissions.45 The demand for illustrations for magazines and pictorial newspapers also opened up opportunities for women in wood cutting and engraving. While many other methods of producing and reproducing illustrations existed by the 1890s, engraving and cutting remained popular techniques and were employed by magazines such as Good Words and Cassell’s.46 The City and Guilds of London Institute saw the demand for wood engravers as an opportunity for women’s employment and devised a program to train art students in the discipline. They opened a studio in conjunction with the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women in 1879 under the direction of Mr C Roberts for pupils who had obtained at least a second-grade certificate from the South Kensington Science and Art Department. The school ran an apprenticeship-style program, with students receiving practical tuition and experience over the course of four or five years. After their first year of training, students were allowed to commercialize their work, and could earn up to £1 a week throughout their tenure. The Society for the Employment of Women also helped Roberts establish a secondary workroom for advanced students adjoining his own studio at Londsale Chambers, where students were hired to assist on publication commissions and orders.47 Other classes for wood engraving were taught at the Lambeth School of Art and at Mr Paterson’s studio on Whitefrairs Street.48

A school fit for women An early proponent of engraving as a profession for women was Henry Cole, one of the chief architects of the Government Schools of Design’ ‘South



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Kensington System’. Government Schools of Design were the major source of art education in England from the 1850s until the early twentieth century. The ‘official centre and controlling power’ of the training scheme was the National Art Training School at South Kensington, founded as the Government School of Design in 1838. Although plagued with conflict and controversy in its early years of operation, by the 1880s the National Art Training School and the approximately 150 other schools that were a part of its network had evolved into key players in English art education.49 The Royal Female School of Art (RFSA)50 was one of the eleven branch schools established in London; although women students were allowed to attend classes at the Government School of Art and the other, co-educational branch schools, the RFSA was specifically founded to provide female students of the working and artisan classes with the opportunity to train in design for the purposes of working in commercial or industrial art occupations.51 The RFSA was one of the first big art schools to respond to the growing demand for press illustrators and lithographers. It founded the Chromo Lithographic Art Studio near its premises at Queen Square in 1883 in association with the Society for the Employment of Women. The studio ran an apprenticeship system, providing students with paid work experience and practical training over the course of three years. As it was among the first schools to produce trained art lithographers in England, the studio developed a wide network of business connections and employers, which enabled it to place graduates in paid positions.52 It received applications for lithographic artists from firms throughout England and Scotland and hired graduates itself to produce orders from illustrated journals, publishing houses and artists.53 In 1886, The Englishwoman’s Review noted that the RFSA ‘is not nearly so well-known as it ought to be’, despite the fact that ‘year after year it does a great amount of quiet unobtrusive good by initiating women into those branches of art work by which they may earn a useful and honourable independence’.54 Articles and pamphlets dedicated to women’s employment consistently referenced the RFSA as the premier institution for training in practical and commercial fields of art such as illustration and engraving. The ‘black and white’ class for press illustration was noted for teaching the most up-to-date reproduction technology that would appeal to publishers of ‘modern magazines and books’. Increased consumer demand for other printed products such as Christmas cards, fashion drawing and valentines, regarded as ‘fresh work suitable for women’, influenced the training offered.55

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Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

At an exhibition of work by present and past students of the RFSA in 1893, the success of graduates in the field of illustration was particularly remarked upon: ‘The authorities of the school have given [illustration] attention, and … success has been attained by students.’ Book illustration by Ethel Nisbet and fashion plates from leading magazines were singled out for praise. ‘Although it may be looked upon by some as one of the lower branches of art work, [it] is one which at the present day demands knowledge and training,’ noted one critic. ‘These more utilitarian branches of art work, too, have the merit of being certain sources of income to those who pursue them, after a due time of steady training.’56 Tracking the careers of RFSA prize winners and graduates indicates that a significant proportion made a living through artistic practice and remained active in various parts of the art world throughout the early twentieth century. The nature of the jobs and activities they pursued, however, means that the specifics of their occupations and achievements were not widely recorded in contemporary sources, and this means that their names are often missing from accounts of women artists of this period. The artist, illustrator and engraver Edith Harwood is an example of a RFSA graduate who strung together various jobs and activities related to art throughout the 1890s and 1900s to earn a livelihood. She had a successful tenure at the RFSA in the late 1880s, winning the Duchess of Westminster’s Prize, the Atkinson Award, the Queen’s Gold Medal and a silver medal in the National Art Competitions.57 Upon graduating she found work as an illustrator and collaborated on projects with Charles Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft.58 She wrote articles on art history for The Woman’s Signal and the Illustrated Archaeologist, produced illuminations for Art Journal, wrote and illustrated guidebooks on Italian art and taught short courses on Italian pictures at the National Gallery.59 In 1910 she held a solo exhibition of tempera paintings inspired by early Italian masters at the Dowdeswell Gallery on New Bond Street. An enthusiastic review in The Times eludes to one reason Harwood’s reputation as an artist has failed to endure: ‘We fear that Miss Harwood has fallen on evil days, days of realism and proso,’ the critic noted, ‘but had she worked 40 years ago, with Rossetti and the young Burne-Jones she would have made an impression.’60 There are numerous other examples of RFSA graduates like Harwood, whose practical art education facilitated a stable, if not profitable, career in art that responded to new demands in the art world, such as illustration and art teaching.



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Conclusion Pursuing training in the forms of art in which women were expected to excel was a practical strategy for students aiming to earn a living from art. Schools and apprenticeship programs that offered training in lithography, engraving and illustration enabled women to practise forms of art considered suited to their natural abilities, while also providing the specialized qualifications necessary to protect them against claims of amateurism. These schools also cultivated links with industry and had in-built employment opportunities, which helped facilitate the transition between training and work. For many women painters, however, the achievement of educational bona fides did little to change or dispel gendered attitudes towards women’s artistic capabilities and aptitudes, even after women were granted equal access to life study and the nude model at art schools. Women continued to be discriminated against based on their sex in critical discourse and under-valued in the commercial arena. Although the RA and the Slade remained popular with female students into the early twentieth century, those who did succeed in making a living through fine art came from a variety of educational backgrounds. Private art schools and ateliers, family members and foreign art schools continued to be important sources of art education for women, and artists who derived their education in these ways were not significantly disadvantaged in the pursuit of a professional career. Education was undoubtedly important to the development of women artists’ careers but was not the lynchpin of their professional identity or success.

Notes 1 ‘Answers to Correspondents: Art’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 3 December 1892, 160. 2 Tessa Mackenzie, Art Schools of London (London: Chapman and Hall, 1895), v. 3 Kirsten Swinth posits that art schools were a ‘principal source of professionalisation in art’. Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 12. 4 Jeremy Tanner, ed., Sociology of Art: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), 9. 5 H.T. Nicely, ‘A Door Ajar: The Professional Position of Women Artists’, Art Education 45, no. 2 (1992): 6.

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6 See also Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 29–44. 7 J.A. Jackson, ‘Professions and Professionalisation: Editorial Introduction’, in Professions and Professionalisation, ed. J.A. Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 7. 8 Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 190. 9 Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (Binghamton: Vail-Ballou Press, 1987), 68. 10 The nude model held important symbolic power in the late nineteenth-century art world. Physical access to the model in life class and in artists’ studios was a ‘staple part of the definition of masculinity and artistic identity’, according to Lynda Nead. In its aesthetic form, representations of the nude were classified as the most prestigious form of academic art and were an important emblem in the developing aesthetic language of modernism. Controlling who had access to models was thus, as Pollock states, an ‘instrument in the exercise of power’ that reinforced male artistic authority while marginalizing and devaluing the work of those who did not conform to this professional artistic ideal. See Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Taylor and Francis, 2002), 49; Hana Leaper, ‘Objects of Art: The Dualities of the Artist’s and the Model’s Bodies in Laura Knight’s 1913 “Self Portrait”’. Bodies of Work: Women and the Arts Journal 2 (2009): np; Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 54; Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 60. 11 Edward Poynter, Ten Lectures in Art (London: Chapman and Hall, 1879), 111. 12 ‘Art Work for Women’, Art Journal (May 1872): 130. 13 D.S.M., ‘Women Artists’, Saturday Review 87 (1899): 138. 14 ‘The New Gallery’, The Athenaeum, 6 May 1899, 568–9. This comment was made in reference to the work of Marianne Stokes and Annie Swynnerton. 15 D.S.M., ‘Women Artists’, 139. 16 See Pamela Nunn, ‘Dorothy’s Career and Other Cautionary Tales’, in Crafting the Women Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, eds. Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 167–86. 17 ‘Art in March: Reform of the RA Schools’, Magazine of Art (January 1890): 21. 18 Magazine of Art, who were at the forefront of the campaign to change admission rules, pointed to the success of female students as the reason the entry requirements had to change. ‘Woman, and her Chance as an Artist’, Magazine of Art (January 1888): 25–6.



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19 ‘The New Rules at the Royal Academy Schools’, Magazine of Art (January 1890): 41–2. 20 Ibid. 21 ‘Notes on News’, Myra’s Journal, 1 March 1890, 35. 22 ‘English News’, The Woman’s Herald, 24 January 1891, 217. 23 Paula Gillett, Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 172. 24 Lady R.A.’s, The Pall Mall, Gazette, 16 August 1886, np. 25 Ibid. 26 Arthur Fish, Henrietta Rae (London: Casell and Company, 1905), 10. 27 Helen Valentine, ‘The Royal Academy Schools in the Victorian Period’, in Art in the Age of Queen Victoria (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1999), 40. 28 As well as representing acceptance into England’s art elite, membership of RA had practical benefits. RAs and associates were entitled to exhibit eight works at the annual summer exhibition, and this allowed members to monopolize gallery space at the most visited annual art exhibition in England. 29 David Fraser Jenkins, ‘Gwen John and Augustus John: Mutual Differences’, in Gwen John and Augustus John, eds. David Fraser Jenkins and Chris Stephens (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 16. 30 Ibid., 14. Gwen John’s relationship with NEAC and her art sales are further discussed in Chapters 5 and 7 of this book. 31 Augustus John, ‘Lady Smith [nee Gwendolen Salmond]’, The Times, 1 February 1958, 8. 32 Sybil Vincent, ‘In the Studio of Professor Henry Tonks’, Studio 112 (1937): 86. 33 Hilary Taylor, ‘“If a Young Painter be not Fierce and Arrogant God … Help Him”: Some Women Students at the Slade, c. 1895–9’, Art History 9, no. 2 (1986): 234. 34 Leigh’s School of Art, formally Dickinson’s Academy, was the first school to admit women on equal terms with men. 35 Jo Deveraux, The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England (Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2016), 88. 36 F.M., ‘The Work of Miss Ethel Wright’. Artist 22 (May 1898), 37. 37 Jessica Hayllar, Unpublished Memoir, quoted in Mary Gabrielle Hayllar, ‘Framing the Hayllar Sisters: A Multi-Genre Biography of Four English Victorian Painters’ (PhD thesis: University of New South Wales, 2012), 98. 38 Ibid. 39 ‘Our Employment Bureau: Art as a Remunerative Employment’, Hearth and Home, 24 June 1897, 301. 40 ‘After having gone through a general training a girl should set herself to consider to which branch of art she must devote herself for remunerative purposes’. Ibid. 41 ‘Answers to Correspondents’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 22 October 1898, 63.

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42 ‘Passing Notes’, The Englishwoman’s Review, 15 April 1893, 125; ‘Miscellanea’, Myra’s Journal, 1 May 1891, 29. 43 What to do with our Daughters’, Myra’s Journal, 1 May 1894, 23. 44 ‘Employments for Gentlewomen’, Myra’s Journal, 1 November 1898, 40. 45 ‘Drawing for the Press: A Chat with Mr Henry Blackburn’, Hearth and Home, 18 May 1893, 18. 46 Henry Blackburn, The Art of Illustration (London: WH Allen & Co, 1896), 183. 47 ‘Work for All: Art’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 22 December 1883, 179; ‘Minor Topics: Wood Engraving by Ladies’, Art Journal (February 1890): 62. 48 Mercy Grogon, How a Woman May Earn a Living (London: Cassell and Co, 1883), 56. 49 Lara Kriegal, Grand Designs: Labour, Empire and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 20. 50 The school underwent multiple name changes throughout its lifetime. It was founded as the Female School of Design in 1842 and renamed the Female School of Art in 1851. Upon receiving the Queen’s patronage in 1887 it was known as the Royal Female School of Art. 51 Stuart Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2004), 171–2. 52 A.E.H., ‘An Interview with Miss Gann, Director of the Royal Female School of Art’, The Woman’s Herald, 2 November 1893, 581; ‘Answers to Correspondents’, Hearth and Home, 11 May 1893, 823. 53 ‘Record of Events’, The Englishwoman’s Review, 15 July 1893, 170; ‘Women’s Employments’, The Woman at Home, 1 (1894): 78; ‘Royal Female School of Art’, The Woman’s Signal, 2 February 1899, 75. 54 ‘Art III – Female School of Art’, The Englishwoman’s Review, 15 March 1886, 102. 55 The Girl’s Own Paper advised its readers that they would be ‘well prepared’ to design Christmas cards or find employment at a stationery manufacturer by attending the RFSA. ‘Answers to Correspondents: Painting Cards’, 3 June 1899, 575; ‘At the Royal Female School of Art, Queen Square, there are good teachers of fashion drawing’. ‘Answers to Correspondents: Designing’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 10 September 1898, 799. 56 ‘Passing Notes’, The Englishwoman’s Review, 15 April 1893, 125. 57 ‘The Royal Female School of Art’, The Morning Post, 22 December 1887, 3; ‘Royal Female School of Art’, The Standard, 30 January 1890, 3; ‘Royal Female School of Art’, Daily News, 28 October 1889, np. 58 ‘Fine Art Gossip’, The Athenaeum, 11 October 1902, 493; Harwood illustrated C.R. Ashbee’s The Masque of the Edwards of England (1902) and provided illuminations and decorative initials for Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Flower and the Leaf (1902)



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printed by Ashbee’s Essex House Press. Alan Crawford, C.R. Ashbee: Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 480. 59 ‘Lectures’, Woman’s Signal, 20 December 1894, 395. Examples of journalistic work include: Edith Harwood, ‘Studies from Pictures of Women in the National Gallery’, Woman’s Signal, 18 July 1895, 44; The Reliquary and Illustrated Archaeologist 2 (1896): 33–58. R.E.D. Sketchley, ‘The Art of the Scribe’, Art Journal (December 1907): 361. 60 ‘Art Exhibitions’, The Times, 12 November 1910, 6.

2

Commerce and Family in the Home Studio

In 1931, Eileen Mayo, artist and model to Laura Knight and Dod Proctor, read Virginia Woolf ’s newly published essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’. In it, Woolf posits that women’s ability to pursue creative professions and attain intellectual freedom depended on their material circumstances. ‘From the beginning of time’, she argues, women have lacked independent sources of income and privacy, the two conditions necessary to achieve creative inspiration, originality and genius. What women needed was an independent and secure income and a space of their own to devote solely to their craft; ‘five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate’, Woolf argued, ‘a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself ’.1 The essay’s sentiments resonated with Mayo. Her own aspiration to paint professionally was realized only when she acquired a private, quiet space that was dedicated to her own interests and possessions. ‘Years ago, I had no idea of succeeding as a painter,’ Mayo wrote, ‘but given the inspiration and the quiet of my own room, I painted my first picture. The great writers and painters of this age are unanimous in agreeing that they owe their most inspired works to being alone. From my own experience, I know it to be true.’2 Mayo’s treatise on the value of space and privacy reflected a long tradition of women artists negotiating the spatial and material parameters of their domestic, marital and economic circumstances to achieve the professional artistic ideal: an independent studio devoted to the production, display and sale of their art. This ideal was a potent social force in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, when studios were at the centre of artistic culture. Their ancillary purposes – as showrooms, meeting places and entertainment spaces – were viewed by the artliterate public and by artists themselves as almost as important as their practical productive use. For women, dogged by the stereotype of ‘Sunday painter’ amateurism, studio access was even more important in establishing their professional credentials to the wider artistic community. Just as importantly, studio space dedicated to their own artistic pursuits supported women’s self-



Commerce and Family in the Home Studio

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identification as artistic professionals. It was there where her artistic subjectivities were formed and her sense of personal artistic worth was validated through the creation of creatively fulfilling and recognized work. These factors meant that there was an important link between the provision of studio space, artists’ familial relationships and domestic responsibilities and women’s capacity to make money from their art. At its most fundamental level, a studio was a functional physical space that contained the material artefacts and conditions needed to produce art – light, space to pose models and props, easels, paints and brushes. The building blocks of an artistic career were contained in this one productive space. For illustrators, studios fulfilled both a design and manufacturing purpose, housing the equipment and materials needed for the production process. Traditionally, the notion of ‘creative and artistic genius’ had been gendered as male. The studio, the space that fostered that creative output, was similarly viewed as a place of male artistic activity and ambition that was crucial in the pursuit of artistic activity. Possession of a studio went some way to situate women in this culturally recognized artistic tradition. A marker of seriousness, professionalism and industry, it was a space that produced and fostered women’s occupational identities, endowing credibility and validity in an industry marked by its ambiguous professional boundaries. Most importantly, studios facilitated the economic interactions necessary to legitimize women’s professionalism. Where a woman’s studio was located, and with whom she shared it, was significant. For many women, decisions over the type of studio they could access and its locality were influenced or determined by family members, particularly fathers, husbands or sisters who were also involved in artistic production. Although the involvement of parents and spouses in a woman’s artistic career was commonly the catalyst for their pursuit and success in the profession, the power dynamics within these relationships also led to challenges that were specific to the female artistic experience, particularly when it came to the provision of studio space. Home studios, or those shared with husbands or parents, risked making a woman’s professionalism invisible, particularly when the barrier between studio space and domestic space was blended and permeable. The acquisition and maintenance of an external studio signalled financial and social self-sufficiency and a willingness to sacrifice for the sake of artistic independence. Buying or renting a studio demonstrated than an artist had the capacity to support themselves through their art and had received validation of their talents through

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Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

the art market. The use of home or family studios could undermine a woman’s commitment to her craft in the eyes of the wider art community. While working from studios within the home was common among male artists, the evidence suggests that domestic space was used and prioritized differently for male artists compared to female artists. When male and female artists shared a home, the ‘primary space for artistic practice’ was typically allocated to the male ‘head of household’, while ‘women’s entitlement to space for art work … would not be guaranteed’.3 Historians and gender theorists have examined what occurs when divisions of public and private space are tested in the home environment.4 The gendered binary of public and private spheres as a lens through which to understand nineteenth-century spatial dynamics has been challenged and scrutinized, returned to and reinforced. The home and family studio is of particular relevance to these discussions because it represents a space where public and private functions intersect and where women could produce new and distinct identities and subjectivities. Home studios take Haar and Reed’s assertion that women’s identities were embedded within the ‘normative structure of the home’ and challenge the definition of what ‘home’ is in terms of the values, conventions, activities and social relations that are inscribed within its walls.5 But while the location of women’s studios, and the spatial, gender and power implications of that location, are meaningful, so too are the familial arrangements that supported, withheld and provided studios and the relationships that played out within their walls. It was these relationships that often facilitated or restricted women’s ability to use their studios to produce saleable art. The power hierarchies that formed within home and family studios were complex and variable, reflecting the diversity of experiences encountered by women artists. For some, studios located in the home of a father or husband, or shared with a spouse or relative, remained patriarchal spaces, dominated by the personality of the male artist, whose reputation and commercial success typically exceeded that of his female counterpart. Even when they too identified as professional artists, the women of these studios were often marginalized within the space, operating in their physical and psychic periphery. This dynamic, particularly when experienced by husband and wife, raised questions of ownership and attribution of female artistic property, both legally and creatively. This issue was significant before the reform of English divorce laws in the 1850s and the passing of the Married Women’s Property Acts in the late nineteenth century.



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However, the division of labour and the power hierarchies that existed within artistic marriages and families were not always conventionally gendered and, when family members accepted and supported a woman’s desire to work professionally, or relied on her income, spouses and parents could assist a woman’s access to studio space. There were instances too when the home/family studio was a refuge from external social expectations and pressures, particularly for unmarried women, who often chose to reside in the family home even when other opportunities existed. Home studios not only offered women a space to practise art that was untarnished by questions of propriety but also provided many of the artistic provisions and accoutrements they required, including, perhaps most importantly, an array of accessible models in the form of family members and household staff. Even if domestic responsibilities or expectations sometimes inhibited their work, many women in the early or even later stages of their professional practice found working within the family home an economic imperative and the material support of family useful in their pursuit of art sales. While there is a tradition in art history of disassociating the production of art from its domestic and family context,6 it is clear that women artists’ domestic and childcare arrangements and familial relationships had an effect on the time and attention they could devote to art, the types of art they could produce and, it follows, to their commercial viability. Studying women’s familial, domestic and spatial relationships is crucial to understanding their economic strategies and the ways they engaged, or did not engage, with the art market.

Married life in the studio When artist Sylvia Gosse was presented with the work of a young, promising female artist, the first question she asked was, ‘Is she married?’ continuing, ‘What a waste of a good talent like this, to go and get married. It does me wild!’ Gosse believed that the best way for a woman artist to be successful was for her to be completely unencumbered; she decided early in her career to live alone and never marry.7 Gosse wanted to work independently and have the autonomy and the time to devote her life to painting. For practical or ideological reasons, marriage ended or circumscribed the artistic careers of many women artists in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Sylvia’s own mother, Ellen Epps, found her artistic pursuits marginalized after her marriage to the critic Edward Gosse. Ellen, who had trained at the studio of Ford Madox Brown and

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Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

was acquainted with the Pre-Raphaelite circle, had been wary of marriage. She wanted to pursue art seriously, and it was only when Gosse promised that she ‘could paint everyday’ that she accepted his proposal.8 While Ellen did continue to paint while pregnant with Sylvia and exhibited landscapes sporadically throughout the 1880s, her earlier aspirations as a painter were not realized, even though she married an enlightened and sympathetic husband and was involved in an artistic, intellectual milieu. The artist Louisa Starr observed, ‘When a [married] woman has a profession, it means in most case that she has two professions.’9 For a woman artist, marriage meant sacrificing two factors essential for artistic practice: autonomy and time. Decisions over where she lived and how she spent her day were influenced or determined by her husband and children. Marital responsibilities and the running of a household served as constant interruptions to artistic work. ‘In marrying, Lucy had not contemplated giving up her profession as a painter for by that time she regarded it as a profession,’10 wrote William Rossetti of his wife Lucy Madox Brown, who had trained with Ellen Epps in her father’s studio.11 After our marriage she tried more than once to set resolutely to work again but the cares of a growing family, delicate health and a thousand constant interruptions … always impeded her and very much to her disappointment and vexation she did not succeed in producing any more work adapted for exhibition.12

One of the primary reasons women found it difficult to practice art professionally after marriage was access to studio space. Married women were most likely to set up studios within their homes. Renting an independent workspace elsewhere solely for practising art was expensive and inconvenient when running a home and family, and married women were unable to purchase property or enter rental contracts until 1882. Propriety and social convention were also concerns. As a result, most married women worked either from a designated room in her marital home converted to fit the purposes of a studio or, if space or economy compelled her, from a room in the house shared with another domestic purpose, most commonly the drawing or morning room. This latter workspace was under constant threat of encroachment from domestic duties. In this locality, the mental and physical barrier between studio space and domestic space was fragile; there were no doors or locks to separate the artist from members of her family and household or to guard her from disruptions. Even when women artists occupied designated studio spaces within their homes, it often proved difficult to distance domestic distractions. ‘Like most women, Mrs. Alma-Tadema works



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with interruptions,’ noted Alice Meynell in her profile of the artist, nonchalantly glossing over the impact of these disturbances on Laura Alma-Tadema’s work.13 Laura Alma-Tadema, who was the sister of Ellen Epps, did have her own studio within the 66-room ‘studio palace’ she shared with Lawrence AlmaTadema in St John’s Wood, but Laura’s workspace was much smaller than her husband’s studio, which was on the first floor of the house, featured a vaulted ceiling and received the best light. Lawrence’s neo-classical history paintings were typically larger in scale and always valued more highly than Laura’s Dutchinspired domestic scenes, which were ‘charming and clever studies of little children’, compared with the ‘courageous’, ‘magnificent’ and ‘luminous’ work of the ‘master’, Lawrence.14 The scale of the couple’s studios was reflected in the scale, and the value attributed to their work, and while Lawrence claimed that theirs was a ‘worker’s house’, in which he, his wife and his daughter Anna, also an artist, were all ‘busy people’, census records reveal that the Alma-Tadema family did not employ more domestic staff than households of artists’ in which the wives and daughters were not employed.15 As Lara Perry notes, these arrangements indicate that ‘the women artists were normally bearing what is now known as the “double burden” of paid work and domestic labour’, and this ‘double burden’ had an effect on the time women could devote to producing work and the types of work they could produce.16 There were women artists who successfully pursued professional artistic careers from more modest domestic workspaces than that of Laura AlmaTadema. Louisa Starr and Louise Jopling used their drawing rooms as studios early in their careers, although Starr’s daughter Estella Canziani recorded her mother’s joy at later acquiring her dream studio home in Kensington Palace Gardens in 1886.17 In both locations Starr’s artistic work was privileged over domestic responsibilities, and Estella was taught never to interrupt her mother’s work. ‘I also grew up to realise that my mother was a very busy professional women, always occupied by her portraits, that work of any kind must not be interrupted, except out of necessity.’18 However, for women whose families were less accommodating of their professional ambitions, homebased workspaces undermined their artistic independence, ownership and legitimacy. As Patricia Zakreski notes, working from a domestic setting like the drawing room placed the art women produced ‘under the control of the male head of household’, a condition under which it was difficult for female creativity to thrive.19 Furthermore, without the external, material markers of a traditional studio to situate them in an obvious cultural tradition, women

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had to work harder to validate their artistic identity to themselves and to be acknowledged by others as artistic professionals. For a drawing-room studio to succeed, the artist’s family and spouse had to not only support and endorse her artistic ambitions but also to respect the mental and physical parameters of her workspace. For some women, the shift to a marital home had immediate and tangible effects on the type of art they could produce and, it follows, their commercial ambitions and viability. Mary Fraser Tytler, for example, gave up painting after her marriages to the much older and more established artist G. F. Watts. Mary trained in fine art and sculpture at the National Art Training School and at the Slade School in the 1870s. She had ambitions to become a portrait painter and, by the mid-1880s, was dividing her time between two studios, one in the house she shared with her mother in Bloomfield Place, Pimlico, and the other at her family’s home in Sanquhar, Scotland.20 Photographs of the latter show a space of cosy artistic industry; the walls are covered with paintings and drawings, and more canvasses are propped against the wall. Two large easels display works in progress, while a nearby table is cluttered with flowers, paints and canisters crammed tight with brushes. At the Pimlico studio Mary arranged for local children to pose as models.21 Although she came from a generation and social class that discouraged female professionalism in any industry, Mary had both the training and the studios of a professional artist. As a single woman, she had access to two designated spaces where she could produce art uninterrupted, and, importantly, these rooms contained the external markers of serious artistic industry – visiting models, an array of materials and accoutrements and room to set up large canvasses and display work for visitors and patrons. The possession of such a studio was a meaningful display of commitment and prioritization of artistic practice.22 Becoming a wife, particularly to an artist of the fame and status of G. F. Watts, put at risk Mary’s access to this independent studio space and the selfdirected, uninterrupted art practice that it provided. Watts initially acted as a mentor to Mary, a role he assumed for many young artists, and she admired both the man and his work. The pair visited each other’s studios, and Watts advised Mary on her art as his student. ‘These opportunities were to me priceless,’ she recalled.23 Following their marriage in 1886, Mary moved to Little Holland House, the studio home Watts had commissioned as a semi-public ‘palace of art’ at the centre of Kensington’s artistic community.24 It was a daunting change for Mary, and although she revered Watts, she worried that acting as his aide



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and companion would halt her own artistic development. In a letter written just before their wedding, Watts responded to her concerns: Whether or not you will ever come to help me with my work … [and] whether or not you will be able to go on with your painting in the life that may be yours I am extremely regretful to think you are losing any chance of improvement.25

To allay her fears, Watts ordered that one of his studios, the ‘iron house’, be altered for her use, and these renovations took place in the months before their marriage.26 Here, Mary worked on gesso panels to decorate a new reading nook that Watts had built in the house, but her time in the studio was frequently interrupted by Watts giving or seeking advice, offering suggestions and asking for her help elsewhere in the house. Women artists and commentators largely accepted such disruptions as a feature of married life. However, in her diary, Mary expressed frustration at her new studio arrangement. ‘Instead of my work, I focus on him. It will take me a little while yet to get over being under the shadow of his great work.’27 This knowledge that her art would always stand ‘under the shadow’ of her husband’s likely contributed to Mary giving up painting after her marriage. Her art production from this point onwards took the form of decorative art, a field in which she would not be compared to Watts, or seen as competing with him for sales, and which she could use to personalize their home. Decorative and applied art were more flexible pursuits than painting, able to withstand interruptions from Watts and his many visitors and synchronize with the rigid schedule around which his day revolved.28 But although she had a studio, and access to art and design luminaries including Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Crane for advice and inspiration, Mary felt stifled by Little Holland House and her art suffered.29 The house was built to reflect Watts’s artistic identity and as a monument to his success and social status. In it, Mary’s artistic identity was effaced, and her nascent professionalism obscured by the myriad spaces, visitors and rituals dedicated to the ‘Watts industry’. In 1891, the pair began construction on Limnerslease, a new house in Compton, Surrey. Mary wanted a break from the formality and conspicuousness of their semi-public London residence, and to have a home that reflected both their artistic tastes and identities. She played a meaningful role in planning Limnerslease and in the design of its interiors, which reflected her growing interest in symbolist pattern and Celtic mythology. Mary’s designs for the house’s entrance hall and sitting room asserted her presence as an artist-inresidence, instant reminders that this house was the home of two artists, not just

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one. ‘At every turn we find signs not only of Mrs Watts’s taste but of her inventive facilities and artistic skills,’ a contemporary noted.30 ‘Mr Watts himself, when he points the details of the design out to you, [says], “It is my wife’s work. She designed it all and she did all the actual work.”’31 Like at Little Holland House, however, Limnerslease revolved around Watts’s studio, a ‘lofty and commodious’ space that remained a shrine for journalists, patrons and art lovers.32 ‘Studio tourism’ was at its height in the late nineteenth century, and the increased fame and wealth of artists like Watts attracted crowds of curious visitors to the homes of the artistic elite.33 While Watts’s studio was the hub of the house, Mary also ensured that she had a space of her own for the production of art. She co-opted the room opposite Watts’s studio, a high-ceilinged open space initially marked as a billiards room on the house’s plans. This was her daily working space, where she designed, made and decorated the panelling for the house’s front rooms.34 Most significantly, this was the space Mary used to lay the foundations for her move back into professional, commercial artistic practice. Before she was married, Mary taught pottery classes associated with the Home Arts and Industries Association (HAIA) at St Jude’s Whitechapel. HAIA was an organization dedicated to cultural philanthropy; it organized an extensive network of art and craft classes throughout the country, with the aim of reintroducing and maintaining traditional craft skills and making use of the leisure time of the working classes. Mary was an active organizer within the HAIA throughout her marriage and, after settling at Limnerslease, she initiated her own pottery class for local residents, using her own studio as the classroom.35 Initially established to provide terracotta tiles for the Watts Mortuary Chapel, a building designed and built by Mary on the Limnerslease estate, the pottery classes grew into the Compton Potters Art Guild, a professional collective. With Mary at the helm, the Guild diversified its products to include tombstones, sundials and garden pots, which were sold to private clients and through department stores like Liberty’s.36 As was the case with many nineteenth-century charitable organizations, the Home Arts movement’s philanthropic ambitions made it an acceptable pursuit for middle- and upper-class women. Under its guise, and by using spaces within the domestic sphere, Mary could move her artistic pursuits back into the commercial realm. At Limnerslease, Mary Watts asserted her own artistic identity on a shared creative and social space by manipulating the domestic spaces that were available to her, bending their purpose to suit her own artistic pursuits. Although Mary fits the traditional, gendered artist/designer power hierarchy and was



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circumscribed by the responsibilities of marriage, she negotiated the spatial and power dynamics of her marital life to find a means of making and selling art that did not compromise her role as wife and companion. But Mary’s marriage, and the studio and domestic arrangements that accompanied it, did significantly alter the types of art she produced. The experiences of Mary Watts illustrates that entering into an artistic marriage was no guarantee of a stable work environment amenable to professional practice. The duties that accompanied marriage to an established and prolific artist and the spatial restrictions of the marital home were what compelled her to practice decorative art, perceived as more suitable to the domestic sphere, instead of painting or illustration. Applied design was traditionally seen as a ‘lesser’ art compared to painting, supposedly requiring less training, concentration and creativity, and women like Mary may also have adopted these disciplines so as not to be seen as challenging or competing with their more established partners. The practice of design was tantamount to an admittance of their inferior artistic skill, to the extent that they would not inhabit the same occupational realm as their spouses. It was rarer for a female fine artist to marry a male designer, but when this did occur the spatial provisions and arrangements concerning studios differed. The painter Evelyn Pickering married William De Morgan, a potter associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, in 1887. She had already struggled against the expectations of her parents to acquire a studio. Her mother, Anna-Maria Stanhope Spencer, studied drawing as a child and was a skilled sketch artist, but her view on art reflected both her class and generation – it was merely one of the many accomplishments a lady should possess. She discouraged the seriousness of Evelyn’s artistic ambitions, claiming once, ‘I want a daughter, not an artist!’37 As a teenager Evelyn practised her art in secret, concealing her paints and canvas with a piece of cloth when she left her bedroom and pasting paper over the gaps in the doorway to mask the smell of paint. Although her parents later employed a drawing master for Evelyn and allowed her to attend the Slade, she continued to chafe under the restrictions of domestic life while working from home. She resented the daily schedule of social calls and long, ceremonial meals and the time these obligations took away from her work. ‘This enforced idleness is insupportable,’ she wrote in her diary.38 Her parents’ home did not contain a room with suitable light for painting, and she was not allowed to bring models there, even if she had been able to pay them. She wanted her own studio outside of the family home, a space that would allow her to devote her time solely to art.

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Evelyn achieved this goal in part after the death of her father in 1877. After this time, her mother and sister spent most of the year in Yorkshire, leaving Evelyn alone at the family’s new home in Bryanston Square. Her friend, the novelist Vernon Lee, recalls visiting her there: In the evening Mary and I went to Evelyn Pickering. She has a mother and sisters, but, for all one sees, appears to be all alone in a huge handsome house in Bryanston Square. … She had a very fine thing in the studio. We sat on perch chairs (the things models sit on) and talked for a long time.39

Evelyn relished the independence of her life at Byranston Square. She was already achieving professional success, exhibiting work at the newly opened Grosvenor Gallery and nurturing contacts and networks within the artistic community. After prolonged disagreements with her parents over their expectations for her future, she appears to have convinced her family to accept her rejection of a conventional upper-middle-class lifestyle. Plans for Evelyn to be presented at court, traditionally a first step towards finding a suitable husband, were abandoned on her passionate declaration; ‘No one shall drag me out with a halter round my neck to sell me!’40 Even when her family were in residence at Byranston Square, Evelyn carried out an independent schedule based around the rooms she had appropriated as her own studio suite: Evelyn used the middle drawing room as her studio and the yellow one in a very bare state as her sort of sitting room. … Mamma and I lived in the morning room in a very uncomfortable state. Afterwards we moved into the front room which was much better. … There we lived entirely, the others joined us at meals and we sat alone there in-between. I saw little of the others. … One never quite knew with [Evelyn] what was coming next.41

Soon, Evelyn achieved even greater independence by moving into a set of rooms above a studio in Chelsea. She was beginning to earn income from commissions and the sale of paintings, which were hung at exhibitions at the Grosvenor Gallery, the Dudley Gallery, the Fine Art Society and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Evelyn understood the importance of selling art to her professional viability as well as to her spatial self-sufficiency, noting that ‘money meant freedom, and freedom meant greater power to work’.42 Her industriousness became her trademark; ‘She has astonishing physical endurance and power of work, starting to paint early in the morning and going on swiftly and surely throughout the day’ remarked May Morris.43 This demanding schedule was made possible by her living arrangements; she lived adjacent to a designated, independent



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studio and, by living alone, was free of the responsibilities of family, entertaining and housekeeping. Her life finally resembled the professional artistic ideal, displaying the sacrifice, commitment and independence that artistic credibility was based on. Evelyn’s studio arrangements defined her firstly not as a daughter or a woman but foremost as an artist. In an occupation such as art, with its amorphous parameters and criteria for success and professionalism, a lifestyle grounded in this ‘historically established studio ideal’ helped prove an artist’s validity in the eyes of the artistic community.44 Having succeeded in establishing herself as a professional art practitioner through her studio, sales and exhibitions, Evelyn had much to lose from marriage. To her family, the idea that she would wed, when ‘her sole romance was art’ seemed ‘too far-fetched for credence’.45 In William De Morgan, however, Evelyn believed she had found someone as devoted to art making as herself. She judged his character over many years; they met in 1883, were engaged in 1885 and married in 1887, and during this time he actively supported her artistic pursuits. They held joint exhibitions in the ballroom of William’s rented home on Great Marlborough Street, showing her paintings and his pottery to friends and clients over tea and refreshments. Once married, Evelyn’s working arrangements were central to the organization of their new home, ‘The Vale’ in Chelsea. Part of the garden was demolished to make room for a new studio, custom-built for Evelyn’s use.46 Much of Evelyn’s income from sales and commissions went to the upkeep of William’s pottery business, which, though artistically acclaimed, was an acknowledged failure economically.47 Theirs was a marriage that subverted the normative gendering of fine and applied art, as well as many of the conventional spatial and financial dynamics expected even in artistic marriages. Evelyn’s studio requirements were provided for in the De Morgan residences, including the Florence apartment where they lived for part of each year, and the income these studios generated supported her husband’s design workshops. Although William is recorded as having loved children,48 the pair remained childless. Whether this was a conscious choice on the part of the couple is unknown, but the arrangement doubtlessly contributed to the maintenance of Evelyn’s artistic career. While some women artists, including Henrietta Ward, illustrator and watercolourist Helen Allingham and portraitist Louise Jopling, succeeded in combining motherhood with professional art practice, it was recognized as a barrier to the serious pursuit of art, particularly when a family’s finances did not allow for sufficient household support. Nurses were a common feature of artistic households who could afford them; both Allingham and Jopling

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employed nurses to care for their young children and Jopling periodically sent her children away from London so she could focus her attention on her work.49 Childcare had been Jopling’s first priority when she began to receive income from her painting, and she employed ‘a little daily nursemaid to take my two little boys out walking’.50 After separating from her first husband in 1871, Jopling sent her children to board in the country while she completed her Royal Academy pictures in a hired, furnished studio. Jopling was interested in landscape painting, but her domestic responsibilities and family arrangements compelled her to paint saleable works, such as portraits and genre pictures, that could be produced from a studio in London. Looking back at this period of her life in her memoirs, Jopling wrote, ‘I had to follow the path that gave me the wherewithal to pay the grocer, the butcher, and the baker.’51 Henrietta Ward, who was known later in her career as a painter of historical genre scenes, also spoke of the impact of her children on the type of art she produced. She married history painter Edward Ward at age sixteen and noted that, as a young mother, ‘I had not specialized, at least not to any great extent – in historical painting, confining myself instead to domestic subjects, which was surely natural, as all my leisure moments were of necessity spent looking after my children’.52 Ward’s portraits of children were popular; her The First Step sold at the 1860 Royal Academy summer exhibition for £75, and, at age twentyfive, she was commissioned by Queen Victoria to paint the royal children.53 Her choice of genre at this stage in her career did not reflect her passion for historical painting, but it was strategic, both economically and domestically. Ward could paint her ‘fancy portraits’ from her home studio, using her own children as models, and the pictures had a ready market, aided by the fact that domestic scenes and children’s portraiture were genres in which women were expected to excel. Even while working within these parameters, Ward needed to impose firm boundaries between her professional and domestic roles when working from home. ‘My work required great concentration and orders were strictly enforced that I was not to be disturbed during certain hours of the day,’ she wrote. ‘But there were expectations; I was occasionally confronted by an alarmed servant coming to tell me of a domestic tragedy, some knotty point that could only be solved by the mistress of the house.’54 Marriage to a fellow artist did not guarantee the provision of a studio, but in most cases, it ensured that a woman was not isolated, physically and psychically, from artistic society. Each woman’s experience negotiating studio space within an artistic marriage differed, according to her unique financial, social and



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artistic circumstances. The miniaturist and animal painter Gertrude Massey, for example, achieved greater commercial success than her artist husband Henry, and her busy portrait business required an inviting and functional studio space. For this reason, Gertrude worked in a dedicated studio within the couple’s home in St John’s Wood, which befitted, as Andrew Sim notes, ‘her status as portrait painter to canine royalty’, and Henry worked in a converted shed in the garden.55

The family studio as community hub When artistic marriages were successful they had the power to generate communities of their own, attracting fellow artists and designers to places that became geographical and factional centres. Elizabeth and Stanhope Forbes’s home formed the heart of the artists’ community at Newlyn, Cornwall. They took a parental interest in the activities of Newlyn artists, visiting their studios and organizing social and recreational activities to stimulate a sense of community. ‘Stan and I spent the morning visiting the different Newlyn studios,’ Elizabeth wrote to her mother-in-law, commenting on each artist’s progress individually.56 Their school attracted more artists to the area, including Laura and Harold Knight, and Dod Shaw and Ernest Proctor, couples to whom the Forbes were a model of successful artistic marriage. Stanhope Forbes was the more famous of the pair, and the design of their Newlyn home was built to his specifications, ‘every detail having been carefully considered and decided upon by himself in the first place’.57 He had a nervous, highly strung temperament, and Elizabeth often assumed the role of comforter and soother, interrupting her own work to provide ‘the encouraging stimulus’ he needed.58 Like Mary Watts, Elizabeth’s own painting schedule was built around her husband’s demands; at four in the afternoon, for example, she always paused to provide Stanhope his afternoon tea.59 However, although Elizabeth continued to fulfil this ‘feminine’ role of selfsacrificing nurturer, spatially and socially her marriage provided her with a practical professional working environment. When she was not painting out of doors, Elizabeth had her own studio in the garden, half covered by a drooping magenta fuchsia. It was plainly decorated with whitewashed walls and a raftered ceiling, showing few concessions to aestheticism or luxury. The walls were thickly hung with charcoal drawings, preliminary studies for oil paintings, and the space had the atmosphere of a workroom, a place where ‘art is seriously

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and earnestly pursued’.60 In keeping with her preference for painting en plein air, Elizabeth also had a portable studio from which she could take full advantage of the Newlyn landscapes. This small wooden hut offered protection from weather and wind and provided space to store equipment and paint while away from home. The hut was planted on cliffs or in meadows to suit the subject of a painting; for the 1903 Royal Academy picture On a Fine Day, the studio was moved to a field three miles from the Forbes’s home, where Elizabeth could depict her five local models in the natural environment.61 Elizabeth’s painting hut and her workmanlike garden studio enabled her to paint the same subjects and work under the same conditions as her male counterparts. The fact that Elizabeth had two studio spaces to herself within the spatial infrastructure of an artistic marriage is, itself, a testament to the ‘mutual affinity’62 and respect that sustained successful artistic partnerships. Although Elizabeth was often cast as a supporter of her husband’s genius, a role she appeared to enjoy, their marriage also supported two distinct professional identities and provided spatially for the maintenance of both. Elizabeth’s marriage to Stanhope Forbes cemented her position as a fixture in Newlyn society. Communities such as Newlyn, and social hubs like the Forbes’s home, countered the isolation both home studios and married, domestic life could engender. ‘We had never led so full a social life,’ remarked Laura Knight upon arriving in Newlyn.’63 The fear of being cut off from artistic society and support was one reason young female artists with sympathetic or artistically minded families remained at home or shared studios with their sisters or friends. The four Hayllar sisters formed their own miniature artists’ coterie at their home of Castle Priory under the guidance of their artist father James Hayllar. The sisters’ lives were dedicated to art; upon leaving school each studied painting daily from ten until four in a specially constructed studio adjacent to the house, furnished with skylights and north facing windows for optimal painting conditions.64 Every space throughout the home was used for an artistic purpose, either as a studio, sketching place or background for the domestic interiors the Hayllars’ specialized in. Among themselves and their extended family the sisters had a ready supply of willing models, and the house itself and the relationships that existed within it were a constant source of inspiration. Their paintings depict afternoon teas, tennis parties, picnics, parties and balls – activities that formed the rhythm of the sisters’ lives at Castle Priory. The same spaces and faces can be seen repeatedly throughout the Hayllars’ work, referencing and memorializing the same shared experiences.



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As well as providing supportive artistic relationships, the sisters’ home also supplied the spatial and material provisions required for professional art practice – suitable rooms for painting, models, props and a place to display art for public view. James Hayllar regularly organized ‘at homes’ at Castle Priory, opening his studio to visitors and critics to view the latest Royal Academy offerings by himself and his daughters.65 This support precipitated exhibiting and commercial success; Edith sold work to the Walker Art Gallery and Kate’s first Royal Academy picture was bought by the Prince of Wales. The Hayllar sisters may have produced images of idyllic domestic femininity in their paintings, but, in their early lives, they actively promoted their industriousness and professionalism, through participating in studio open days and exhibitions and by giving interviews about their art studio and practice. The house, and the sisters’ relationship within it, was so intertwined with the art they produced that the loss of this environment triggered a severing of artistic activities; the sisters who left Castle Priory in adult life ceased artistic practice.66 The reasons for the Hayllar sisters giving up on painting professionally are not recorded; however it is unlikely their subsequent homes and lifestyles afforded the same opportunities for painting as their family home, a point crystallized by the fact that Jessica, who remained with her father at Castle Priory throughout her life, was the only of the sisters to produce and exhibit art into the twentieth century. Castle Priory was an unusual space in that it privileged female art making above domesticity; materially and spatially it abetted artistic professionalism. It is an example of a sister studio – a studio and living space shared by sisters or female friends for the purposes of companionship and art production. Sister studios were another way family relationships influenced the provision and purpose of studios for women artists, and the communities that formed around these spaces differed from those created by artistic marriages. Sister studios were miniature artistic communities, providing camaraderie and encouragement and facilitating collaborations, the sharing of materials and models and the exchange of ideas.67 The presence of a female family member or friend went some way to counteract the social impropriety of a woman seeking property outside of the home, and this allowed sisters and friends to acquire independent workspaces away from the binds of familial responsibility, spaces that indicated the seriousness of their intentions and facilitated the production of commercially competitive and saleable art.

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Conclusion In her appraisal of the early twentieth-century artist Hilda Carline, Alicia Foster compares the ‘spatial marginalization’ Carline experienced throughout her working life with the way her art was marginalized critically and commercially in comparison to that of her brothers and her husband, Stanley Spencer.68 Despite being born into an artistic family, Carline struggled to access adequate studio space from the beginning of her career. As a student living in the family home at Hampstead, she set up a workspace in the hallway that separated the two studios occupied by her brothers, prompting visitors to label her the ‘passage artist’.69 She was, literally, working from the periphery. Independent workspace remained difficult to come by after Carline’s marriage to Spencer as she juggled domestic and artistic pressures. At the Spencer’s home in Cookham village Carline shared a room with her daughter Unity, lamenting that ‘all my possessions are packed into that tiny bedroom. … I cannot even have my paintbox about – it has to be packed away.’70 For large parts of their working lives, women like Carline had trouble accessing what was regarded as the ‘natural’ habitat of professional artists. As well as providing important functional support to artists’ practice, studios were a vital part of artistic identity; they wrapped the artist in an appealing and recognizable ‘package’.71 They were spaces that embodied the tense interplay of culture and commerce, reflecting the newfound wealth and status English artists achieved throughout the nineteenth century and the increasing commercialism and professionalism of the English art market.72 For Carline and many others, however, access to studios remained largely dependent on familial and marital relationships, which often determined the type of studio women had access to and, it follows, the type of art she could produce and sell. Women’s experiences with home-based studios differed in accordance with their marital, economic and social circumstances. Working from a familial home meant that women’s artistic practice and autonomy was under constant threat from domestic responsibilities, and the location could isolate women from the social interactions and activities associated with studio life and undermine their professional commitment and seriousness. Domestic and childcare responsibilities limited the time that women could devote to their work and it follows, the type of art they could produce and their commercial viability. Other women, however, benefited from access to productive home studios and reinscribed the meaning attached to domestic space; for them,



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home studios ‘represented their artistic freedom rather than their second-class citizenship of the world of art’.73 For a woman to move her artistic practice outside of the drawing room and into a specialized studio – even if that studio was still inside of her home – was a signal of the seriousness and longevity of her enterprise and her intention to create art for purposes beyond that of the pleasure and enjoyment of herself and her family. It was this shift to producing work that could be purposefully exposed to the scrutiny of the public and the market that marked women’s intentions out to her peers as recognizably professional.

Notes 1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984), 99. 2 Eileen Mayo, ‘Privacy is Essential: Miss E. Mayo on the Art of Living’, Birmingham Daily Mail 12 February 1931. Personal Papers of Eileen Mayo, Tate Archive, TGA 916/174. 3 Lara Perry, ‘The Artist’s Household: On Gender and the Division of Artistic and Domestic Labour in Nineteenth-Century London’, Third Text 31, no. 1 (2017), 21. 4 See Kirsten Ringelberg, Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Painting: Work Place/Domestic Space (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Lynne Walker, ‘Women Patron-Builders in Britain: Identity, Difference and Memory in Spatial and Material Culture’, in Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2006); Lynne Walker, ‘Vistas of Pleasure: Women Consumers of Urban Space in the West End of London 1855–1900’, in Women in the Victorian Art World ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995): 70–88. 5 S. Haar and C. Reed, ‘Coming Home: A Postscript on Postmodernism’, in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. C. Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 272. 6 See Perry, ‘The Artist’s Household’, 17–19. 7 Kathleen Fisher, Conversations with Sylvia: Sylvia Goss, Painter 1881–1968, ed. Eileen Vera Smith (London: Charles Skilton, 1975), 74. 8 Ibid., 12. 9 Louisa Starr, ‘The Spirit of Purity in Art’, in Transactions of the International Council of Women, ed. Ishbel M. Gordon (London: T Fischer Unwin, 1900), 86. 10 William Rossetti, Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti (New York: Charles Scribner, 1906), 2:433.

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11 Angela Thirlwell, William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis (New Haven: University Press, 2003), 147. 12 Rossetti, Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti, 2:433. 13 Alice Meynell, ‘Laura Alma-Tadema’, Art Journal (November 1883): 347. 14 Baroness Von Zedlitz, ‘An Interview with Mr Laurens Alma-Tadema, R.A.’, Woman at Home 3 (1895), 491–500. 15 Ibid., 494. 16 Perry, ‘The Artist’s Household’, 28. Records indicate that the Alma-Tadema household employed three servants and a cook. 17 Estella Canziani, Round about Three Palace Green (London: Methuen, 1939), 184. 18 Ibid., 40. 19 Patricia Zakreski, Representing Female Artistic Labour: 1848–1890 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 75, 83. 20 Mary McMahon, The Making of Mary Seton Watts (Guildford: Watts Gallery, 2013), 27–9. 21 Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life (London: Macmillan, 1912), 2:49. 22 Alison Bain, ‘Constructing an Artistic Identity’, Work, Employment and Society 19, no. 1 (2005): 32. 23 Watts, George Frederic Watts, 2:53. 24 Strand Magazine noted in 1893 that Kensington ‘has for some years past been completely converted into a colony of eminent artists and sculptors … and R.A.’s in particular. … It is altogether the ideal spot for an artist.’ Harry How, ‘Illustrated Interviews. XXV – Mr Luke Fildes, R.A.’, Strand Magazine, 6 (1893): 110. 25 Letter from George Frederic Watts to Mary Seton Watts, 23 July 1886. George Frederic Watts Papers, Watts Gallery Archive, GFW/2/17. 26 Letter from George Frederic Watts to Mary Seton Watts, 3 October 1886. George Frederic Watts Papers, Watts Gallery Archive, GFW/2/25. 27 Mary Seton Watts Diary, 7 September 1887. Mary Seton Watts Papers, Watts Archive, MSW/1/2. 28 The Illustrated London News noted that Watts believed it was his ‘methodical’ routine that allowed him to achieve the vast quantities of work he produced throughout his lifetime. D.W., ‘The Surrey Home of Mr G.F. Watts, RA’, Illustrated London News, 29 July 1893, 135. 29 Mark Bills, ‘Two Artists who are of Just the Same Mind Concerning their Ideals of Art’: George Frederic Watts (1817–1904) and Mary Seton Watts (1849–1938)’, in An Artist’s Village: G.F. Watts and Mary Watts in Compton ed. Mark Bills (London: Watts Gallery/Philip Wilson, 2011), 16. 30 Julia Cartwright, The Life and Work of George Frederick Watts, R.A. (London: Art Journal Office, 1896), 30.



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31 Hulda Freiderichs, ‘An Interview with Mr G.F. Watts, R.A.’, The Young Woman (December 1895): 76. 32 D.W., ‘The Surrey Home of Mr G.F. Watts, RA’, 135. 33 Lara Garner, ‘Palace of Art: Victorian Studio-Houses in the Museum Context’ (PhD thesis, Baylor University, 2012), 12. 34 I am indebted to Desna Greenhow of the Watts Gallery Archive for providing me with this information. 35 Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life, 2: 284. 36 C.J. Ffoulkes, ‘Notes from the Workshop’, in Books of Garden Ornaments (London: Liberty and Co, 1904), 22. See also Barbara Morris, ‘Liberty’s Pioneer Designer’, in Mary Seton Watts: Unsung Heroine of the Art Nouveau, ed. Veronica Franklin Gould (England: Watts Gallery, 1998), 11–13. 37 A.M.W. Stirling, William De Morgan and his Wife (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1922), 174. 38 Ibid., 176. 39 Vernon Lee, Vernon Lee’s Letters (Privately Printed, 1937), 64. 40 Stirling, William De Morgan and his Wife, 181. 41 Anna Maria Wilhemina Stirling, Unpublished Autobiography. The De Morgan Foundation. 42 Stirling, William De Morgan and his Wife, 185. 43 May Morris quoted in Ibid., 192. 44 Alison Bain, ‘Female Artistic Identity in Place: The Studio’, Social and Cultural Geography 5, no 2 (2004): 190. 45 Stirling, De Morgan and His Wife, 194. 46 Ibid., 199. 47 Elise Lawton Smith, Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the Allegorical Body (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), 28. 48 Ibid., 75. 49 Perry, ‘The Artist’s Household’, 26. 50 Louise Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 1867–1887 (London: John Lane, 1925), 10. 51 Ibid., 26. 52 Henrietta Ward, Reminiscences (London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1911), 88. 53 Pamela Gerrish Nunn, ‘The Mid-Victorian Woman Artist, 1850–1879’ (PhD thesis: University College London, 1982), 307; Henrietta Ward, Memoirs of Ninety Years (London: Hutchinson, 1924), 71. 54 Ward, Memoirs of Ninety Years, 124. 55 Gertrude Massey, Kings, Commoners and Me (London: Blackie and Sons, 1934), 85; Andrew Sim, ‘Henry and Gertrude Massey: A Life Class at Heatherley’s’, Sim Fine Art, 2013, http:​//www​.simf​i near​t.com​/pdf_​bin/M​assey​%20Co​llect​ion.p​df.

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56 Letter from Elizabeth Forbes to Mrs. Forbes, 31 July c. 1888. Tate Archive TGA 9015/4/2/2. 57 ‘Houses of Today: An Artist’s House at Newlyn’, The World, 10 September 1907, 245. Tate Archive TGA 9115/11/4. 58 ‘Mrs Stanhope Forbes’, The Queen, 18 October 1890, 576. Tate Archive TGA 9115/11/4. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 576. 61 Gladys B Crozier, ‘Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes’, Art Journal (December 1904): 382–3. 62 ‘Mrs Stanhope Forbes’, 576. 63 Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936), 166. 64 Jessica Hayllar’s biographical manuscript quoted in Mary Gabrielle Hayllar, ‘Framing the Hayllar Sisters: A Multi-Genre Biography of Four English Victorian Painters’ (PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 2012), 96. 65 ‘District News: Mr Hayllar’s Pictures’, Jackson Oxford Journal, 29 March 1890; ‘District News: Wallingford’, Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 26 March 1892; ‘Wallingford: Mr Hayllar’s Pictures’, Jackson Oxford Journal, 25 March 1893. 66 Edith Hayllar gave up painting when she married Reverend Bruce Mackay in 1900, and in the same year Kate Hayllar took up nursing and ceased artistic activity. Mary Hayllar stopped working professionally after her marriage in 1887. See Christopher Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar. Part Two: Jessica, Edith, Mary and Kate’, Connoisseur (May 1974): 2–9. 67 For a discussion of sister studios in the Scottish context, see Elizabeth Cumming, Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland (Edinburgh: Berlinn, 2006): 51–80. 68 Alicia Foster, Tate Women Artists (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 77. 69 Gilbert Spencer, Stanley Spencer (London: Gollancz, 1961), 165. 70 John Rothenstein, Stanley Spencer, the Man: Correspondence and Reminiscences (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979), 55. 71 Sarah Burns, ‘The Price of Beauty: Art, Commerce and the Late NineteenthCentury American Studio Interior’, in American Iconography: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature ed. David C Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 218; Mark Girouard, ‘The Victorian Artist at Home: The Holland Park Houses – 1’, Country Life 152, no. 3934 (1972): 1279. 72 Girouard, ‘The Victorian Artist at Home’, 1279. 73 Ibid.

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Single Ladies and Studio Celebrities

Artists’ studios assumed unprecedented cultural significance in late nineteenth-century England. As the wealth and social prominence of artists grew, public interest in their lifestyles, homes and habits increased exponentially. Books, newspapers articles and photographic series documented artists’ working environments, giving insights into their creative processes and aesthetic subjectivity.1 The studio transformed from a private place of work to a public site of cultural consumption. ‘In our epoch, the painter is no longer the labouring artisan who locks himself away in his studio behind a closed door,’ wrote the art critic Albert Wolff. ‘He has thrust his head foremost into the bustle of the world. … He had his day when his studio is transformed into a salon where he receives the elite of his day.’2 The purest manifestation of the studio’s newfound status was the custom-designed studio house, which was built to reflect and advertise the taste, wealth and reputation of the commissioning artist. These homes, built in the fashionable artistic areas of Kensington, Chelsea, Hampstead and elsewhere, were showrooms for the artist’s unique aesthetic sensibilities and creativity. They operated as ‘packaging’ for both the artist and their work, presenting them to an attentive public as cultural icons and influencers.3 ‘At homes’, private views and ‘show Sundays’ were a chance for members of the culturally curious middle class as well as the social and artistic elite to view the interiors of London’s ‘palaces of art’.4 As well as impressing on visitors the prosperity, sophistication and innovation of the artist-in-residence, these events allowed the artist to interact with the upper echelons of London society, forming new relationships and connections that further entrenched them into the nation’s cultural establishment. Grand studio houses were only within the reach of an elite group of artists, who were almost exclusively male, but the attention and press they generated encouraged other artists to view their studios as a means to brand, market and promote their careers. ‘The studio does not make the artist quite the same way

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as the tailor is said to make the man’, noted Walter Goodman in The Magazine of Art: It very materially assists however, in the making of a picture, while in these fashionable times of private views and Show Sundays a well-regulated studio goes far towards impressing the visitor with the proper appreciation of the artist’s worth, and at the same time helps to enhance the merits of its performance by showing them off at the best possible advantage.5

The studio house phenomenon and the increasing status and professionalism of artists elevated even more prosaic studio spaces into cultural artefacts, worthy of visitation and comment. One commentator noted, ‘Outsiders are always curious about artists and their surroundings; to them the sanctum sanctorum of the painter’s house is a mysterious place.’6 To the general public, studios were presented as, ‘a laboratory in which ideas are melted down and boiled up and turned out on canvas by magic, the paint pot and brushes being the wizard’s apparatus’.7 As studios became central to cultural understandings of what an artist was, women artists increasingly sought out independent workspaces that they could personalize and use to promote their artistic careers. Custom-built and independent studios were places for carrying out the social and commercial interactions expected of professional artists and which were increasingly necessary to sell their work.

Performing studio life Anna Lea Merritt understood the importance of the studio in public understandings of artistic professionalism. One of the few women to commission a studio house independently, she wrote candidly of the difficulties women faced in achieving that professional ideal. Following her husband’s death in 1877, Merritt required an independent studio near her former home on Cheyne Walk where she could work on portrait commissions, but she was continuously rebuffed because of her sex. ‘The owners would not let any flat to any lady–only men were allowed the comfort of small dwelling rooms, a large studio and most especially a janitor cook!’8 Unable to rent an appropriate space, Merritt invested ‘all [she] possessed’ into building 50 Tite Street, Chelsea, a two-bedroom home with a spacious studio perfectly proportioned for painting portraits, which she named ‘Work House’. ‘Artists understand the necessity of



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space to secure atmosphere,’ she wrote. In her new studio ‘the light and space were just what I needed and the benefit was at once evident in my work’.9 It was at Work House that Merritt participated in Frederick Hollyer’s photographic series, which captured artists in their working environments – a project which itself contributed to the increased public interest in artists and their studios. In Hollyer’s photograph Merritt appears modestly and respectably dressed, holding a large palette and brush in her hands. Merritt presents herself, independent in her own, custom-designed studio, as ‘the acceptable face of the New Woman of her time, assertive and autonomous’.10 However, Merritt was also intensely aware of how difficult it was for women to maintain the material conditions that were expected of professional artists, which in turn supported their saleability and boosted their market value. By the late 1880s the cost of maintaining 50 Tite Street was untenable, and Merritt gave up the house to move to the country. As she would later warn other women artists, art was an expensive and uncertain career, and the ‘social claims’ on artists could lead them to live more expensively than they could afford.11 Despite her financial insecurity, Merritt was proud of the fact that she ‘lived by the brush’ and her studio house was built as a testament to her professional ambition.12 Louise Jopling too viewed the studio house as a visual marker of professional status. After working from her drawing room during her first marriage, and occupying a rented studio after her divorce, Jopling expressed delight at the twin, custom-built studios designed by William Burges in the garden of her second marital home. Jopling and her second husband, the artist Joe Jopling, commissioned the studios to stand side by side at the back of their Chelsea residence, allowing each the independence and privacy they desired while still fostering a communal and supportive atmosphere. ‘It was a great delight to me when my new studio was finished,’ wrote Jopling. ‘I was able to work in it – all alone in my glory.’13 The studio was designed to her specifications and allowed space for models, props, exhibits and social gatherings. ‘The architect and I used to spar occasionally about the proportions – but I always posed him by asking: “Who is going to use the Studio – you or I?”’ Jopling recalled.14 ‘It was a delightful room to work.’15 Jopling used her studio as a tool to cultivate her networks and display her art in a professional and tasteful setting, aware that studios represented ‘not just a particular type of structure but a definite manner of social life’.16 Her workspaces attracted the attention of journalists and photographers, and the resulting articles further promoted her professionalism, sophistication and success. One

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writer recalled the décor and furnishings of Jopling’s Kensington studio, which she took independently after the death of Joe Jopling, in breathless detail, and a contemporary reader would recognize its oriental draperies, eastern carpets and Moorish screen as the height of aesthetic fashion. The grand piano and parquet floor were ‘suggestive of impromptu dances’ while a tea table and ‘luxurious chairs and couches [gave] an air of comfort’.17 In this space of work, entertainment and show, Jopling applied studio home principles to create an aesthetic studio in miniature, which promoted her professional identity and legitimacy by demonstrating her knowledge of the most fashionable trends in artistic interior decoration. Louise Jopling’s prominent place in London’s artistic society and determined self-promotion – which included the publication of a detailed memoir in 1925 – ensured that the status of her studios in her marital and post-marital homes was known and her role in their creation recognized. The image and narrative that women artists wanted their studios to portray was not uniform; it differed according to the public identity of each artist, and the values and ideas they wanted to promote. Kate Greenaway’s idealized depictions of pre-industrial childhood made her one of the most successful illustrators of the late nineteenth century. In 1885, Greenaway commissioned the architect Norman Shaw to design a studio house on a £2000 block of land in the semi-rural Hampstead. She took an active role in the design of the house; as a commercially successful artist she already had access to an attractive, wellproportioned studio and wanted the new building to provide even more comfort and functionality.18 Greenaway needed a space that would materially support her professional activities, but the design of the house also served to obscure the seriousness and commercialism of her artistic pursuits. Greenaway’s public persona was often identified with the nostalgic domesticity depicted in her illustrations. While other successful women artists, like Greenaway’s former studio mate Elizabeth Butler, were criticized for attempting to paint ‘like men’, Greenaway was praised for using her ‘feminine’ artistic sensibilities to create images for children – for whom women artists were seen as having a ‘special vision’.19 In her studio home, Greenaway created a space that promoted this image of cosy femininity by borrowing from the style of her signature illustrations. ‘One can see at once where Miss Greenaway received the inspiration for her quaint gabled house,’ remarked one journalist. The house reproduced her pre-industrial aesthetic in its exteriors, which were described in contemporary press in the same language used for her illustrations – simple, bewitching and picturesque.20



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While other studio homes featured expansive dining rooms and galleries for the reception of guests, in the Greenaway house the tearoom was the space most frequently used for entertaining. Here, the ‘long windows, with their full curtains, the cosy window seats … had a familiar look to those who had studied the work of the talented artist’.21 In this room, Greenaway entertained her child models and close circle of friends. She did not open the house on ‘show Sundays’ or host parties or private viewings, nor did she network with other artists to earn commissions and patrons. For an artist whose commercial success was built on idealized depictions of domesticity, the house was designed to support her art in a different way. It was a public embodiment of the aesthetic and lifestyle her illustrations promoted – an advertisement for her art that also cloaked her commercial success and professional routine in a veil of feminine conventionality. Louise Campbell notes that Greenaway’s studio home endowed her artistic practice with an ‘old fashioned charm’, rendering it ‘individual, feminine and domestic’.22 It displayed and promoted her signature aesthetic to the world, while also presenting her artistic practice in the guise of a lady-like, genteel pastime, encouraging her reputation as an artist who embraced her natural feminine sensibilities. There was a performative aspect to the way Greenaway used her studio house to conceal rather than promote her professionalism; within it she defined and played out a non-threatening, feminine artistic identity. Although it did not perform in the same way as the archetypical studio houses of G. F. Watts and Sir Frederic Leighton, it was still a ‘key element in the creation of Greenaway’s professional and artistic identity’.23 Greenaway had the motivation and the means to construct an elaborate and bespoke workplace to support the production of her art and the maintenance of her brand. For most women artists, however, the cost of maintaining even a small studio was significant. To maximize its value and utility, many tried to acquire space in an artistic area of the city where they could be close to exhibition venues, galleries and dealers and feel part of an artistic community. Even on a small scale, these spaces enabled women artists to perform the ‘studio life’ that structured the daily routines of working artists and defined public perceptions of the artistic lifestyle. The location of their studios and the activities and interactions that occurred within them was one tool women artists used to show their dedication to the craft and their belonging and status in the profession. The fact that portrait and genre painter Ethel Wright worked from Royal Academician John Pettie’s

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former studio encouraged Artist magazine to label her a ‘legitimate successor’ to that artist’s success. ‘[The studio’s] present owner is a hard worker, going into her studio with the regularity of a business man,’ reported Artist, alongside a photograph of Wright’s tastefully decorated studio.24 In occupying the former workspace of a respected and acclaimed artist, Wright was physically inserting herself into an established artistic narrative. Impressionist-inspired artist Ethel Walker employed a variation of this studio strategy. She occupied a studio on the Chelsea embankment, which consisted of a double room on the first floor of a converted Victorian house. The space functioned as a bedroom and kitchen as well as a studio, and it was here that Walker worked, entertained guests and received critics and journalists. Finished canvasses were stacked haphazardly five or six deep against the walls and perched upon piles of books to be on view.25 Pictures, ornaments and vases were crammed on the mantle and atop tables, contributing to an atmosphere of ‘glorious confusion’.26 In press accounts Walker’s studio positioned her in the tradition of famous Chelsea bohemians Augustus John and Dante Rossetti – a figure of the ‘Chelsea pageant’ who was keeping the ‘romantic aura’ of the area alive. ‘Miss Ethel Walker is the Squire of Chelsea. When she advances along King’s Road … the painters’ suburb becomes a village again.’27 The location of Walker’s studio and the lifestyle it facilitated placed her firmly in an established cultural and historical narrative that was recognizable to an art-literate public – the bohemian maverick. She encouraged this perception in interviews and through her interactions with the local area; she walked her dogs each morning in black satin pyjamas and regaled journalist with stories of her clashes with other artists.28 Walker settled in her Cheyne Walk studio in 1899, at a time when artistic identities like ‘the bohemian’ started to become more accessible to women. The solitary, nonconformist artist, a product of mid-nineteenth century French literature, was a recognized cultural figure in Britain. The lax sexual morality and social rebellion associated with the bohemian lifestyle were accepted, so long as it remained discreetly behind the doors of a male studio.29 However, women artists’ access to studio space in modern, urban environments enabled them to also reject the social and behavioural codes of their gender. In this space women had the freedom to set their own work and social routines – they could eat and sleep when they pleased, entertain male and female guests and visit galleries and theatres on their own time. The studio was a space where women could exercise their nascent modernity and experiment with new and more autonomous modes of living.30



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Studios and the single girl The artistic histories of areas like Kensington, Chelsea and Bloomsbury situated women in an established spatial tradition. These addresses functioned as a signifier of cultural credibility and placed women in geographic dialogue with the primary infrastructure of art production and commerce. Urban studio life for women was, by the late nineteenth century, seen as ‘one of the developments of modern times’, but the cost of maintaining a studio in these areas was a significant challenge for many. The Athenaeum remarked on the high number of artists working from drawing rooms, ‘who would prefer studios but are unable to rent them at present in London’.31 In 1901, Anna Lea Merritt suggested that young artists budget £200 a year for studio rent, materials and models – significantly more than the £115 Emily Hobhouse estimated as the average income of a professional female artist in 1900. To meet artists’ requirements of space and light, Hobhouse found that nearly a third of their income needed to be devoted to rent, compared to the average female contribution of 21 per cent.32 Women artists seeking independent live-in studios were thus recognized as part of a larger social problem concerning the provision of housing for respectable, working women of small and medium incomes. Self-supporting female professionals and single women needed accommodation that was more private and comfortable than boarding houses and more affordable and sociable than privately rented flats. The ‘ladies housing problem’ was highlighted in the pages of The Englishwoman’s Review and Work and Leisure, where the desire for ‘wholesome and cheap lodging’ where single women ‘could live in comfort and safety without sacrificing privacy or independence’ was deeply felt.33 One business-orientated solution to the issue that benefited women emerged with the founding of the Ladies Dwelling Company in 1888. This society aimed to build purpose-designed accommodation for single, professional women in the areas of London where they desired to reside – Bloomsbury, Kensington and Marylebone. The interior designer and women’s rights advocate Agnes Garrett was at the centre of the new company and her former architectural master, J. M. Brydon, was chosen to design the second Ladies Residential Chambers at Chenies Street, Bloomsbury. Garrett did not design the building’s interiors but was on the subcommittee for the residence’s domestic fittings and took responsibility for choosing furniture and refitting the building’s bathrooms and common areas over its lifespan.34

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The Ladies Dwelling Company residences at Sloane Street, Chenies Street and York Street, Marylebone, were designed with the needs of artist residents in mind. At the latter two, women could rent one, two or three room apartments, allowing space to store materials and accoutrements and to host students or clients. Separate studios and workrooms were also provided for those who required them.35 The common dining room dispensed with the need to cook and tenants had their rooms serviced by a staff of cleaners. These arrangements freed women artists from the burden of housekeeping and, according to one Chenies Street resident, were a significant part of the appeal of the Ladies Residential Chambers compared to other communal living ventures.36 The private rooms and studios provided professional women with respectable and independent spaces to devote to their work and the communal areas fostered a sense of community and facilitated professional networking. Amateur theatre, musical performances and charity fundraisers were frequent occurrences, and these events contributed to an atmosphere of cultural and intellectual industry.37 Florence Reason, Mary Elizabeth Harding, Grace May, Ann Maitland and Mary Aberigh-Mackay pursued careers in art and art teaching from Chenies Street and York Street Chambers in the late 1890s and early 1900s.38 After working from an austere attic studio in the latter part of her Royal Academy studentship, Chenies Street provided Reason with the location and resources she needed to make a living from her art.39 She already referred to herself as a professional painter but was pragmatic about the range of activities she had to pursue to make a living. As well as exhibiting oil and watercolour paintings and illustrating books and magazines, she returned to her preparatory school, the Royal Female School of Art, as a teacher. Residing at Chenies Street, which was at the centre of literary and artistic London and nearby to the RFSA, publishing houses and exhibition venues, facilitated this breadth of artistic pursuits. Another studio arrangement available to female artists of small or medium incomes were purpose-built studio developments. These were popular with building developers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they were a way to use unusually shaped or leftover plots of land, while taking advantage of the demand for studio accommodation from the city’s growing population of artists.40 Most of these developments took the form of studio flats and included a small sleeping area, lobby or living space, scullery and bathroom. The Avenue Studios at 76 Fulham Road Chelsea, credited with being the first custom-built studio building, was one of the most popular developments among women artists. Elizabeth Butler painted her breakthrough picture The



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Roll Call at an Avenue Studio the year after the complex was built, and Annie Swynnerton and the famed canine painter Frances Farman also made homes there.41 Sylvia Pankhurst rented a studio at The Avenue in order to complete a paid mural commission from the Women’s Social and Political Union for an exhibition in May 1909.42 Women artists also populated the Bolton, Chester and Thurloe Studios in Kensington along with the Carlyle Studios in Chelsea. Five of the seven residents of the Edith Grove Studios in 1915 were unmarried female artists.43 Studio developments were attractive to artists of small and medium incomes because they allowed them to share in the cultural capital of a fashionable address that was prohibitively expensive in other residential forms. The spaces were far preferable to adapted drawing rooms and attics; they were designed with the needs of the artist in mind and so were equipped with north facing windows and skylights. More luxurious and expensive accommodation featured shared entertainment spaces and caretakers, while even simple and affordable developments like 38 Cheyne Walk, designed by Charles Ashbee, incorporated double-height studios and dressing rooms.44 Purpose-built studio flats and female residential developments allowed women artists to participate in the artistic community and to partake in the activities and behaviours expected of working, professional art practitioners. Elizabeth Butler hosted show Sundays and at homes at her Avenue studio, which she decorated to complement the pictures on display. ‘From one till six today people poured in,’ she remembered. ‘My studio was got up quite charmingly with curtains and screens, and with wild beast skins disposed on the floor, and my arms and armour furbished up’.45 The studio’s Chelsea location allowed her to fully participate in the events that surrounded the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition as well as the social activities of London’s artistic quarter; she attended at homes, garden parties and private views, dined with John Millais and the critic John Ruskin, met art collectors and patrons and went to music recitals at the nearby Bolton Studios.46 Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale used her studio at 11 Holland Park Road, Kensington to host viewings with writer and art critic Arthur Fish.47 Some women used the space that independent studios provided to supplement their income by subletting or teaching. Louise Jopling ran her painting school from two studios at the Clareville Studios in South Kensington and, after the death of her husband, Henrietta Ward earned extra income by renting one of her two Chester Studios while working from the other.48 To afford the lease on a pair

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of rooms at Trafalgar Studios for herself and her husband Dora Meeson sublet space in her studio several days a week.49 While some women were ‘content with a north room in their own houses’, independent, affordable studio spaces allowed them to more freely ‘entertain their friends, [give] “at homes” and afternoon teas’ and pursue a ‘useful and pleasant’ studio life.50 The fact that these spaces were designed and equipped with the needs of artists in mind and located in the artistic districts of London situated the occupants firmly within an established and recognizable professional tradition. It was only when the illustrator Florence Upton took up residence in a studio-flat at 38 Cheyne Walk that she was ‘ready to begin her career as a serious, professional artist’, notes her biographer.51

Conclusion Gloria Garfunkel’s hypothesis that women tend to ‘only experience themselves as artists when actually “doing” art’,52 reflects the experiences of women artists and illustrators attempting to earn a living at the turn of twentieth century. Studios were fundamentally functional spaces, and access to well-equipped studios provided women with the material conditions and practical provisions they needed to pursue their choice of style and genre and be commercially competitive. The cultural discourse and representational meaning surrounding the possession of a studio, meanwhile, served to validate women’s artistic identities and sense of occupational legitimacy. The provision and affordability of independent studios and workspaces increased in the first decade of the twentieth century, as purpose-built residences for professional women and studio developments responded to the growing demand for inexpensive, autonomous workspaces. These places fostered female artistic communities and networks, allowing women to inscribe political, feminist and bohemian meanings onto the spaces they inhabited. For many women residing in independent studios, workspace and living space were merged, an arrangement that led to a ‘new kind of domestic interior’ which signalled women’s independence and professionalism, rather than their femininity, domesticity or seclusion.53 Although studios remained gendered spaces, allied with male artistic traditions and masculinist notions of power, commerce and representation, for many of the women discussed here the studio was a place of burgeoning



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female modernity – a space of creative ambition where the female artistic process was privileged. In this way, access to studio space supported women artists’ professional practice, both in terms of their internal sense of professional identity and their peer-determined reputation as serious working artists. While art school endowed women with the tools and techniques required to achieve proficiency in art, studios were where artistic production actually happened. If women artists and illustrators did not have access to spaces where they could carry out their work without interruption or intervention, and access the artistic accoutrements and materials required for their chosen genre, their ability to produce work of the standard and quantity needed to earn a livelihood was stymied. Studios were as much commercial spaces as they were creative ones. It was there that artists produced the work they would sell through the art marketplace and showcased their wares and their professional persona to buyers, patrons and critics. Defining the professional artist as Art Journal did in 1900, as one ‘whose ideal of professional standing is an annual income from his work and a full quota of pictures in the annual exhibitions’, the studio was the most important material condition of women artists’ professional practice. As a result, women fashioned spaces that responded to the structural, gender-based biases that remained in place into the twentieth century and which allowed them to participate in art commerce as professional art practitioners.

Notes 1 These included F.G. Stephens’ influential book Artists at Home, published in 1884 with photographs by J.P. Mayall depicting well-known artists in their studios. Stephens stated, ‘In biographical and historical interest no pictures surpass views of the interiors of artists’ studios.’ Artists at Home (New York: Appleton and Co., 1884), 6. Other publications in this vein include Maurice Adams’s 1884 book Artists’ Homes, The Graphic’s series ‘Painters in the Studios’ which appeared in the late 1880s and Magazine of Art’s multi-part exploration entitled ‘Artists’ Studios: As They were Then and as They Are’. 2 Albert Wolff, Le Capitale de L’art (Paris, 1886), 285. 3 Devon Cox, The Street of Wonderful Possibilities: Whistler, Wilde and Sargent in Tite Street (London: Francis Lincoln, 2015), 42. 4 Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 237–9.

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5 Walter Goodman, ‘Artists’ Studios: As They Were Then and as They Are – II’, Magazine of Art (June 1901): 402. 6 The Architect and Building News, 11 (1874), 174. 7 Ibid. 8 Anna Lea Merritt, Love Locked Out: The Memoirs of Anna Lea Merritt ed. Galina Gorokhoff (Boston: Museum of Fine Art, 1981), 130. 9 Ibid., 136. 10 Olive Maggs, Anna Lea Merritt’s Murals: Wall Paintings in a Surrey Church (Surrey: The Society for the Arts and Crafts Movement in Surrey, 2011). 11 Merritt, Love Locked Out, 167. 12 Anna Lea Merritt, ‘A Letter to Artists: Especially Women Artists’, McBride’s Magazine 65 (1900): 463. 13 Louise Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 1867–1887 (London: John Lane, 1925), 135. 14 Ibid., 134–5. 15 Ibid., 155. 16 Joseph Frank Lamb, ‘Lions in their Dens: Lord Leighton and late Victorian Studio Life’ (PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1987), 6. 17 Ibid. 18 M.H. Spielmanm and G.H. Layard, Kate Greenaway (London: Adams and Charles Black, 1905), 144; Louise Campbell, ‘Questions of Identity: Women, Architecture and the Aesthetic Movement’, in Women’s Places: Architecture and Design 1860– 1960, eds. Brenda Martin and Penny Sparke (London: Routledge, 2003), 12. 19 ‘Women and Art’, Bow Bells 1 (1888): 13. 20 ‘Our Illustrations: Miss Kate Greenaway’s House’, British Architect 23, no. 19 (1885): 224; ‘Kate Greenway’s House’, Bow Bells 18 (1892), 164. 21 ‘Kate Greenaway’s House’, 164. 22 Campbell, ‘Questions of Identity’, 14. 23 Ibid. 24 F.M, ‘The Work of Miss Ethel Wright’, Artist, 22 May 1898. 25 ‘She Threw George Moore Down the Stairs’, The Recorder, 19 November 1949. Grace English Collection, Tate Archive Ref: TGA 716/96. 26 ‘An Artist at Home’, Tatler and Bystander, 9 July 1941. Grace English Collection, Tate Archive TGA 716/96. 27 ‘Ethel Walker: Artist’, Picture Post, 9 January 1941. Grace English Collection, Tate Archive TGA 716/96. 28 ‘Two Sets of Biographical notes on Ethel Walker by Grace English’, Grace English Collection, Tate Archive TGA 716/81; Austin, ‘She Threw George Moore Down the Stairs’. 29 Gill Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and Feminine Art, 1900 to the late 1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 192.



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30 For a discussion of how women used their studio spaces to support the women’s suffrage movement, see Tara Morton, ‘Changing Spaces: Art, Politics and Identity in the Home Studios of the Suffrage Atelier’, Women’s History Review 21, no 4 (2012): 623–37. 31 Darley Dale, ‘Lady Artists’, London Society (November 1898): 490; ‘The New Type of Studio’, The Athenaeum, 26 September 954. 32 Emily Hobhouse, ‘Women Workers: How They Live, How They Wish to Live’, Nineteenth Century 47 (1900): 473. 33 ‘A Castle in the Air’, Work and Leisure 12 no. 9 (1888): 235; ‘Sloane Gardens House’, Work and Leisure 11 no. 14 (1889): 285. See also H Reinherz, ‘The Housing of the Educated Working Woman’, The Englishwoman’s Review, 15 January 1900, 7–11. 34 Elizabeth Crawford, Enterprising Women: The Garretts and Their Circle (London: Francis Boutle, 2002), 210. 35 ‘Editorial’, Manchester Guardian, 23 January 1889, 5. 36 Alice Zimmern, ‘Ladies Dwellings’, The Contemporary Review 77 (1900): 101. 37 ‘Our London Correspondence’, Glasgow Herald, 23 December 1889; The Morning Post, 12 January 1893, 5. 38 1891 England and Wales Census and 1901 England and Wales Census; ‘Society of Women Artists Sixty-Sixth Exhibition Catalogue’, Society of Women Artists Records, Archive of Art and Design, Victoria and Albert Museum, AAD/1996/7/67. 39 Florence Reason, ‘Art’, in Ladies at Work: Papers on Paid Employment for Ladies (London: A.D. Innes, 1893), 49. 40 Giles Walkey, Artists’ Houses in London: 1764–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), 139. 41 Elizabeth Butler, An Autobiography (London: Constable & Co, 1922), 101; ‘Mrs. Swynnerton’, Manchester Guardian, 16 January 1934, 11; Society of Women Artists, Exhibition Catalogue, Forty-Fifth Exhibition (1899) Society of Women Artists Records, Archive of Art and Design AAD/1996/7/46. 42 Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 (London: Routledge, 2013). 43 Walkey, Artists’ Houses in London, 239. 44 Kate Orme, ‘Artist’s Studios Supplementary Planning Guide’, Royal Borough of Chelsea and Kensington, http:​//www​.rbkc​.gov.​uk/pl​annin​gandc​onser​vatio​n/pla​ nning​polic​y/ido​c.ash​x?doc​id=83​15563​5-4ac​f-. 45 Butler, An Autobiography, 184. 46 Ibid., 137, 152. 47 Letter from Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale to Arthur Fish, 2 March 1901. Arthur Fish Correspondence, Tate Archive TGA 20076/1/39. 48 Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 307; Walkey, Artists’ Houses in London, 235. 49 Dora Meeson Coates, George Coates: His Art and His Life (London: JM Dent and Sons, 1937), 135.

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50 Dale, ‘Lady Artists’, 490. 51 Norma S. Davis, A Lark Ascends: Florence Kate Upton, Artist and Illustrator (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 68. 52 Gloria Garfunkel, ‘The Improvised Self: Sex Differences in Artistic Identity’ (PhD thesis: Harvard University, 1984), i. 53 Frances Borzello, At Home: The Domestic Interior in Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), 137.

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4

Academy Politics

In the 1890s, Florence Fenwick Miller began a campaign through her column in The Illustrated London News against the Royal Academy’s treatment of its female exhibitors. As a professional journalist and advocate of female suffrage, Fenwick Miller took an active interest in the challenges of other women workers in her ‘Ladies’ Column’, particularly those attempting to make a living through art or other cultural enterprises. Her reviews of the Royal Academy’s summer exhibitions read as a feminist alternative to those found in mainstream news outlets such as The Times; special attention was paid to the number of women selected as exhibitors, the care with which their pictures were treated and the prestige attached to their location within the exhibition. Fenwick Miller’s articles draw attention not only to the importance of the jurors and hanging committee to the reception of a picture but also to the internal Academy politics involved in these decisions. ‘Can it be true,’ she wrote of the Royal Academician Lawrence Alma-Tadema, for example: That the artist who has lavished such care on painting women, in so noble an attitude as that of these matrons and so lovely an aspect as that of these girls, can be in practice accustomed to exert all his influence against the admission of women’s work to the Academy, and so against its prominence of place?1

Fenwick Miller saw the attitudes of Royal Academicians like Alma-Tadema and others as preventing the election of women as RA associates and academicians and as influencing the decisions of the selectors and hanging committee, and she rallied against this ‘wholesale depreciation of living women artists’.2 However the motivation for her sustained critique of the RA’s practices was not to encourage women to abandon the Academy and its exhibitions nor to promote the work of alternative, female-run societies but, paradoxically, to advocate for women’s further involvement at the Royal Academy itself. While criticism from both men and women of the RA’s policies and preferences mounted in the last years of the nineteenth century, Fenwick Miller, like many others in the art world, continued to equate ‘success with Royal Academy membership’.3

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Unlike other nineteenth-century professionals, such as lawyers and doctors, artists did not have to register to a professional association to practise. A peak institutional body did not enforce nationwide, uniform standards, nor was a licence required to paint professionally. In some ways, the absence of a ‘defined professional framework’ for art benefited women; they had no legal barriers to overcome, and women were not subject to the rules of a central organizing body, such as a marriage bar or age restriction.4 But the lack of uniform standards or set professional trajectory also made the art world more difficult to enter, particularly for those who did not conform to the character profile of the typical artist – that is, an urban, middle-class male. Without a peak institutional organization to grant or deny professional membership, artists and designers were at the mercy of a variety of professional gatekeepers, who included art critics, gallery owners, art dealers and exhibiting societies. The Royal Academy was the most important exhibiting society for monitoring professional status throughout the art world. The management of the RA and other art societies mirrored the policies of other male-dominated industries.5 They established selection criteria and processes for application and membership, which bestowed professional legitimacy on those deemed qualified and suitable and shut out others to the benefits that accompanied that status. In fields such as medicine and law, professional societies had strong claims to objectivity when it came to selecting members. As Harold Perkin explains, these associations were places ‘in which people find their place according to trained expertise and the service they provide rather than the possession or lack of inherited wealth or acquired capital’.6 Being judged on ‘empirical, rational and objective standards’ rather than on class or, for that matter, gender, was part of the appeal of professionalism and contributed to the desire of women artists to be granted membership of professional organizations.7 By the latter half of the nineteenth century, however, the RA and other mainstream art societies continued to run according to opaque, subjective and non-standardized procedures, in which personality, connections and networking played an important role.8 Professions in which the professionals themselves controlled membership, rather than the state or universities, were the most difficult for women to gain entry to, and these practices produced particular challenges for women artists.9 The lack of a formal, credential-based system for membership meant that their exclusion could continue to be justified on subjective, gendered and traditionalist grounds. Although not technically barred from its membership, no women were elected to the Royal Academy in



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the nineteenth century and women remained marginalized in its administration and management. Histories of women’s art frequently argue that the prestige of the Royal Academy, and its importance to women’s careers, waned at the end of the nineteenth century, as its inward-looking selection and hanging practices and relevance to contemporary art were challenged by new exhibiting groups.10 For women, however, membership to the oldest and most traditional art society continued to be a relevant professional ideal because, and not in spite of, its exclusionary and gendered membership practices. The fact that women had not been given the opportunity to participate in the RA as full members and associates meant that it continued to hold value for them as a marker of establishment acceptance and professionalism, at a time when many male artists, some of them RA members and associates themselves, lost confidence in the society. The titles bestowed by the RA were potent and widely recognized symbols of legitimacy and establishment acceptance. ‘ARA and RA are weighty letters, a hall mark as to the possession of talent,’ Fenwick Miller explained.11 In addition, membership of the RA continued to confer practical benefits; before 1903 RAs and associates were entitled to exhibit eight works at the annual summer exhibition, a condition that allowed members to monopolize the exhibition space. Most importantly, the post-nominal were an indicator of market value. As a writer in the Examiner commented in 1871, ‘Everyone knows the money value (to mention no others) of the magic letters [RA].’12 Fenwick Miller argued that just as male artists found it ‘useful to have this hall mark affixed to their names’ women would find it ‘of the greatest value in impressing outsiders of their merit and in adding infinitely to market value of their work’.13 Apart from these material advantages, the continued exclusion of women from art’s largest organizational body prolonged the association between women and amateurism by withholding from them the most official title an artist could hold. Despite the RA Committee’s apparent antipathy towards female exhibitors, it remained important for women to continue their attempts at integration for the sake of their own professional success.

Reforming art’s aristocracy? Fenwick Miller’s opinion of the RA as England’s foremost artistic organization was a common one in the 1890s, even though the society had faced criticism

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about its management for decades. The 1863 Royal Commission into the Academy’s relationship to fine arts in Britain heard grievances about the organization’s lack of transparency in its exhibition and election processes, along with its ambiguous position as both a publicly supported institution and a private society that refused to answer to any higher authority and claimed a monopoly over the artistic establishment.14 The commission recommended that the Academy reconstruct its membership on a ‘wider and more liberal basis’. Critical and popular discourse on art continued to protest the RA’s limited membership and dispute the privileges members enjoyed at exhibitions compared to conditions for general exhibitors.15 But, even while its cultural monopoly was being challenged, the Academy largely retained the esteem of the art-literate public and continued to operate as the nation’s premier fine art organization in the eyes of many, perhaps because a more credible challenger that could command the same authority and loyalty never emerged.16 Its exhibitions attracted more coverage from newspapers and periodicals than any other society or club in England and were treated by critics as a guide to the current landscape of contemporary art and a barometer of its health.17 And while it was not technically a public institution, the RA’s royal charter and statesponsored premises at Burlington House endowed the society with an air of national responsibility and cultural legitimacy.18 As The Times remarked in 1886, [The Royal Academy’s] presumed recognition by the State gives it, its members, and their works a dignity and market worth beside which the value of their Burlington House lodgings is inconsiderable. All Academicians are really aware of their dependence on the public belief that their academy is a public and not a private institution.19

The Royal Academy’s perceived role as the nation’s artistic arbiter, along with its art schools, membership structure and exhibitions made it a ‘locus of professionalization’ in the nineteenth century as it sought to monopolize cultural power and arbitrate who and what was considered legitimate in the world of art.20 As the closest England had to an official, state-endorsed peak body for artists, a relationship with the RA was particularly important for women, who required external validation of their professional status to be taken seriously. However, this perceived association between women and amateurism, or at the very least with sub-standard artistic production, also gave the RA a reason to distance itself from female artists and to do the least of all major professional societies to support their professional ambitions. The risk of women members



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tainting the RA’s reputation for artistic and cultural legitimacy was seen as high, while the awkwardness of introducing women participants to the social and administrative sides of the Academy also caused concern. G. D. Leslie recalled the unease felt by Academicians as the success of women at the RA schools and exhibitions grew more obvious: Members considered the difficulty of the treatment of women after they had been elected; for instance, they might choose to come to the banquet; possibly one solitary lady would come! … Would she have to be escorted into dinner? And if so, by whom? The president has to escort the highest personage that attended the banquet. Would the Royal personage himself escort the lady. Would ladies be eligible to serve on the council – or to serve as Visitors? Might we not some day even have a female president?21

The movements to reform the Royal Academy did little to change these attitudes towards the position of women within the organization or to enact practical changes to aid their integration and, throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the impulse for reform among the broader public waned.22 Debates about the inclusion of women as associates and Academicians were often answered by pointing to women’s existing success as exhibitors.23 Paul Usherwood explains how the Royal Academy’s generous treatment of Elizabeth Butler in the early 1870s, and the success of her battle painting The Roll Call, gave the institution the opportunity to project itself as an open-minded and liberal institution, without having to give any real, long-lasting concessions to female exhibitors.24 While some critics called for Butler’s election as an RA associate, others, in an opinion seemingly mirrored by the RA, saw Butler’s experience as proof that women could achieve success in the art world from their present position and would not benefit from any membership concessions. Why, when women could already ‘sit down at their desks and easels to write books and paint good pictures’ would they ‘hanker after a participation in the dirty drudgery which pertains to men’, questioned one journalist in an otherwise glowing review of The Roll Call.25 The reasons for women’s exclusions from RA membership were thus explained by the lack of professionalism in most women artists’ work, the social awkwardness and impropriety that would be caused by women’s inclusion in member events and activities and the fact that those women who did achieve success as exhibitors at the RA did not require membership to further advance their position. The question of female members’ participation in RA banquets was answered in 1881, when the Academy revised its rules to exclude any future

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female associates or Academicians from attending this event and from serving on the Academy Council. The first point, meanwhile, was used by many to justify the absence of women from the Academy’s membership – as the Academician William Powell Frith wrote in the late 1880s, ‘Whether we shall have female Academicians or not depends upon the ladies themselves; all the honours the Academy can bestow are open to them.’26 It was not the fault of the Academy that a woman had not yet been elected but of women themselves in failing to produce an artist of the standard an RA associateship would demand. This point was disputed by the more progressive contingent of the critical commentariat, along with members of the Academy themselves and some outspoken women artists, although others placed their good relationship with the Academy above protesting on the part of their sex.27 There was some truth to the view that successful female painters did not need to be elected to the RA to reap the benefits of association with the organization, at least in terms of publicity and commercial success. Elizabeth Butler’s status as a serious member of the professional art community, for example, was solidified through the RA’s treatment of The Roll Call. Its prestigious placement ‘on the line’ at the summer exhibition and the Academy’s feting of Butler’s achievement contributed to the picture becoming the ‘hit of the season’. The picture was so popular with the public that the RA hired a policeman to protect it and the paintings nearby from damage.28 In practical terms, this success resulted in Butler receiving £1,200 from Dickson and Co for the picture’s copyright, along with a myriad of new admirers, clients and commissioners – including Queen Victoria – and a vastly increased market value.29 These factors contributed to Butler’s ability to practice as an economically viable, professional painter and participate in the art marketplace in equal competition with her male counterparts. Participating in the ‘market of sale and purchase’ was ‘a principle close to [Butler’s] heart’, as she saw it as the only way to be judged fairly and equally as a professional artist and distance herself from the stereotype of female amateurism.30 Exhibiting at the RA continued to strengthen the careers of female artists at the end of the century. Lucy Kemp-Welch experienced a similar trajectory to Butler when, early in her career, she caused a sensation at the 1897 RA summer exhibition with Colt Hunting in the New Forest, which became the second picture by a female artist to be purchased for the nation via the Chantrey Bequest Fund.31 As in the case of Butler, the broad, highly publicized platform of the summer exhibition granted Kemp-Welch almost overnight fame within



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the art world and beyond, and this renown helped the artist develop contacts and clients while, significantly, increasing the market value of her work. The first painting Kemp-Welch exhibited with the Royal Academy, Gypsy Horse Drovers, sold for £60 at the 1895 exhibition, a commercial success that was ‘beyond her wildest dreams’ at that time.32 Colt Hunting in the New Forest was purchased for £525. Although almost £1,500 less than what the Chantrey paid for works by John Everett Millais and Frank Dicksee around the same period, £525 was a significant sum for a woman artist and a respectable price for an artist of any gender.33 While Kemp-Welch did not routinely sell work for over £500 after this RA success – an 1898 work measuring 12 feet in length and priced at £1,000, for example, did not sell – she routinely received between £100 and £400 for paintings throughout her career.34 The number of women artists included in the RA summer exhibitions fluctuated, but by the end of the nineteenth century women were a highly visible presence among the exhibitors. In 1897 for example, one-fifth of all exhibitors were female, and Kemp-Welch, Ethel Wright, Louise Jopling, Henrietta Rae and Maud Earl were favourably hung. As non-members these women were excluded from the ceremonial banquet that accompanied the exhibition and could have no role in the selection committee charged with reducing the 12,000 entries down to a barely manageable 2000, but the rituals, events and customs that surrounded the show still provided them with valuable exposure and opportunities for networking. A ‘lady artist’ reporting on the events leading up the exhibition’s opening noted the thrill of varnishing day, when artists saw the position of their painting for the first time, made last minute adjustments and mingled with their fellow exhibitors. At midday, parties of artists broke off to dine at the surrounding restaurants, where gossip and news about the year’s art were swapped. ‘The picture is the same – good, bad, or indifferent – whether it has a place in the Academy catalogue or not,’ she notes, ‘but that, Burlington House being the best “shop” it is a very good thing when our works are shown there’.35 The associated ‘show Sundays’, when artists displayed their Academy entries in open studios to a revolving audience of artists, critics and spectators were an important opportunity to participate in the studio culture of the period and gain greater visibility in London’s insular and interconnected art society. Some women, like Henrietta Rae, were satisfied to participate in the RA purely as exhibitors and saw little reason to advocate for greater status. ‘The title RA would be a purely honorary one,’ Rae claimed. ‘The introduction of any women RAs into the inner workings of Burlington House must only cause

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hindrance and undesirable change.’36 While few women experienced the feting Butler and Kemp-Welch attracted for their star pictures, the RA summer exhibitions were, for many artists, the gateway to public exhibition and selling art. They offered exposure to the nation’s largest gathering of art critics and buyers and were an opportunity to secure the attention and patronage of dealers and form relationships that could lead to commissions, solo exhibitions and gallery representation. No other event in the art world attracted the number of visitors the summer exhibitions did. In the 1880s and 1890s approximately 355,000 people visited the shows each year, and viewing numbers did not start decreasing significantly until the First World War.37 These visitor numbers meant that the summer exhibitions offered huge commercial exposure to artists. The RA did not officially take responsibility for selling works exhibited at the summer exhibitions, but the show operated as a buying venue for art consumers and dealers and a ‘shop window’ for exhibiting artists. Artists sent recommended prices for their works to the Academy’s secretary, and visitors were advised in the exhibition catalogue to contact the price clerk to find out the price of a work. The catalogue also included artists’ addresses so that potential buyers, dealers, patrons and commissioners could contact them directly regarding payment. Unlike most other exhibiting societies, the RA did not charge a commission on works sold through its exhibitions, making it a profitable place for artists to make sales.38

The politics of membership However, some women did view the Academy’s withholding of membership status as unjust, even if its meaning was largely symbolic. Henrietta Ward, for example, expressed frustration at being shut out of the official art establishment. ‘I have long felt the injustice of withholding the honour of RA from women,’ she remarked, noting in her memoir, ‘I don’t suppose that there is anyone living who has attending so many RA private views as I, dating from the time when it was held at the National Gallery.’39 Ward was the daughter of artists and married to a Royal Academician. She had exhibited at the RA since the age of fourteen, known Academicians from childhood and was friends with a succession of RA presidents including Frederic Leighton and John Everett Millais. She did not lack artistic connections and enjoyed a successful exhibiting and teaching career, but the absent title of ARA or RA still exerted a strong reaction.



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For women without the in-built connections of an artist like Ward, RA membership would have meant something even more tangible – contact with the art world’s most influential and powerful personalities and access to important networks of dealers and patrons, some of whom dealt exclusively with members of the Academy. Paradoxically however, the women in most need of the connections and benefits of RA membership had the least chance of appointment. RA elections were political events that necessitated campaigning on the part of nominees. When a journalist asked a member of the Academy in 1892 if the last three elections represented true artistic opinion, the artist replied, ‘Perhaps not, but there are social and commercials reasons.’40 Lucy KempWelch’s unsuccessful attempts at RA elections over a period of twenty years can be explained by her unwillingness to play politics, cultivate supporters or solicit favours. Kemp-Welch was shy and reclusive and was more interested in devoting her time to work than building useful social networks within art society.41 Despite this, Academy membership was meaningful to her, and she was excited at the prospect of potential election in 1900, when her large-scale painting Horses Bathing in the Sea garnered significant attention at the summer exhibition.42 That excitement and anticipation are evident in her diary entry from 30 April of that year. ‘Varnishing day. Picture looking very well. RA’s very kind and saying works of genius etc. Davis RA especially and Seymour Lucas. Val Prinsep said he had seconded my name for the Academy. All very enthusiastic. It is overwhelming.’43 In this instance, the RA’s traditionalists prevented KempWelch’s election. Kemp-Welch’s biographer notes that, from that point onwards, it was ‘probable that she contributed to her own exclusion from the RA by refusing to play political games’, adding that women who were ultimately elected to the RA in the 1920s and 1930s were advantaged by the advocacy of a close circle of influential male friends and husbands.44 However, even women who showed a willingness to cultivate connections and who enjoyed male support were unlikely to be successful in RA elections, as the failure of artists such as Louise Jopling, perhaps the female artist most known for her social connections and networking skills, to be nominated demonstrates. The fact that the RA withheld membership from women for so long made these eventual elections more meaningful than the unfashionable status of the Academy at the time would suggest. For Laura Knight, the second woman to be elected as an associate and the first to be given full Academician status, the RA remained a symbol of official recognition for her talents and achievements. She was a product of a Victorian childhood and a struggling artist mother, who had

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instilled in Knight the belief and ambition that she would ‘be elected to the Royal Academy one day’.45 At a time when modern and avant-garde forms of art were flourishing, Knight remained a staunch realist with a traditional approach to art, and her values regarding the RA mirrored her nineteenth-century training. As Rosie Broadly notes, ‘Official recognition, and the financial security that would surely follow, was the only way to demonstrate that she had overcome the double disadvantage of her sex and background.’46 The fact that the Academy chose Knight, a traditionalist and Academy loyalist, as the first female Academician, reflects their own ideas towards the type of art and artist that deserved recognition. Knight’s friend Alfred Munnings, who later became the RA’s president, supported her throughout the election process, and Knight was aware of the advocacy of ‘certain supporters’ on her behalf but remained cautious of the outcome and afterwards, surprised that prejudice and discrimination were still at play. ‘Even today’, Knight claimed, ‘a female painter is considered more or less a freak, and may either be undervalued or overpraised, and by sole virtue of her rarity and her sex be of better press value’.47 RA membership rewarded her lifelong pursuit of artistic professionalism and loyalty to the Academy ideal, and delivered her new and more prestigious commissions and clients, but the title could not erase long-established and enduring attitudes towards the otherness of female artistry and the associated value judgements. The election of Annie Swynnerton and Laura Knight as associates to the Royal Academy in the 1920s reflected an attempt by the organization to introduce institutional reforms and widen its membership base. While most accounts of the RA in the period after 1900 focus on the organization’s entrenched traditionalism and resistance to artistic changes, the Academy did slowly reform by reducing the number of works members and non-members were permitted to submit, reversing a ban on the admission of engravers to the Academy and including exhibitors from diverse educational backgrounds. However, many artists continued to be dissatisfied with the RA’s dismissive treatment of mediums other than oil, its populism and inward-looking disregard of progressive art. The RA’s selection and hanging policies ‘alienated a large number of the more thoughtful artists in this country’, according to one commentator.48 ‘You did not speak of the Royal Academy if you pretended to be interested in modern art,’ noted The Sunday Times’s art critic Frank Rutter.49 The changing nature of the art market and diversifying exhibiting practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also challenged the RA’s cultural and economic dominance among professional art societies.



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Conclusion As the most prestigious exhibition society in the United Kingdom, the Royal Academy was key to the professionalization of art that occurred throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Art societies took on the role of monitoring professional status and standards, representing artists’ interests and facilitating connections between the art world and the broader community. Because of their continued exclusion from its membership, the Royal Academy continued to hold meaning for women artists long after its position as the cultural establishment had begun to erode, with the letters ARA and RA continuing to hold value as recognizable symbols of acceptance into the artistic community and of quality, eminence and success. The fact that women did not find a more liberal or accepting outlook in protest and anti-establishment societies – whose broad-minded approach to art did not extend to the advancement of women – reinforced their continued interest in traditional makers of professional acceptance. Admittance to the Royal Academy summer exhibition was, for many women, the first step in moving their work into the public realm and initiating relationships with buyers. The Academy was useful and relevant to the process of women ‘becoming’ professional because it indicated recognition and validation from their peers and, most significantly, provided a conduit to art sales.

Notes 1 F.M.M., ‘The Ladies’ Column’, Illustrated London News, 7 May 1887, 516. 2 F.M.M., ‘The Ladies’ Column’, Illustrated London News, 21 October 1889, 795. 3 Meaghan Clarke, Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880–1905 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 92. 4 Grace Lees-Maffei, ‘Professionalisation as a Focus in Interior Design History’, Journal of Design History 21, no. 1 (2008): 5. 5 Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 68. 6 Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 359. 7 Nancy F Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 234.

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8 Julie F Codell, ‘Artists’ Professional Societies: Production, Consumption and Aesthetics’, in Towards a Modern Art World, ed. Brian Allen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 171–4. 9 Maria Malatesta, Professional Men, Professional Women: The European Professions from the Nineteenth Century until Today, Trans. Adrian Belton (London: Sage, 2011), 130. 10 See Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993), 65; Katy Deepwell, Women Artists between the Wars: A Fair Field and No Favour (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 101–3; Pamela Gerrish Nunn, ‘Dorothy’s Career and Other Cautionary Tales’, in Crafting the Women Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, eds, Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 167–86. 11 Quoted in Clarke, Critical Voices, 93. 12 Quoted in Cherry, Painting Women, 65. 13 Quoted in Clarke, Critical Voices, 93. 14 The Reader described the position of the Royal Academy as ‘peculiar. It is a selfelected aristocracy of art, having the sanction and patronage of the Sovereign, and a prescriptive right to lodgings at the expense of the nation; in return for which they provide a perfectly gratuitous education in art and though reserving to themselves certain privileges they admit the works of the profession generally to their annual exhibition.’ ‘The Royal Academy’, 17 February 1866, 187; See also Tom Taylor, ‘Report of the Commissioners Appointed into the Present Position of the Royal Academy’, The Fine Arts Quarterly Review (October 1863): 275–98; Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 304–5; Helen Valentine, Art in the Age of Queen Victoria (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1999), 34–5. 15 See ‘A Comparison of the Salon and the Royal Academy’, Art Journal (August 1880): 247–8; D.S. MacColl, ‘The Royal Academy’, The Fortnightly Review 53 (1893): 881– 9; A.L. Baldry, ‘The Royal Academy Exhibition’, Art Journal (June 1904): 161–82. Even while criticizing the RA as playing the ‘undignified part of purveyor of the things which are most in demand’, Baldry admitted that the Academy was ‘accepted as the chief guardian of British art’. 16 Thomas Bayer, ‘Money as Muse: The Origin and Development of the Modern Art Market in Victorian England: A Process of Commodification’ (PhD thesis, Tulane University, 2001), 178. 17 As Marion Spielmann commented in 1901, ‘You may approve the Royal Academy as the great official living Art institution of the day, or you may deride it for its dullness … but you cannot deny that it is at the centre of all the popular artistic



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movements of the country.’ ‘Behind the Scenes of the Royal Academy Exhibition’, The Pall Mall Magazine 24, no. 97 (1901): 99. See also Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, eds. The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 6. 18 The Royal Academy was founded by Royal Charter in 1768, at which time King George III guaranteed to underwrite the organization’s financial losses. Maryanne Stevens, ‘A Quiet Revolution: The Royal Academy 1900–1950’, in The Edwardians and After: The Royal Academy 1900–1950, ed. MaryAnne Stevens (London: Royal Academy of Arts; Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1988), 15. 19 The Times, 28 September 1886, 7. 20 Gordon Fyfe, ‘Auditing the RA: Official Discourse and the Nineteenth-Century Royal Academy’, in Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Rafael Cardoso Denis and Colin Trodd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 118. 21 G.D. Leslie, Inner Life of the Royal Academy (London: John Murray, 1914), 222–3. 22 Within the art world, however, criticism of the RA continued into the early twentieth century. 23 The membership structure of the RA at the turn of the century allowed for forty Academicians (full members) and thirty associates. Associates were elected by Academicians and promoted to full member status in the same way. William Stevens, ‘The Royal Academy’, The Leisure Hour (June 1898): 490. 24 Paul Usherwood, ‘Elizabeth Thompson Butler: A Case of Tokenism’, Woman’s Art Journal 11, no. 2 (1990/1991): 14–18. 25 G.A. Sala, ‘The Royal Academy’, The Daily Telegraph, 2 May 1874. 26 William Powell Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences (London: Richard Bentley and Sons, 1887), 491. 27 Fred Miller, for example, claimed that Elizabeth Butler should be elected and Artist magazine supported the election of Ethel Wright to the RA. Frank Miller, ‘Angelica Kaufmann, Royal Academician’, The English Illustrated Magazine 175 (1898): 20; F.M. ‘The Work of Miss Ethel Wright’, Artist, 22 May 1898, 33–43. Norman Shaw and John Everett Millais, for example, supported both Butler’s and Louise Jopling’s election as associates. See Elizabeth Butler, An Autobiography (London: Constable, 1922), 136 and Louise Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life (London: John Lane, 1925), 151, 154. 28 Butler, An Autobiography, 110. 29 Ibid., 104–13; ‘Exhibition of The Royal Academy’, The Times, 2 May 1874, 12; ‘Miss Butler’s Roll Call’, Newcastle Courant, 18 September 1874. 30 John Oldcastle, ‘Our Living Artists: Elizabeth Butler nee Thompson’, The Magazine of Art (January 1879): 260.

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31 ‘Signals from our Watch Tower’, The Woman’s Signal, 13 May 1897, 296; Rose Sketchley, ‘The Reign of Woman in the World of Art’, The Argosy (February 1901), 58. 32 Laura Wortley, Lucy Kemp-Welch 1869–1958: The Spirit of the Horse (Woodbridge: Antique Collector’s Club, 1996), 36. 33 A.C.R. Carter, The Year’s Art 1898 (London: J.S. Virtue and Co, 1898), 97–8. 34 Wortley, Lucy Kemp-Welch 1869–1958, 54, 143. 35 A Woman Artist, ‘Varnishing day at the RA’, The Woman’s Signal, 2 May 1895, 280. 36 Henrietta Rae, ‘My First Success’, Atalanta: The Victorian Magazine, 1 January 1896, 260. 37 Sidney C. Hutchison, The History of the Royal Academy 1768–1968 (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1968), 138. 38 In 1879, for example, profits from work sold totalled £20,814. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1910), np. 39 Mrs. E.M. Ward, Memories of Ninety Years (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1924), 174, 279. 40 G.M., ‘The Royal Academy’, The Speaker 5 (1892): 497. 41 Wortley, Lucy Kemp-Welch 1869–1958, 95, 135. 42 This painting was purchased ‘off the walls’ of the Royal Academy by the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, on the advice on the Chantrey Bequest, in 1900. Linda Waters, ‘Horses Bathing in the Sea by Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869–1958): A Close Examination’, Art Bulletin of Victoria 39 (1999), np. 43 Quoted in Wortley, Lucy Kemp-Welch 1869–1958, 93. 44 Laura Wortley, ‘Lucy Kemp Welch: The Hunt for the Artist Behind the Horses’, Antique Collecting (February 1997), 13–15. Kemp-Welch was nominated for election again in 1920 but was not successful. 45 Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (London: Macmillan, 1936), 1. 46 Rose Broadley, Laura Knight: Portraits (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2013), 20. 47 Laura Knight, The Magic of the Line: The Autobiography of Laura Knight DBE (London: William Kimber, 1965), 307. 48 ‘For the RA and Others’, The Outlook, 21 April 1900, 368. The Outlook criticized the RA for selecting the most commercial pictures to hang on the line. Their ‘haphazard hanging consequent on accepting too many canvasses’ and ‘their complete failure to discriminate between good pictures and bad’. 49 Frank Rutter, Art in My Time (London: Rich and Cowen, 1933), 53.

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In the second half of the nineteenth century, England’s art market expanded and diversified. The nation’s middle class was increasing in influence and buying power. As the general consumer base grew, ‘a collective effort was needed on the part of … sellers of services to capture and control expanded markets’.1 For artists, this meant that new ways of generating and securing the attention and patronage of potential buyers had to be created. One way to diversify the existing art market to appeal to new groups of art consumers, and ‘open the ranks of traditional professional elites’, was to establish new professional societies that represented a specific group of artists and responded to a niche demand of the art-buying public.2 These societies were also a reaction to the increased supply of artists in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s – a fact that was itself a result of the professionalization of the industry and the expanding educational opportunities that emerged throughout the century.3 Among this increased number of practitioners artists had ‘to meet and motivate new demand’ from a buying public that was expanded in numbers but reduced in individual buying power.4 New societies attempted to create new markets for art at the same time as they responded to existing and undersupplied demands.5 Women accounted for a significant portion of the increased artist population, and accordingly, were interested in the new art societies founded to represent their needs. D. S. MacColl supplied a list of some of these groups in his 1893 critique of the Royal Academy, in which he blames the ‘stupidity and neglect’ of the Academy for the ‘many and manifold’ new exhibitions in London: The Water-Colour societies, the Painter-Etchers, the Pastellists were started because the Academy did not care for water-colour, and hardly knew such things as etchings and pastels existed … the New English Art Club and the Grafton exhibit the younger schools. … Last of all the Portrait Painters have set up shop.6

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By organizing and representing artists who specialized in one genre, these societies created a monopoly on a specific set of expertise. The world of art was sub-professionalized into a series of market specializations, connecting members of the public to trusted authorities in an artistic field. The niche nature of these societies, and their overt relationship with art commerce, stood them apart from the broad, generalist exhibitions of the Royal Academy and positioned artists in closer contact to consumers. The Society of Miniature Painters explained its role as ‘bringing the public and the artist into direct communication’, while the International United Arts Club wanted ‘to bring the patron and the art worker into touch with one another … to act as agents for members of the club in the sale and purchase of works of art’.7 In this way, specialized art societies encouraged artists to become more business-like and energetic in their pursuit of clients and sales, in a way that contradicted, to some, the more genteel traditions of older societies, but which generally benefited women seeking to validate their professionalism by selling art.8

The exhibition marketplace Some women may have found the emphasis on commerce, business and selfpromotion in consumer-facing societies difficult to reconcile with their own and others’ expectations of appropriate female behaviour. But most women embraced the opportunities specialized professional societies afforded for exhibiting in a commercial context and connecting with buyers. As women were already encouraged to pursue genres and mediums such as watercolour, miniatures, pastels and portraits because of their reputation as less technically challenging forms of art, they were natural occupiers of the corresponding professional societies and were welcomed there on more equal terms than were found at the Royal Academy. The Society of Portrait Painters included four women in its founding group of twenty-seven members in 1891, and some thirty women were represented by its first exhibition.9 One of those was Louise Jopling, an artist who, like many of her male colleagues, joined several professional art societies to access a variety of different markets and take advantage of multiple exhibition opportunities. In 1887, she was invited to join the Graphic Society, a group which, like many other societies founded in the early parts of the century, sought to liberalize its membership base in the 1880s and 1890s in response to changing market conditions and the emergence of new exhibiting groups. As the



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secretary noted in his letter to Jopling, ‘Our old society has at length resolved, in accordance with the spirit of the age, to admit Lady Artists, of professional eminence as members.’10 Jopling was also the first female member of the Royal Society of British Artists. Although she continued to express hope that she would be elected to the RA, membership of these well-regarded societies ensured that Jopling had a consistent presence in London exhibitions and brought her into contact with potential buyers, interactions that helped vouch for her professional status in the eyes of the public. The proliferation of exhibiting societies at the end of the nineteenth century led to the development of a hierarchy based on the quality and reputation of exhibitors and the prestige associated with the exhibition venue. These factors contributed to the symbolic capital that the society generated and endowed to its artists, and this capital had to be weighed by potential exhibitors against the commercial results of a society’s exhibitions, its selection process and commission practices when they were deciding where to send their work. The Dudley Gallery Art Society, for example, was open to all artists and was intended to showcase the work of young and emerging exhibitors; the Art Journal called the Dudley a ‘nursery’ for artists.11 This meant that it was comparatively easy for artists’ work to be accepted in the exhibition, and since the gallery had a good record for sales the society was an attractive option for many women.12 However, the society’s liberal selection processes also meant that it was not seen as a prestigious exhibiting venue, and this affected the prices artists could demand and the artistic and professional capital they gained by being associated with the society. As Magazine of Art explained, ‘Since the Dudley Gallery admits work by artists not yet established, its exhibitions are sometimes uneven and ignored by critics.’13 Critics who did attend the Dudley exhibitions noted that there was a need for ‘a more rigorous standard of admission’; in 1880, Art Journal complained that from 672 pictures, there was ‘nothing on the walls commanding excellence’, referring to the high percentage of works by ‘lady hands’.14 The Dudley also charged up to 75 per cent commission on works purchased at its exhibitions, which significantly lowered profits on any pictures sold.15 The mixed sex exhibiting societies that best served the interests of women focused on select genres or materials. Although there was some danger that membership or participation within these groups would encourage the belief that women were ‘naturally’ more suited to specific types of art, and further marginalize women into female genre ghettos, in practice women artists welcomed the opportunity to participate fully in societies’ events and rituals.

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They were proud to place the letters of an organization after their names, standing, as they did, for their acceptance and recognition as authoritative art professionals. The two national watercolour societies, the Society of Painters in Watercolour (founded in 1804) and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour (founded in 1831), both liberalized their positions towards women in the 1880s and 1890s – the former by allowing women who had previously been given the title of associate, full membership status in 1890 and the latter by electing its first female member, Kate Greenaway, by invitation in the same year.16 In line with other media-specific societies, the Society of Painters in Watercolour took a more overt position on the commercialism of its exhibitions than the RA. It kept a book of prices inside the exhibition rooms for the convenience of buyers, and this policy benefited women even if they remained exhibitors rather than members. ‘A clerk in the exhibition room with a book containing the prices of all those paintings sent for sale, ready to answer inquiries and to take deposits, would give the artist a much better chance for customers than … at the Royal Academy,’ noted watercolourist John Roget in 1891.17 Art societies founded in the last two decades of the nineteenth century generally had the most inclusive policies towards women artists. The Society of Painter-Etchers and the Society of Miniature Painters were the two groups where women fared the best in terms of recognition and membership. The Society of Miniature Painters commenced in 1896 with a membership that was limited to fifty professional artists.18 The founding members included Josephine Gibson, Mabel Hobson, Alice Mott and Mrs Theo Smith-Dorrien, alongside Royal Academicians Edward Poynter and Lawrence Alma-Tadema.19 Miniature painting was viewed as ‘an opening for the artistic working woman of today’ because of the delicate and refined nature of the work, and it was one area in which women were taken seriously as practitioners and could earn a steady living.20 Miniaturists relied heavily on portrait commissions, and the society aimed to act as an agent connecting artists with potential clients.21 ‘The exhibition just closed brought a considerable number of commissions for portraits to the exhibitors,’ noted one women’s paper, and, as the miniaturist Mabel Terry Lewis commented, these commissions were important as a tangible sign of professional success.22 The Society of Painter-Etchers, established in December 1880, also sought to represent the interests of a select group of artists, many of whom practised etching in addition to painting and sculpture. The revival of interest in etching at the end of the nineteenth century involved and benefited many women, who



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were taken seriously in the genre as among the best of its practitioners.23 Women could be named fellows of the society from its inception, and Mary Nimmo Moran was elected the first woman member in 1881, followed by Catherine Maude Nichols in 1882.24 Fifteen per cent of fellows between 1880 and 1930 were women, a number that exceeded all other art societies except for the Society of Miniature Painters.25 Fifteen per cent of members over a period of fifty years may not appear a significant proportion. However, the treatment women received at societies that focused on a specialized but profitable segment of the art market, particularly when that specialization was in line with existing ideals of ‘feminine’ arts, far exceeded that which was found at the other category of group that proliferated at the turn of the century: the anti-establishment or avant-garde society. At the same time as artists who perceived their genre or medium to be ignored by the Royal Academy formed their own specialized societies, a young generation of exhibitors, interested in new ideas of art emanating from France, broke away too, forming new groups that promised forward-looking exhibitions and more open and progressive membership structures. The liberal ideals of these societies, however, did not extend to their attitudes towards female painters, and many continued to share common features with the Royal Academy, particularly when it came to the unquestioned acceptance of male control, pricing practices and organizational structures.26 As Julie Codell notes, breakaway and protest societies also continued to rely on the same tightly networked group of press, art dealers, gallery owners and buyers as the Royal Academy and other established societies.27 Their participation in this traditional infrastructure made the groups’ ‘anti-establishment’ claims difficult to reconcile and ensured that women faced the same difficulties in attracting unbiased critical attention and neutral pricing valuations as they did elsewhere. The most prominent breakaway society was the New English Art Club (NEAC) founded in 1885. NEAC did not explicitly bar women from its membership, but few women benefited from its professed openness and independence or its elected selection jury. Before 1900 the society was controlled by a close coterie of young male artists, who dominated both the exhibitions’ walls and the group’s administration. The society’s talk of democracy was a ‘superficial pretence’ according to one critic, who labelled NEAC ‘an effective oligarchy, a narrow clique in which a number of shifting and hostile talents has circled round one or two fixed points’.28 Although the women who exhibited with the group generally shared the same educational background and artistic principles as their male

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counterparts, they continued to be viewed as a distinct and separate category, both by members of the society itself and by the critics and commentators who reported on its exhibitions.29 The Outlook’s critic commented in 1900, for example, ‘I am more than willing to welcome any woman painter, however imperfect, who should bring to painting a certain fineness of soul that is the prerogative of her sex.’30 The ‘otherness’ of participating female painters was reflected in the way women’s work was priced and hung, and in decisions regarding membership, which continued to reward male artists of a particular social, artistic and educational ilk. NEAC had a close relationship to the Slade School, for example, where members including Henry Tonks, Philip Wilson Steer and Frederick Brown were professors. Almost half of the male artists elected to NEAC between 1900 and 1940 were Slade educated. Of the sixteen women elected as members in the same period, three quarters attended the school. However, women made up three quarters of the Slade student population.31 For women, possessing the appropriate educational pedigree thus did not change entrenched perceptions about their artistic abilities or guarantee acceptance at the NEAC or any other artistic society. As Vanessa Bell observed, ‘All the members of the NEAC seemed somehow to have the secret of the art universe within their grasp, a secret one was not worthy to hear, especially if one was that terrible low creature, a female painter.’32 The lack of institutional recognition women received from groups like NEAC and the associated rhetoric of mediocrity regarding women’s paintings that was constantly articulated in the press influenced women’s own perceptions of their artistic value, and had practical consequences on the opportunities they pursued. Even women like Bell, who were active in the artistic and social circles of the avant-garde, may have internalized attitudes towards the inferiority of their work and, consequently, failed to promote or price their work at a necessary or appropriate level.33 Gwen John and William Orpen, artists closely aligned by art scholars with the history of NEAC, provide an example of the differing pricing strategies of male and female artists and the value judgements and commercial recognition that underpinned them. Two years apart in age and from middle-class backgrounds, John and Orpen both attended the Slade School of Art in the late 1890s and were taught by NEAC members Henry Tonks, Philip Wilson Steer and Frederick Brown. They moved in the same social and artistic circles and received early recognition for their talent at school; John received the Melville Nettleship Prize for Figure Composition in 1898, and Orpen won the Slade Composition Prize



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the following year. Orpen debuted at NEAC in his final year at the Slade in 1899, and the support of Tonks and Steer ensured that he became a member of the club the following year. His The Mirror sold to art dealer David Croal Thomson for £25 in 1900 and his market value quickly increased; the following year the subject painting A Mere Fracture was purchased from NEAC by Sir George Swinton for £100, the largest sum Orpen had received for a painting to date. His total income for that year, which also saw his first solo exhibition at the Carfax Gallery, was £390.34 At the age of twenty-three, the Dublin-born artist was already earning a respectable, middle-class income, which allowed him to rent a house in Kensington and a separate studio on Fitzroy Street. Dedicating himself to portraiture and continuing a close association with NEAC, Orpen’s earnings consistently increased year-on-year. By 1905, he was earning close to £1000 a year, comfortably in the upper-middle class of Edwardian England.35 Although she received the same training, had the same mentors of Henry Tonks and Frederick Brown and moved in the same artistic and social networks as Orpen, John’s experience with NEAC stood in stark contrast to her male counterpart. She debuted at the NEAC in 1900, the year after Orpen’s first showing, with the well-received picture Portrait of the Artist36 and exhibited again at the Club the following year. Her second self-portrait37 was much admired by Brown, who purchased the work and included it in the background of his own self-portrait in 1926. But instead of being made a member of NEAC like Orpen or her brother Augustus, and receiving the practical benefits38 and prestige of that status, John continued to interact with NEAC from the unreliable position of the casual exhibitor, and her success and sales at their exhibitions were subject to the whims and taste of the hanging committees. John’s two entries to the 1902 exhibition were accepted but not hung, and John’s biographer speculates that it was Orpen, Augustus’s close friend, who determined the fate of these pictures.39 John’s treatment at the hands of the NEAC hanging committee shook her confidence. She told her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt she would never again paint anything specifically for an exhibition and would instead only send in ‘anything I happen to have’.40 She was a fastidious painter and a perfectionist and disliked the pressure of having to prepare works that were exhibition ready twice a year, but her need to make money meant that she could not turn her back on the exhibition system altogether. After moving to Paris, where she supported herself by modelling, John again entered the NEAC exhibition in 1908. Her two entries, Chloe Boughton-Leigh and La Chambre sur la Cour, both sold at the exhibition. John priced Chloe, described by critic T. Martin Wood as ‘one of the greatest

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achievements in the exhibition’ at fifteen guineas and was annoyed when the club’s salesman, Mr Winter, let it go to a buyer41 for £15.42 ‘He is incorrigible’, John noted to a friend, ‘he loves lowering prices’.43 Winter also suggested that John accept £10 for La Chambre sur la Cour, but the painting eventually sold to Sir Francis Darwin for £30. John continued to submit pictures to the NEAC exhibitions until 1911, but she was not elected a member of the club44 and her works were consistently priced at a lower rate than those of Orpen, her other male Slade contemporaries and her brother. While the experiences of William Orpen and Gwen John are not always directly comparable, charting these two artists’ experiences with the NEAC does illuminate the different commercial trajectories of male and female artists who received the same education, and who both relied on their art to make their living. In just their first year out of school, Orpen and John’s commercial value began to diverge, as did the critical attention, patronage and institutional recognition received by John and her brother Augustus John. For Augustus and Orpen, the advantages accorded to Slade students – including access to the NEAC, mentorship from Tonks, Steer and Brown and attention from NEACaligned ‘New Critics’45 – set up their professional careers and established their place in a well-defined segment of the art marketplace.46 While technically all available to women, these advantages were not the same vehicle to commercial success for the Slade’s female graduates. Only six of the sixty-three artists included in the NEAC’s 1905 winter exhibition were women, accounting for seven out of the one hundred and twenty-seven works on display. NEAC was known for its preference towards paintings depicting interiors, domestic scenes and portraits, subjects that could be coded as ‘feminine’ by the aesthetic standards of the day, and the club certainly rewarded women artists whose work fit within conventional ideas of ‘the feminine’. But where male artists’ interiors scenes were typically read as detached, objective commentary on broader social and cultural themes, women artists’ domestic scenes, portraits and flower paintings were more likely to be described in terms of their decorative qualities, as ‘pretty’ or ‘charming’, a viewpoint that ignored women’s often highly personal renderings of domestic spaces as sites of modernity and extensions of self.47 These value judgements informed the pricing of women artists’ work at NEAC and beyond. NEAC’s attitude towards women painters was typical of modernist or avantgarde exhibiting groups in the early twentieth century. The London Group, established in 1914 in response to the perceived failure of NEAC to represent



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modern and emerging art and the continuing conservatism of the RA, was marginally more welcoming of female exhibitors and members.48 The society was an amalgamation of two existing groups – the Fitzroy Street Group and the Camden Town Group – along with seceders of the Omega Workshop and other proponents of cubism and vorticism.49 Fitzroy Street and Camden Town members were given automatic membership of the London Group, a condition that allowed Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson, who belonged to the former, to be founding members of the new group, despite the fact that they were shut out of Camden Town on account of their sex. When that group was established in 1911 to ‘hold within a fixed and limited circle those painters whom they considered to be the best and most promising of the day’, women’s exclusion was justified as a means to maintain the group’s standards.50 Another explanation from James Manson claimed that the ban evolved from an explicit ‘disinclination of the group to include Miss S[ands] and Miss H[udson] of Fitzroy Street in the list of members’.51 As Nicola Moorby explains, these justifications reflected the perceived antipathy between women and the modernist impulse, as well as persistent assumptions about women’s amateurism in art.52 The Camden Town Group was designed as a professional platform to help artists sell their work within the art marketplace and, although artists like Sands and Hudson along with others such as Sylvia Gosse and Vanessa Bell, shared the aesthetic concerns of the Camden Town artists, their gender meant that their seriousness and professionalism in regard to the business side of art was questioned by the group’s male founders, as was their commitment to painting as an all-consuming lifestyle.53 When the Camden Town Group merged into the London Group the ban on women members was lifted, and the society provided women with a valuable entrée into London’s modern art scene. Unusually for art societies at the time, the London Group did periodically include women in the selection jury for its exhibitions, although they were always the only female in the room. Vanessa Bell was elected to the membership in 1919, but she had little influence on the committee throughout the 1920s. Bell ‘never so far as I remembered raised her voice in contradiction in meetings’, remembered the artist Raymond Coxon. ‘Roger’s [Fry] booming voice boomed and all was agreed upon.’54 This was typical of women who gained membership of mixed sex professional societies; even when they did overcome the practical and ideological prejudices they faced to be included in professional groups, they remained shut out of positions of influence within the membership itself.

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Exhibition gatekeepers Throughout the nineteenth century, women artists’ only involvement in the administration of artistic societies was as secretaries in council meetings or as helpers at exhibitions where they distributed refreshments or oversaw the price book. When women’s names began to appear on members’ lists in the late nineteenth century it was rarely as part of the council or members of selection committees and juries. One of the primary reasons for the resistance to women’s administrative involvement stemmed from a deeply rooted discomfort in the notion of women having authority over male members and exhibitors, particularly regarding their judging of male artists’ work. As Kirsten Swinth posits, pseudo-scientific ideas of women’s natural irrationality and sensitivity were invoked to question whether women had the ‘dispassion and authority’ to judge art works appropriately, and questions were asked about whether male artists would be embarrassed or diminished by female jurors.55 Women’s absence from positions of influence within professional societies did not go unnoticed by feminist-leaning periodicals and press. Magazines such as The Woman’s Signal, Hearth and Home and The Women’s Penny Paper frequently commented on women’s exclusion from hanging committees in their reviews of exhibitions. Reporting on the Royal Academy summer exhibition, one journalist complained that ‘in the large room, which is considered the place of highest honour, it is not wise to expect to find much women’s work till there are some ladies on the hanging committee!’56 The Women’s Penny Paper meanwhile reported on a case in which a woman, of equal merit to her male counterpart, was passed over for a position on a hanging committee on account of her gender – the justification being that the male artist was likely supporting a family.57 Women’s exclusion from administrative and management roles within professional societies was significant, because these positions reflected where members of the art world placed their authority, trust and respect. Council and committee members, selection jurors and exhibition hangers were gatekeepers within England’s art ecosystem. They determined the rules and policies of a society regarding women, adjudicated disagreements over rules and style and made decisions regarding which artists and what kind of art would be included in exhibitions and where and how it would be hung – choices that affected pricing and valuations. These decisions mattered, particularly for artists who were on the margins of the cultural establishment or lacked strong artistic connections, a group in which women were disproportionately represented.



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Inclusion in an exhibition and a prominent hanging position helped artists build their public reputation and could instigate relationships with dealers, printsellers and buyers, which, at an economic level, were crucial. Women’s absence from exhibition societies’ decision-making processes meant they could play no role in establishing professional standards or categorizing ‘exhibitable art’.58 The societies that first granted women roles within their management were the same genre-specific groups that welcomed them openly as members and exhibitors. Mrs Theo Smith-Dorrien was chosen as the Secretary of the Society of Miniature Painters when it was founded, and female members including Josephine Gibson went on to serve on the society’s council, allowing them a role in the management of the society’s affairs.59 Lucy Kemp-Welch, a member of both niche and generalist societies, was elected to the council of the Royal BritishColonial Society of Artists.60 Serving as both a member and an administrator of art societies was important to Kemp-Welch because it indicated that her work would be displayed and valued on equal terms to her male counterparts. She eschewed female only exhibiting societies and pursued membership instead at gender inclusive groups to ensure that her work was seen broadly and not isolated in a separate market for ‘women’s art’. As a council member, Kemp-Welch had a role in managing the rules and regulations of a society and determining its hanging and selection processes and, from this position, she could influence the group to adopt more gender-neutral practices. In 1913, she was selected as the inaugural president of a new exhibiting group, the Society of Animal Painters, whose membership included Britain’s leading animal sculptors and artists including Alfred Munnings and Herbert Dicksee.61 It was not only a sign of the admiration and respect Kemp-Welch commanded from her peers but also an important symbol of female authority and influence within the art world, even if only applicable to a specialized market. While genre- or medium-specific societies were among the first to give women management roles, women continued to be overlooked even within this generally sympathetic segment of the market. Generalist societies in London such as the Royal Institute and the Royal Society of British Artists, meanwhile, resisted promoting women members to their council or selection committees. Exhibiting groups based in the nation’s regional centres, however, took a more liberal approach. The Manchester Academy of Arts granted women opportunities to exercise artistic authority and influence with an institutional backing. In the late 1890s, Isabel Dacre was a member of the Academy’s council, Emma Magnus its Literary Secretary and Florence Monkhouse one of the organization’s two

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auditors.62 Other women were periodically appointed to the council, including Fanny Sugar in 1898 and Louisa Bancroft in 1910.63 Magnus was also the first woman to be elected to the academy’s hanging committee, where she was involved in selecting and curating the annual exhibition at the City Art Gallery.64 The Manchester Academy was known for its embrace of female painters, and it was a target for women seeking recognition through exhibition and membership.65 The academy’s inclusion of women in its management structures fostered this atmosphere and endowed women with new measures of professional authority, which enabled them to influence the city’s artistic culture more broadly. The first woman to serve on the hanging committee of a major art exhibition was also given the opportunity by a regional artistic centre. In 1893, Henrietta Rae and her husband Ernest Normand were invited by the Liverpool Corporation to hang the city’s annual autumn exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery.66 Rae’s appointment ‘broke the spell of masculine exclusiveness in this respect’67 and was remarked on by the press as a major advancement for women’s role in the art world. Rae referred to her time in Liverpool as the happiest of her life – a comment that reflects the significance of the role to her personal sense of artistic achievement and professional acceptance.68 As the hanger of the exhibition, Rae was also tasked with advising the Purchasing Committee of the Gallery on their acquisitions from the exhibition. She recommended the work of an artist not well known in England at the time, Giovanni Segantini, and it was based on her counsel that the picture was bought by the committee.69 In this role, Rae was elevated to a gatekeeping position, from where she could influence the tastes and direction of the wider artistic community. Rae’s success in Liverpool may have contributed to her appointment on the women’s work committee for the Victorian Era Exhibition at Earl’s Court in 1897, a commercial exhibition mounted by Imre Kiralfy and London Exhibitions Limited. Rae was the only artist, or professional worker of any kind, selected for the committee of titled women and as such was tasked with curating and hanging the vast exhibition of women’s art included in the Women’s Work section.70 The exhibition aimed to present the most ambitious collection of women’s art ever shown; previous displays of women artists had been ‘misleading’, because they had ‘only received those pieces that were not likely to obtain admission to more important exhibitions’. In her exhibition, Rae wanted to curate the first ‘genuine display’ of the best work by the leading women artists.71 While some of the artists Rae approached objected to showing their pictures in a single-sex exhibition, she explained bluntly that the men and women’s galleries were hung separately, so



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women ‘had to choose between being in our gallery or not at all’.72 Even within the segregated structure of the exhibition, she hoped that the strength of the display would indicate that women’s work should be judged on its own merits and not as a separate category of ‘female art’.73 The work was consuming; it took Rae weeks to pen the necessary correspondence and work out the composition of the galleries, but the role also provided her with increased visibility as a leader among female artists and allowed her to influence the way women’s art was presented to the general public.74 Rae’s prominent position in a large, generalist exhibition such as the Victorian Era Exhibition was justified by the fact that she was a woman artist judging the work of other women. Apart from Rae’s work with the Walker Art Gallery, it remained rare for women to obtain positions of authority over male artists as selectors or judges, or for them to organize art societies or exhibitions that were taken seriously by the wider art community. Groups like the Artists’ Guild invited well-known women artists to judge their exhibitions, but these societies focused on amateur artists and students, so the presence of female authority was not considered threatening.75 One exception was Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club, which she established in the summer of 1905. While a student in Paris Bell observed the camaraderie and community between artists that played out in that city’s cafes and artists’ homes. In founding the Friday Club, she hoped to recreate that cultural milieu in London and facilitate a space in which artists could discuss their ideas and philosophies towards art as well as exhibit work to the public. It was around this time that Bell began to take herself more seriously as an artist and regard her painting as a viable profession.76 The club was an attempt to surround herself with like-minded workers and provide a platform for her own and others’ work to gain visibility. She organized meetings for members at her own home, where she promoted open and frank dialogue, and searched London for suitable rooms in which to hold regular exhibitions.77 Annual shows were ultimately held at the Alpine Club, where a disparate group of artists showed both fine and applied arts. The group had no unifying aesthetic principles, so it fell to Bell to negotiate between different factions and manage the varied personalities and egos to put a cohesive show together.78 As her sister, Virginia Woolf, observed, ‘Old Nessa goes ahead and slashes about her and manages all the business and rejects all her friends’ pictures, and don’t mind a bit. She is said to have a genius for organization and it all seems to interest her.’79 Bell’s role in the club’s management was rarely mentioned in

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reviews of its exhibitions, which tended to portray the society as a junior version of NEAC, but, within it, she created a space in which women and men’s art were displayed on equal terms and where women’s impulse towards modern art was encouraged rather than marginalized.80 Vanessa Bell distanced herself from the Friday Club in the 1910s, when she felt that the increasing numbers of amateur artists exhibiting with the group were diluting the society’s purpose.81 Although Bell often denigrated her own art in comparison with her male Bloomsbury associates, she was intent on pursuing a professional course and sought to dissociate herself from the vast core of amateur artists and designers seeking to infiltrate the professional market.82 Like many of her contemporaries, Bell associated art amateurism with women. She was interested in the avant-garde and post-impressionist aesthetic that Roger Fry had introduced to London and in some ways absorbed the gendered hierarchy of genres that associated women with applied arts and men with the emerging forces of modernism.83 Within this world, Bell was viewed, and regarded herself, as an exception, rather than proof of women’s artistic ability. While membership of a society’s council theoretically allowed women a greater role in controlling a group’s rules and regulations and afforded them chances to influence attitudes towards women artists, in practice the tokenistic inclusion of women in the management of mainstream and mixed exhibiting societies did little to change entrenched, deterministic opinions about the value of female art.

No men allowed Women art professionals were not necessarily concerned with furthering the interests of a collective, female artistic identity. In the intensely competitive world of art, many women were more invested in the individualistic pursuit of artistic and commercial success than advocating for gender equity on behalf of their female colleagues. As Nancy F. Cott explains, the ‘professional credo, that individual merit would be judged according to objective and certifiable standards’, inculcated the ranks of female artists in the early twentieth century, leading to conflict between women’s individual and collective identities and successes.84 These divisions were visible in the attitudes of women artists towards single-sex art societies, which were formed to offer female artists with alternative exhibiting opportunities and, it was hoped, a separate but equivalent path to artistic professionalism. Single-sex art societies were initially founded in the nineteenth



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century to address the exclusionary practices of established art societies such as the Royal Academy. The Society of Women Artists (SWA), founded in 1855, sought to provide a separate platform for women artists, where their work would be included and hung on its merits and not discriminated against because of its maker’s gender. Its aim was to provide an unbiased and supportive space where women artists could come together and forge a community that would further their collective professional goals. Women’s art societies also aimed to promote the ‘cultural presence of women’ and to demonstrate to the wider public the artistic and commercial power of women artists.85 At the time of its inception, the Society of Women Artists (then the Society of Female Artists) self-consciously set itself apart from mixed or male-dominated exhibiting groups by including ideas of sexual difference within their aims and objectives. While the purpose of the society was to serve the interests of professional women artists who sought to make a living out of their art, it did this by embracing a benevolent separatism, which accepted and celebrated what was distinctive and ‘feminine’ about women’s art. Early accounts of the society in the women’s press reported that its exhibitors should ‘select subjects which are in harmony with their own natures’. While some subjects were so inherently masculine that women would be in vain to attempt them, domestic scenes, portraits, flowers and fruits were women’s ‘natural’ right to depict.86 In endorsing this gendered artistic ideology, the society did not intend to devalue these ‘feminine’ subjects but rather to counteract their denigration and assert women’s superior artistic powers in those art forms that were ‘natural’ to her sex.87 This approach grouped the work of women artists together, so that exhibitions were understood to show the collective merit of England’s female art constituency. This type of female art society promoted a ‘feminine professionalism’, which asserted the talents and ability of women while maintaining their separateness as a category of artists.88 This allowed women members to form a collective artistic identity, from which they could draw a sense of belonging and camaraderie and promote a form of cultural authority based on their distinct, gender-determined skills. However, when it came to furthering women’s professionalism in practical terms by facilitating sales and building connections between artists, art dealers, printsellers and clients, the SWA struggled to compete with mainstream art societies. The society replicated the organizational structures of the Royal Academy by dividing its membership into full and associate members, electing officers and pursuing royal patronage. The elected council dealt with the

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administrative matters of the society, which included managing requests for membership, selecting the hanging committee and determining membership rates and rules.89 But despite modelling itself on the RA, hosting a major annual art exhibition and insisting on the professional status of its members, the SWA never achieved the unqualified respect of other players in the art world. Reviews of their exhibitions in The Times, the Magazine of Art and other prominent periodicals frequently tempered praise with remarks about women artists’ lack of technical skills and seriousness of purpose, while those attempting ambitious or ‘masculine’ subjects were criticized as ‘too vigorous’ or ‘unwomanly’.90 By defining itself by the gender of its exhibitors, the SWA allowed critics to propagate the notion of a unified category of ‘women’s art’, subsuming the individual merits and styles of the exhibitors into a homogenous collective, able to be disregarded quickly and indiscriminately by critics and buyers. This critical reception affected the prestige associated with membership of the society and the professional and commercial value of participating in its exhibitions. Within the art world, the SWA was regarded as a reputable place for small-scale collectors and buyers to purchase inexpensive art. Its exhibition catalogues reveal that work was priced affordably – in the late 1890s most works were advertised for £50 or less, and many could be purchased for as little as £5 or £10.91 By 1914, the majority of artwork was still listed for between £5 and £20.92 The society only charged a small, 10 per cent commission on sales, from which members were exempt, and its focus on smaller scale, affordable art was in line with the concurrent shift in the art market towards more modest ‘drawing room’ pictures for middle-class buyers.93 Artist Elizabeth Forbes considered the SWA ‘a good place for getting rid of little pictures’, noting that she ‘generally managed to sell there’.94 But in the crowded exhibition landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, competition for sales was strong and the lack of prestige associated with the society was reflected in the profits from its exhibitions. By 1929, when the number of exhibits in the fine art section alone numbered 353, sales from the exhibition amounted to just £295.95 Because the SWA reinforced the notion that women were a separate category of artists, it was avoided or sidelined by many artists, who saw the organization as isolating, instead of integrating, women into the art market.96 ‘To group together pictures upon any other criterion save that of merit alone is a confession of inferiority,’ claimed one feminist periodical. ‘To sway the judgement by the assertion of collective femininity – to deprecate criticism, as it were, by offering the unassailable shield of feebleness is to acknowledge the



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defeat of open competition.’97 The SWA needed the leading women artists of the period to embrace its purpose and take its exhibitions seriously in order to legitimize the society’s position on the art landscape, but many chose to ignore its activities altogether, and those who did contribute frequently sent unsold pictures from previous years, which had already been shown at multiple other venues. That idea that ‘only the weaker members form themselves into separate societies’ was a common view.98 Gertrude Demain Hammond summarized the position of many women artists when she claimed, ‘I prefer to place my work in juxtaposition with that of male artists, that I may be fairly judged and criticised.’ Her stance was questioned by a reporter for the feminist-leaning Woman’s Herald in 1891: You are like many others, but this hardly shows a proper esprit de corps. If women of the world all unite and send their very best work to their own exhibition the world would be forced to come and see, and they would become a national institution.

‘No doubt you are right,’ Demain Hammond replied, ‘but I really have very little time and I always try and send my pictures to the Institute’.99 Like many other women artists, Demain Hammond prioritized sending her newest and most impressive works to the most prestigious exhibitions, where they had the best chance of attracting press notice and buyers, but this practice hamstrung the relevance of the SWA, which was repeatedly criticized for its lack of original or innovative exhibits. This was a problem faced by other single-sex exhibiting societies, which, despite the challenges faced by the SWA, continued to emerge onto England’s exhibition scene in the 1880s and 1890s. The Women’s International Art Club was founded in 1899 to provide a collegiate support network and exhibiting platform to women artists who had trained in Paris. It was open to members and exhibitors of all nationalities and encouraged internationalism in its exhibition, but the club was managed from London and most its council and membership were British. The WIAC’s first exhibitions drew submissions from leading women artists including KempWelch, Rose Barton and Louise Jopling, but the club attracted widespread criticism for accepting previously exhibited and unsold paintings and for its lenient and uncritical hanging practices.100 ‘Art societies of women have been the critic’s despair,’ The Academy claimed.101 Like the SWA, the WIAC did allow women agency over the management of a professional society and provided opportunities for its members to assume the roles of jurors, hangers and selectors.

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‘It is quite delightful to see the three young ladies who have done the active part of the preparation presiding at the manager’s desk in turn and conducting the show as they have done from start to finish,’ remarked one journalist.102 The fact that prominent female artists like Jopling and Kemp-Welch exhibited with the club speaks to the willingness of professional women to showcase their work widely to broaden their commercial exposure. But, like the SWA, the prestige and value accorded to the club by the press suffered from its choice to exclusively exhibit the work of women – the gendered organizing principle inviting similarly gendered attacks on the lack of originality and creativity in female art. Commentators viewed the exhibitions as a means to measure the progress of women as a unified category of artists and seek out the special characteristics that differentiated women’s work from that of their male counterparts, and this ran counter to the professional objectives of many, who wanted their work to be considered on equal terms, commercially and aesthetically, to other artists.103 The questions of whether women artists needed single-sex art societies as platforms to showcase their work and whether these groups furthered or hindered their professional standing remained contested into the early decades of the twentieth century. ‘Recent attempts to make separate exhibitions of women’s work were in opposition to the views of the artists concerned, who knew that it would lower their standard and risk the place they already occupied,’ argued the prominent female painter Anna Lea Merritt. ‘What we so strongly desire is a place in the large field: the kind ladies who do distinguish us as women would unthinkingly work us harm.’104 Others, however, took a pragmatic approach to their interactions with professional art societies. Artists wholly reliant on sales for their livelihood embraced all exhibiting platforms and welcomed the opportunity to showcase their work on the broadest scale possible. Louise Jopling, for example, worked with the single-sex SWA, WIAC and the 91 Club, along with the RA, the Society of Portrait Painters, the New Gallery and others to ensure that her name remained a constant presence on London’s art landscape.

Conclusion Faced with institutional barriers and aware of the importance of societies to art commerce, women artists’ approach to art societies was pragmatic; they



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exhibited widely, taking advantage of opportunities that were to hand and exploiting changes in the exhibition landscape to their own advantage. Genrespecific societies gave women access to specific segments of the art-buying market, some of which were particularly amenable to women’s perceived ‘natural’ talents, and these groups gave women the opportunity to become influencers and gatekeepers in their field by occupying roles within the society’s management. The professional pragmatism that is evident in women’s approach to art societies accounts in some ways for the failure of single-sex exhibiting groups to become powerful forces on the exhibition landscape. Women concerned with their own professional advancement and commercial activities were unlikely to invest socially and artistically in societies whose seriousness was questioned by art critics and commentators, and this lack of support from the period’s most respected female artists contributed to those societies’ poor reputations. Women artists’ approaches to professional societies were characterized by pragmatism and individualism. Most women seeking to support themselves through art recognized the significance of societies as spaces of professional interaction, networking, exhibition and commercialism. Few artists or designers could support themselves without access to a professional society to provide them with contacts, exhibition space and introductions to buyers and patrons. Societies were a vital conduit between artists and the public, and they facilitated artistic commerce. Membership of a society marked out an artist as a serious art practitioner, whose talents were recognized and vouched for by his or her peers, and this status enabled artists to charge higher prices for their work, attract more clients and gain press attention and notices. Societies granted women varied levels of access but women took advantage of the new opportunities emerging out of the expanded late nineteenth-century art market and took part in the networking that was necessary to secure visibility in the crowded exhibition landscape. Societies were, for many women, the most important link to the business side of art and their greatest chance for socially acceptable self-promotion. Their interactions with professional societies did not bring them visibility and legitimacy in the art world that was equal to that of men, nor vouch for their professionalism, but expanding organizational opportunities did enable more women to operate as artistic professionals than ever before and to access the commercial opportunities necessary to be taken seriously as individual participants in the English art world.

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Notes 1 Margali Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 10. 2 Ibid. 3 ‘Art Exhibitions’, The Times, 27 March 1906, 14; ‘The Business Side of Art’, Art Journal (August 1888): 249. 4 Julie Codell, ‘From Culture to Cultural Capital: Victorian Artists, John Ruskin and the Political Economy of Art’, in The Political Economy of Art: Making the Nation of Culture, ed. Julie F. Codell (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 31. Codell explains that the ‘boom’ in art buying that was led by wealthy patrons and collectors in the mid-nineteenth century ceased in the 1880s in line with the overall economic downtown in Britain at that time. The expanding middle class thus became a more important component of the art-buying public, and the types of art being produced and the prices demanded had to change accordingly. 5 Art Journal noted that ‘Without lowering the quality of their work’ artists should ‘endeavour to suit the tastes of the large numbers’. ‘The Business Side of Art’, 249. 6 D.S. MacColl, ‘The Royal Academy’, The Fortnightly Review 53 (1893): 887. 7 Quoted in Julie Codell, ‘Artists’ Professional Societies: Production, Consumption and Aesthetics’, in Towards a Modern Art World, ed. Brian Allen (London: Yale University Press, 1995), 173. 8 Marcus B. Huish, ‘Whence comes this Great Multitude of Painters’, Nineteenth Century 32 (1892): 720. Some older and more established societies continued to downplay their exhibitions’ links to commercialism. The Graphic Society, for example, did not allow visitors to ask the prices of work displayed and make purchases, so that meetings ‘would not degenerate into a bazaar’. ‘Rules and Minutes of the Graphic Society’, quoted in Codell, ‘Artists’ Professional Societies’, 171. 9 The women members were Louise Jopling, Anna Lea Merritt, Annie Swynnerton and Mary Waller. Society of Portrait Painters: Catalogue of the First Exhibition (London: The Society, 1891). 10 Louise Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life (London: John Lane, 1925), 321. 11 ‘The Winter Exhibitions at the Smaller Galleries’, Art Journal (December 1882): 378. 12 A.C.R. Carter, The Year’s Art (London: J.S. Virtue and Co, 1898), 108. 13 ‘The Dudley Gallery’, Magazine of Art 4 (1881): 342. 14 ‘The Dudley Gallery’, The Academy 548 (1882): 447; ‘The Dudley Gallery Spring Exhibition’, Art Journal (May 1880): 155. 15 Joanna Meacock, ‘The Exhibition Society’, Exhibition Culture in London 1878– 1908, 2006, http:​//www​.exhi​bitio​ncult​ure.a​rts.g​la.ac​.uk/e​ssays​.php?​eid=0​2#_ft​ nref3​6.



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16 Charles Holme, ed. The History of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (London: The Studio, 1905), 20. 17 John Lewis Roget, A History of the Old Watercolour Society (London: Longman, Green and Co, 1891), 142. 18 ‘The Society of Miniature Painters’, Glasgow Herald, 20 August 1896. 19 Hearth and Home 277 (1896): 615. 20 ‘Music and Art’, Hearth and Home 282 (1896): 798. 21 ‘Miniature portraiture, more than any other branch of painting, depends on the goodwill of society. The condition of its development is the existence of a group of fashionable wealthy people who can indulge in its dainty and exquisite luxury.’ ‘The World of Art’, Glasgow Herald, 3 August 1896. 22 ‘The Society of Miniature Painters’, Myra’s Journal 1 (January 1897): 9; ‘A Rising Miniaturist – Miss Mabel Terry Lewis’, Atalanta, 1 November 1897, 80. 23 Frederick Wedmore’s Etching in England recorded several successful female etchers (London: George Bell, 1895). 24 ‘The Etcher Notes’, The Etcher (September 1881): 18; ‘The Etchers Notes’, The Etcher (January 1882): 15. 25 Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang, Etched in Memory: The Building and Survival of Artistic Reputation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 269. 26 The exclusion of women from art societies that proclaimed their modernity and embrace of the avant-garde can also be seen as a symptom of the perceived ‘feminization’, and associated decline, of the culture that such groups were attempting to distance themselves from. Lisa Tickner writes that English painters at the turn of the century struggled against the ‘debilitating influence of mass culture, mass politics and the “femininsation” of social life.’ Women and femininity were associated with the mediocrity of mass culture and were seen as contrary to the modernist aesthetic, which was ‘intent on distancing itself from the … banalities of everyday life’, which women were seen to represent. Lisa Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven Yale University Press, 2000), 203; Andreas Huyssens, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 47. 27 Codell, ‘Artists’ Professional Societies’, 172. 28 D.S.M., ‘The New English Art Club’, The Saturday Review 82 (1896): 539. 29 Katy Deepwell, Women Artists between the Wars: A Fair Field and No Favour (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 138. 30 This comment was made in relation to Ethel Walker’s Lydia. ‘The New English Art Club’, The Outlook, 14 April 1900, 337. 31 See Katy Deepwell, ‘A Fair Field and No Favour: Women Artists Working in Britain Between the Wars’, in This Working Day World: Women’s Lives and Culture(s) in Britain, 1914–1945, ed. Sybil Oldfield (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 144.

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32 Quoted in Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1983), 36–7. 33 Bridget Elliot and Jo-Ann Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im) positionings (London: Routledge, 1994), 81. 34 Bruce Arnold, Orpen: Mirror to an Age (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), 97. 35 Ibid., 211. Orpen would become one of the most well paid artists of his generation. In 1919, the year he elected as an associate of the Royal Academy his income was £5,436. By 1921 it was £41,675. 36 Now at the National Portrait Gallery, London. 37 Now at the Tate. 38 Until 1926 NEAC members were allowed to send four works to the NEAC exhibitions, as opposed to two for non-members. 39 Sue Roe, Gwen John (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001), 34–5. 40 Letter to Ursula Tyrwhitt dated 8 July 1904 in Gwen John, Gwen John: Letters and Notebooks, ed. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan (London: Tate Publishing in association with the National Library of Wales, 2003), 33. 41 The buyer was the portrait’s subject. 42 T. Martin Wood, ‘The New English Art Club’s Exhibition’, The Studio 44 (July 1908), 134. 43 Letter to Ursula Tyrwhitt dated 29 May 1908 in John, Gwen John: Letters and Notebooks, 43. 44 As of 1909 the Club had four female members, two of whom had been elected prior to 1900. That number increased to seven (out of forty-five) by 1918. See Deepwell, Women Artists between the Wars, 135. 45 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), 324. See Chapters 6 and 7 of this volume for a broader discussion of the role of the critic in artists’ market value. 46 See David Fraser Jenkins, ‘Gwen John and Augustus John: Mutual Differences’, in Gwen John and Augustus John, eds. David Fraser Jenkins and Chris Stephens (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 16–20. 47 See Nicola Moorby, ‘Her Indoors: Women Artists and the Depictions of the Domestic Interior’, in The Camden Town in Context, eds. Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt and Jeniffer Mundy (Tate Online Research Publications, 2012). 48 ‘The Jubilee exhibition of the New English Art Club seems to have coincided with the formation of a society to supersede it.’ ‘The Revolutionaries’, The Manchester Guardian, 20 January 1914, 8; Roger Fry, a significant supporter of the group, claimed that the London Group did for English post-impressionism what NEAC had done a generation earlier for English impressionism. J.R., ‘The London Group Looks Back’, The Manchester Guardian, 2 May 1928, 12.



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49 ‘Art and Artists: The London Group’, The Observer, 8 May 1914, 7. 50 See Charles Ginner, ‘The Camden Town Group’, The Studio (November 1945): 129. 51 Letter from James Manson to Esther Pissarro, 23 November 1911. James Bolivar Manson Collection, Tate Archive TGA 806/2/6. 52 Moorby, ‘Her Indoors: Women Artists and the Depictions of the Domestic Interior’. 53 Moorby explains that the ‘overriding reason for the single-sex stricture appears to have been the persistent antipathy towards the notion of the female “amateur”.’ Walter Sickert repeatedly chided female artists, including Sands and Hudson, for not devoting the whole of their time to artistic improvement, and for having too many domestic and social responsibilities. Ibid. 54 Coxon quoted from a letter to the author in Spalding, Vanessa Bell, 211. 55 Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 69. 56 ‘Signals from our Watch Tower’, The Woman’s Signal, 5 May 1898, 280. 57 ‘Leaderettes’, Women’s Penny Paper, 11, 5 January 1889, np. 58 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993), 165. 59 ‘Notes on Art and Archaeology’, The Academy 1269 (1896): 150; ‘Society of Miniature Painters’, Harmsworth Monthly 1, no 2 (1898–99): 79. 60 ‘Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch’, The Times, 28 November 1958, 15. Kemp-Welch was also a member of the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Royal Cambrian Academy and the Pastel Society. 61 ‘Biographical Notes’, Lucy Kemp-Welch Papers, Bushey Archive, Bushey Museum and Art Gallery; ‘Animal Painters’ Exhibition’, The Times, 24 October 1919, 19. 62 ‘Northern Counties Notes’, Hearth and Home, 11 February 1887, 545. 63 ‘Manchester Academy of Fine Arts’, British Architect, 18 February 1898, 111; ‘Manchester Academy of Fine Arts: The Annual Meeting’, The Manchester Guardian, 16 February 1910, 3. Fanny Sugars was a ‘well-known Manchester artist’ who had been the only artist out of forty-one nominees to be elected to the Manchester Academy membership in 1897. ‘Women’s Doings’, Hearth and Home, 11 March 1897, 722. 64 ‘Women’s Doings’, Hearth and Home, 29 March 1900, 883. 65 Cherry, Painting Women, 70. 66 Arthur Fish, Henrietta Rae (London: Cassell and Company, 1905), 27. 67 Helene L. Postlethwaite, ‘Some Noted Women-Painters’, Magazine of Art (January 1895): 18. 68 Fish, Henrietta Rae, 70. 69 The purchase of The Punishment of Luxury by Segantini was greeted by protest from the Liverpool community at the time, but the acquisition paid dividends when the artist’s reputation increased in the following years. 70 ‘Woman’s Work in the Victorian Era’, The Morning Post, 25 January 1897, 6.

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71 ‘Women’s Pictures at the Victorian Exhibition, Earl’s Court: Interview with Henrietta Rae’, The Woman’s Signal, 8 July 1897, 19. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 The women’s art section was regarded as the strongest component of the women’s work exhibition. ‘The Victorian Era Exhibition’, The Times, 24 May 1897, 5. 75 For example, Louise Jopling and Henrietta Ward joined William Frith to judge the Artists’ Guild annual exhibition in 1891. ‘People, Places, Things’, Hearth and Home, 12 November 1891, 820. 76 Spalding, Vanessa Bell, 55. 77 Letter to Clive Bell from Vanessa Stephens [Bell], c.1905. Charleston Trust, Tate Archive TGA 8010/2/7. 78 Richard Shone, ‘The Friday Club’, Burlington Magazine 117, no. 866 (1975): 279. 79 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicholson (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 1: 213. 80 ‘New English and Other Artists’, The Speaker 14, no. 351 (1906): 270–1; ‘Other Exhibitions’, The Athenaeum, 4 July 1908, 22. 81 Shone, ‘The Friday Club’, 283–4. 82 As early as the late 1880s art commentators were complaining about the efforts of art and craft ‘dabblers’ flooding the exhibiting market with inferior wares. Art Journal remarked that ‘this would not be to so great an extent if the ability to sketch and painted were regarded, like music and singing, merely as a graceful accomplishment; but unfortunately, when the young student produces a little picture, however weak and amateurish it may be, there arises a strong desire to sell it.’ ‘The Business Side of Art’, Art Journal (August 1888): 249. 83 Elliot and Wallace, Women Artists and Writers, 63. 84 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 234. 85 Susan Butlin, The Practice of Her Profession: Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 146. 86 ‘The Society of Female Artists’, The Lady’s Newspaper, 6 June 1867, 355. 87 As one report concluded, the Society was a ‘demonstration of woman’s willingness to work out thoroughly the good gifts that are in her’. The exclusively female exhibitions ensured ‘that appreciation for a speciality should not be confused and lost by being spread over a multiplicity’. ‘The Society of Female Artists’, The Englishwoman’s Review, 1 May 1898, 581. 88 Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalisation of Women Artists in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 108. 89 ‘Rules of the Society of Women Artists 1919’, Society of Women Artists Records, Archive of Art and Design AAD/1996/7/1.



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90 Art Journal was the periodical most encouraging of the SWA. Its early reviews made note of the educational limitations women faced in drawing from the living model, and it continued to publish lengthy and constructive reviews of the exhibition into the late nineteenth century. 91 Exhibition Catalogues for the 31, 40, 45, 51 and 66 Exhibitions of the Society of Women Artists, Society of Women Artists Records, AAD/1996/7/35; 42; 46; 52; 67. 92 Exhibition Catalogue, Society of Women Artists Exhibition, 1914, Society of Women Artists Records. 93 Carter, The Year’s Art, 107. In this period the expanding middle class art-buying public were replacing ultra-wealthy collectors and connoisseurs as artists’ most important customers. In this context, Walter Sickert encouraged artists to make a living by working and selling ‘on a small scale.’ Walter Sickert, ‘Small Pictures’, The Speaker, 2 January 1897. See also Patricia De Montfort, ‘The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition’, in Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present: A Cultural History, eds. Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplede (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 147–59. 94 Letter to Mrs Forbes (Elizabeth Forbes’ mother-in-law), 10 July 1888. Stanhope Forbes Papers, Tate Archive TGA 9015/4/2/8. 95 This number includes sales from the fine art section and the extensive craft and applied design exhibit. Minutes of the Society of Women Artists Autumn Council Meeting, 1930, Society of Women Artists Records AAD/1996/7/1. 96 Lucy Kemp-Welch’s biographer, for examples, notes that the artist initially exhibited with the SWA but ceased her involvement with the organization because she felt it isolated women from the broader art market. Wortley, ‘Lucy Kemp Welch’, 13. 97 ‘Society of Women Artists’, Hearth and Home, 9 February 1899, 531. 98 Mrs Oliphant, ‘Brown Owl’, Atalanta 4 (1894): 733. 99 ‘Interview: Miss Gertrude Demain Hammond’, The Woman’s Herald, 10 January 1891, 177. 100 Queen, 16 March 1901. Ladies Field asserted, ‘The club needs a hard-hearted hanging committee – one that would reject without mercy everything that was not up to a respectable standard of excellence. It would cause present pangs and heart burnings, but it would be better for the rejected artists in the long run.’ 31 January 1903. Press Cuttings 1901–1967. Women’s International Art Club Archive, Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths University. 101 Haldane Macfall, ‘Women in Art’, The Academy (December 1904): 621. 102 Belfast Newsletter, March 1901. Press Cuttings 1901–1967, Women’s International Art Club Archive. 103 Ethics, 15 March 1902; ‘Women’s International Art Club’, The Times, 4 March 1912. 104 Anna Lea Merritt, ‘A Letter to Artists: Especially Women Artists’, McBride’s Magazine 65 (1900): 467.

6

Making a Living through Middle-Class Demand

In 1912, the ‘Women’s Work Bureau’ of The Quiver magazine offered advice to women who wanted to enter the ‘overstocked profession’ of art. The magazine assured readers that with ‘push, energy and perseverance’ women could earn an income from art, but to do so, they would have to ‘be quick at adapting [their] talent to the moods and modes of perpetually changing fashion and styles’. To earn money from art, it was not enough to draw and paint well. In addition, women ‘must also know the more difficult art of combining sound business faculty with artistic expression’.1 The business of art was a fundamental part of a professional artist’s career. With more men and women pursuing art as a career than ever before, the number of art works for sale at English exhibitions swelled. ‘Nothing seems to check the production of painters,’ remarked The Times, ‘the swift succession of their exhibition continues’.2 By 1886, the ‘supply of pictures’ was ‘far in excess of the demand’, according to Art Journal. To sell their work in this competitive and crowded marketplace, it was imperative for artists to ‘pay greater attention to the business side of art’.3 Relying on the Royal Academy’s summer exhibitions as a place to display art, gain visibility and elicit sales would no longer be sufficient, and as art critics and art dealers gained greater prominence within the art ecosystem, it became more incumbent on artists to respond to trends and fashions, to use intermediaries to access specific markets and to pay attention to the demands of buyers. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, artists of both genders sought out new ways to display and sell their work as ‘marketable commodities’ beyond the traditional exhibition society.4 The size and diversity of the art-buying public was expanding, and the amount of art being purchased was greater than ever before, but artists had to be savvy about their own commercial strengths and understand the mechanics of the art scene to capitalize on the new market conditions.



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Accessing the spaces and gatekeepers that facilitated art commerce and selling art in a recognized and public way were the most important factors in women artists operating and being recognized as professional artists. Among the vague and slippery discourse surrounding art professionalism in the late nineteenth century, the ability to earn a living wage through the practice of a defined, specialized skill was one constant and uncontested feature of professional status. John Stuart Mill rationalized his claim that ‘all women artists are amateurs’5 on the basis that they did not make their living out of art practice. It was noted in multiple profiles of Madeline Marrable, the president of the Society of Women Artists in the 1890s, that she only turned to art as a ‘professional’ when she was obliged to sell her work for personal, commercial gain after the death of her husband in 1872. While Marrable had already exhibited with the Royal Academy in the 1860s and, in her own words, ‘worked hard’ at her art, she donated any money she received for her pictures to charity and did not engage seriously with the business side of art.6 Her art was viewed as a ‘girlish interest’.7 It was when she was ‘obliged to work … as a means of earning my living’ that Marrable entered the world ‘as a professional’.8 It was the shift from producing work that was ‘subjectively satisfying’9 to that which was purposefully exposed to the scrutiny of a disinterested market that marked women’s intentions out to her peers as recognizably professional and deserving of the corresponding status and benefits of that label. However, as Patricia Zakreski notes, women who did devote themselves to selling art and who relied on it to earn their living, ‘offered a challenge to the feminine ideal’.10 Women were impacted by the general anxieties about artists’ relationships with commerce and their interactions with the market particularly strongly. The role of commerce in nineteenth-century conceptions of professionalism was complicated for all artists. Although a key aspect of professionalism was control and monopoly over the market, the fact that professions were vocations, motivated not by economic need but by public need, service and utility was what differentiated them from general labour. This point was particularly pertinent in the cultural industries, where tensions and debates proliferated over the commodification and monetisation of art and taste, which some saw as threatening to the ‘calling of art making’.11 Women artists were particularly vulnerable to these criticisms. Aspiring female professionals occupied a nebulous category, because they had to distance themselves from aspersions of amateurish inexperience on one hand and ambitious commercialism on the other.12 The way women artists approached business

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opportunities was thus critical to the financial and social viability of their careers and defined their professional identities. Despite the centrality of art commerce to women artists’ careers, scholarship dedicated to women’s relationship with the late Victorian and Edwardian art market is limited, and this reflects, in part, the scarcity of archival material relating to this topic. ‘Overall the account of how and to whom the women artists sold their work is thin,’ concluded Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn. In her 1993 monograph, Deborah Cherry stated that ‘at present, remarkably little is known about the relations between women artists and those who purchased or collected their work, the ways in which women artists negotiated sales, secured commissions or cultivated their clients’.13 Despite valuable contributions to the field from Patricia Zakreski, Patricia de Montfort and others, women’s interactions with the expanding commercial art market remains under-researched and under-documented, even while scholarly interest in the development of the modern art market in Europe, and the dealer-critic system in England, has increased.14 Source material revealing the business transactions and commercial relationships cultivated by women artists remain scarce, but recent developments in online databases and digitization projects do allow for women’s interactions with the art market and its actors to be more clearly mapped on a macro level, so that patterns and trends emerge.

The business of art in late nineteenth-century London Expectations and aspirations as to what an artistic career in late Victorian England would provide financially varied, in accordance with the vast range of incomes that existed in England’s multilayered art community. ‘It may be said that their [artists’] incomes at the present day vary from nothing to many thousands per annum,’ reported one magazine for young people, promising that, despite the recent increase in artists, men and women who applied their talent to study ‘may be sure of a respectable income’.15 In the early twentieth century, a critically and commercially successful artist could earn above the average for middle-class professionals; George Lambert’s yearly earnings totalled approximately £1,000 at a time when L. G. Chiozza Money categorized a yearly income of between £160 (the base income tax level) and £700 as ‘comfortable’.16 These numbers were based on a largely male workforce. Remuneration received by women working in the same professions as men differed, often based



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on the expectation that they were not solely supporting themselves or others, and this disparity remained present within the art professions, where it was informed by value judgements about artistic worth and genius. Feminist campaigners took on the issue of women’s wages as one that was as (or more) important than the vote to secure female independence. ‘One thing women lacks above all others,’ proclaimed the Freewoman in 1911, ‘and that thing is money.’17 Virginia Woolf, who constantly identified the relationship between professionalism and earning a living in her writing, noted that women artists faced an additional challenge in supporting themselves due to the necessity for expensive equipment, studios and materials.18 For a woman artist earning a comfortable living wage was ‘always a chance’, as Louise Jopling explained. For her, professional success came down to the individual and depended on whether an artist ‘has the gift of pleasing the public and so finding a market for her wares’.19 By the late nineteenth century, ‘finding a market’ for art involved engaging with the commercial art infrastructure that had developed in England over the course of the century, which included commercial art galleries and print sellers, art dealers, auction houses and the art press. The professionalization of female artistic practice occurred concurrently to and was intertwined with these developments in the retail market for art – which themselves represented a new professionalism in the fields of selling and marketing visual culture. For women to sell enough art to make a living they had to participate in these complex and interlocking structures and spaces and, in turn, have their worth, prestige and professional status legitimized by the actors and mechanisms that operated within the art marketplace.20 There is no doubt that women were active within this infrastructure; many built reputations and earned a livelihood by selling art through the commercial market system and benefited from the business-like approach to art that it facilitated. But, as artist Jessie Macgregor explained in 1904, women remained ‘generally at a disadvantage, in a matter of selling’.21 Expectations and attitudes about women’s artistic capabilities, and their interactions with the public realm of business, continued to affect their success in the commercial market into the first decades of the twentieth century. The association between art and commerce was not only problematic for women. The monetisation of art was a broadly discussed issue in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As the number of commercial galleries and art dealers in England increased in line with the growing pool of art consumers, the flow of art and money circulating within the market surged.

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Within art-critical discourse, debates about art’s commodification, and whether the increasingly transactional nature of the market tarnished art’s position as rarefied culture, periodically arose up to the final decades of the nineteenth century. ‘The excitement of the stock exchange has been “imported” into the pure and formally unsullied realm of art,’ claimed Fraser’s Magazine in 1885, reflecting a view that was underpinned, according to Dianne Sachko Macleod, by ‘the eighteenth century construction of a pure and ideal art produced independently of the marketplace’.22 Critics who held this idealized view of art as a rarefied commodity that should be bought and sold in a manner that befitted its status as high culture, employed terms such as ‘art manufacture’, ‘producer’ and ‘commercialist’ to denigrate artists they regarded as too involved in the monetary and transactional aspects of art. Roger Fry repeatedly chastised artists for ‘corrupting’ their work through market influences; he claimed John Singer Sargent had been bankrupted by market forces and snobbery into producing monotonous society portraits, while Lawrence Alma-Tadema was described as a ‘capable commercialist’ whose undemanding, customer-pleasing paintings were likened to margarine. These criticisms, along with those that characterized art galleries as bazaars and department stores, linked artists and exhibition venues to the crass demands of modern consumer culture.23 Not all commentators saw artists’ participation in art commerce as dangerous or disreputable. Art Journal and Magazine of Art were fairly consistent in promoting the commercial aspects of art by announcing art sales and auction results and advised artists on how to engage with the business side of their profession.24 Rather than hurting their creative output, G. D. Leslie argued that ‘pecuniary gain’ motivated artists to create their best work, claiming that the old masters ‘by no means despised the remuneration they obtained for their labours’.25 What was consistent on both sides of this debate, however, was an insistence on the respectability of art and artists; to maintain an untarnished reputation while engaging in the commercial side of their profession it was necessary for (male) artists to be viewed as ‘gentlemen’ by the buying public. This is because the ‘eminently decorous’ English middle class continued to ‘perceive a certain aroma of social and moral laxity in the atmosphere of the studio’, into the 1880s, a result, in part, of their ‘periodical impecuniosity’.26 Popular impressions of artists were still grounded on a ‘vague and unreasoning prejudice’ based on their perceived eccentricity, impulsivity and capriciousness, and this fact, along



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with the prevalence of anti-commercial discourse in the press, made artists’ social respectability paramount.27 Participating in the commercial side of art was thus crucial to artists’ professionalism, but it was also potentially damaging to the respectability they needed to court middle-class buyers and achieve the aesthetic ‘purity’ demanded by some art critics. As Julie Codell notes, late nineteenth-century concepts of the professional involved a ‘nexus of economic and social responsibilities and rewards, balancing economic interest with “moral regulation”, standards perceived as conflicting with artist stereotypes’.28 The conflation of economic participation and professionalism was one way for artists to neutralize the risks associated with commercializing their work and the negative perceptions attached to the artist stereotype.29 By linking art commerce to the ideals of professionalism – such as regulated standards, expert knowledge and public good – artists’ interactions with market mechanisms were legitimized under the umbrella of middle-class professional respectability. It was within this nexus of expectations and activities that women artists negotiated their own participation in the art market and managed the ambiguous, sometimes conflicting, claims that participation made on their own professional identities. The means through which women used the mechanisms of the art market to further their own professionalism are best discussed with reference to two separate but interconnected components within the art market – commercial art galleries and art dealers.

Commercial galleries In 1877, Henry James praised the easy and democratic way English commercial galleries facilitated picture browsing and buying. He described paying a shilling to ‘an extremely civil person in a shop front’ before passing into a ‘maroon draped penetralia’ where he was supplied with a neat piece of cardboard containing literary explanations of the pictures displayed, ‘as clever as an article in a magazine’.30 The gallery James described was located on Bond Street in London’s West End, a focal point for the sale of art and luxury goods in the late nineteenth century. Specialist art dealers had operated in England since the early 1700s, selling and acquiring art through auction houses, but the private commercial gallery did not emerge as a means of displaying, marketing and selling art until the middle of the nineteenth century.31

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The boom in the art market during those decades encouraged print sellers and art dealers to expand their operations into more sophisticated, often purposedesigned, premises situated in fashionable districts of London.32 Agnew’s, for example, relocated its London office from Waterloo Place to Old Bond Street in 1875 because of the rapid expansion in the firm’s business; its new, spacious building reflected the status of Agnew’s as one of the most influential and successful dealer-run galleries in the country and the growing perception of art as a luxury commodity.33 Dignified, impressive gallery spaces presented artistic commodities to the public in a way that elevated their symbolic and cultural capital. As Anne Helmreich notes, commercial galleries were spaces not only of display but also of ‘sociability, fashionability and prestige’, which allowed consumers to acquire art-historical knowledge and display their sophisticated connoisseurship.34 The cluster of commercial galleries that formed around Bond Street in the late nineteenth century firmly situated fine art in the luxury retail trade – a fact that contributed to criticism of art’s commodification, but which also encouraged the viewing and buying of art as a leisure activity for the fashionable middle class, for whom art was a means to signify their social status and cultural erudition. The profit-driven side of the galleries was veiled to these consumers by the comfortable luxury of their interiors, which recalled in style and taste customers’ own homes.35 By the 1880s, private commercial galleries had become central to the way artists gained exposure and drove sales. Galleries pioneered new methods of displaying and exhibiting art that promoted the reputation of a single artist by building a critical and personal narrative around their oeuvre. ‘One man’ shows were largely an innovation of the Fine Art Society’s director Marcus Huish who, in his double capacity of gallery curator and editor of Art Journal, had unprecedented influence to create reputations through the combined force of single artist exhibitions, scholarly catalogues and biographical magazine articles.36 The gallery made money from these ventures through the sale of art along with reproductive prints of the most popular works displayed. Solo exhibitions could be hugely influential in building an artist’s reputation and, it follows, increasing the value and demand associated with their art, but access to them was difficult for artists who were not already established. Previous critical and commercial success at the Royal Academy or other important exhibitions was one way for women artists to capture the interest of commercial galleries. Elizabeth Butler, for example, parlayed her enormous



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success at the 1874 Royal Academy summer exhibition into a series of profitable one woman/one picture shows at the Fine Art Society, which helped cement her reputation as both a critically and commercially viable artist. Demand for engravings and prints of Butler’s early military paintings was high, and her Fine Art Society contracts included the rights to her paintings’ copyright which, until 1897, could be purchased independently from the artwork itself. This arrangement was profitable for popular artists like Butler, who could demand upwards of £1,000 for reproductive rights to individual paintings, but it was also highly beneficial to galleries, who often relied on the reproduction market to maintain their finances.37 The Sketch credited the public’s demand for Butler’s pictures for keeping the Fine Art Society afloat. The space Butler devotes in her autobiography to her dealings with commercial galleries over copyright and solo exhibitions indicates their importance in her career trajectory and professional standing. But few women (or men) experienced the overnight celebrity that catapulted Butler into a bargaining position with Bond Street. While any artist could solicit galleries door to door with a portfolio of their work, most gallery owners tended to support artists who already had a strong critical reputation or public profile to ensure returns on their investment.38 Any form of critical attention helped raise an artist’s profile and separate them from the anonymous multitude of would-be professionals canvassing galleries. Being noticed and reviewed in general mixed exhibitions was one way for emerging women artists to capture the attention of galleries and to promote their own chances for an exhibition or engraving. When Frances Hodgkins arrived in London from New Zealand in the early 1900s she simultaneously submitted work to the New English Art Club and Royal Academy exhibitions and approached commercial galleries about a solo show, despite anticipating ‘nothing but rebuffs’. She brought her portfolio to the Dowdeswell Gallery and the Fine Art Society, two of London’s most prestigious commercial spaces, but was politely told that her work was unsuitable. ‘By this time, I began to grasp that until I had made some kind of a name I could hope to get no dealer to run a show for me,’ Hodgkins wrote to her sister. ‘They won’t take the risk until they are assured of a success – and they accordingly make all sorts of excuses to get rid of you.’39 Editor of the Studio, Charles Holme, advised Hodgkins instead to exhibit at different galleries and general exhibitions before trying to hold a solo show.40 Hodgkins’s interactions with Bond Street galleries are illustrative of several issues women artists navigated in their attempts to gain gallery exposure. The

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circular relationship between receiving critical attention at major exhibitions and holding a solo or small group show was difficult to penetrate – exhibiting societies and the RA did not tend to include artists with no experience or reputation, but commercial galleries were unlikely to support artists who had not achieved success at major group exhibitions. Further, private galleries were by their nature commercial in outlook and were thus partial to genres and styles that, they believed, were in line with the demands of the buying public. At a time when galleries were relying more on middle-class customers, this demand often translated into small-scale pictures suitable for domestic decoration.41 The expansion of the middle-class art market meant that galleries increasingly staged shows targeting an aesthetic niche or sub-genre, such as watercolours, flower painting or travel subjects, and these shows provided expanded exhibiting opportunities to women willing to work within those genres. ‘It is a decided gain to the interest of minor London exhibitions that the fashion has grown for collecting works connected with each other by something more than a common medium,’ commented Art Journal in 1882. ‘Subdivision is one of the most striking conditions of modern life, and upon its judiciousness or injudiciousness depends much of the pleasure and profit of the contemporary world.’42 The commercial success of these trends led galleries to encourage artists to pursue popular certain styles and genres. At the Dowdeswell Gallery, for instance, Hodgkins was told that her existing work was not what the clientele wanted, but, if she had brought flower paintings, ‘it would have been quite another matter’.43 Many other women profited from commercial galleries’ focus on domesticsized genre pictures, heeding Walter Sickert’s maxim that ‘if painters are to make a living, they will have to learn to work on a small scale’.44 The artists who held one woman shows at the Goupil Gallery between 1886 and 1907 all built their exhibitions around a tight theme based on a specific medium, subject or genre.45 Emily Osborne showed a series of Norfolk and Suffolk rivers in 1886, reflecting the popular trend for exhibitions themed around places and travel. Isabel Codrington Pyke-Nott’s 1904 solo exhibition featured a collection of miniatures on ivory depicting views of the Italian lakes, which The Times praised as ‘full of detail and pleasantly harmonious in their general effect’.46 In the same notice, the paper commented that nearly all the small exhibitions reviewed that week were held by women; it mentioned Helen Allingham at the Fine Art Society, Frances Rodd and Gertrude Prideaux-Brune at the Modern Gallery, and a loan collection of Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale’s pictures, which



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was being restaged at Leighton House after showing in Bond Street three years prior.47 Although women were the minority of exhibitors at commercial galleries between 1880 and 1914, one or two woman shows were common enough occurrences that they were not regarded as a novelty by the art or mainstream press. Women artists, who had achieved a modicum of critical or public attention, and whose work fit galleries’ exhibiting agendas, participated freely in London’s gallery economy and profited from the model of targeting specific market niches with smaller-scale works. The expansion of the middle-class art market in the second half of the nineteenth century was a boon for women artists; it was the middle class’s desire to own art as a marker of social and cultural status that produced the demand needed to keep the artistic profession afloat at a time when its numbers were swelling.48 ‘The so called middle class of England has been that which has done the most for English art,’ confirmed F. G. Stephens, and women artists were an unintended but significant beneficiary of this phenomenon.49 There were, however, limitations to this strategy of targeting middle-class buyers with small-scale paintings. Although the increased number of private galleries that emerged in the late nineteenth century provided women with greater opportunities for commercial exhibitions, not all of these spaces were regarded as equal in the eyes of the artistic community. As Helmreich and Holt explain, different venues generated particular sets of values and associations, which influenced the degree of prestige, critical attention and ‘symbolic capital’ an exhibition conferred on an artist.50 For example, when Frances Hodgkins showed for the first time at a commercial gallery in 1902 she hoped that the exhibition would constitute a breakthrough in her attempts to penetrate London’s tightly concentrated private gallery system and deliver the critical attention she needed to attract bigger prices and better opportunities. However, the nature of the exhibition, arranged by Hodgkins’s friend March Phillips at the Dore Gallery, diminished the show’s visibility and prestige. Rather than being invited to show by a well-respected gallery manager, Phillips paid to rent the rooms herself and undertook much of the organization and promotion. Although Hodgkins thought Phillips’s work was amateurish, she had a broad network of literary and artistic friends to invite to the opening reception and purchase her work, inflating her sales in comparison to Hodgkins. As a result, the exhibition did not make ‘the commotion in art circles I thought it would’, and ‘business was bad’.51 The next year, Hodgkins was far more excited to be included in a group show at the Fine Art Society –

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a venue that, she believed, would do more to bolster her reputation and the value of her art. ‘It is a long way ahead of the Dore show of last November. … The Fine Arts confers a certain cachet on one’s work which I hope may prove valuable.’52 Hodgkins sold at least four paintings at the Fine Art Society to earn over £50, and Linda Gill suggests that the recognition Frances received from the Bond Street dealer ‘reinforced her faith in her talent’.53 While many well-respected galleries entered into agreements such as the one Phillips negotiated, where the financial burden and profits of an exhibition were shared, venues that allowed any artist to hire rooms without being subject to artistic or commercial criteria were low in the hierarchy of exhibition spaces. As Pamela Fletcher notes, a gallery’s exhibition history determined its reputation. What artists had exhibited there, the critics who had attended and the calibre of people working behind the scenes defined the status and prestige a space possessed.54 Key to all of these factors was the dealer or manager who ran the gallery; a good dealer-run venue was expected to reflect the taste and disposition of the person in charge, who in turn vouched for the authenticity and talent of the artists chosen to exhibit. Exhibition spaces without a specialist dealer or manager to select and curate the artists on display lacked both authority and exclusivity, which were vital to a gallery’s symbolic status. The Dore Gallery was originally founded to exhibit the work of French artist Gustave Dore and continued to hold exhibitions under the purview of dealer Joseph Fishburn into the early twentieth century, but its six galleries, advertised as being of various sizes and having excellent light, were also available for hire upon application to the director, and this lessened the value and prestige associated with its exhibitions.55 The Modern Gallery, which held numerous solo and group exhibitions of women artists in the first two decades of the twentieth century, operated exclusively on a rental basis. In the period between 1900 and 1907, for example, it staged seven times more solo or group shows featuring woman than the more selective Dowdeswell Gallery.56 The Modern Gallery’s New Bond Street location, well-designed exhibition catalogues and art-press advertisements positioned it alongside other dealer-run enterprises, inviting audiences to view and judge its exhibitions as they would any other private gallery. But annual advertisements in trade publication The Year’s Art called upon artists to hire the galleries, which were available for ‘special and one man exhibitions, and at homes, soirees, lectures, etc’.57 This arrangement allowed artists who failed to attract the attention of dealer-run galleries to hold exhibitions, but it diminished the seriousness with which these shows were treated in the press



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and the value, in monetary terms, of the artwork on display. The Observer, for example, criticized the Modern Gallery’s methods of advertising pictures ‘like an American patent medicine’.58 In contrast, the managing dealers of galleries like the Fine Art Society and the Goupil carefully fostered their reputations as art experts, ensuring that the artists involved in the galleries would benefit from the reflected glow of their cultural knowledge and connoisseurship. Holding solo or small-group exhibitions at rented venues like the Modern Gallery did not necessarily result in poor press or a shortfall in sales, but it did not confer what Hodgkins referred to as ‘a certain cachet’ to the artist’s work or guarantee the quality or distinction of those exhibiting alongside them. These spaces were a way into the gallery system, but their association with amateurishness is evidenced by the fact that women artists abandoned them as their careers became more successful. Kate Greenaway, for example, held her first exhibitions at the Dudley Gallery, a venue that was leased by several different art societies and groups and which was known for its support of young and emerging artists. Although it was not a prestigious venue, exhibiting at the Dudley Gallery served a useful purpose at this stage of Greenaway’s career. Informed by the practical art education she had received at the National Art Training School and motivated by economic necessity, Greenaway was pursuing a career in the commercial branches of art, and the populist Dudley Gallery gave her work a broad exposure to potential consumers and employers.59 It was at her first Dudley exhibition that Greenaway’s work came to the attention of the editor William Loftie, who purchased a group of pictures for reproduction in People’s Magazine, and introduced Greenaway to the art-stationery publisher Marcus Ward. Greenaway produced numerous designs for Ward’s greeting card sets over the next nine years, and, as well as providing a steady income, this job increased her public renown and introduced her distinctive style to the artbuying public. Later in her career when Greenaway was attempting to move away from her commercial roots and make ‘more serious use of her talent’, she organized for her work to be shown at the Fine Art Society.60 In exhibiting at the FAS, Greenaway was trying to dissociate her paintings from their overtly commercialist and populist beginnings, and showcase a new, more naturalistic style in a venue that vouched for her seriousness. The president of the RA, Lord Frederic Leighton, purchased two works from Greenaway’s 1891 FAS solo show, which made £1,350 in sales.61 Examples such as this one indicate why venues like the FAS were popular with artists; they provided a space that

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was imbued with artistic credibility while also attracting a sophisticated group of buyers with the purchasing power to make solo exhibitions profitable.

The role of art dealers Greenaway’s existing reputation as an artist and her well-known style and story contributed to the success of her FAS solo shows. Dealer-run exhibitions at commercial galleries were often informed and marketed on the public reputation and personal narrative of the artist, rather than on the objective merit of the artwork involved. As Kirsten Swinth has argued in the American context, dealers sold ‘the image of the artist’, rather than the artwork itself, an approach that, she argues, hurt women’s chances of securing dealer and gallery attention.62 However, the preference of dealers to work with artists with clear identities and strong narratives worked in Greenaway and her contemporary Helen Allingham’s favour. Allingham also began her exhibiting career at the Dudley Gallery before moving to more prestigious venues as her career advanced.63 She showed drawings at Agnew’s and the Walker Art Gallery in the 1880s, but it was her solo exhibitions at the Fine Art Society, and the artistic narrative that these shows projected, that solidified her distinguished standing in the art world.64 The FAS’s marketing of Allingham as the painter extraordinaire of the English rural cottage began with the 1886 exhibition ‘Illustrating Surrey Cottages’, for which the gallery’s managers chose to commission and highlight a highly curated and narrow selection of Allingham’s drawings that featured the rural cottage as a subject.65 These pictures did not represent the scope of Allingham’s oeuvre, but the tactic was successful in attracting positive attention from the press and consumers and set the stage for Allingham’s branding as an heir to the English pastoral genre. Along with curating and editing Allingham’s exhibitions to reflect this narrow scope, the FAS used other tactics to cement their artists’ identities in the public imagination. Art dealers such as Ernest Gambart, David Croal Thomson and the FAS’s Marcus Huish pioneered the use of the exhibition catalogue as a marketing tool. These dealers exploited their connections and relationships with art critics and periodicals to produce informative content for exhibition catalogues that provided sympathetic context to artists’ pictures.66 Established or trusted commentators often wrote the introductory and biographical essays for these catalogues, which sought to earn the trust and respect of the reader and to



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create a recognizable identity for the exhibitor that corresponded with a niche or segment of the market. The FAS was known for its sophisticated, scholarly catalogues that purported to educate the consumer as much as sell to them.67 The educational nature of these catalogues served to distance both the gallery and the artist from the charge of commercialism. Reflecting on the catalogues, Art Journal noted, Commercial considerations do not appear to be the sole controlling motive of the exhibitions held … in this gallery. An educational purpose palpably asserts itself on every occasion, and this is perhaps the reason why this gallery has received in so large and pronounced a degree the countenance and support of the educated public. The example, with every exhibition comes the annotated catalogue, and generally a memoir of the artist.68

The introductory essay for Allingham’s 1886 exhibition positioned her as a champion of cottage preservation with an interest in illustrating and defending the English countryside. This premise and message was then reflected back in critics’ responses to the show. Despite the fact that the gallery itself stated that the exhibition was ‘not a representative exhibition of the artist’s work, but a number of drawings of Surrey Cottages’, The Academy described Allingham as ‘one of those happy artists who has found … their true road and have not been tempted to stray from it’, labelling the artist ‘the poet of the cottage home’.69 The Saturday Review praised the catalogue for providing information on defenders of rural architecture and noted that the sentiment ‘cannot but influence the sympathetic visitor’.70 The success of this show prompted the FAS to stage seven more exhibitions of Allingham’s work in the following years based on similar themes. Although some critics noticed that Allingham’s practice was broader than these exhibitions indicated, in general her cottage and countryside works were positively received as new additions to the English pastoral tradition.71 The FAS encouraged Allingham and other watercolour painters to pursue these subjects because they appealed to urban dwelling, middle-class consumers. Patrons of Allingham’s FAS exhibitions tended to be members of the professional classes residing in fashionable middle-class London suburbs, to whom the drawings provided an appealing and accessible rendering of idyllic country life.72 FAS director Marcus Huish ensured that Allingham was well known among this consumer group by orchestrating and encouraging the publication of biographical profiles on the artist, which appeared in periodicals such as Art Journal and The Strand from the 1880s onwards.73 As the editor of

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Art Journal, Huish was able to influence the extent of this coverage, and he contributed further to Allingham’s popularity by publishing a full-length companion to the artist and her work in 1903. Allingham supported herself and her family after the death of her husband in the late 1880s and left an estate of £25,000 upon her death in 1926, a figure that indicates the success of Huish’s strategy and the benefits of working with a canny art dealer.74 It is worth noting, however, that Allingham’s considerable financial success pales in comparison to that of successful male artists working in the same period. For example, the prolific portraitist William Orpen’s estate was worth £163,851 when he died in 1931.75 The Fine Art Society’s marketing strategies also benefited other female watercolour painters including Greenaway, Ella du Cane, Evelyn Heathcote and Helen Milman.76 These artists shared a style, genre and subject matter that both lent itself to mass consumption and was considered ‘natural’ to their sex. Their work was highly finished, highlighting the ‘input of labour’ that both dealers and buyers valued, and small in size, which allowed the gallery to reap maximum returns by displaying a large selection of paintings. These works were also suitable in scale for buyers’ urban, domestic dwellings.77 Demand from middleclass consumers raised the prices associated with travel pictures, landscapes and animal pictures, and so although these women still routinely received lower prices than their male counterparts, the genres in which they were expected to practice were now at least in-demand commercially. Interacting with art dealers and engaging in self-promotion remained challenging for some women, who feared that such business exchanges were immodest or indecorous. The expectations on women to be humble and selfeffacing were also a hindrance according to one commentator, who noted that young female artists often accepted ‘defeat rather than even making a show of fighting’ in the realm of business.78 The tendency of critics and dealers to categorize women artists solely by their gender made it more difficult for them to build the distinctive artistic identity dealers looked for.79 Art dealers’ attempts to develop clear identities and reputations for women thus worked best for artists such as Greenaway and Allingham, who pursued art styles that were regarded as natural to their sex. The relationship dealers cultivated with these artists can be seen as tokenistic, as it played on their gender as a marketing tool. But as The Athenaeum pointed out, it was because Allingham and Greenaway were prepared to ‘meet [the public] half way’ by restricting themselves to subjects their sex ‘instinctively likes’, that they could promote and commercialize their



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work without compromising their feminine decorum or challenging their categorization as ‘women artists’.80 The most pragmatic and effective route for women to attract attention and patronage from art dealers was not to present work that vied for the status of ‘high art’, or which demonstrated vast ambition in style and technique, but to produce work that satisfied middle-class public taste, and this was the strategy that many women artists discussed here adopted in their engagement with dealers and commercial galleries. Relationships with art dealers were important for artists even if they did not lead to solo exhibitions or exclusive representation. Dealers were prominent and prolific purchasers of art at group exhibitions and auction houses. While they tended not to own the artworks exhibited at solo or special exhibitions, works bought directly from artists or from auction were part of dealers’ inventories and were sold or retained depending on market conditions. A reliable relationship with a dealer could help women offset the ‘fluctuations’ of the market.81 For most of the nineteenth century, dealers could also separately purchase the copyright to a piece of art and were willing to pay significant sums for the right to reproduce and sell prints and engravings of works they believed would be popular with the public.82 Dealers accounted for a large number of the sales made at the Royal Academy summer exhibitions and pre-purchased promising works from artists’ studios before they went on public view, and so building relationships and connections with dealers was highly beneficial.83 For women artists to rely on purchases from dealers and sales of copyright, however, they had to produce work that was a ‘safe bet’ for the purchasing dealer. John Millais claimed that dealers were more likely to take risks on new styles and genres than the typical connoisseur but, where women artists were concerned, dealers were most likely to purchase pictures that featured popular subject matter and were suitable for mass reproduction.84 These criteria did not always correspond to work that garnered critical respect; Arthur Fish noted that it was because the work of Maude Goodman, Mary Fowler and Marie Ellen Lucas was not ‘great art’ that it earned the attraction of the public, whose admiration was instead ‘aroused by the homeliness of [their] subjects’.85 The South Kensington-trained Goodman was adept at tapping into popular, mainstream taste. She devoted herself to a style that the Windsor Magazine deemed ‘domestic idealism’ early in her career, wasting no time in ‘experiments in ambitious impossibilities’.86 Although not well-regarded among critics, who viewed Goodman and the school of art she inspired as ‘purveyors of mere

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prettiness’, Goodman’s work was highly popular with the art-buying public, to whom she was better known than most RAs.87 Art dealers and printers contributed to and capitalized on this renown by broadly disseminating engravings and reproductions of Goodman’s numerous exhibition pictures. ‘Every print shop in the Kingdom has one of her prints in the window,’ noted a fellow artist.88 Goodman’s first agent was Henry Wallis, the manager of the famed French Gallery, who scouted Goodman’s work when she was still an art student.89 He provided advice and encouragement throughout the early parts of her career and sold paintings such as Ready for the Ball through the gallery, at one point attracting a customer so enamoured with Goodman’s work that he was willing to pay above the ticketed price.90 The Leggatt Brothers also represented Goodman’s work in the 1880s and paid upwards of £250, inclusive of copyright, for paintings such as Chant D’Amour, a picture that attracted a ‘remarkable amount of popular admiration’ in its engraved form.91 Goodman’s paintings were purchased and reproduced by other dealers and printers including Buck and Reid and the Mendoza Gallery, who were attracted to the work because of its high profitability; the engraving of Want to See the Wheels Go Round, earned its owner over £10,000.92 It is worth noting, however, that Goodman sold many works for between £10 and £30.93 Goodman’s success demonstrates that women artists did benefit from what Macleod termed as the ‘major consequence’ of increased middle-class art patronage: ‘the popularisation, or domestication, of art’.94 While women like Goodman capitalized on this phenomenon and benefited from the traditional association between women artists and domestic subjects, the broader link between women artists and populism was a hindrance to women seeking serious critical attention and respect or patronage from dealers and collectors who considered themselves connoisseurs. Another way to attract the attention of dealers and printers was to produce artwork that reflected a stylistic trend in the art world, or which generated mass publicity upon exhibition. The former method paid dividends for Louise Jopling, whose Five O’clock Tea, painted in the fashionable Japonais style, was bought from the Royal Academy by Agnew’s to her ‘great delight’ for the significant sum of £400.95 Agnew’s was a leading firm during this period with enough financial and cultural capital to ‘buy up the country’, according to Belgravia,96 and the importance of their support is evidenced by Jopling’s frustration when a studio visit from the firm did not result in sales. ‘I saw [the artist] Fred Morgan,’ she wrote in 1876, ‘and he said that Agnews had bought the whole of their pictures,



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just after leaving our studio. What a failure I am! … I have no picture making qualities.’97 Jopling regularly visited commercial galleries and dealers’ showrooms, combining social and professional engagements in order to cultivate her own reputation in the art world and build the connections and networks that led to art sales and patronage.98 Her movements indicate that women could be visible and active participants in late nineteenth-century gallery culture, although it is important to note that not all women were willing or able to exercise the social, artistic and spatial flexibility that allowed Jopling to traverse London’s public and private artistic spaces.99 Despite her talent for negotiating London’s gallery culture and willingness to produce art works that tapped into trends and fashions in the art world, Jopling only periodically sold to art dealers and did not find her way into a dealer’s ‘stable’ of artists, whereupon her work would have been purchased, marketed and resold more consistently. While her Five O’clock Tea was a popular exhibit at the 1874 Royal Academy, it was another artwork by a woman artist at the same exhibition that illustrates the greater effectiveness of the ‘sensation picture’ tactic in securing dealer attention. It was the unprecedented popular and critical success of Elizabeth Butler’s The Roll Call at the 1874 RA summer exhibition that led several dealers to court the artist. Art dealers were constantly looking for pictures that captured the public’s attention. Acquiring the copyright of paintings that attracted crowds at the Academy was a safe way for dealers to secure huge profits through ticket sales to one-picture touring exhibitions and the sale of engravings.100 The publicity generated by the success of The Roll Call thus made Butler a highly attractive client; the Fine Art Society was willing to pay £1,000 for the copyright of Butler’s next Academy painting and purchase and commission further works because they were near-assured to receive returns on their investment. As was the case often throughout her career, Butler’s relationships with art dealers were not representative of most women artists’ experiences. While many women profited from occasional purchases from art dealers and the sale of copyrights and benefited from the professional validation that accompanied those transactions, very few could rely solely on dealers and commercial galleries to earn a living wage. An alternative commercial venue for these artists, whose style and subjects may not have corresponded with the interests of art dealers, was the Grosvenor Gallery, established on New Bond Street in 1877 by Sir Coutts Lindsay. Just as the name and design of the Fine Art Society projected gentlemanly connoisseurship rather than crass commercialism, so too did the Grosvenor position itself as an institution intent on supporting artistic culture

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rather than facilitating ‘commercial speculation’.101 Louise Jopling described the gallery as the ‘finest building of its kind in London’, with walls covered in red damask and a blue ceiling ‘powdered with stars’.102 The artistic elite mixed with royal guests at the gallery’s opening and subsequent events and exhibitions, which were embraced by fashionable London society. The Grosvenor clearly differentiated itself from the Royal Academy by its hanging policy and style. Rather than submitting works to be judged by a hanging committee, artists were invited to exhibit paintings of their own choice at the Grosvenor’s exhibitions, where pictures were displayed in one line with ample blank wall space dividing each painting.103 This style of display contrasted sharply with the Royal Academy, where pictures were juxtaposed closely together regardless of style or subject, creating a premium for pictures hung at viewers’ eye line. At the Grosvenor, every picture was hung ‘on the line’ and Lindsay made a point of inviting artists who had their work ‘skied’ or ignored by the RA to exhibit, including many women artists. Although Sir Coutts Lindsay may not have thought of the gallery as a purely commercial venture, the exhibition space did function as a selling point for artists as well as a place for the social activity and networking that facilitated selfpromotion and artistic commerce.104 In line with the gallery’s aim of supporting artists, Lindsay only levied a small commission of 5 per cent on works sold at the gallery and did not attempt to acquire paintings’ copyright or charge artists a fee to exhibit.105 In 1880, the gallery opened a ladies’ drawing room, where artists and supporters could meet and socialize for an annual membership fee of two guineas, and a ladies’ restaurant was opened in 1888.106 Art Journal noted the Grosvenor’s progressive attitude to female exhibitors soon after the gallery opened: Among other features characteristic of the Grosvenor is the honourable place allotted to the works of female artists, and one is rejoiced to find that in every instance the ladies have proved themselves worth of such consideration.107

Susan Casteras characterizes the Grosvenor’s commitment to women artists as ‘somewhat revolutionary’ in the way that it infused women into London’s maledominated exhibition culture.108 The democratic mode of hanging meant that women artists’ work was consistently placed on equal footing with men, and the venue’s fashionable reputation generated significant exposure. It offered an important showcase for artists working in more avant-garde styles; Evelyn De Morgan exhibited more than twenty-five paintings at the Grosvenor throughout her career and found the venue a more natural fit for her allegorical and symbolist



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style than the Royal Academy. Marie Stillman considered the Grosvenor exhibitions her best chance of having a picture ‘well placed’, and considered years when she was not able to exhibit there ‘very unfortunate’.109 Other women to feature at the Grosvenor include Sophie Anderson, Anna Lea Merritt, Louise Jopling, Helen Allingham, Margaret Gillies, Louisa Starr, Annie Swynnerton, Henrietta Rae and Clara Montalba although Elizabeth Butler, for one, spurned the gallery as the home of the Aesthetes’s ‘unwholesome productions’.110 But for all of the Grosvenor’s support of women, female artists still made up by far the minority of exhibitors; women averaged 16.3 per cent of exhibitors at the Grosvenor’s summer exhibitions between 1888 and 1890, for example.111 In general, the Grosvenor and the New Gallery, founded in 1888 by two of the Grosvenor’s former managers, offered exhibiting and selling spaces that did not highlight the feminine aspects of women’s work for marketing purposes or marginalize them because of gender, which was still a rarity in London’s turnof-the-century gallery culture. This was the greatest benefit of the Grosvenor and the New Gallery to women artists’ professionalism; it was a space where they could display their work to an audience of sophisticated art buyers without being sidelined or pigeonholed by their gender, and although amateur artists were allowed to exhibit, the fashionable nature of these venues vouched, in large part, for participants’ professionalism.

Conclusion Charting women’s interactions with commercial galleries and art dealers at the turn of the twentieth century shows that women were active and knowledgeable participants in the commercial art market and the emerging dealer-critic system. Women sought representation in specific commercial galleries, like the Fine Art Society and the Dowdeswell Gallery, which could deliver them cultural cachet and endow them with a recognizable ‘narrative’ and reputation. When those opportunities were not made available, women organized their own solo or small-group exhibitions at galleries that they could rent themselves, and which mimicked the aesthetics, geography and display methods of more prestigious galleries. Through these exhibitions, women situated themselves within the cluster of commercial galleries around London’s West End and ensured that their wares were visible and accessible to buyers engaging in the fashionable middle-class leisure activity of buying art.

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Women artists took full advantage of the new methods of selling and promoting art that were pioneered throughout this period. Like many of their male contemporaries, women displayed pragmatism in their reactions to the changing demands and desires of art buyers, as middle-class art patronage continued to increase. The majority of the women represented in commercial galleries capitalized on the existing ideas about women’s ‘natural’ artistic talents to satisfy a niche in the market and achieved professionalism by pursuing forms of art superficially deemed unchallenging or domestic. It was not uncommon for women to receive solo exhibitions at commercial venues, and dealers were willing to use the marketing tools at their disposal to promote women if they considered their art sufficiently saleable. Women such as Helen Allingham and Maude Goodman benefited from this pragmatic, commercially directed approach. In general, however, dealers did not take risks on women; it was those who worked in highly commercial genres or whose work created its own publicity that benefited from their services. Painting ‘for the market’ in this way did little to improve the artistic reputation of women as a generic category, as the pejorative association between women and unsophisticated populism persisted. But, for most women who needed or wanted to make a living through art, commercial viability outweighed the desire for critical acceptance, particularly as it was market interactions that did the most to distinguish them as serious, working professionals, as the frequent references to earnings and sales in women artists’ autobiographies attests. In practical terms, exchanging art for money was what enabled women to buy materials, rent studio space and support their families, but being paid was also the most important and visible marker of their professional status to the broader community. Women were a visible presence in England’s art market and the seriousness and pragmatism with which they approached their commercial dealings was what separated them from the ‘glib frivolity’112 associated with female art amateurs.

Notes 1 ‘The Women’s Work Bureau’, Quiver 47, no. 8 (1912): 809. 2 ‘Art Exhibitions’, The Times, 27 March 1906, 14. 3 ‘The Business Side of Art’, Art Journal (August 1888): 249–51. 4 ‘A Word to the Dealers’, The Burlington Magazine 47, no. 272 (1925): 221; Henry Stace, ‘The Business Man in Art’, The Academy, 22 June 1912, 783–4.



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5 John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Penguin Classics, [1869] 2006), 92. 6 ‘Interview: Mrs. Marrable’, The Women’s Penny Paper, 27 September 1890, 577. 7 Heart and Home, 14 December 14, 1893, 156. 8 Ibid.; ‘Interview: Mrs. Marrable’, 577. 9 Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 29. 10 Patricia Zakreski, Representing Female Artistic Labour: 1848–1890 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 64. 11 Julie Codell, The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870–1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 103, 113. 12 Ibid., 109. 13 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London, Routledge, 1993), 97. Discussing how women commercialized their art, Clarissa Campbell Orr acknowledges, ‘there is room for more research into how women took the next step and marketed their art’. Introduction to Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 12. 14 See Anna Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere, eds. Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens and Their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008); Niel de Marchi and Hans J van Meigroet, eds. Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe 1450–1750 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006); Jeremy Warren and Adrianna Turpin, eds. Auctions, Agents and Dealers: The Mechanisms of the Art Market, 1660–1830 (Oxford: Beazley Archive, 2008). For France, see Nicholas Green, ‘Circuits of Production, Circuits of Consumption: The Case of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century French Art Dealing’, Art Journal 48, no. 1 (1989): 29–43; Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Paris Art Market between 1910 and 1930 (New York: Garland, 1981); Stephen Bann, Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 15 Alfred C Harmsworth, ‘What Shall I be’, Young Folks Paper, 18 December 1886, 388. 16 Anne Gray, Art and Artifice: George Lambert 1873–1930 (Roseville East: Craftsman House, 1996); L.G. Chiozza Money, Riches and Poverty (London: Methuen, 1905), 41–3. 17 ‘Notes of the Week’ Freewoman, 7 December 1911, 42. 18 Virginia Woolf, ‘Professions for Women’, Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Bridget Elliot and Jo-Ann Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (im)Positionings (London: Routledge, 1994), 65.

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19 Louise Jopling, ‘Occupations for Gentlewomen’, Atalanta 8, no 88 (1895): 221. 20 Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn describe a ‘web’ of critics, dealers, collectors and patrons, which women artists had to contend with in order to build professional reputations – which in turn determined the worth of their art. Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (London: Virago, 1989), 169. 21 Sybil, ‘Art as a Career for Girls: An Interview with Miss Jessie Macgregor’, in The Girl’s Realm Annual for1904 (London: Bousfield and Co, 1904), 934–42. 22 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 244. This was a romanticized view of the eighteenth-century art market, which was marked by commercial developments. 23 Pamela M. Fletcher, ‘Consuming Modern Art: Metaphors of Gender, Commerce and Value in Late Victorian and Edwardian Art Criticism’, Visual Culture in Britain 6, no. 2 (2005): 158–60. Fletcher notes that the Royal Academy faced similar criticism for its undiscerning commercialism throughout the nineteenth century. 24 See ‘The Business Side of Art’, 249–51; Art Journal’s ‘Art Sales of the Year’ and ‘Art Sales of the Season’ series. There were some exceptions to these publications support of art commerce. A review of George Fox’s private art collection from 1872, for example, praised the collector for working directly with artists instead of relying on a dealer, thereby removing art from the ‘atmosphere of trade’. 25 G.D. Leslie, ‘The Artist in Relation to his Work’, Art Journal (March 1882): 171–2. 26 T.H.S. Escott, England: Her People, Polity and Pursuits (New York: Henry Holt, 1880), 233. 27 Ibid. 28 Codell, The Victorian Artist, 109. 29 Despite being averse to dealing with the coalface of art commerce with his own work, Royal Academy president Frederic Leighton often equated artists’ involvement in economics with professionalism. Emile Barrington, The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton (London: George Allen, 1906), 2:358–9. 30 Henry James, ‘The Picture Season in London’, The Galaxy 24, no. 2 (1877): 151. 31 David Ormrod, ‘The Origins of the London Art Market, 1660–1730’, in Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800, eds, Michael North and David Normand (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 182. 32 Giles Waterfield, Palaces of Art: Art Galleries in Britain (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1991) 164. 33 Geoffrey Agnew, Agnew 1817–1967 (London: Bradbury Agnew Press, 1967), 29. 34 Anne Helmreich, ‘Traversing Objects: The London Art Market at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, in Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present: A Cultural History, eds. Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplede (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 138.



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35 Henry James noted of one gallery owner, ‘In so far as his beautiful rooms in Bond Street are a commercial speculation, this side of their character has been gilded over and dissimulated in the most graceful manner.’ ‘The Picture Season in London’, 153. 36 The catalogue for the Fine Art Society’s 100th exhibition in 1892 claimed ‘amongst the exhibition to which attention may be directed, the first place may be assigned to those which are now designated “one man”, the idea of which, as regards living artists, originated with the society.’ Quoted in Patricia De Montfort, ‘The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition’, in Marketing Art in the British Isles, 147. 37 The copyright for Butler’s 1874 picture The Roll Call, for example, was purchased by Dickinson’s Gallery for £1,200. Elizabeth Butler, An Autobiography (London: Constable and Co, 1922), 104. 38 The Dowdeswell Gallery, for example, advertised for ‘artist’s desirous of exhibiting their work are invited to call personally with specimens.’ A.C.R. Carter, The Year’s Art (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1910), 10. 39 Letter from Frances Hodgkins to Isabel Hodgkins, 7 March 1902. Letters of Frances Hodgkins, ed. Linda Gill (Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1993), 86. 40 Ibid. 41 De Montfort, ‘The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition’, 156–7; Anne Helmreich, ‘Contested Grounds: Garden Painting and the Invention of National Identity in England, 1990–1914’ (PhD thesis: Northwestern University, 1994), 54. 42 ‘The Winter Exhibition at the Smaller Galleries’, Art Journal (December 1882): 378. 43 Letter from Frances Hodgkins to Isabel Hodgkins. Gill, Letters of Frances Hodgkins, 86. 44 Walter Sickert, ‘Small pictures’, The Speaker, 2 January 1897. 45 Data collected from Exhibition Culture in London 1878–1908. University of Glasgow (2006) http://www.exhibitio​ncult​ure.a​rts.g​la.ac​.uk/.​ 46 ‘Art Exhibitions’, The Times, 17 May 1904, 15. 47 Ibid. 48 ‘There are probably very few houses – certainly none whose owners have the slightest pretentions to culture, and are not hampered by want of means – which do not possess some specimens of modern pictorial art’, noted Magazine of Art. Arthur Griffiths, ‘Treasure Houses in Art’, (January 1881): 266. 49 F.G. Stephens, ‘William Holman Hunt’, The Portfolio 2 (1871): 38. 50 Anne Helmreich and Ysanne Holt, ‘Marketing Bohemia: The Chenil Gallery in Chelsea, 1905–1926’, Oxford Art Journal 33, no. 1 (2010): 43. Pierre Bourdieu defined symbolic capital as ‘the form the various species of capital assume when they are perceived and recognised as legitimate.’ Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power’, Sociological Theory 7, no. 1 (1989): 17.

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51 Letter from Frances Hodgkins to Dorothy Richmond, 20 November 1902. Gill, Letters of Frances Hodgkins, 144. 52 Letter from Frances Hodgkins to Rachel Hodgkins, 22 July 1903. Gill, Letters of Frances Hodgkins, 168. 53 Letters of Frances Hodgkins, 298. 54 Pamela Fletcher, ‘Shopping for Art: The Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery, 1850s–90s’, in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 56–8. 55 A.C.R. Carter, ed. The Year’s Art 1909 (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1909), 434. 56 Pamela Fletcher, ‘Shopping for Art’, in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 57. According to data collected by the University of Glasgow’s ‘Exhibition Culture in London 1878–1908 Database’, twenty-two women held solo or group shows at the Modern Gallery between 1900 and 1907, compared to three at the more prestigious Dowdeswell Gallery. 2006, http:​//www​.exhi​bitio​ncult​ure.a​rts.g​ la.ac​.uk/.​ 57 A.C.R. Carter, ed. The Year’s Art 1906 (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1906), 608. 58 ‘The Modern Gallery’, The Observer, 21 October 1909, 6. 59 Kristina Huneault, ‘Kate Greenaway’, in Dictionary of Women Artists, ed. Delia Gaze (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers), 1:614. 60 Rodney Engen, Kate Greenaway: A Biography (London: Macdonald, 1891), 109–10; ‘Picture Exhibition Notes’, British Architect, 13 February 1891, 116. 61 Huneault, ‘Kate Greenaway’, 614. Greenaway’s attempts to transition from illustrator to fine artist, and the impact of this on her professional career, is explored in more depth in Chapter 8. 62 Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 110. 63 Helmreich, ‘Contested Grounds: Garden Painting and the Invention of National Identity in England, 1890–1914’, 36. Helmreich notes that Allingham stopped exhibiting at the Dudley Gallery because its association with amateur artists might have hampered her professional reputation. 64 Ibid. 65 The FAS ‘commissioned the lady to collect and add to her drawings of cottages with a view to this exhibition.’ ‘Fine Art Society’, The Athenaeum, 20 March 1886, 399. 66 Anne Helmreich, ‘David Croal Thomson: The Professionalisation of Art Dealing in an Expanding Field’, Getty Research Journal 5 (2013): 92–4. 67 De Montfort, ‘The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition’, 154. 68 ‘Art Notes and Reviews’, Art Journal (December 1881): 377. 69 ‘Catalogue of a Collection of Drawings by Mrs Allingham, R.W.S. illustrating Surrey Cottages’, (London: Fine Art Society, 1886), 1. National Art Library



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Catalogues Collection; Cosmo Monkhouse, ‘Mrs. Allingham’s Drawings’, The Academy, 3 April 1886, 245. 70 ‘Art Exhibitions’, The Saturday Review, 1 April 1886, 542. 71 The Athenaeum noted, for example, that Allingham’s depictions of children were superior and more technically advanced than her cottage work. ‘Minor Exhibitions’, The Athenaeum, 28 May 1887, 710; Anne Helmreich, ‘The Marketing of Helen Allingham: The English Cottage and National Identity’, in Gendering Landscape Art, eds. Steven Adams and Anna Greutzner Robins (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 50. 72 Helmreich, ‘The Marketing of Helen Allingham’, 47–50. 73 See for example Laura Dyer, ‘Mrs. Allingham’, Art Journal (July 1888): 198–201; Alfred Baldry, ‘The Work of Mrs. Allingham’, The Magazine of Art (January 1889): 346–61; ‘Mrs. Helen Allingham’, The Strand Magazine 10 (1895): 175. 74 Helmreich, ‘Contested Grounds’, 52. 75 Bruce Arnold, Orpen: Mirror to an Age (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981), 417. 76 Heathcote exhibited a series of drawings of Northern Italy inspired by Shelley’s poetry. ‘Art Notes’, Illustrated London News, 26 December 1891, 839. Milman’s 1905 exhibition featured watercolours of English gardens. List of Watercolours of English Lawns and Gardens by Mrs Caldwell Crofton (Helen Milman) (London: Fine Art Society, 1905), National Art Library Archive. Du Cane showed drawings of gardens from Japan at the Fine Art Society in 1908 and from Madeira in 1910. ‘Queen at Art Galleries’, Manchester Guardian, 16 May 1908, 8; Catalogue of an Exhibition of Watercolours of Madeira by Miss Ella Du Cane (London: Fine Art Society, 1910), National Art Library Archive. For consumers’ interest in travel painting see Patricia de Montfort, ‘Dealers and the London Exhibition Scene’, Exhibition Culture in London, 1878–1908, University of Glasgow, 2006, http:// www.exhibitionculture.arts.gla.ac.uk/essays.php?eid=01. 77 Thomas M. Bayer, ‘Money as Muse: The Origin and Development of the Modern Art Market in Victorian England: A Process of Commodification’ (PhD thesis, Tulane University, 2001), 225, 229. 78 ‘Palette and Chisel’, Table Talk, 14 February 1901, 18. 79 Swinth, Painting Professionals, 111. 80 ‘Book Review: Happy England’, The Athenaeum, 28 November 1903, 725. 81 Cherry, Painting Women, 101. 82 Fletcher and Helmreich, ‘Introduction: The State of the Field’, 10–11. 83 Paula Gillett, ‘The Profession of Painting in England: 1850–1890’ (PhD thesis: University of California, Berkeley, 1978), 209. Gillett quotes Richard Redgrave’s recollection of at the RA exhibitions. ‘They [dealers] were all waiting at the door at ten o’clock and, on entering, I soon found what a business they made out of the Academy’.

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84 Millais quoted in Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 240. 85 Arthur Fish, ‘Childhood in Modern British Art’, Quiver 61 (January 1904): 742. 86 Helen Postlethwaite, ‘More Noted Women Painters’, The Magazine of Art (January 1898): 480. 87 ‘In Passing’, The Outlook, 6, no. 152 (1900): 693; Fish, ‘Childhood in Modern British Art’, 742. 88 By a Woman Artist, ‘Varnishing Day at the R.A.’, The Woman’s Signal, 2 May 1895, 280. 89 Sara Gray, The Dictionary of British Women Artists (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2009), 119. 90 Postlethwaite, ‘More Noted Women Painters’, 480; ‘Miss Maude Goodman’, Art Journal (July 1889): 200; The ‘exclusive French gallery opened their doors to her and made her welcome.’ ‘Women in the World of Art: Maude Goodman’, Hearth and Home, 3 December 1896, 155. 91 Geraldine Norman, ‘£28,000 for German Altarpiece’, The Times, 1 February 1972, 14; ‘Women in the World of Art: Maude Goodman’, 155; ‘Un Chant D’Amour’, Auckland Star, 28 December 1901, 1. 92 ‘New Prints’, Saturday Review, 2 November 1889, 504; ‘Watching the Tournament’, The English Illustrated Magazine 132 (1894): 1157; ‘Art and Artists’, Otago Witness, 20 November 1901, 70. 93 Norman, ‘£28,000 for German Altarpiece’, 14. 94 Dianne Sachko Macleod, ‘Art Collecting and Victorian Middle-Class Taste’, Art History 10, no. 3 (1987): 347. 95 Marion Hepworth Dixon, ‘The Art of Mrs. Louise Jopling’, Lady’s Realm 15 (1903–4): 704. Agnew’s also purchased Jopling’s Ophelia for £75. Five O’clock Tea was engraved by Magazine of Art. Louise Jopling, Twenty Years of my Life (London: John Lane, 1925), 68. 96 ‘Echoes from the Royal Academy’, Belgravia 3 (1874): 423. 97 Jopling, Twenty Years of my Life, 91. 98 Jopling describes a typical day in a letter reprinted in her memoir: ‘In the afternoon I went to Wallis’s Gallery. He was very gracious. I met there Mr Burgess (RA) and a Mr Williams. They were going on the Goupil’s [Gallery] to see some French pictures and they asked Percy and me to join them…After luncheon we went and had tea at Morris’, whose Studio is next door…Then we went to the Grosvenor Gallery…’ Jopling, Twenty Years of my Life, 121. 99 Patricia de Montfort, ‘Louise Jopling: A Gendered Reading of Late NineteenthCentury Britain’, Woman’s Art Journal, 34, no 2 (2013): 32, 36. De Montfort suggests that Jopling ‘set a new paradigm of female networking and creativity’. 100 James Hamilton, A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Atlantic Books, 2014), 170–1.



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101 John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (New York: Bryan, Taylor and Company, 1894), 4: 71; De Montfort, ‘The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition’, 147. 102 Jopling, Twenty Years of my Life, 113–4. 103 Ibid.; Mary Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life (London: Macmillan and Co, 1912), 1:323; Agnes D. Atkinson, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, The Portfolio 8 (1877): 97–8. 104 Waterfield, Palaces of Art, 159. 105 Colleen Denney, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery as Palace of Art: An Exhibition Model’, in The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England, eds. Susan P. Casteras and Colleen Denney (New Haven: Yale Centre for British Art, 1996), 17. 106 Paula Gillett, ‘Art Audiences at the Grosvenor Gallery’, in The Grosvenor Gallery, 55–6. 107 ‘The Grosvenor Gallery’, Art Journal (July 1879): 135. 108 Susan P. Casteras, ‘Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Circle at the Palace of the Aesthetes’, in The Grosvenor Gallery, 86. 109 Quoted in Ibid., 87. 110 Butler, An Autobiography, 186. 111 For a detailed discussion of the Grosvenor Gallery’s treatment of women artists at their pastel exhibitions, see Freya Spoor, ‘The Revival of Pastel in Late NineteenthCentury Britain: The Transience of a Modern Medium’ (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2017). 112 Codell, The Victorian Artist, 160.

7

Portraiture and Patronage1

A significant consequence of the rise of commercial galleries and art dealers in the mid- to late nineteenth century was the marginalization of direct patronage as a mainstream method of selling art. In the early part of the century the ‘almost invariable rule’ of art buyers was to buy ‘direct from the artist, a method which sounds simple and unobjectionable’, explained The Times in 1909. However, as new methods of buying and selling art emerged, and the size of the art-buying public increased, the shortcomings and challenges of the patronage model became more apparent; ‘Personal idiosyncrasies came to play too large a part,’ The Times reported. ‘Buyers were exacting, patronising, changeable … after a time the artist would feel humiliated.’2 The rise of dealers and commercial galleries offered artists an attractive alternative to the direct interactions and demands involved with traditional patronage and allowed them more artistic autonomy. The influence of traditional patrons such as the royal family and aristocracy lessened as art works were increasingly produced without commission and then purchased by dealers or anonymous buyers.3 Many buyers preferred the less personal, more professional means of buying art that dealers facilitated. ‘I am sick of commissioning and dealing with artists,’ noted patron Andrew Kurtz. ‘If in buying from dealers you pay through the nose – you get what you want and what you have seen.’4 However, patronage from established and renowned collectors along with direct commissions from buyers continued to play some role in the development of artists’ careers. For women struggling to build a reputation and establish a place for themselves in the crowded late nineteenth-century marketplace, the support of a patron – particularly one that was well known within the art world – was an endorsement of talent and an indicator of market value.5 Individual commissions, whereby the artist worked directly with a client to produce a particular art object, remained the primary source of income of many female art practitioners, supplementing the often-unreliable sales from exhibitions



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and galleries. Reviewing the 1910 exhibition of the Society of Women Artists, The Athenaeum’s art critic reflected on the role of patrons and commissions in the professional success of working women artists: ‘How completely artistic development is dependent upon patronage is not generally realised,’ he concluded.6 There were a number of opportunities for women to build relationships directly with buyers, and profit from the referrals and renown that could develop via the support of a well-known or esteemed client. The shift away from aristocratic art patrons, whose collecting practices tended to be based on artistic reputation and connoisseurship, and towards the heterogeneous art public of the middle class benefited women; middle-class buyers were more likely to purchase art they responded to on an individual, intuitive level, rather than be dictated by their cultural education or artistic knowledge.7 As Belgravia magazine explained, when ‘bankers, merchants, manufactures and successful speculators’, entered the market for art, ‘it was not always taste that influenced their purchases; indeed, ideas on art were often as singular as they were characteristic.’8 Popular ideas of sexual difference did have some impact on women’s experiences with patrons and commissions. Women were more likely, for example, to attract commissions for work in particular genres and materials, such as miniatures and family portraits, and the prices patrons and buyers paid for these works continued to reflect differences in the ways men and women’s art was valued. Working within these parameters some women were able to develop useful patron relationships, while a select few benefited from the patronage of new collectors from the industrial and commercial classes, who were willing to patronize artists whose art they admired regardless of their sex. Through commissions and patronage, women could directly and publically validate their market worth, ambition and, it follows, their professionalism.

The business of portraiture The one facet of picture production and selling that remained dependent on direct relationships with clients was portraiture.9 Portrait painting was an art of collaboration, which required artists to work with customers to fulfil an aesthetic, social or ideological vision.10 For this reason, portraiture was an unpopular genre among many artists, who resented submitting to the whims and wills of a client to the detriment of their own creative impulses. ‘I was obliged for my

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daily subsistence to paint not what I knew to be true and right, but what my customers exacted,’ wrote one portraitist. He blamed the ignorant taste of the general public for turning him into a ‘mere journeyman painter’ and warned younger artists not to take up painting unless they were able to pursue a style other than portraiture.11 The new means of selling art offered by commercial galleries encouraged some painters to move away from portraiture as the primary component of their professional practice. At the same time, demand for portraits was reaching a new high, as increasing numbers of the middle and upper-middle classes turned to portraits as a means of demonstrating and recording their new status and achievements.12 So while portraiture may not have been the most desirable of artistic genres in the late nineteenth century, it was one that offered many artists steady, profitable work at a time of increasing competition and instability within the art market. These were the factors that encouraged many women to pursue portrait painting as a profession. The general lack of prestige and creativity associated with portraiture encouraged claims that it was a genre particularly suited to women and their supposedly mimetic artistic natures. Since the eighteenth century, critics had associated ‘feminine’ qualities of vanity and imitation with portraiture, despite the relatively public nature of the genre. While the female painter lacked ‘the power for heroic subjects’, in portraits ‘she possesses her greatest strength’, noted one critic in 1805. ‘Females are … particularly suited to this branch of art. … It is a gift which nature has preferred to grant as a weapon to the weaker.’13 While creatively limiting, these assumptions meant that portraiture was considered an appropriate and acceptable path for the well-trained female professional, at a time when opportunities within the genre were growing. ‘Portrait painting is undoubtedly a very profitable field of employment to those who are competent to produce correct and pleasing likenesses,’ noted Myra’s Journal in an article advising, ‘What to do with our daughters’. They instructed women in the profession to paint sitters ‘at their very best’ and noted that most people were likely to pay larger sums for good likenesses of their relatives than they were for any other picture.14 Portraiture was undertaken by many women, particularly at the beginning of their careers, because of this potential profitability. Henrietta Rae began her artistic career by painting portraits and discovered early the importance of recommendations and advocates. Rae’s friendship with the watercolour painter John Steeple led to several introductions and referrals that brought ‘grist … to [her] mill’, according to Rae’s biographer.15 It was through Steeple that Rae



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gained commissions for two early portraits of children, along with a portrait of Steeple’s own wife in 1883.16 Portraits provided a steady economic backbone to her career, allowing Rae to experiment artistically in her favoured genre of neoclassicalism. As a young female painter, however, Rae encountered some who were hesitant to work with her. One potential client from Leicester discovered Rae’s work at the British Artists’ Exhibition and wrote to her care of the Royal Academy schools unaware of her gender. Rae recounts: As I then had no studio I made an appointment to see him in the corridor of the Academy schools. I can see his surprised look now as a girl student came tripping along, with heels clattering on the stone pavement, bearing his visiting card. ‘I want to see Mr Rae,’ he began. ‘There is no one else here of the name of Rae,’ I replied. ‘But H. Rae, whose head study I have seen at the Society of British Artists,’ he urged; and he was quite put out when I explained that it was my signature.17

Rae eventually secured the commission, and many others with both male and female sitters, but youth, gender and lack of reputation could all count against artists trying to secure clients, particularly for prestigious or well-paid jobs. Louise Jopling received a portrait order in 1882 for the sum of 150 guineas, only to later lose the commission to John Everett Millais, to whom the client offered 1000 guineas. ‘Such are some of the disappointments of the profession,’ Jopling explained.18 In unpacking the different prices offered to Millais and Jopling, it is difficult to separate gender from fame and reputation. Millais, a painter of prime ministers and a future president of the Royal Academy, was one of the most well-known artists of the period.19 His personal fame, won through his early success at the Royal Academy, attracted ‘increasingly wealthy and distinguished patrons’ as his career progressed, and from the 1870s onwards his portrait practice was based on his personal contacts.20 Millais’s portrait business also benefited from the assistance of his wife, Effie, who played a substantial role in managing Millais’s commercial studio practice. She corresponded with potential clients, arranged sitting times, negotiated fees and helped secure notable sitters, including the famous writer and adventurer Captain Edward John Trelawny. Effie’s behind-the-scenes dealings to enhance her husband’s business are evident in a letter she wrote to him in 1869, in which she details the negotiations she made to secure Millais a high-priced commission from the banker William Cuncliffe Brooks:

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I had an opportunity of speaking to Brooks and it is all settled that you paint Miss Brooks immediately you return for G [guineas] 2000 full length, a regular Chef D’oeuvre in the Sr Joshua size and either in her Court or Bridal dress. Brooks charmed and very grateful indeed if you will do it thought the price just what you ought to have and said he didn’t hesitate a moment between a half length at G 1000 or a full length to hand down in the family for 2000 as he thought it much more important and worth double the money so that is settled.21

Jopling too was aware of the role of reputation and celebrity in artistic success and value and consciously tried to build her own popular renown through social and artistic means. Soon after losing the commission to Millais she painted a portrait of the famed actress Ellen Terry and exhibited the work at the fashionable Grosvenor Gallery, where it sparked attention and conversation. ‘It is a great help to an artist to paint a celebrity,’ Jopling noted. ‘The picture is certain of being talked about.’22 Securing portraits of well-known figures, whether they were commissioned or not, was a way for artists to build their profiles as portrait painters and attract new clients and orders. Thanks to her cultivation of her own celebrity, Jopling was, by the 1880s, someone ‘continuously written about, talked about, drawn and painted’.23 The disparity between her fame and that of Millais’s was present, but not vast. Even well-known women artists like Jopling thus suffered from gendered pricing and valuation practices. Records of the rates charged by female portraitists are far from comprehensive and the different pricing systems and practices used by women are not broadly discussed in secondary literature, though Deborah Cherry notes that ‘in the upper reaches of the market … works by women did not command high prices’.24 The evidence suggests that women routinely charged and received lower rates for portraits than their male counterparts, both for domestic and family portraits and for paintings commissioned by businesses and public entities. The average price for a three quarter length portrait by the painter Frank Holl, for example, was 600 guineas in 1887, whereas Jopling’s rate for a half-length portrait was approximately 150 guineas.25 In harder times, Jopling accepted as little as 25 guineas for head studies, and she regularly charged between 75 guineas and 100 guineas for portraits throughout the 1880s.26 The one commission that rivalled Holl’s average rate was from the Raja of Kapurthala, for a life sized, two-figure portrait in 1880. Valentine Prinsep, then an associate of the Royal Academy, passed on this job to Jopling after he was too busy to complete it, and the high rate of 700 guineas received may have reflected Prinsep’s own pricing.27



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The fact that Jopling regularly received lower prices than those charged by her male counterparts meant that she was compelled to string together continuous orders to make a living. Although she also sold pictures at exhibitions and through dealers, portrait painting was her primary livelihood, and she was highly dependent on referrals, recommendations and repeat clients, along with fluctuations in the market for portraits generally. The Rothschild family, for example, were a major source of commissions that Jopling cultivated in the late 1870s and early 1880s. She painted portraits of Constance and Annie de Rothschild in 1876 and later worked on pictures of Charles and Evelina de Rothschild and their father, Sir Nathan.28 While some of these subjects did not want their portraits exhibited publically, which would have secured Jopling’s work more attention, the patronage of a prominent family contributed to Jopling’s profile as a portraitist and made her a candidate for other high-profile projects. Jopling’s excitement at receiving a Rothschild commission speaks to its significance; ‘I have an order!!!’, she wrote to her husband.29 Following her series of Rothschild portraits, many of Jopling’s commissions came from the groups that largely maintained demand for portraiture in the late 1800s – the professional middle-class and minor gentry, including the tea merchant and art collector W. R. Winch, local landowner Joseph Williams and Queen’s Counsel William Gully, later the first Viscount Selby. Many of these jobs required Jopling to travel out of London and stay as a houseguest of her client, a prospect that could prove challenging to a female artist travelling alone. As Patricia de Montfort notes, professional visits to country houses presented painters with the opportunity to make valuable social connections, but the presence of an ‘economically independent, professional female’ in a family home also led to awkward or uncomfortable interactions, which women artists had to learn to negotiate tactfully.30 Portraiture involved interacting with a broad range of people of different genders and social classes, and traversing disparate, sometimes unknown, public, private and social spaces; respectability in behaviour, dress and demeanour was thus vital to women artists’ success and reputations within the genre.31 Jopling’s career demonstrates several of the issues and practices female portrait painters faced at the end of the nineteenth century. Women were broadly accepted as portraitists, and with the right social and artistic connection they could construct viable, even profitable careers within the genre. Orders and commissions were highly dependent on recommendations, referrals and reputation, and women cultivated their profile and networks within the bounds

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of acceptable and appropriate feminine behaviour. Ethel Wright, for example, relocated her studio to the fashionable area of Lowndes Square, which was a suitable and convenient setting for the sitters she was trying to attract.32 She was known as a ‘great favourite of society’, and an ‘excellent hostess’, two traits that raised her public profile and allowed her to move in the same circles as potential clients. Women were not generally confined to portraits of their own gender. Ethel Wright, Henrietta Rae and Ethel Mortlock all routinely painted men, often via commission from local governments and institutions like universities and hospitals. Mortlock made a career out of painting prominent men, including politicians, war heroes and ambassadors, and gained commissions from the Royal Navy, the Conservative Party and the Prince of Wales.33 Like Jopling, she was canny in pursuing high-profile subjects who would attract attention upon exhibition. She secured sittings with the explorer and soldier Colonel Fred Burnaby shortly before his fatal trip to Egypt in 1885, which brought him posthumous fame as a hero and martyr in General Gordon’s Sudan campaign. Mortlock made the most of this fortuitous timing; hers was the last portrait painted of Burnaby before his death, and she exhibited it to great interest at the Royal Academy shortly after. She was invited to present the portrait to the Prince and Princess of Wales at Marlborough House and later exhibited the painting for public view at Dierken’s Art Gallery in London and at galleries in Manchester and Birmingham.34 Mortlock also executed the first English portrait of Mary Endicott, the American heiress and ‘social lioness’ set to marry Joseph Chamberlain, and this commission – regarded as the sensation of the season – brought interest from American clients.35 Mortlock received £130 for a three-quarter length portrait of Edward S. Mostyn Price in 1892 but claimed to charge as much as £1,000 for commissions from foreign ambassadors. However, as Mortlock named this price during bankruptcy proceedings, as a means of explaining her debts by way of unpaid portrait commissions, this number may have been inflated.36 Nevertheless, she was respected as a ‘painter of men’s portraits’ who took on ‘first rate’ military, political and society subjects with equal success.37 Painting portraits sometimes presented challenging social and professional situations for artists to navigate. Painting multiple portraits a year and pleasing diverse clients was hard work, even for very established artists. John Millais wrote to his wife in 1890, ‘The anxiety of satisfying people in portraiture is



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almost intolerable.’38 If they were in demand, both male and female portraitists often took on numerous commissions at one time, capitalizing on periods of popularity that could be fleeting. In 1882, Hubert Herkomer painted thirteen portraits in two and a half months, sometimes scheduling up to three sittings a day.39 He wrote to a friend that it was ‘astonishing … the extraordinary rapidity with which one can make money’ through portrait painting and noted that he intended to ‘make hay whilst the sun shines’. Herkomer outlined a strategy in which he would devote five months a year to portrait painting, during which he could earn £12,000. The remaining seven months of the year he would devote to painting for pleasure.40 Frank Holl painted twenty-four portraits, along with five subject paintings, in 1882. Holl’s prolific output enabled him acquire a handsome studio and led to lucrative commissions from clients like the Duke of Cambridge and the Prince of Wales, but the anxiety Holl experienced in producing these works, together with the heavy workload, took a toll on his health. By 1888, Holl was ‘at the end of his tether’, according to his daughter, and he suffered a breakdown.41 Holl’s friend Millais wrote to him, ‘Portrait painting is killing work to an artist who is sensitive, and he must be so to be successful, and I well understand that you are prostrated by it.’42 Holl died in July of that year, at the age of forty-three. Women artists also experienced this ‘portrait fatigue’ but were rewarded far less monetarily for their efforts. Herkomer earned £6,014 for painting his thirteen portraits in 1882, or approximately £463 per portrait, and Holl charged between £400 and £600 for portraits at the end of his career.43 Louise Jopling frequently painted up to ten portraits a year, along with several other subject and genre pictures, but because the portrait fees she could command were between £25 and £150, her overall income was much lower. Jopling’s yearly income in 1872, for example, was £320, which derived from the sale of thirteen pictures, including seven portraits.44 Her yearly income fluctuated significantly, depending on the number of commissions and significant sales that she made. In 1883, for example, Jopling’s income was £1,103;45 in this year she painted eight portraits, including one of the actress Ellen Terry, along with the ‘fancy portrait’ Phyllis, bought by art collector Merton Russell-Cotes. Herkomer’s protégée, Lucy Kemp-Welch, charged £100 for portraits in the early years of the twentieth century.46 But, regardless of these gendered pricing practices, portraiture provided a relatively stable and sustainable livelihood to women with the means and determination to foster their reputations and to cultivate client relationships.

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Attracting patronage Besides portraits, the most personal and sustained relationship artists could cultivate with clients was direct patronage. ‘In the eighteenth century and before artists were visited by their patrons who bought what the artist had to sell and commissioned him to paint what he was pleased to paint,’ explained George Moore.47 By the 1890s, Moore claimed, the West End art dealer had replaced the patron as the most likely visitor to an artist’s studio. Important late century art collectors such as George McColloch and Henry Ismay chose not to work directly with artists to build their collections, relying instead on the selection committees of major exhibitions and dealers to curate the best ‘blue chip’ investments for their private galleries.48 William Frith believed that this arrangement benefited artists. ‘[T]he “patron” may have peculiar taste, or no taste at all,’ he noted. [He] may be as full of whims and fancies as he is of ignorance, and then the life of the painter is not a happy one. For many years, I have always sold my pictures to what is called ‘the trade’ and have invariably escaped the tribulation that so often attends the patrons’ patronage.49

But, although it was less common in the 1880s and 1890s than it was a century earlier, direct patronage, whereby a client paid a stipend in return for the first access to paintings or established a regular buying pattern with an artist, was still a feature of the art ecosystem at the turn of the twentieth century that many artists relied upon. In the middle decades of the century, it was the direct, personal patronage of collectors like George Rae and Frederick Leyland that made the aesthetic experiments of artists like Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones viable. ‘Without these patrons, Rossetti would have been forced to adapt his powers to pleasing personal taste,’ noted Art Journal. ‘By their help, he was able to work out his own theories of art.’50 Similarly, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was avant-garde artists who both attracted and were most reliant upon, involved, reliable patrons. English impressionists and post-impressionists such as Walter Sickert, Augustus John and Mark Gertler attracted patronage from collectors and art lovers sympathetic to their modern style and methods.51 Aristocratic women involved in literary and artistic society were an important and welcome source of patronage for this group of artists; as well as providing financial support by paying stipends, purchasing art and commissioning decorative schemes,



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they took on the ‘vague but important role’ of facilitating useful introductions to other buyers and collectors within their social networks.52 Few women, however, benefited from the support of this group of female patrons. Lady Ottoline Morell, Lady Ian Hamilton and Lady Cunard, among others, favoured male artists of the avant-garde, with whom romantic and sexual relationships sometimes coalesced with artistic patronage. The scarcity of collectors in this mould willing to patronize female artists reflects women’s uneasy relationship with avant-garde and modern forms of art in general. The association between women and the feminine, domestic and imitative in art distanced them from conventional understandings of cultural modernity, while women’s less privileged critical and commercial position in the art world meant they were less able to take the aesthetic and social risks necessary to be involved in progressive art movements. One of the few women artists to benefit from patrons of avant-garde and modern art was Gwen John, and she was aided in this regard by her brother Augustus. He recommended Gwen’s art to one of his own patrons, the American John Quinn, after he discovered she was struggling financially. Augustus John was a trusted guide to Quinn and so his recommendation of Gwen John was taken seriously, particularly as it came at a time when Quinn was looking to expand his collection with new and modern artists.53 Gwen was anxious about fulfilling the expectations of such a relationship and was slow to respond to Quinn’s offers of support. ‘I find it difficult to thank you as I wish too for your offer to buy my pictures regularly and to send me the money regularly,’ she wrote to Quinn in 1912. ‘I cannot decide my answer now but will in a few weeks. It would be very good for me to have money regularly and so be able to have good models, but I am not sure at this moment whether my pictures will be good.’54 Although Quinn was a non-demanding patron, Gwen experienced the same tension felt by many other artists involved in patronage relationships; as Sue Roe explains, Gwen’s desire to paint ‘freely and intuitively’ had to now coexist with her responsibility to Quinn.55 His preference for oils and portraiture were taken into account in her choice of subjects and materials, and she expressed regret and shame at her struggle to complete pictures by the expected time. Laura Knight shared Gwen John’s concerns about direct patronage relationships. Although not an avant-garde artist, she was one of the few women to be offered sustained, direct patronage early in her career. The connoisseur and collector William Hartshorne offered Knight £250 a year to paint a series

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of portraits in 1896, shortly after Knight submitted her first picture to the Royal Academy. In her memoir, Knight records that she was ‘saved from this fate’ by a financial crisis in the Hartshorne family, indicating her distaste for the obligation and creative limitations such a relationship would engender.56 Other women received patronage from collectors and connoisseurs that was of a less formal nature than the arrangement offered to Knight. Prominent late nineteenth-century art collectors of the commercial class included the works of women artists like Evelyn De Morgan, Louise Jopling and Henrietta Rae in their personal galleries. The Liverpool ship owner William Imrie was one of De Morgan’s few steady patrons; he purchased Dryad from the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885 and went on to commission seven more paintings throughout the 1890s, including Cassandra and Helen of Troy.57 Rae was one of the many women artists to have work purchased by George McCulloch, whose collection of British and European art by living artists was considered one of the finest in England.58 McCulloch paid the considerable sum of £1,000 for Rae’s masterwork Psyche at the Throne of Venus, a huge canvas featuring fourteen female figures, in 1894, and he also collected multiple works by Marianne Stokes, Laura Alma-Tadema, Emmie Stewart Wood and Elizabeth Forbes.59 McCulloch did not claim to have a special interest in supporting women artists and did not forge close, personal relationships with the ones he patronized; he primarily purchased art from major exhibitions and was driven by personal taste and the desire for good investments. In this way, his attitude towards collecting the work of women artists was somewhat typical of late nineteenth-century art patrons; he did not discriminate against work by women and purchased it when he liked it personally or considered it a solid investment, but women artists were not central to his collection or regarded as the centrepiece within it. In some regards, McCulloch’s collection reflected women’s position in the art world generally – they were accepted as legitimate participants within it but their status, both commercially and critically, was minimal. Nevertheless, being a part of such a high-profile collection bolstered artists’ reputations and public profile. Merton Russell-Cotes was one of the few patrons to emerge from the merchant and professional classes who did have an active interest in collecting the work of female artists. Although in many ways his collecting practices reflected typical urban, middle-class taste, Russell-Cotes had a penchant for both representations of the female form and works by female artists.60 He purchased works by women from the early nineteenth century along with examples by well-known living female painters such as Lucy Kemp-Welch, Evelyn De Morgan and Louise Jopling;



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a painting by Laura Alma-Tadema was his favourite of the entire collection. Once Anna Lea Merritt’s Love Locked Out became the first work by a woman artist to be bought for the nation by the Chantrey Trust, Russell-Cotes immediately ordered a copy to be produced for his own collection.61 Russell-Cotes purchased art from a variety of sources; as well as visiting artists in their studios he bought work from the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy and Walker Gallery in Liverpool and frequented auctions and dealerrun galleries. Collectors like McCulloch and Russell-Cotes did not enter into traditional patronage relationships with women artists, but having paintings purchased by recognized collectors was a sign that the artist’s work was worth collecting, and it placed women’s work alongside prestigious ‘blue chip’ artists like Millais and Leighton. Although it did not offer the financial stability that direct patronage provided, it was a significant marker of professional credibility that was free from creative or professional obligation. While art collectors from the merchant and industrial classes grew in prominence throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, Elle Du Cane and Gertrude Massey were two artists who benefited from a more traditional source of patronage: the royal family. Royal patronage was an important component of garden painter Ella Du Cane’s career throughout the 1890s, when Queen Victoria acquired nearly thirty of her watercolour drawings.62 The Queen commissioned Du Cane to paint the gardens of various royal residences and gave the pictures as gifts to family members, describing the artist in a letter to Empress Frederick as a ‘very talented young lady with a particular talent for painting flowers’.63 Du Cane received an invitation to Buckingham Palace in 1893, and such was her popularity with the Queen that her work was purchased by the Duke of York and his siblings for their mother’s birthday present.64 The royal family continued to support Du Cane’s career both publicly and privately after Queen Victoria’s death. King Edward and Queen Alexandra visited exhibitions of Du Cane’s watercolours at the Graves Gallery in 1904 and the Fine Art Society in 1908, where the King purchased a selection of watercolour sketches for £130.65 Du Cane ‘persistently capitalized’ on these advantages to expand professionally, and her favoured status with the royal family allowed her to develop a portfolio of stately clients whose grand gardens she was commissioned to paint.66 The miniaturist Gertrude Massey received her first private commission from royalty in 1899, after the Marchioness of Lansdowne, for whom Massey had carried out a portrait commission, brought her work to the attention of the Princes of Wales. From the Marchioness ‘ripples of recommendation widened’,

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culminating in Massey’s first ‘royal portrait’ of Peter, the Prince of Wales’s French Bulldog. Securing the support of a high-profile patron in the Marchioness early in her career was, Massey found, a valuable means to accelerate her career progression: Most miniature painters and portrait painters in other media start by painting their relatives and then get commissions from their friends. They work up the social scale gradually, getting more and more interesting and well-known sitters as they ascend. I started at the top by painting one of the first ladies in the land – a lady in waiting to the Queen.67

Massey attributed her popularity from this point onwards to the endorsement of the aristocracy and royal family. She noted, ‘As a result of that work [for the Prince of Wales] people came to me for miniatures and portraits. … It is amusing how people follow the example of outstanding personalities.’68 Like Du Cane, Massey was savvy about methods of publicizing and capitalizing on her royal commissions. She gained permission to reproduce the pictures for popular distribution and asked for her visits to the royal residences to be announced in the Court Circular; ‘apart from the honour’, she explained, ‘half the Americans in London will want me to paint their portraits’.69 She credited her royal canine portraits with beginning a fashion for animal miniatures. ‘All sorts of society people wanted me to paint miniatures of their dogs also. I had four or five visitors daily to my studio.’70 According to Massey, King Edward and Queen Alexandra took an active interest in promoting her career. After discovering that Gertrude and her husband relied on painting for their livelihood, the King took steps to publicize her work within his circles to ensure that she would get ‘plenty of sitters’. Massey recalled people arriving at her studio announcing that the King had sent them to have a portrait of themselves or their dog painted. ‘He was the heartiest and most appreciative patron I have ever had,’ she concluded.71 Massey produced over 800 miniatures and portraits in the years following her initial royal commission and became her family’s principal wage earner. Massey’s career trajectory indicates that patronage from the royal family still had the power to establish artistic reputations at the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time when many traditional authorities and institutions in the art world were losing their influence and prestige. A significant number of women artists benefited from royal attention at this time. Both Queen Alexandra and Queen Mary took a more active interest in women’s artistic pursuits than Queen Victoria; both were patrons of the Society of Women Artists and regularly



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made purchases at its annual exhibition.72 These were dutifully recorded in The Times’s ‘Court Circular’ and other newspapers, guaranteeing publicity for the artist. Alexandra and Mary also regularly attended one-woman and small group shows staged by women at London’s West End galleries; Lucy KempWelch, Beatrice Parsons and Kate Wyatt were some of the artists who benefited from the attention these royal visits drew and from ‘copycat’ buyers seeking to imitate royal consumption.73 Anne Helmreich notes that in Parsons’s case, ‘Such noted patrons undoubtedly attracted other purchasers eager to emulate the royal family’s taste.’74 Patronage from the royal family increased the desirability and cachet attached to a woman artists’ work which, in turn, advanced her commercial viability.

Conclusion The facet of artistic practice that was most important to women’s professionalism – selling art – was also the one where they faced the most significant challenges socially and psychologically. Exchanging goods for money and entering into economic transactions and contracts was largely a male privilege, and although women were a visible presence in the commercial art world by the late nineteenth century, some expressed reluctance towards these interactions. Whether these aversions were real or a contrived and strategic attempt to conform to traditional feminine behaviour is sometimes unclear. Louise Jopling wrote openly about her financial struggles and pursuit of commissions in her memoir, and she was a campaigner for women’s economic and legal rights but still felt the need to issue a disclaimer on this issue in her memoir: ‘The monetary side of an artist’s career seems sordid. Somehow in asking for money for one’s work, one has the feeling … of being a robber and a thief.’75 In the same memoir, however, she expresses annoyance at the low prices her pictures fetched. Elizabeth Butler, too, expressed ambivalence towards the business side of her artistic career. The detailed account of her sales, exhibitions and commissions included in her autobiography indicates that she took pride in her selling power and was savvy about the art market, but she claimed to rely on (male) advisors because she had ‘not been favoured in that way myself ’.76 The fact that two of the most well-known and respected women artists of the period expressed conflicted, somewhat contradictory, opinions towards the basic professional

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premise of selling art illustrates the ambiguous position of women artists in relation to the art market. Women artists confronted these difficulties in various ways. As traditional methods of selling art, portrait commissions and other forms of patronage continued to be important to women into the early twentieth century. Portraiture was the backbone of many artists’ careers, and demand from the middle and upper-middle classes provided steady work to women such as Louise Jopling, Henrietta Rae and Ethel Wright. Art collectors, including the royal family, did not discriminate against women artists but were more likely to commission or purchase work that reflected their ‘natural’, feminine artistic aptitudes. Miniatures, infant portraiture and flower painting were genres in which women artists were likely to attract commissions, and by fulfilling this niche some maintained stable and successful careers. Few women attracted the kind of sustained, involved patronage that provided male artists with consistent income and the opportunity to experiment artistically. Collectors tended to respond to works by women artists on a personal level, rather than pursue them for the sake of connoisseurship. Although they faced conflicting messages on the virtue of selling art, the attitude of most women towards the art market was pragmatic. Engaging with the business side of art was essential to earning a living and achieving professional status, and so women interacted with the infrastructure of the art market as fully as they were able. Each had their own strategies and tactics to balance the necessity of art commerce with the expectations of feminine respectability. The social and cultural capital gained from their training, studio practice and organizational memberships facilitated and strengthened what were the key interactions and relationships of their professional lives.

Notes 1 This chapter is derived in part from an article published in Visual Culture in Britain 17, no. 2 (2016), copyright Taylor &Francis, available online at https​://ww​w.tan​ dfonl​ine.c​om/do​i/abs​/10.1​080/1​47147​87.20​16.11​88024​. 2 ‘Mr W.P. Frith, R.A.’, The Times, 3 November 1909, 13. ‘A complicated and contradictory mixture of deep gratitude and powerful resentment is thus built into the dynamic of patronage’, notes Marjorie Garber, Patronising the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 2.



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3 Thomas Bayer, ‘Money as Muse: The Origin and Development of the Modern Art Market in Victorian England: A Process of Commodification’ (PhD thesis, Tulane University, 2001), 2. 4 Quoted in Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 240. 5 Shannon Hunter Hurtado, Genteel Mavericks: Professional Women Sculptors in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), 93. 6 ‘Works by Women Artists’, The Athenaeum, 12 March 1910, 314. 7 Author and critic Lady Elizabeth Eastlake described this new trend in art patronage, ‘The patronage which had been almost exclusively the privilege of the nobility and high gentry, was now shared … by a wealthy and intellectual class, chiefly enriched by commerce and trade. … One sign of the good sense of the nouveau riche consisted in a consciousness of his ignorance upon matters of connoisseurship.’ Sir Charles Eastlake, Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts with a Memoir Compiled by Lady Eastlake (London: John Murray, 1870), 147. 8 William R. Folkestone, ‘English Pictures and Picture-Dealers’, Belgravia 2 (May 1867): 290. 9 Nancy Ann Wisely, ‘Making Faces: A Sociological Analysis of Portrait Painting’ (PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1993), 140. 10 Douglas Lord, ‘Nineteenth-Century French Portraiture’, Burlington Magazine 72, no. 423 (1938): 253. 11 ‘Experiences of a Portrait Painter’, The Crayon 6, no. 6 (1859): 169–70. 12 Wisely, ‘Making Faces: A Sociological Analysis of Portrait Painting’, 140–1. 13 August von Kotzbue referring to Angelica Kauffman, quoted in Angela Rosenthal, ‘She’s Got the Look! Eighteen-Century Female Portrait Painters and the Psychology of a Potentially “Dangerous Employment”’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 147–8. 14 ‘What to do with our Daughters: Painting’, Myra’s Journal, 1 July 1894, 23. 15 Arthur Fish, Henrietta Rae (London: Casell and Company, 1905), 28. 16 Ibid., 31. 17 Ibid., 29. 18 Louise Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 1867–1887 (London: John Lane, 1925), 230. 19 See Gordon Fleming, John Everett Millais: A Biography (London: Constable, 1998), 160–8. 20 Paul Barlow, Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 182. 21 Effie Millais quoted in Jason Rosenfeld John Everett Millais (London: Phaidon, 2012), 149.

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22 Fleming, John Everett Millais, 232. 23 ‘London’s Drawing Rooms and Their Chatelaines: Mrs. Jopling’s’, The Lady’s World (August 1887): 340. 24 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993), 98. 25 ‘Notes on Current Events’, British Architect, 3 September 1887, 244. 26 For example, Jopling executed a likeness of the Reverend Wood in 1880 for twentyfive guineas, which she regarded as a ‘small order’. Around this time, she wrote to her son ‘affairs look very gloomy; money very short; no orders or prospects’. She charged seventy-five guineas for a ‘small portrait’ of Catharine Williams, the wife of local landowner and mill owner Joseph Grout Williams. Her rate for both the commission lost to Millais and a portrait of Florence Gully, the daughter of William Gully QC, was 150 guineas. Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 159–63, 191. 27 Ibid., 125. 28 Unpublished diary extract published on ‘The Catalogue: Portrait – Miss Constance de Rothschild’, Louise Jopling (1943–1933): A Research Project, University of Glasgow, 2012, www.louisejopling.arts.gla.ac.uk/. 29 Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 109. Original punctuation. 30 Patricia De Montfort, ‘Louise Jopling: A Gendered Reading of Late NineteenthCentury Britain’, Woman’s Art Journal, 34, no 2 (2013): 32. 31 Cherry notes that Jopling presented herself as an ‘utterly respectable but nevertheless stylish professional woman’. Cherry, Painting Women, 90. Instances when she veered too far towards the avant-garde in dress are remarked upon in her memoirs, where she recalls one client’s horror when she chose at dinner not to wear a neck ribbon, designed to enhance the modesty of her low-cut evening gown. Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 43–4. 32 ‘Women in the World of Art’, Hearth and Home, 22 October 1896, 881. 33 ‘Our London Letter’, Dundee Courier, 26 February 1886, np; ‘A Lady’s Letter on Current Topics’, Hampshire Telegraph, 29 May 1886, np. 34 ‘Chit Chat’, Sunday Times, 22 May 1885, 6; The Times, 26 June 1885, 2. 35 ‘Society’, Bow Bells, 16 November 1888, 319. 36 R.H.J. Griffiths, ‘Ethel the Bankrupt Portrait Painter’, Family Tree Magazine, 22, no. 1 (2006): 71. 37 Florence Fenwick Miller, ‘The Ladies Column’, Illustrated London News, 16 June 1888, 647; ‘Royal Academy’, The Times, 25 May 1883, 4. 38 Rosenfeld, John Everett Millais, 212. 39 Hubert Herkomer, letter to Lieber Hans, dated 24 July 1882. J. Saxon Mills, Life and Letters of Sir Hubert Herkomer (London: Hutchinson, 1923), 130. 40 Ibid.



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41 A.M. Reynolds, The Life and Work of Frank Holl (London: Methuen and Co, 1912), 213. 42 Ibid., 301. 43 Saxon Mills, Life and Letters of Sir Hubert Herkomer, 130. 44 Patricia De Montfort, Louise Jopling: A Biographical and Cultural Study of the Modern Woman Artist in Victorian Britain (New York: Routledge, 2017), 70; Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 326. 45 Cherry, Painting Women, 101. 46 Laura Wortley, Lucy Kemp-Welch 1869–1958: The Spirit of the Horse (Woodbridge: Antique Collector’s Club, 1996), 134. 47 George Moore, Modern Painting (London: Walter Scott, 1893), 153. 48 Dianne Sachko Macleod, ‘Art Collecting and Victorian Middle-Class Taste’, Art History 10, no. 3 (1987): 343–5. 49 W.P. Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1888), 157. 50 Lionel Robinson, ‘The Leyland Collection’, Art Journal (May 1892): 136. 51 Anna Gray, ed. The Edwardians: Secret and Desires (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2004), 66. 52 Oriana Baddeley, Judith Collins and Teresa Grimes, Five Women Painters (Oxford: Lennard Publishing, 1989), 18; Diane Sashko Macleod, ‘Women as Patrons and Collectors: 1900–1940’, Oxford Art Online, 2009. 53 Sue Roe, Gwen John (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001), 124–5. See also Ysanne Holt, ‘New York, London, Ireland: Collector John Quinn’s Transatlantic Network, c.1900–1917’, Visual Culture in Britain 14, no. 1 (2013), 56. 54 Letter from Gwen John to John Quinn, 17 November 1912 in Gwen John, Gwen John: Letters and Notebooks, ed. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan (London: Tate Publishing in association with the National Library of Wales, 2003), 77. 55 Roe, Gwen John, 132. 56 Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936), 66. 57 A.M.W. Stirling, William De Morgan and His Wife (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1922), 192; ‘Flora’, De Morgan Centre, http://www.demorgan.org.uk/Flora. 58 ‘Mr George McCulloch’, The Times, 13 December 1907, 8. 59 The Painters of the Pictures’, Western Mail, 12 October 1894, np; Royal Academy Winter Exhibition. Exhibition of Modern Works in Painting and Sculpture. Forming the Collection of the late George McCulloch (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1909). 60 Giles Waterfield, ‘Paintings from the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth’, The Magazine Antiques, 155, no. 6 (1999), 261; ‘The Art Collection’,

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The Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, 2008, http:​//www​.russ​ell-c​otes.​bourn​ emout​h.gov​.uk/E​xplor​e-The​-Coll​ectio​ns/Th​e-Art​-Coll​ectio​n.asp​x. 61 Ibid. 62 Delia Miller, The Victorian Watercolours and Drawings in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (London: Philip Wilson, 1995), 284. 63 Ibid. 64 ‘Court Circular’, The Times 1 March 1893, 11; Alice Stronach, ‘A Painter of Gardens: An Interview with Miss Ella Du Cane’, The Girl’s Realm (August 1902): 780–1. 65 ‘Court Circular’, The Times, 22 April 1904, 8; ‘Court Circular’, The Times, 12 May 1908, 10; ‘Queen at Art Galleries’, Manchester Guardian, 16 May 1908, 8; Miller, The Victorian Watercolours and Drawings in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, 284. 66 Alison Redfoot, ‘Victorian Watercolourist Ella Du Cane: A Study in Resistance and Compliance of Gender Stereotypes, the Professional Art World, Orientalism and the Interpretations of Japanese Gardens for British Society’ (Masters thesis: University of California, 2011), 31. 67 Gertrude Massey, Kings, Commoners and Me (London; Blackie, 1934), 15. 68 Ibid., 14. 69 Ibid., 54. 70 Ibid., 21. 71 Ibid., 57. 72 Sir Edward Poynter called Queen Alexandra an ‘enthusiastic lover of painting’. ‘Her Majesty, Queen Alexandra’, Art Journal (June 1902): 184; ‘Queen Honours Them: Mary of England Buys Paintings of Women Artists’, The Washington Post, 24 May 1914; ‘Court Circular’, The Times, 11 May 1901, 7; ‘Court Circular’, The Times, 11 February 1902, 10; ‘Court Circular’, The Times, 20 February 1904, 12; ‘Court Circular’, The Times, 13 February 1905, 7. 73 Wortley, Lucy Kemp-Welch 1869–1958, 114; ‘Court Circular’, The Times, 16 June 1906, 11; ‘Court Circular’, The Times, 2 March 1912, 11; ‘Queen Alexandra Picture Buying’, The Observer, 19 December 1915, 14. 74 Anne Helmreich, ‘Contested Grounds: Garden Painting and the Invention of National Identity in England, 1990–1914’ (PhD thesis: Northwestern University, 1994), 90. 75 Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 26. 76 Butler, An Autobiography, 104.

8

Illustrating Success

In 1893, Henry James commented that the ‘illustration of books, even more of magazines, may be said to have been born in our time, so far as variety and abundance are signs of it’.1 The last decades of the nineteenth century were a pivotal period in the development of publishing and print culture. After the ‘golden age’ of illustrative wood engraving in English magazines in the 1860s, advances in printing technology saw illustrations became ‘more a matter of course’ in all forms of printed media.2 For artists seeking a livelihood in the crowded and competitive late nineteenth-century art market, the advent and subsequent mass popularity of illustrated magazines, books and other printed material was a boon. The success of daily and weekly illustrated papers created new demand for illustrators with the gift for ‘rapid reproduction’.3 ‘The number of persons of both sexes who have begun to draw for the daily papers, advertisements, [and] books is something enormous,’ noted Joseph Pennell in 1890.4 In the mid-nineteenth century, women illustrators were most likely to find work engraving illustrations on wood blocks, which was one means of producing and printing illustrations for the press. This work was regarded as appropriate for women’s smaller, more delicate hands and supposedly imitative artistic abilities, while drawing illustrations on wood blocks was seen as a more creative pursuit better carried out by men. Even though women such as Adelaide and Florence Caxton and Mary Ellen Edwards achieved success as press illustrators by drawing on wood in the 1860s and 1870s, the notion that women were unsuited and incapable of working within this ‘masculine’ art form remained prevalent. In 1882, Charles Ross, the editor of Judy magazine, produced a cartoon that lampooned the attempts of a woman artist drawing on wood, even though Ross employed female artists, including his own wife, to produce illustrations for his magazine.5

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By the end of the nineteenth century, new printing technologies allowed pen and ink sketches on paper to be transferred onto printing blocks without the process of engraving. These advancements diluted the gendered division between the creative and imitative components of producing illustrations and made it easier for artists without technical training to submit illustrations to periodicals. Although popular with both male and female artists, press illustration was noted in publications such as Women and Work and Myra’s Journal as a suitable pursuit for women seeking remunerative artistic employment. Myra’s Journal recommended that women take additional classes in press drawing from a dedicated studio – such as Henry Blackburn’s on Victoria Street – and then approach magazines and newspapers as a journalist would, sending illustrations to one paper after another until her work was accepted.6 The benefit of press drawing, they claimed, was that it was a relatively steady occupation once an artist’s name was established; ‘Once a footing has been obtained, a good and steady income may be made,’ advised one journalist.7 Although women made up a significant portion of the press drawing workforce, general studies of the illustrated book and Victorian publishing largely bypass their contributions or ignore their presence altogether, mentioning Kate Greenaway, and perhaps Helen Allingham, but few others. The business side of illustration, and the working conditions of the illustrators, are largely sidelined in early studies by Frank Weitenkampf and Geoffrey Wakeman, in favour of analysis of technological developments.8 More recent work by Catherine Flood and Dawn and Peter Cope has illuminated how women artists took advantage of the commercial opportunities offered by new forms of graphic media to cement their professional status in the latter half of the nineteenth century.9 Illustration was the field of art in which women were the least constrained or held back by their gender. The commercial basis of the art form meant that it valued the more gender-neutral traits of expediency, accuracy and reliability over artistic reputation, which was a notoriously subjective and variable concept when it came to women. Women benefited from the high demand for domestic, familial and nursery subjects, and many took advantage of women’s perceived affinity for sentimentality. Their success in this genre was not seen as threatening to the male artistic establishment, because it did little to disrupt male artists’ economic advantage.10 While some aspects of women’s success in illustration reinforced pejorative stereotypes about women’s artistic abilities that were damaging to the gender as a whole, in general, the newness of commercial and press illustration as industries meant that they were places where innovation and



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diversity could prosper, at least in comparison to fine art. Illustration provided women with the exposure, flexibility, legitimacy and economic stability they needed to operate as professional artists much more quickly than could usually be achieved through painting.

Press and book illustration The rise of press and book illustration as a viable, and for many, necessary, career path for artists blurred and complicated the division between fine art and commercial art.11 Drawing for the press was not routinely taught in government schools of art, in part because drawing masters did not keep up to date with the new processes and technologies it involved. This meant that, from an educational standpoint, painting continued to be positioned as the pinnacle of an artistic career, even though for many art students, ‘the only possible career … [was] that of illustration, or design’.12 As the nineteenth century drew to a close, and a greater number of respected and celebrated artists experimented in press and book illustration, advocates of illustration pushed for illustrators to receive ‘recognition as original artists’.13 The clash of illustrators’ ‘socio-economic and artistic aspirations’ and the instability of their careers contributed to what Michele Bogart calls an unresolved professional identity.14 While painters could engage with consumers and buyers through intermediaries such as art dealers and galleries – who, to some extent, regulated and controlled supply and demand in the market for painting – illustrators dealt with a ‘less organized market’.15 They were at the coalface of art commerce, dependent on their relationships with editors, publishers and authors for regular work. There was an onus on illustrators to produce work that was accessible and populist, and that considered the taste of the public – a fact that contributed to a backlash against illustration from within the artistic profession in the late nineteenth century. Women were particularly vulnerable to criticism regarding artistic commercialism because of the nature of the commissions they received. As women were associated with domesticity and family in popular culture, women illustrators were more likely to receive commissions for work that was sentimental or domestic in nature.16 They were expected to produce images that were recognizable, accessible and, most importantly, popular among a broad audience. Addressing the new generation of women illustrators working for

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American and European magazines in 1910, The New York Times noted that ‘commercialism with a big C has entered the lists of illustrative art as opposed to old fashioned and out of date idealism’.17 This criticism ignored the fact that most artists, including even ‘eminent painters’, had an economic rationale to take up illustration and had little control over the subject or style of their work.18 The overcrowded field of illustration was a buyer’s market, and the majority of artists only earned a modest income and had little job security.19 To demand high rates or contracts from publishers illustrators had to be ‘thoroughly experienced’ and ‘considered safe’ according to the editor of Art Journal. ‘You will not get much for your first effort, even if they show ability,’ he warned young artists. ‘Better let the publishers have the pictures at their own price until you have become independently busy, then put up your prices.’20 Most of the women artists represented on the pages of illustrated newspapers and magazines practised illustration alongside other artistic and commercial pursuits; it was one means of making the money necessary to sustain an artistic career. The relationship between illustrative work and fine art in the careers of these women, and the professional impact of each pursuit, functioned differently for each artist, as the examples of Kate Greenaway and Helen Allingham, two of the most well-known female illustrators of the period, illustrate. Allingham began working as an engraver while a student at the Royal Academy (RA) schools in the 1860s and her skills led to commissions from popular illustrated journals, including Once a Week and Aunt Judy’s Magazine. She built a strong reputation as an illustrator for these publications, and, in 1870, was offered a position on staff at the Graphic, an influential weekly newspaper credited with revolutionizing the way illustrations and artists were used in print.21 As well as contributing to the fashion pages, Allingham provided the illustrations for high-profile literary serializations such as Victor Hugo’s Ninety Three and Mrs Oliphant’s Innocent.22 Allingham was one of the few women employed on staff at a major pictorial publication, and the work provided her with a steady income at a time when she was relying on art for her livelihood. Allingham gave up the post after her marriage in 1874 because of the ‘societal prescriptions against the employment of married women’,23 but she continued to practice art professionally and her tenure in magazines established her reputation within the art world.24 Allingham is an example of an artist who began in commercial art and progressed into the world of fine art – by the end of her career she was better known as a watercolour artist than a graphic artist.25 In this



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way her illustrative work did not restrict her artistic practice to a commercial art ghetto; like male artists John Millais and William Holman Hunt she benefited professionally and economically from staking a claim in both worlds and moved between the two with relative ease. For Kate Greenaway, the transition from illustration to fine art and back again was more complicated. Greenaway established her reputation as a commercial artist in the emerging greeting card business after she was introduced to William Hardcastle Ward, the London manager of the influential art-stationers Marcus Ward and Co, in the early 1870s.26 Greenaway offered Ward a sample of her work in the form of a Valentine’s card which, to Ward’s surprise, sold over 25,000 copies in the weeks following its publications. This success earned Greenaway £3 and the promise of a continuing working relationship with the company.27 The Belfast-based Marcus Ward and Co had won the respect of the art world in the late 1860s with their carefully designed, well-produced stationery and cards, which influenced the foundation of similar firms in the subsequent decades.28 It was Ward who encouraged Greenaway to include her watercolour portraits of children, which he had seen displayed at the Dudley Gallery in the late 1860s, into her illustrative work and this subject, paired with sentimental verses, became the successful formula in the Ward/Greenaway collaboration. Although some have portrayed the narrative of Greenaway’s career as one of overnight success, her years as a freelance illustrator were laborious and testing.29 Ward was a demanding employer who challenged his artists to produce work that conformed to his aesthetic standards and to the exacting requirements of the lithographer. Greenaway’s diaries suggest that she was singularly focused on her career and producing work that would win the praise of her commissioner. ‘Fatigue promises reward, perseverance gets the prize,’ she recorded in her notebook.30 With the help and advice of her father John, a wood engraver, and her early patron, editor William Loftie, Greenaway also began providing illustrations for children’s books and periodicals, and her increasingly distinctive style was rewarded financially. She earned £124 from three commissions in 1874 and as her reputation as a book and magazine illustrator grew, so too did her income. Greenaway’s relationship with Ward, however, was fundamentally exploitative. She was not consulted or remunerated when her designs were continually reissued by the publisher, and she severed her relationship with the company in the late 1870s, although Ward continued to control the rights to illustrations that he already owned. Under the Window, the ‘breakthrough’ book

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that she both wrote and illustrated, was issued by a different publisher, Edmund Evans, with whom Greenaway negotiated better terms, and the extraordinary critical and commercial success of this book freed Greenaway from the demands of exploitative editors and magazine deadlines.31 The widespread popularity of Greenaway’s work in the 1880s, which included self-authored books of verse, Christmas books, almanacs, and illustrations for other authors, led to the development of a Greenaway industry, with fabrics, wallpaper, dolls and clothing items manufactured in a style inspired by Greenaway’s idealized pastoral aesthetic.32 As her obituary in Graphic pointed out, Greenaway unconsciously birthed her own stylistic school, which was bolstered by her editors’ ambitious and relentless publishing schedules.33 The spate of gift books and special editions issued by various publishers in the winter of 1884 alone included 40,000 copies of Painting Book, a collection of her early card designs, the almanac The Language of Flowers and The English Spelling Book.34 Financially, Greenaway was appreciative of her popularity, which allowed her to support her family and build a new, purpose-designed studio home, but the crowd of imitators who made up the ‘Greenaway School’ also troubled her. They flooded the market with iterations of her style, weakening demand for the original product. Greenaway considered giving up book illustration, which she came to view as merely an economic vehicle; ‘I don’t want to do any books for other people – I’d rather do other things,’ she wrote to her editor. While her books remained popular in the United States, over-saturation of the market contributed to the fashion for Greenaway’s illustrations fading in the late 1880s and 1890s.35 Greenaway’s friendship with Helen Allingham, begun when the two were students and rekindled in the late 1880s, inspired her to shift focus away from commercial illustration and re-engage with her gallery career. She sold her drawing The Bubble to the soap manufacturer Pears to help fund her new artistic approach and organized a solo watercolour exhibition at the Fine Art Society (FAS) in 1891. Although the exhibition brought in £1350 in sales – a high figure compared to similar exhibitions held by other female artists – the £964 that Greenaway received was far less than what she earned from her more successful books, and examples of her early illustrative work were much more popular with buyers than her landscape painting.36 Critics too continued to focus on examples of her early work rather than acknowledge her new direction. Those who did engage with the newer paintings noted their derivative aspects and the influence of Allingham on her landscapes and figure studies.37



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At her FAS exhibition in 1898 it was again the old pictures of ‘dressed up babies’ that sold well; ‘I felt so depressed about it,’ Greenaway noted to Violet Dickinson.38 Greenaway supported herself financially through the later years of her life by selling her personal archive of original illustrative art at these exhibitions and by attempting portrait commissions, but the subdued response to her more naturalistic watercolour paintings left her despondent.39 ‘It is rather unhappy to feel that you have had your day,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘Yet if I had just enough money to live on I could be so very happy, painting just what I liked and no thought of profit. … It’s rather difficult to make enough money in a few years to last for your life. Yet now everyone is so tired of things – that is what it comes to.’40 Greenaway’s trajectory demonstrates both the advantages and the limitations of book illustration and the dangers of relying too heavily on one style of illustration and segment of the market. In Greenaway’s case, the popularity of her distinctive aesthetic encouraged publishers, critics and consumers to pigeonhole her creative abilities. She was so defined by the success of her illustrative work that her attempts to pursue other types of art were stymied, and this produced both financial and creative frustrations throughout her career. Unlike Helen Allingham and other, male artists/illustrators, Greenaway’s success in illustration ultimately limited rather than expanded her professional opportunities. While they may not have achieved Greenaway’s lasting fame, it was women who had diverse and adaptable styles of drawing who were more likely to achieve stability and longevity within the illustration profession. The explosion of the youth and adolescent reading market in the second half of the nineteenth century, which Greenaway pioneered, was a boon for women illustrators. The revolution in illustrated periodical publishing affected child readers as much as adult ones; by 1900 more than 160 children’s magazines were published in England.41 Illustrated books aimed at the juvenile market, meanwhile, brought more ‘grist to the mill’ of booksellers and publishers than practically any other genre.42 New books appeared on the market constantly throughout the year and, during the Christmas season, they ‘poured forth in bewildering profusion’, according to one contemporary critic.43 Claudia Nelson explains that it was the ‘stimulus of newly inexpensive and effective colour printing techniques and the new right of illustrators to copyright their work’ that contributed to the profusion of both cheap and ornately produced children’s books aimed at the middle-class reading market.44 The influence of Kate Greenaway and the success of her Under the Window can also not be underestimated. In the year following

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the release of that book, Belgravia noted the publication of fifty ‘Fine Art Gift Books’ aimed at younger readers, all emulating the style of Greenaway’s text.45 The popularity and prevalence of these books meant that book and art critics took them seriously; columns dedicated to reviewing new juvenile literature were found in literary journals and in periodicals such as Art Journal.46 Although the juvenile book market provided employment opportunities to both male and female artists, the subject matter and styles that characterized the genre lent themselves to women and their perceived ‘feminine’ artistic sensibilities, particularly when it came to books aimed at ‘nursery’ readers and young girls.47 Women artists did not dominate the field, but they made up a highly visible presence within it, and their participation and success in the genre allowed some to achieve widespread professional and popular renown. Children’s books and youth orientated almanacs and Christmas books were largely sold on the strength of their pictures, and this allowed illustrators to cultivate much larger public profiles and consumer bases than they would as fine artists. As the major drawcards in the juvenile book market, illustrators were the ‘purchase point’ for middlebrow and highbrow consumers alike.48 Mary Ellen Edwards’s name was used to advertise upcoming serialized stories in place of the name of the author; in one case neither the author’s name nor the title of the story were mentioned, as Edwards’s illustrations were positioned as the primary attraction.49 Hilda Cowham, Mrs Seymour Lucas (Marie Cornelissen) and Mabel Lucie Attwell all had high enough profiles to sell serialized children’s stories, gift books and almanacs on the strength of their names alone. Like Greenaway, these artists cultivated distinctive styles focusing on the characterization of children, which set their work apart from the multitude of imitative illustrative work aimed at the youth market, and this made them valuable commodities for publishers.50 Attwell and Cowham parlayed their popular, unique aesthetics into ongoing relationships with the publishing houses Raphael Tuck, Blackie, and Cassell.51 Their involvement in these publishers’ gift books also contributed significantly to their professional profile and status, since artists were considered to be more important contributors to gift books than the authors and were well paid for their designs.52 In contrast, some publishers, particularly those who specialized in cheap editions of children’ stories, did little to publicize the work of the artist. Some publishers did not allow their artists to sign their own work, and this lack of accurate attribution has contributed to the difficulty scholars experience tracing the career trajectories of women in this field.53 Others women never achieved



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the degree of success and fame that allowed artists like Attwell and Greenaway to sell work on the strength of their name alone, but they were employed in-house by publishers to produce consistent, attractive illustrations for a broad range of publications. Millicent Sowerby, for example, received a £150 retaining fee in 1915 from the publisher Henry Frowde, for whom she produced numerous illustrations from 1910 onwards.54 Most children’s book illustrators also pursued other forms of illustration and continued to exhibit oil or watercolour paintings to maintain their visibility within the fine art world. Because women illustrators were at risk of being grouped together and pigeonholed on account of their sex, many benefited more from low-profile commissions and in-house retainers than they did from the highly visible and popular work of the kind Greenaway produced, particularly when it came to securing a broad range of work and transcending genre limitations. Artists such as Fannie Moody and Gertrude Demain Hammond cultivated sustained careers as illustrators/artists by working across a variety of genres and varying their styles and subject matter to fit individual commissions. Moody and Demand Hammond produced illustrated stories and special editions for the Graphic and the Detroit Free Press among others and worked for book publishers alongside exhibiting at mainstream art societies in London.55 Demain Hammond’s primary source of income was illustrating books for girls, commissioned by publishers such as by Blackie and Macmillan, but she was also a respected watercolourist and was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour in 1896.56 In 1891, she noted having ‘so much on order’, that her eyes gave out; ‘I do not make a large fortune,’ she explained, ‘but I earn quite as much as I want, and I always have more work than I can execute’.57 Here, Demain Hammond models the type of professional stability that moderate success in illustration could generate. Publishing different types of work in multiple publications provided continuous and public validation of her credibility and ongoing exposure, two factors that ‘all professional artists needed’.58 Her willingness to engage in the business side of illustration by forging relationships with editors and publishers, along with the reliability and consistency she demonstrated in balancing various freelance commissions, vouched for her seriousness and dedication to the craft. Mary Ellen Edwards was another artist who modelled this strategy throughout her career, as she pursued work from multiple sources and altered her style to fit the aesthetic demands of clients. In the 1860s and 1870s, she worked on staff at the Graphic while also contributing to the Illustrated London News, Argosy and

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Belgravia. Her work for these magazines reflected the style of ‘poetic naturalism’ that characterized illustrative art in the 1860s, and it was her ability to work in this style and produce illustrations directly onto wood blocks that helped secure her standing as an in-demand illustrator at some of England’s most influential magazines.59 She illustrated serialized novels for Anthony Trollope and Charles Lever and collaborated with well-regarded male illustrators such as William Holman Hunt and Walter Crane. After her marriage to the children’s book illustrator John Charles Staples in the early 1870s, Edwards adapted her style and approach to allow the couple to collaborate on projects and became known as ‘one of the pioneers in the production of colour printed books for children’.60 They illustrated numerous stories for the author and poet Fred E. Weatherley and Edwards produced illustrations for youth-focused magazines such as The Girl’s Own Paper and Little Folks, and for novels targeted at the rapidly growing market for adolescent girls. Although she also continued to illustrate novels for adults, including those by the travel writer Matilda Charlotte Houston and the suffragette Isabella Fyvie Mayo, the domestic, sentimental work Edwards produced, at the behest of editors and publishers, for children and adolescents has come to define her legacy. In his Illustrators of the 1860s Forrest Reid ignores Edwards’s versatility and varied artistic oeuvre, which included more than 3,000 illustrations, and instead focuses solely on her most conventional output.61 Edwards ‘would occupy a higher position among our illustrators had she not repeated herself so monotonously’, he notes, overlooking the changes and adaptations that occurred in her work throughout her career.62 Reid’s assessment reflects the challenge illustrators faced balancing the oftencontradictory pull of ‘market forces and aesthetic goals’.63 Illustrators were largely aware that the work editors and publishers commissioned was often derivative or repetitive, but most had little choice but to accept well-remunerated work when it was available; they recognized the importance of producing popular and familiar styles. It was Edwards’s very reliability, and ability to produce illustrations that fit within the parameters of a project, that made her work attractive to editors. Illustrators were ‘expected to make a decent drawing of any subject given’ and to respond to ‘the ideas and requirements of the editor or publisher’, and in this sense Edwards was the ideal illustrative artist.64 Illustrators who achieved long-term success had the ability to precisely identify the market to which their work was targeted to and to produce designs that fulfilled the demands of that niche.65 It is in this context that the American illustrator Mary Hallock Foote, who decried the



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necessity of producing ‘stupid commonplace “popular” subjects’ instead of her own original work, compared herself to a mercenary.66 The willingness to adapt and conform to the artistic vision of others, however, is easily misinterpreted as conventionality and repetitiveness, and this partially accounts for why the professional activities of artists like Edwards and Demain Hammond are not more widely recognized. In cultivating multiple sources and markets for her work and diversifying her style, Edwards modelled the strategy employed by many women illustrators to secure a consistent income. This approach was economically necessary for most, and beneficial in terms of demonstrating artistic versatility, but it was also demanding of artists, who had to acquire and then manage contracts, orders and deadlines from multiple editors and publishers. The business correspondence of Helen McKie, one of the most prolific illustrators of the 1910s, indicates the extensive negotiation and administration involved in sustaining a freelance career. She was offered advertising work from the stationery company J. M. Kronheim after her work was displayed at the South Kensington School’s National Exhibition and, throughout the next decade, gained commissions from referrals, recommendations and word of mouth. The tight timeframes and limited instructions she received reflect the difficult working conditions press and commercial illustrators dealt with. McKie was paid between five and eight guineas for individual commissions from Queen, The Autocar and Bystander in the mid-1910s and was generally asked to deliver work within four to six days.67 In 1915, she was employed on staff at the Graphic and Bystander but found the terms of her contracts limiting at a time when her work was in high demand from other publishers. She complained to the Graphic’s editor: I do not think that the conditions are fair to me having regard to the amount of work which I do for you. Particularly so far as the Graphic is concerned it cannot be said that you keep me fully employed. … I have had some very good offers with regard to colour work since my exhibition and as you know I have had in the past to refuse these because of my agreement with you, although your company takes practically none of my colour work.68

McKie’s business correspondence indicates that illustration work was abundant in the early twentieth century but, as contractors and freelancers, women artists had to build good relationships with publishers and editors and had to be willing to negotiate the terms of their employment to ensure they could gain enough

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work to earn a sufficient income. Press illustration, in particular, often involved strict deadlines and required artists to fulfil the creative vision of an editor or author with little precise guidance. In the late 1870s, Ellen Clayton noted that newspaper illustration involved ‘a very unpleasant amount of hurry, bother, downright drudgery, and “night work”’.69 By the 1910s, working conditions had intensified. ‘Things are moving so fast that the conditions under which the great illustrators of the last generation, like Millais and Fred Walker worked, have largely passed away,’ noted Art Journal in 1912. ‘The profession has become overcrowded, and the pressure daily becomes greater.’70 As competition within the field grew, Arthur Rackham warned that young artists should not pursue illustration as a profession unless they were also furnished with an independent income or a secondary means of earning of a living, like teaching.71 Specialized training in illustration was increasingly expected of artists required to produce realistic, dynamic and attractive drawings on demand, but most mainstream art schools remained uninterested in teaching illustrative forms of art into the first decades of the twentieth century.72 To acquire the myriad contracts and commissions that illustrators like McKie relied upon to make a living, newcomers had to act as their own publicists and hawk their portfolios to as many editors and publishers as they could access. Myra’s Journal informed young women that perseverance, push and industry were just as important to an illustrator’s success as talent. ‘She must … send her work from one paper to another till she gets something accepted,’ they instructed.73 To first gain the attention of editors, illustrators ‘trudged the concentration of streets around Covent Garden,’74 where book publishers’ offices were located. Mabel Lucie Attwell claimed that she would never forget the trembling fear she felt on her first visit to a publisher’s office or the joy of receiving a guinea on her way out in return for her illustration.75 These firms were so inundated with aspiring artists that they hired special doormen to deal with their inquiries. The writer and critic Frank Swynnerton fulfilled this role while working as a clerk at J. A. Dent and Co in the early 1900s, and he remembered particularly ‘the lady art students in long cloaks and eccentric witch-like hats who brought so many hopeless children’s books for consideration’.76 His comments suggest that the popularity of children’s literature, and the expectations on women to pursue this genre, led to an over-supply of illustrators in the field, who were invariably grouped together on account of their gender. Women were more likely to find their start in magazines or newspapers, where the demand and turnover of illustrated material was much higher than in book



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publishing. Once established in that field women could receive up to £10 a page from leading papers for their illustrations, although less famed publications with smaller circulations paid substantially less. Just as working with well-respected art dealers could advance the prospects of painters, illustrators benefited from the support and championing of other illustrators, editors and publishers. Alice Bolingbroke Woodward began her career creating scientific drawings for her father, the Keeper of Geology at the British Museum, and credits the support of the influential illustrator and critic Joseph Pennell with separating her work from the multitude of aspiring illustrators. Pennell ‘blew my trumpet for me with the result that Macmillan and Dent gave me a book and I got some work on the Daily Chronicle which was just starting illustrations,’ Woodward recalled. ‘I was frightfully proud.’77 From these beginnings Woodward pursued a long career in illustration, splitting her attention between book illustration, where she enjoyed long relationships with publishers Blackie and George Bell and Sons, and scientific illustration. Other artists were aided by family members or friends who were also in the illustration business; Evelyn Stuart Hardy’s uncle, the animal painter Heywood Hardy, helped find Evelyn work in-house at the Sporting and Dramatic and the Gentlewoman, while the illustrator Edward Johnson helped establish his niece Mary Ellen Edwards in London’s art scene.78 Compounding the challenges that were facing illustrators attempting to build a multifaceted artistic career was the fact that illustrative art continued to be viewed by many as a second-rate pursuit, resorted to only out of economic necessity.79 Christiana (Chris) Demain Hammond, Gertrude’s sister, was named as one of the top three illustrators working in England in the 1890s, but in his appreciation of the artist Alfred Forman positioned illustration as inferior to painting: [She] was amply endowed with all the specific qualities necessary for the attainment of eminence as a painter either in watercolours or in oils; but circumstances determined that she was to devote her talents more particularly to the pen and ink illustration books and of stories appearing in weekly journals or in monthly magazines.80

Although Chris Demain Hammond was a prize student at the Lambeth School of Art, and had a distinguished tenure at the Royal Academy schools, she experienced what Meaghan Clarke claims was a common hesitation among women artists – doubt in their own ability to create profitable art at the ‘highest’ level. Demain Hammond ‘had misgivings as to her ability as an

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oil painter to achieve with sufficient rapidity a reputation that would justify her in having adopted art as a means of livelihood,’ Forman reported. ‘She felt clear intimations from within that in “black and white” she might hope more speedily to attain such results as were rendered necessary by her condition of dependence on her own resources.’81 According to Forman, Chris Demain Hammond’s decision to pursue illustrative work rather than fine art was motivated by her need to rapidly establish a profitable and reliable career, and by feelings of inadequacy in the field of oil painting, despite her extensive and distinguished training. In Demain Hammond’s case this decision yielded positive results; she experienced solid and continuous success as an illustrator of magazines and books, and her work was in demand from papers including Illustrated London News and Sketch along with publishers Macmillans, Cassells and George Allens. Illustration and advertising work allowed Demain Hammond to support herself economically and adopt the trappings of an artistic lifestyle – she maintained a studio in Hammersmith, joined artistic societies and moved in cultured social circles. However, Demain Hammond herself admitted that the work was not as artistically fulfilling or prestigious as fine art. ‘If I had not required to earn money at once, I should have preferred to paint pictures,’ she explained. ‘Perhaps I may be able to fulfil my early ambition someday – who knows?’82 Although more and more artists were blurring the divisions between fine art and illustrative art in the late nineteenth century, there continued to be an uneasy relationship between illustration and the art world in general.83 The mercantile nature of illustrative art was obvious, and this lessoned the creative and artistic merit of the work in the eyes of some.84 To be commercially orientated was, to certain critics, a sign of being ‘un-artistic’, a producer of wares rather than a serious creator of art.85 However, as the case of Chris Demain Hammond demonstrates, the decision to primarily pursue illustrative art instead of fine art was often a matter of circumstances rather than choice. It is impossible to generalize about women’s personal reaction to or enjoyment of the profession when so little firsthand material is available, and the impact of illustrative pursuits on the critical and commercial success of women’s fine art practice was dependent on the individual circumstances and style of the artist. What is clear, however, is that press and book illustration was a legitimate, if not prestigious, artistic pursuit that offered many women artists the remunerative opportunities needed to sustain a career within the art industries. And somewhat paradoxically, it was precisely the commercial



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nature of illustration that made the art form so significant to women artists’ professionalism. While any artist, amateur or professional, could paint a picture in oils or watercolour and submit it for consideration at the Royal Academy summer exhibition, working on staff at a magazine or receiving commissions from a book publisher were indisputably professional activities, because they represented an artist’s ability and willingness to sell.86 Publishing illustrations was an endorsement of women’s technical skills, their knowledge of aesthetic trends and styles, their reliability and consistency as workers and their business acumen. Women who achieved success as illustrators were rewarded with the benefits of professional status: occupational and economic stability, the respect of their industry peers and authority within their field. It is thus unsurprising that while some took up illustration purely as a means of supporting or supplementing their fine art practice, others considered success in book or magazine illustration their primary professional objective.87 The artists who were most successful in negotiating the traditionally masculine sphere of publishing were those who were willing to adapt and diversify their style and methods to appeal to different editors, consumers and reading markets. And while some continued to be prejudged and categorized in accordance with their gender, these restrictions were less problematic for those who took advantage of their perceived ‘natural’ artistic affinities to excel in the abundant children’s book and female-orientated illustration work that was available.

Cards, valentines and printed ephemera The contentious relationship between illustration and the broader art community was particularly relevant to artists who made their living through the ‘purely commercial side of art’, producing the ‘artistic’ printed ephemera present in everyday life.88 The popularization of new printed materials such as greeting cards and posters offered women the opportunity to pursue artistic occupations without having to engage personally with the pressures and constraints of the overstocked art market or having to negotiate with the infrastructure of editors and publishers that surrounded press illustration. Employment as a designer at an ‘art publisher’ specializing in stationery and greeting cards provided women with the rare opportunity of earning stable income while having their artwork widely printed and dispersed.

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Henrietta Rae criticized women artists who created Christmas card illustrations instead of ‘really important’ pictures for lacking in ambition and seriousness, suggesting that women’s pursuit of these occupations damaged the collective reputation and standing of women artists.89 Rae’s views are reflected in the lack of research and scholarship dedicated to the artists involved in this industry, which belies the commercial interest in these printed materials that existed during the period of their production. Christmas and greeting card illustration was viewed as a legitimate and, significantly, attainable artistic pursuit for the multitude of women seeking remunerative employment through art, and the development of the industry both reflected and contributed to popular trends in nineteenth-century visual culture. In terms of their professional contribution to, and impact on, popular culture, commercial press illustrators had an influence that was beyond what most gallery-focused painters could achieve. The first artist-designed Christmas card was created by John Horsley RA in 1846 for the personal use of his friend Henry Cole, who wanted a ‘ready to mail’ card to replace the customary but time-consuming practice of writing Christmas letters.90 Cole sold about 1,000 extra copies of this card through the publisher Joseph Cundall for a shilling a piece, and the tradition of sending and receiving Christmas cards slowly grew in popularity through the middle decades of the nineteenth century.91 In the early stages of their development Christmas cards were ‘simple and inexpensive trifles’ of little artistic import, as publishers’ experienced difficulty persuading well-known artists to contribute designs. As the numbers of cards circulating each year reached its height in the 1880s, however, demand grew for original, artistic designs that responded to popular taste and were suited to mass reproduction.92 ‘Popular requirements nowadays insist that the Christmas card shall possess something of art in its design,’ reported The Times, ‘and with this demand manufacturers have of course to comply’.93 Stationery publisher Tuck and Sons cemented the relationship between Christmas cards and the art world in 1880 when it instigated the first artistic competition for Christmas card illustration. Competing entries were displayed in a widely reviewed exhibition at the Dudley Gallery and 500 guineas of prize money was distributed to the winners, who included Alice Squire, Harriet M. Bennett and Kate Sadler.94 Judged against conventional pictures, some of the designs took ‘a very respectable position’, claimed Magazine of Art, who also noted that the competition was a particular boon to ‘lady artists’, of whose designs ‘a large proportion’ were bought by the company.95 Stationers continued to find



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illustrators through sponsored and magazine-run competitions throughout the 1880s and 1890s, and artists also found freelance work by calling on the offices of stationery companies personally. Ethel Parkinson, for example, entered into a long relationship with the stationers C. W. Faulkner by visiting the firm’s offices with her portfolio and asking to see Charles Faulkner directly. Faulkner responded well to Parkinson’s business-like approach to illustration, and Parkinson produced more than 300 cards and postcards for the company over a period of twenty years.96 Other illustrators were represented by art agents, who negotiated commissions from stationers, publishing companies and advertising firms, although it is difficult to determine how many female artists found work in this way. When Mabel Lucie Attwell approached the agents Francis and Mills, who represented many of the artists involved in the prestigious, all-male London Sketch Club, she was told that the firm was ‘not interested in the work of young ladies’, although they made an exception for Attwell based on her well-known saleability.97 Women artists were involved in the production of Christmas cards in two ways. Some, like Squire, Sadler and Bennett, contributed designs to various publishing firms on a freelance basis as a means of supplementing their income from other artistic pursuits. Female artists were paid between three and six guineas for a single design and were expected to submit illustrations in coordinating sets of four, each measuring between three and six inches.98 Publishers such as Hildesheimer, Marcus Ward and Co, Tuck and Sons and Alfred Grey were considered to produce cards of the highest artistic quality, and women applied to these firms on an individual basis to sell their designs.99 Artists were also employed on staff at publishing firms to produce designs in-house. Women dominated this field of employment; the two head designers at Tuck and Sons were women, and they controlled a ‘small army of lady artists’, who produced the firm’s original designs.100 At Birn Brothers the permanent design staff was made up entirely of women, who both produced designs and executed the hand-painted cards. The firm also purchased 600 sets of designs from external sources annually, and most freelance designers patronized were women.101 Artists employed on staff worked eight hours a day and earned from ten shillings to three guineas a week, with extra overtime each busy season. Their jobs were eagerly sought after. ‘This work appeals to so many that there are constant applications for a post in the studio,’ journalist Leily Bingen reported. ‘A permanent list is kept of ladies waiting to enter when there shall be a vacancy.’102

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Bingen claimed that a successful and prolific freelance designer could earn an income of between £500 and £900 a year by selling designs for cards and gift books to art-publishers like Birn Brothers.103 Whether any female designers received remuneration of this scale seems questionable, due to the fact that most continued to pursue other remunerative work such as book illustration, advertising and portrait commissions in addition to freelancing for stationers, but the rates of pay were high enough to attract numerous artists to the profession, and the high turnover of designs meant that there was constant demand for new illustrations. Christmas cards and gift books were a highly visible form of illustration and new designs were routinely reviewed in major papers and art periodicals. This coverage provided some publicity and name recognition to the artists involved and served to acknowledge the viability and legitimacy of commercial illustration as an artistic profession. Adolph Tuck claimed that his company’s greeting cards popularized Kate Sadler’s flower paintings, which ‘assisted her reputation as one of the first painters of roses very materially’.104 However, artists who were too closely associated with Christmas card and stationery illustration could also find that the work damaged their artistic reputations more broadly and hindered their success in other, more ‘serious’ artistic fields. ‘If Miss Alice Squire would change her monotonous and somewhat irritating method of painting the human figure … she might rise to higher things than the Christmas card-like work which we have learnt to associate with her name,’ noted Artist in a review of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour Exhibition in 1897.105 Squire was a member of the Royal Institute and the Society of Women Artists and exhibited regularly, but she supported herself primarily through illustrative work and this association evidently had some impact on her critical reputation as a watercolourist. While Adolph Tuck claimed that Sadler never ‘regretted that we reproduced her designs’, the artist herself gave up illustrating cards as soon as she could support herself through watercolours. ‘I may say that now I do not take any pride in them,’ she said later of her Christmas card designs.106 Commercial illustration continued to grow as a field of work for artists into the first decades of the twentieth century. The advent of cards for Christmas popularized other forms of specialized stationery for occasions such as birthdays and Easter.107 Despite advancements in photographic reproduction, illustrated postcards continued to be produced in high numbers, and there was also a role for the artist in the production of posters, wallpaper and fabric design, advertisements and calendars.108 Through these products, commercial



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artists could find greater reach and exposure for their work than most fine artists achieved in their careers. It was estimated in 1891 that between ten and twelve million birthday cards were circulated in England each year with a comparable quantity exported abroad, and competition among publishers for the best designs and verses was high.109 Well-known artists and Royal Academicians could ask ‘a couple of hundred pounds for a design and get it’, noted one commentator but, in general, RAs preferred ‘not to have their work confined to the narrow limits of a birthday card’.110 The women artists who provided publishers with most of their designs, of whom the most successful included Bertha Maguire and Annie Simpson, received a far more modest rate per card. Illustrated picture postcards were another correspondence-related development that provided work to artists in the early years of the twentieth century.111 Although postcards were used as a means of distributing images from the 1870s onwards, before 1900 English postal regulations prohibited the sending of picture postcards with handwritten messages written on the address side of the card. After increasing the size of postcards private companies were permitted to produce in 1899, Parliament legalized the inclusion of written messages on the back of postcards in 1902.112 As David Gwynn explained, these changes brought about an ‘explosion in the production of picture cards’ for both personal and commercial use and popularized the pastime of postcard collecting, heralding a golden age of postcard illustration that continued until the 1920s.113 Publishers and businesses who used postcards as a means of advertising their wares worked with artists in two ways: by specially commissioning illustrations to promote a book or product or by purchasing the rights to an existing painting for the purposes of reproduction, a strategy pioneered by Pears Soap’s use of the John Millais painting Bubbles. Postcards were particularly popular as a means of marketing products and books to children, and so many illustrators of nursery books found additional work producing postcards to advertise confectionery, medicines and sanitation products. Book publishers also distributed promotional postcards featuring samples of a book’s illustrations to retailers, book clubs and lending libraries, which were intended to attract orders and act as reader keepsakes.114 As the demand for new and original picture postcards grew, book, magazine and stationery illustrators diversified their practice to include the new form, while young or emerging artists found the medium to be an effective way to enter the illustrative profession. Mabel Attwell, for example, began her career by contributing illustrations to magazines and producing book illustrations

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but found immediate success with picture postcards following her initial publications for Valentine and Sons in 1911 and 1912. She had a particular skill for formulating ideas for postcards that caught the public’s imagination and ‘command[ed] a wide sale’, infusing her typical, sentimentalized depictions of children with a ‘cartoonist’s wit’.115 Such was the popularity of her postcards that the publisher issued an illustrated catalogue of all her designs in the 1920s and kept her early postcards permanently in print.116 Attwell’s postcard designs sold up to half a million copies, and this unprecedented popular success, along with her keen business acumen, was the catalyst for the ‘wealth of subsidiary merchandizing material’ that brought Attwell widespread fame and made her depictions of children ubiquitous throughout the first half of the twentieth century.117 Attwell’s designs were populist by their nature, satisfying the public’s continuing demand for sentimental, sometimes saccharine depictions of children, but the postcard market was broad and catered for many different tastes. There was scope for artists to translate their own styles and subject matter into postcard design and to experiment artistically with the form. Sybil Barham chose to work with postcards after she graduated from the prestigious Herkomer School because the confined format of the medium suited her own preference for small canvasses. She developed a long relationship with the publisher C. W. Faulkner beginning in 1905 and translated her penchant for muted, autumnal tones, earthy, pastoral subjects and experimentations with light into her commercial work.118 The accessibility of postcards and printed novelties was also attractive to artists looking to build their public profiles. Maude Goodman’s domestic genre paintings were so popular with buyers that they often sold at private views before they were exhibited to the public at the Royal Academy.119 When Raphael Tuck commissioned Goodman to produce a series of pictures for calendars, postcards and gift books in the early 1890s her work became accessible to a vast number of people outside of the typical art-buying public, who purchased the reproduced postcards in their millions.120 For an artist such as Goodman, who courted mainstream, popular taste, this level of exposure and renown was invaluable, increasing the value of her original paintings and their copyright. For artists without Goodman’s reputation, remuneration for postcards, calendars and cards was variable and depended on the size and scope of the project and on the artist’s relationship with the publisher. Illustrators who had a distinctive style or series of characters were in a good position to negotiate



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continuing royalties along with upfront payments. Chloe Preston, for example, received a 10 per cent royalty on the sale of the calendars she designed for Hodder Stoughton in 1914, which featured the characters from her children’s books Peek-A-Boos.121 While some artists used pseudonyms to sign their commercial illustrations, or chose not to sign their names at all to obscure the work from their more prestigious patrons, for others postcards, posters and greeting cards were a unique and rewarding art form in its own right, which was pursued out of choice rather than necessity.122

Conclusion For all the reviews of Christmas cards and artistic novelties in Art Journal and other periodicals, commercial illustration was widely regarded as inferior to fine art. It was the antithesis of both the technical, ambitious oil paintings rewarded by the RA and the innovative, progressive work favoured by anti-establishment societies like the New English Art Club. Women’s relative success as illustrators is, in part, due to the lack of esteem and value placed on their talents by the wider artistic community. Women illustrators could be paid much less than wellknown Royal Academicians for similar designs because women’s work was not awarded a comparable value. However, this view that illustration was an inferior art form, and that women were less creative artists, assisted women’s professional success in those fields. As the American editor of St Nicholas Magazine, Frances W. Marshall, claimed in 1912: In this career, the natural adaptability of women is a decided advantage. For an illustrator must be biddable, willing to follow the author’s lead and subordinate the expression of her own personality to the text which her pictures accompany. … Their work demands a certain power of impersonation, the ability to lose one’s self in a character and experience, the emotion the person in the story or the poem is supposed to feel.123

Women’s adaptability, their willingness to fulfil the demands of their employer and their perceived ‘natural’ empathy and lack of ego were, in the case of illustration, qualities that helped rather than hindered women’s pursuit of consistent artistic work. As head designers, artists or freelance contributors to stationers and publishing firms, women took on specialized roles that often required dedicated training.

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Their work was closely intertwined with the market, and they were responsible for producing designs that would appeal to tens of thousands of readers. This required a close understanding of aesthetic trends and consumer demands, and the ability to create designs that fulfilled the sales goals of the publisher while retaining artistic integrity. The remuneration offered by stationery firms enabled successful commercial artists to earn higher and more consistent incomes than they would likely achieve through painting. To the extent that professionalism encompasses the economic relationship between the expert and the client, commercial forms of art facilitated, rather than diminished, women’s professional status. Access to the field of illustration and to the spaces and actors that operated within it – publishers, stationers, editors and agents – provided women with a better chance of earning a living through art than perhaps any other aspect of artistic practice. Although their accomplishments may have been due to the perceived limitations or inferiorities of the art form, the determination, talent, pragmatism and business acumen of the women who succeeded in the field reflected the attributes women artists needed to practice art professionally at the turn of the twentieth century.

Notes 1 Henry James, Pictures and Text (New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1893), 1. See also Amy Tucker, The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 1. 2 Joseph Pennell, ‘A New Profession Wanting Professors’, The Contemporary Review, 58 (July 1890): 121. 3 ‘Employments for Gentlewomen: Art’, Myra’s Journal, 1 November 1898, 40. 4 Pennell, ‘A New Profession Wanting Professors’, 21; ‘The appearance of an illustrated newspaper in London, producing and consuming thirty to forty illustrations daily [is] an important event in the artistic world because of the prospect for employment opened out by such undertakings’, noted Henry Blackburn. ‘The Illustration of Books and Newspapers’, The Nineteenth Century 27, no. 156 (1880): 213. 5 Catherine Flood, ‘Contrary to the Habits of Their Sex? Women Drawing on Wood and the Careers of Florence and Adelaide Claxton’, in Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, eds. Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 110.



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6 ‘What to do with our Daughters’, Myra’s Journal, 1 May 1894, 23; ‘Employments for Gentlewomen: Art’, 40. 7 ‘Employments for Gentlewomen: Art’, 40. 8 Geoffrey Wakeman, Victorian Book Illustration (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1973); Frank Weitenkampf, The Illustrated Book (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938). Morna Daniels mentions briefly two women in her Victorian Book Illustration and claims that Eleanor Vere Boyle was ‘the only noted woman illustrator of the 1860s’, omitting the work of the Caxton sisters, Mary Ellen Edwards, Helen Allingham and more. Morna Daniels, Victorian Book Illustration (London: The British Library, 1988), 65. 9 Flood, ‘Contrary to the Habits of Their Sex?’, 107–22; Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery: The Illustrators of Children’s Books and Postcards, 1900–1950 (London: New Cavendish Books, 2000); Mary Waldrep’s study remains one of the only texts to reveal and explore the breadth of women who participated in the commercial illustration industry in this period, offering short, biographical sketches of women illustrators and brief examples of their work. Mary Carolyn Waldrep, By a Woman’s Hand: Illustrators of the Golden Age (New York: Dover Publications, 2010). 10 Ellen Mazur Thomson, ‘Alms for Oblivion: The History of Women in Early American Graphic Design’, in Design History: An Anthology, ed. Dennis Doordan (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995), 8. 11 Pamela Gerrish Nunn, ‘The Mid-Victorian Woman Artist, 1850–1879’ (PhD thesis: University College London, 1982), 295. 12 Henry Blackburn, The Art of Illustration (London: WH Allen & Co, 1896), 216. 13 Ibid., 3. 14 Michele H. Bogart, Artists, Advertising and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 38. 15 Ibid. 16 Simon Cooke, ‘Mary Ellen Edwards and the Illustration of the 1860s’, Work and Reputation, 2014, http:​//www​.vict​orian​web.o​rg/ar​t/ill​ustra​tion/​edwar​dsme/​cooke​ .html​. 17 ‘A Latter-day Industry and its Rewards: How a Group of Illustrators are Making Fortunes by Drawing Pictures of the “Modern Girl”’, The New York Times, 6 February 1910, 9. 18 ‘The Business Side of Art’, Art Journal (August 1888): 251. 19 H.W. Bromhead, ‘Some Contemporary Illustrators’, Art Journal (September 1898): 268–72. 20 Quoted in Bogart, Artists, Advertising and the Borders of Art, 40. 21 Pamela Dalziel, ‘Illustration’, in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. Philip Mallet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 66.

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22 ‘Etchings from Pictures by Contemporary Artists: Mrs Allingham’, The Portfolio (January 1878): 34. 23 Anne Helmreich, ‘The Marketing of Helen Allingham: The English Cottage and National Identity’, in Gendering Landscape Art, eds. Steven Adams and Anna Robins (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 45. 24 ‘Etchings from Pictures by Contemporary Artists: Mrs Allingham’, 34. 25 Nunn, ‘The Mid-Victorian Woman Artist’, 297. 26 ‘Notes on Art’, The Academy, 23 August 1884, 128. 27 Rodney Engen, Kate Greenaway: A Biography (London: Macdonald, 1981), 44. 28 Marcus Ward and Co originated as a partnership between John Ward, James Blow and Robert Greenfield in 1802 that developed into the firm known as Marcus Ward and company in the 1830s. It began mass-producing cards, calendars and other printed stationery in the 1860s. It began publishing Christmas cards in 1867. See also ‘Marcus Ward’s Christmas Cards’, Art Journal (January 1874): 295. 29 Earnest Dudley Chase, for example, suggested that Greenaway ‘became famous overnight’ after her first exhibition of drawings. The Romance of Greeting Cards: An Historical Account of the Origin, Evolution and Development of Christmas Cards, Valentines, and Other Forms of Greeting Cards from the Earliest to the Present Time (Dedham, Massachusetts: Rust Craft, 1956), 17. 30 Quoted in Engen, Kate Greenaway, 45. 31 Ibid. 32 Waldrep, By a Woman’s Hand, 1–2. 33 Anne Lundin, Victorian Horizons: The Receptions of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway (London: The Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, 2001), 203. 34 Engen, Kate Greenaway: A Biography, 116. 35 Imitation of her style ‘did her reputation harm’ according to Mrs Edmund Evans, the wife of Greenaway’s long-time editor. Some of them ‘out Kate-Greenawayed Kate Greenaway in their caricatures, and many people did not know one from the other’. Quoted in M.H. Spielmann and G.S. Layard, Kate Greenaway (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905), 59. 36 Engen, Kate Greenaway, 171. 37 Magazine of Art, for example, commented, ‘She is less happy when she gives her small people a landscape setting aft the fashion of Mrs Allingham.’ ‘Art in February’, (January 1894), 19. The Sunday Times noted that the work of Ned Walker, Stacey Marks and Allingham had all been ‘drawn upon’. ‘Art and Artists’, 29 January 1894, 8. 38 Letter to Violet Dickinson, 22 February 1898. Quoted in Spielmann and Layard, Kate Greenaway, 226.



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39 Spielmann and Layard, Kate Greenaway, 237. Greenaway wrote to Lady Dorothy on 28 December 1900, ‘I can’t say the public rush to buy my work now – I don’t believe they will sell one at the Fine Art. It seems to me I shall have to keep to my idea of doing portraits if I wish to make money.’ Kate Greenaway Papers, de Grummond Collection, the University of Southern Mississippi REF: 8/51. http:​// www​.lib.​usm.e​du/le​gacy/​degru​m/pub​lic_h​tml/h​tml/r​esear​ch/fi​ndaid​s/gre​enawa​ y.htm​. 40 Letter to Lady Maria Ponosby, 22 April 1897, quoted in Spielmann and Layard, Kate Greenaway, 212. 41 Diana Dixon, ‘From Instruction to Amusement: Attitudes of Authority in Children’s Periodicals before 1914’, Victorian Periodicals Review 19 (1986): 63–7. 42 ‘Behind a Booksellers’ Counter’, The Bookman 1, no. 3 (1891): 105. 43 ‘Juvenile Books’, The British Quarterly Review, 53, no 105 (1871): 290. 44 Claudia Nelson, ‘Growing Up: Childhood’, in A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1999). For more on the expansion of the juvenile reading market in the nineteenth century see Martyn Lyons, ‘New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers’, in A History of Reading in the West, eds. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 325–31. 45 A.A. Strange-Butson, ‘Art in the Nursery’, Belgravia 49, 194 (1882): 223. 46 See for example ‘Christmas Cards and Children’s Books’, Art Journal (December 1896): 380. 47 Girls’ Realm articulated the widespread view that women were naturally suited to children’s illustration. ‘There must be some inherent quality in women which makes them so peculiarly happy and successful in that little corner of art which covers the picturing of toy and children’s books.’ (London: SH Bousfield and Co, 1903). The American illustrator and art teacher Howard Pyle, whose many female students included Jessie Willcox Smith and Violet Oakley claimed, ‘Girls are, after all, at best, only qualified for sentimental work.’ Pyle, ‘Why Art and Marriage Won’t Mix’, The North American, 9 June 1904. 48 Emily Jenkins, ‘Trilby: Fads, Photographers and “Over Perfect Feet”’, Book History 1, no. 1 (1998): 223. 49 ‘Notice’, The Argosy (November 1879): 322. 50 Cowham’s pictures of children ‘had distinct individuality’, noted the Birmingham Daily Post, 8 March 1900, np. The Athenaeum commented that she ‘has the merit of a style of her own in portraying children’. ‘Books Review’, 9 December 1911, 731. ‘She is perhaps the only lady artist in her particular line of work who combines artistic ability with a dainty sense of real humour’, claimed Edith Young. Girls’ Realm Annual (London: Bousefield, 1902). See also Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 186.

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51 Cowham also wrote and illustrated her own books, as was a popular path for children’s book illustrators. Sara Gray, The Dictionary of Women Artists (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2009), 82. 52 Lorraine Janzon Kooistra, Poetry, Pictures and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 21. 53 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 25. 54 Ibid., 229. 55 ‘Interview: Miss Fannie Moody’, The Woman’s Herald, 6 June 1891, 515; ‘Interview: Miss Gertrude Demain Hammond’, The Woman’s Herald, 10 January 1891, 177. 56 ‘Notes on Current Events’, British Architect, 5 June 1896, 395. 57 ‘Interview: Miss Gertrude Demain Hammond’, 177. 58 April F. Masten, Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-NineteenthCentury New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 165. 59 Cooke, ‘Mary Ellen Edwards and the Illustration of the 1860s’. 60 Helene Postlethwaite, ‘More Noted Women Painters’, The Magazine of Art (January 1898): 484. 61 Ibid. 62 Forrest Reid, Illustrators of the 1860s (New York: Dover, [1928] 1975), 261. 63 Masten, Art Work, 179. 64 H.W. Bromhead, ‘Some Contemporary Illustrators’, Art Journal (September 1912): 268. 65 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 74. 66 Quoted in Darlis A Miller, Mary Hallock Foote: Author-illustrator of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 22. 67 Letter from Iliffe and Sons to Helen Mckie, 13 December 1919; letter from Bystander to Mckie, 8 January 1917; letter from Field and Queen Publishers, 14 September 1915. Helen Mckie Papers, Victoria and Albert Archive of Art and Design, AAD/2005/5/4. 68 Draft of letter to Mr Will of the Graphic, Helen Mckie Papers. 69 Ellen C. Clayton, English Female Artists (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876), 2:45. 70 Bromhead, ‘Some Contemporary Illustrators’, 268. 71 Arthur Rackham gave this advice in a letter to an aspiring artist in 1909, quoted in Derek Hudson, Arthur Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1960), 36. 72 See Percy Bradshaw, Drawn from Memory (London: Chapman and Hall, 1943), 40. 73 ‘What to do with our Daughters’, 43. 74 Michael Felmingham, The Illustrated Gift Book (Aldershot: The Scolar Press, 1988), 26. 75 Attwell quoted in Chris Beetles, Mabel Lucie Attwell (London: Pavilion, 1988), 10. 76 Quoted in Felmingham, The Illustrated Gift Book, 26.



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77 Quoted in Bertha E. Mahoney, Louise Payson Latimer and Beulah Folmsbee, eds. Illustrators of Children’s Books 1744–1945 (Boston: The Horn Book Inc, 1947), 374–5. 78 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 138. Cooke, ‘Mary Ellen Edwards and the Illustration of the 1860s’. 79 The Examiner noted that although ‘press illustration has done much that is good for the welfare of art’, it suffered from a ‘total want of recognition’. ‘The Pictorial Press and the Painters’, 10 August 1878, 1007. 80 Alfred Forman, ‘Chris Hammond: In Memoriam’, The Argosy (July 1900): 343. 81 Ibid., 348. 82 Demain Hammond quoted in Margaret Bateson, Professional Women upon Their Professions: Conversations (London: Horace Cox, 1895), 22. 83 Pat Donlon, ‘Drawing a Fine Line: Irish Women Artists as Illustrators’, Irish Arts Review 1 (2012): 81. 84 It seems widely accepted that periodical illustration was undertaken out of economic necessity in the case of both men and women. George du Maurier was a trained painter but undertook a career in illustration as a means to support himself and his family in a way that was both artistic and respectable. He described the occupation as ‘not the highest unfortunately, but a paying one I suppose’. The Young George du Maurier: A Selection of His Letters, 1860–67, ed. Daphne du Maurier (London: Peter Davies, 1951), 264. 85 Pamela M. Fletcher, ‘Consuming Modern Art: Metaphors of Gender, Commerce and Value in Late Victorian and Edwardian Art Criticism’, Visual Culture in Britain 6, no. 2 (2005): 159. 86 Masten, Art Work, 205. 87 Honor Appleton, for example, studied sculpture and painting at the South Kensington schools and the RA schools with the sole view of becoming an illustrator. Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 82. Appleton went on to illustrate over 150 books throughout her career. She took a ‘very businesslike’ approach to being an illustrator. Alan Horne, ‘Honor Charlotte Appleton (1871– 1951)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http:​//www​.oxfo​rddnb​.com.​ezpro​xy.li​brary​.uq.e​du.au​/view​/arti​cle/6​9285.​ 88 ‘Employments for Gentlewomen: Art’, 40. 89 ‘Lady R.A.’s: Henrietta Rae’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 16 August 1886, np. 90 ‘Christmas Cards’, The Times, 25 December 1883, 5; J.C. Horsley, ‘Christmas Cards’, The Times, 28 December 1883, 4; ‘World’s Oldest Mass Produced Christmas Card’, Southern Methodist University, 2009, http:​//www​.smu.​edu/N​ews/N​ewsIs​sues/​oldes​ tchri​stmas​card.​ 91 ‘Early Christmas Cards’, Bow Bells, 32, no. 414 (1895): 573.

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92 An estimated four and a half million cards were sent in the seven days prior to Christmas in 1877. Michelle Higgs, Christmas Cards (Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications, 1999), 9. 93 ‘Christmas Cards’, 5. 94 Charles H. Lewins, ‘The Home of the Christmas Card: An Interview with Mr Adolph Tuck’, The Ludgate (December 1900): 174. The competition was judged by Sir Coutts Lindsay, Marcus Stone, G.H. Boughton and Solomon J. Solomon. 95 ‘The Exhibition of Christmas Cards at the Dudley Gallery’, Magazine of Art (January 1881): 74–6. 96 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 188. 97 Beeltes, Mabel Lucie Attwell, 13–14. Francis and Mills were founded in 1899. The Artist noted that Francis and Mills were ‘a great deal more than mere business representatives. They took complete control of their artist clients and provided a constant flow of work for them.’ The Artist 97 (1892): 23. 98 ‘Chats with Celebrities: Miss Kate Sadler, the Rose Painter’, Hearth and Home 2 July 1891, 205; ‘What to do with our Daughters’, Myra’s Journal, 1 February 1894, 23. 99 ‘Christmas Cards’, Fun, 13 December 1882, 257; ‘What to do with our Daughters’, Myra’s Journal, 1 April 1894, 23. 100 Lewins, ‘The Home of the Christmas Card’, 177. 101 Designers patronized by Birn Brothers included Harriet Bennett, Helena and Bertha Macquire and Pauline Sunter. Leily Bingen, ‘Christmas Cards: Their Origin and Manufacture’, The Windsor Magazine, 7, December, 116–22. 102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 Lewins, ‘The Home of the Christmas Card’, 176. 105 ‘The Spring Exhibition’, Artist 19 (May 1897): 219. 106 Lewins, ‘The Home of the Christmas Card’, 176; ‘Chats with Celebrities’, 205. 107 ‘Christmas Cards’, 5. 108 Norman Alliston, ‘Pictorial Post Cards’, Chambers’ Journal 2, no, 99 (1899): 745–8. 109 Alfred Lord Tennyson, for example, was offered 1000 guineas to write twelve short birthday poems. ‘Birthday Cards’, The Strand Magazine (January 1891): 245. 110 Ibid. 111 The Postcard magazine called postcards a ‘postal revolution’. 27 December 1889, np. 112 Initially only five words were permitted on the back of postcards, but this rule was later relaxed. Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 18. See also Adolph Tuck, ‘Picture Postcards and the Postmaster General’, Manchester Guardian, 7 April 1923, 7. 113 David Gwyn, Wales from the Golden Age of Picture Postcards through Time (Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2009), 1. Postcards were singularly



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collectable – they were cheap, accessible, attractive and appealed to many different tastes and markets. Monica Cure, ‘Text with a View: Turn of the Century Literature and the Invention of the Postcard’ (PhD thesis: University of Southern California, 2012), 7. 114 See also ‘To Our Readers: Apologia Pro Vita Nostra’, The Picture Postcard, 1 (1900): 1. 115 Stationery Trades’ Journal 34 (1913): 18; Brian Alderson, ‘Mabel Lucie Attwell (1879–1964)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http:​//www​.oxfo​rddnb​.com.​ezpro​xy.li​brary​.uq.e​du.au​/view​/arti​cle/3​0499.​ 116 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 83. 117 Ibid., 85; Beetles, Mabel Lucie Attwell, 9; Alderson, ‘Mabel Lucie Attwell (1879– 1964)’. 118 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 88. 119 Postlethwaite, ‘More Noted Women Painters’, 480; ‘Miss Maude Goodman’, Art Journal (July 1889): 200. 120 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 133. 121 Ibid., 201. 122 Flora White, for example, preferred postcard illustration to painting or book illustration. ‘I work very quickly, I have a great deal of freedom of choice in my subject matter, complete the artwork and receive payment. There’s too much fuss with books’, she explained. Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 161, 253. 123 Ibid.

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In 1894, a critic for the Atlantic Monthly reflected on the evolution of the terms ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’, particularly in relation to women and art. ‘Amateur has collided with professional, and the former term has gradually but steadily declined in favour,’ he noted: It has become almost a term of opprobrium. The work of an amateur, the touch of an amateur, a mere amateur, amateurish, amateurishness – these are different current expressions which all mean the same thing, bad work. … At all times the line has been difficult to draw, but at least, fifty or a hundred years ago, the professions were restricted by sex; now the difficulty is made complex by the application and perseverance of the present generation of women. Everyone now demands pay for work, recognition as a worker.1

The shifting meaning and value attached to the label of ‘amateur’ problematized and complicated what it meant to be a professional artist in the mid- to late nineteenth century, for women in particular. Traditionally associated with the leisure activities of the upper class, by the late nineteenth century amateurism was regarded as a threat to an art world that was more organized, commercial and ‘professional’ than ever before. By the middle of the nineteenth century, male artists’ experience of professionalism was shaped around their possession of certain key qualifications and characteristics: specialized knowledge of art derived from study at a recognized institution; exhibiting with and then gaining membership of a professional society; possession of a studio and participating in studio culture; receiving public and institutional honours; and taking on commissions and patronage, the payment for which validated the worth of their service and talent. These traits were the criteria for achieving professional status in the art world, and as women’s access to the institutions and organizations connected to those criteria was restricted, professionalism was clearly defined as a masculine sphere. Even as the institutional barriers to women’s access to art education and exhibitions gradually dissolved in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the link between amateurism, bad work and women artists remained. The greatest obstacle to women’s ability to practise and be recognized as professional artists

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and to enjoy the economic and social benefits that accompanied that status was their association with amateurism. Woman’s professionalism, defined largely by the seriousness and commitment of her artistic enterprise and the perceived value of her work, was largely judged on her ability to sell. While access to educational qualifications, commonly seen by art historians as the threshold for professional status, held the promise of meritocratic and objective validation, the fact that art schools were populated by ‘accomplishment’ students, who did not intend to use their expertise for the purposes of selling art, weakened the legitimizing power of specialized art training – for women if not for men. Recognizable talent and learned expertise were undoubtedly important to women’s ability to pursue art as a career, but the source of their training had little impact on their eventual professional achievements. Women did enter England’s art schools in larger numbers than ever before during this period and, due to their own agitation and campaigning, enjoyed greater access to life study and co-educational classes. Those agitators believed that equalizing the conditions of women’s art education would ensure that their pictures were judged ‘without reference to the sex of the artist’. If female students displayed ‘hard work [and] thorough study’, then she would be ‘fairly entered’ into professional competition, argued The Englishwoman’s Review, a staunch supporter of women’s education that firmly believed that access to serious art training had been the major obstacle to women pursuing artistic careers.2 In practice, however, women who were accepted into major art schools continued to be judged according to their sex. Many aspiring professionals recognized that the visibility of amateur students reflected poorly on their own intentions and ambitions. Laura Knight, for example, claimed that her seriousness as a student was disregarded because, for most girls in her classes at the Nottingham School of Art, ‘art was no more than one accomplishment among other forms of higher schooling, before taking place in society as a lady’.3 Gendered attitudes towards women’s ‘natural’ artistic aptitudes remained. Improved access to high-quality art training and life study did increase the viability of art as a profession for women, but it did not, as The Englishwoman’s Review optimistically predicted it would, remove the tendency of art teachers, critics and buyers to group women artists together and measure their merits ‘by a standard supposed to be suited to women alone’.4 Women who achieved commercial success as artists and were seen by their colleagues to be professionals came from a variety of educational backgrounds. Graduating from the Royal Academy schools or the Slade School did not legitimize a woman’s artistic practice, and there was no single, set method of training or

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educational qualification that could secure a woman professional recognition. Where educational qualifications had the clearest link to professional outcomes was when it took the form of specialized, applied art training, in areas like press, fashion and commercial illustration, which facilitated and expedited women’s entry into paid work. The material condition that was most important to women becoming professional was studio space. While studio provisions have not received as much attention as educational qualifications in studies on artistic professionalism, access to studios was central to women artists’ perceived professionalism, as well as to their own self-identification as artists, which, in turn, fostered their commercial confidence and ambition. Studios provided the practical conditions for women to produce the art they needed to sell to legitimize their professional intentions. As examples of women who struggled to acquire independent studios because of familial, domestic or financial circumstances indicate, the character and location of studio space tangibly affected the type of art a woman could produce and, it follows, her commercial viability. Moreover, studios were a place to carry out the social and commercial interactions expected of professional artists. They were spaces for the display and promotion of art, activities that supported women’s efforts to sell their work. Studios made visible the seriousness of women artists’ enterprise and facilitated the production and promotion of saleable art. Art school qualifications, studio space and membership of artistic societies were recognized markers of professionalism and for male artists, whose seriousness and commitment to their craft were largely taken for granted, these attributes could vouch for their professional status. For women, however, of whom amateurism was expected, talent, training, studios and memberships were not enough to prove the professionalism of their artistic enterprise. The real value of these qualifications and spaces to women’s professionalism was in the extent to which they supported and facilitated her ability to sell. The importance of artistic societies to aspiring women professionals was thus more than the credibility or prestige that might be conferred by their membership; for many women, the exhibitions and events hosted by artistic societies were the most accessible conduits to art commerce. It is unsurprising then that most women took a pragmatic approach to their interactions with art societies. While many continued to view the RA as the ultimate symbol of establishment acceptance, even after its relevance to the broader art world began to wane, most took full advantage of the genre or material-specific societies that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. These groups responded to the demands and desires of the increasingly middle-class art-buying public

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and were often more overtly commercial than older societies like the RA, which benefited women seeking socially appropriate ways of promoting and selling their work. It was these societies that were the most useful to women’s professionalism both practically and in terms of public perception. The fact that these societies catered to a specialized segment of the market meant that they were useful in connecting women artists with a particular group of clients and tended to attract a more select audience than generalized exhibitions. Women were early adopters of the new methods of selling and displaying art made possible by the popularization of commercial art galleries and dealers, and they even benefited from middle-class buyers’ predilection for small scale and domestic pictures in these decades. Commercial and press illustration, meanwhile, were relatively quick ways for women to confirm their market worth. Having work accepted by business-orientated editors and published or printed for mass consumption provided a constant, public and objective validation of women’s work. It was an industry in which women’s ‘natural’ artistic attributes of empathy, adaptability and fastidiousness were seen as advantages, and success in illustration provided women with a better chance of validating her professional status and earning a living wage than perhaps any other aspect of professional artistic practice. While some male artists were questioning whether the overt commercialism of the art market might devalue their professionalism, and the higher motives of public service and economic disinterest that it was meant to embody, women artists did not have the luxury of opting out of the market system. Their male counterparts might be recognized for their talent on their own account, or even argue that working for money diminished the purity of their artistic ideals, but women proved their talent and ability through sales. Women thus had a vested interest in creating work that appealed to the popular market and to work in genres and with materials to which they were ‘naturally’ suited. This in turn reinforced the widespread view that women were ‘naturally’ suited to these more commercial and ‘middlebrow’ styles and hindered women’s ability to attract the patronage and support they needed to experiment in avant-garde and modern modes. Louise Jopling, whose statement on the importance of remunerative work opened this study, provides an apt case study of the professional expectations placed on women artists and how they differed from those applied to men. Jopling was one of the most recognized professional women artists of her time, and she did not acquire this status through her education, acquired relatively late in life at a foreign atelier, her family background or even her institutional memberships. While artists like Frederic Leighton could elevate their professionalism by

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distancing themselves from the market, Jopling along with Maude Goodman, Ethel Wright, Laura Knight, Henrietta Rae, Gertrude Massey, Helen Allingham and other women discussed throughout this volume secured their professional status by embracing the ‘hustle and the scramble’ of selling art.5 It was their commercial ambition, their visibility at exhibitions, their networks of portrait clients, their visits to art dealers and showrooms – their willingness, that is, to take on every opportunity for commercial advancement that presented itself and to immerse themselves in the infrastructure and networks of England’s art market – that differentiated these women from their amateur counterparts. And, significantly, critics and commentators did not treat this visible commercial drive derisively or suspiciously. Instead, the press almost always commented on it positively, as a marker of the seriousness and commitment with which they approached their craft. All of these women took care to preserve and promote their moral and social reputations, but, in this way, they were no different from male artists, whose viability as professional artists also relied on their perceived status as respectable gentleman. The women artists discussed in this volume could not rely on traditional markers of professionalism to be taken seriously as artists, because the association between women and amateurism that intensified throughout the nineteenth century meant the standards of professionalism were applied differently to women then they were to men. Middle-class women artists only achieved professionalism by entering into market transactions. It is by uncovering women’s interactions with this economic side of art that their status as working women can be reclaimed and the contribution of their businessorientated pragmatism to the development of the modern English art market be fully recognized.

Notes 1 ‘The Contributor’s Club: The Decline of the Amateur’, The Atlantic Monthly 440 (1894): 859. 2 The Englishwoman’s Review, 15 November 1877, 510. 3 Laura Knight, The Magic of the Line (London: William Kerber and Co, 1965), 77. 4 The Englishwoman’s Review, 510. 5 ‘A word to the Dealers’, The Burlington Magazine 47, no. 272 (1925): 221.

Appendix 1

Artist Biographies

Helen Allingham (nee Patterson) 1848–1926 Born in Derbyshire and raised in Cheshire and Birmingham, Allingham was the niece of artist Laura Herford, the first woman to gain entry to the Royal Academy schools and the granddaughter of landscape artist Sarah Smith Herford. She entered the Royal Female School of Art in London at age seventeen and was accepted to the Royal Academy schools in 1867. Allingham supported herself through illustration, and in 1870, while still a student, she became the only female founding staff member of The Graphic magazine. She left the Royal Academy schools in 1872 to pursue illustration full time but continued her education through evening classes at the Slade School of Art. Allingham illustrated serialized novels for Thomas Hardy and Juliana Ewing and, in 1875, was elected an associate of the Society of Painters in Watercolour, becoming its first female full member in 1890. She married the editor and poet William Allingham in 1874 and concentrated on watercolour painting throughout the 1880s, taking inspiration from the Surrey and Sussex landscapes near where she lived. Allingham exhibited at the Royal Academy and held a number of solo exhibitions at the Fine Art Society between 1886 and 1908. The Fine Art Society’s first director, Marcus B Huish, who was the editor of Art Journal from 1881 to 1892, supported Allingham’s career, and the two collaborated on the illustrated book The Happy England of Helen Allingham in 1903. After the death of William in 1889, Helen supported her three children through painting and illustration.

Elizabeth Butler (nee Thompson) 1846–1933 Elizabeth Butler was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, to parents who encouraged both of their daughters’ cultural pursuits. Elizabeth and her sister Alice were



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educated by their father and travelled extensively throughout Europe, before Elizabeth settled in London to spend two years at the South Kensington schools. She received further instruction from Giuseppe Bellucci in Florence in 1868 and began to gravitate towards military subjects, which she saw as largely neglected in England’s art scene at the time. Butler first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1873, and her 1874 entry The Roll Call propelled her to success and renown within the art world. She exhibited consistently at the Academy along with the Dudley Gallery, the Paris Salon, the New Gallery, the Society of Women Artists, the Royal Glasgow Institute and the Fine Art Society. Butler was elected a Member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolours, but, despite her critical and commercial success, she was not elected to the Royal Academy. Her sister Alice was the well-known writer, critic and suffragist Alice Meynell. Butler married Sir William Butler in 1877, and the pair had six children. Eighteen of Butler’s works are housed in public collections in the United Kingdom, including at the Tate; The Roll Call is in the Royal Collection, after being purchased from its original commissioner by Queen Victoria.

Evelyn De Morgan (nee Pickering) 1855–1919 Born and raised in London to an upper-middle class family, De Morgan held ambitions of becoming an artist from an early age. Educated at the Slade School of Art and in Italy by her uncle, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, De Morgan began her exhibiting career at the Dudley Gallery and then at the inaugural exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. Her work was informed by allegory and spiritualism and generally featured the female form. Her maid, Jane Hales, often acted as her model. After her marriage in 1887 much of De Morgan’s income from painting went to supporting her husband William De Morgan’s ceramic business. The couple spent time in Florence and also lived in Chelsea, where their house ‘The Vale’ had a custom-built studio for De Morgan’s use. A pacifist and a supporter of female suffrage, De Morgan was a signatory of the 1889 Declaration in Favour of Women’s Suffrage and opposed both the Boer and the First World Wars. De Morgan has eight works in public collections in the United Kingdom, including at the Walker Art Gallery.

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Gertrude Demain Hammond 1862–1952 and Christiana Demain Hammond 1860–1900 The daughters of a bank clerk, Gertrude and Christiana (known as Chris) were born in Brixton and studied at the Lambeth School of Art and then at the Royal Academy schools. Both were skilled in draughtsmanship and figure drawing and exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour from the mid-1880s. The sisters took a pragmatic approach to earning their living through art and became prolific illustrators from the early 1890s. Chris contributed to Pall Mall Magazine, Pearson’s Magazine and the Idler and was the principal illustrator for St Paul’s Magazine. She also illustrated new editions of novels by Jane Austen, William Thackeray, Maria Edgeworth, Oliver Goldsmith and Elizabeth Gaskell. Chris did not marry and died unexpectedly in her studio at age thirty-nine in 1900. Gertrude primarily worked illustrating books for girls for publishers including Blackie and Sons, Macmillan and Co and Frederick Warne. She also contributed to periodicals such as The Yellow Book and illustrated books of poetry and editions of Shakespeare. Gertrude lived and worked with her husband Henry McMurdie and alongside Chris at the St Paul’s Studios in Hammersmith.

Elizabeth Forbes (nee Armstrong) 1859–1912 Born in Ontario, Canada, Elizabeth Forbes first travelled to England to study at the South Kensington schools in the 1870s. She went on to study under William Merritt Chase at the Art Students League of New York and travelled to Munich, Brittany and Haarlem, the Netherlands, before settling in Newlyn, Cornwall in 1885. Forbes exhibited widely in London during this time, including at the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers, the Grosvenor Gallery, the Royal Institute, the New Gallery and the Society of Women Artists. She married fellow Newlyn painter Stanhope Forbes in 1889. Together the couple ran the Newlyn School of Art from 1899 and took an active role in the Newlyn artist community. Forbes was elected an associate of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1898 and held solo exhibitions at the Gallery of Fine Arts (1901) and the Leicester Gallery (1904). Prominent late nineteenth-century art patron George McCulloch collected Forbes’ work, and seventeen of her paintings are now held in public collections in the United Kingdom.



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Maude Goodman 1853–1938 The daughter of a Manchester cigar dealer, Goodman was born in 1853 and studied in London at the South Kensington schools, where she met her agent and art dealer Henry Wallis. She worked for a period at the studio of a Spanish painter in London before first exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1874. Goodman married the accountant Arthur Scanes in 1882 but exhibited under her own name. Goodman’s subject pictures, portraits and flower paintings were consistently included at the Royal Academy’s summer exhibitions until 1901; she had six paintings chosen for the exhibition in 1886. The collector John Aird purchased the first work Goodman showed at the Royal Academy and in the 1880s dealers frequently purchased her paintings for the purposes of reproduction. Goodman also worked as a portraitist and exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, The Royal Institute and the French Gallery, which was managed at this time by Goodman’s agent Henry Wallis. Goodman was one of the few woman artists of this period to benefit from a sustained relationship with a prominent art dealer. In the 1890s Goodman illustrated a series of books for the publisher Raphael Tuck, some of which were written by her husband.

Kate Greenaway 1846–1901 Raised in London and in Nottinghamshire, Kate (born Catherine) was the daughter of a dressmaker mother and a wood engraver father. She trained at the Finsbury School of Art, the South Kensington schools and then the Royal Female School of Art. She entered the Slade School of Art in 1871. Greenaway received her first commissions in 1867, providing illustrations to William Kingston’s book Infant Amusements and first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1877. She achieved widespread success with the publication of the illustrated book Under the Window in 1879, which sold 100,000 copies during Greenaway’s lifetime. She published a number of illustrated children’s books in the twenty years that followed, including children’s almanacs, and also contributed illustrations to the work of John Ruskin and Robert Browning. Greenaway was elected a member of the Institute of Painters in Watercolours in 1889 and held three solo exhibitions at the Fine Art Society. In 1885 she commissioned Richard Norman Shaw to design a studio house in the Queen Anne style in Frognal, Hampstead. Greenaway’s distinctive illustrative style was much imitated during

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her lifetime, and influenced late Victorian fashions for children’s clothing. The Kate Greenaway Medal for distinguished children’s book illustration was named in her honour in 1955.

Gwen John 1876–1939 Gwen John was born and raised in Wales before moving to London in 1895 to attend the Slade School of Art. Her brother, Augustus John, had entered the Slade the year before. In 1898, John studied under James Whistler at his Académie Carmen in Paris, and in 1904 she settled in France permanently, supporting herself by working as an artist model. John first exhibited with the New English Art Club in 1900 and continued to show with the Club intermittently until 1911. From 1919 until the mid-1920s she exhibited with the Salon d’Automne. From 1910 until 1924 John received support from the American art patron John Quinn; Quinn purchased several of John’s paintings and sometimes paid her a monthly stipend. From 1911 John lived in Meudon, France, accompanied by her cats. She held a solo exhibition at London’s Chenil Gallery 1926. Unlike most of the other female artists discussed in this book, John’s reputation as an artist has increased since her death. Sixty-five of John’s paintings are held in public collections in the United Kingdom. The Arts Council of Great Britain (1968), National Museum of Wales (1976) and the Tate Britain (2004) have staged retrospectives of her work, and John is the subject of biographies by Sue Roe and Mary Taubman.

Louise Jopling (nee Goode) 1843–1933 Born in Manchester, Jopling studied at Charles Chaplin’s atelier in Paris in the late 1860s. She first exhibited with the Royal Academy in the early 1970s under the name of her first husband, Frank Romer. In 1874 she married the wellconnected artist and curator Joseph Jopling. Her third marriage was to George Rowe in 1887. Louise Jopling exhibited at the Paris Salon, Royal Academy and the Grosvenor Gallery and was a member of the Royal Society of British Artists, the Society of Portrait Painters and the Graphic Society. The primary earner for her family, Jopling relied on portraiture to make money and was the recipient of consistent patronage from the de Rothschild family. A supporter of women’s suffrage, Jopling founded her own art school for women in the 1880s



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and was a well-known figure in London’s fashionable artistic milieu. She wrote an autobiography detailing her career in art in 1925. Jopling was recently the subject of a monograph by Patricia De Montfort, and eight of her works are held in public collections in the United Kingdom. John Everett Millais’s portrait of Jopling currently hangs at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Lucy Kemp-Welch 1869–1958 Born in Bournemouth but associated with Bushey, Hertfordshire, throughout her life, Kemp-Welch was educated at the Herkomer School of Art. She took over the management of this school from her mentor Hubert von Herkomer in 1905 and ran it until 1926 as an animal painting school. Kemp-Welch began exhibiting at the Royal Academy as a student in 1895. Predominantly a painter of horses, Kemp-Welch was the second female artist to have her work purchased by the Chantrey Bequest (now the Tate Collection) in 1897. She staged solo exhibitions at the Fine Art Society (1905), the Dudley Gallery (1912) and the Arlington Galleries (1938) and was elected the inaugural president of the Society of Animal Painters in 1915. Kemp-Welch was commissioned to paint works for the British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee and the Women’s Work Section of the Imperial War Museum during the First World War. She currently has forty-nine works housed British public collections.

Laura Knight (nee Johnson) 1877–1970 Laura Knight was born in Derbyshire and raised by her mother, Charlotte Johnson, a part-time instructor at the Nottingham School of Art. Knight took over her mother’s teaching responsibilities when Johnson was diagnosed with cancer in 1892; she died the following year. Knight won a scholarship to the South Kensington schools and then lived in Staithes, where she married the artist Harold Knight in 1903, the same year her first painting was accepted by the Royal Academy. In 1907 the Knights moved to Cornwall and became part of the Newlyn artists community. Knight continued to exhibit with the Royal Academy throughout her career and also showed at the Newlyn Art Gallery, the Fine Art Society and the Watercolour Society, to which she was elected a member in 1909. Knight painted en plein air scenes in Cornwall and also specialized in

202

Appendix 1

portraiture. During and after the Second World War Knight was commissioned to produce several works by War Artists’ Advisory Committee, and she attended and painted scenes from the Nuremberg Trials. Knight was elected an associate of the Royal Academy in 1927, and in 1936 she was the first woman since the eighteenth century to be made a full academician. Eighty-nine of Knight’s works are currently held in public collections in the United Kingdom; an exhibition of her portraits was staged at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2013.

Gertrude Massey (nee Seth) 1868–1957 Raised in London, Gertrude Massey began painting for money in art school, after the sudden death of her father. She received her first portrait commission at age seventeen and sold calendars and greeting cards to local shops. After her marriage to the artist Henry Massey in 1890 the couple lived in Bushey, Hertfordshire, where Gertrude was refused entry to the Herkomer School of Art on account of her being a married woman. It was in Bushey that Massey began painting the miniatures that brought her the most success. The couple moved to St John’s Wood to better service Massey’s portrait clients who, from 1899, included members of the British royal family and their pets. Massey occupied the larger of the two studios at St John’s Wood and also shared a studio with her sister, Florence, in Piccadilly. In 1907, Henry Massey purchased The Heatherley Art School, and he and Gertrude ran the school in the style of a Parisian atelier until 1934. Massey’s autobiography, Kings, Commoners and Me, was published in the same year. Several of Gertrude’s miniatures remain in the Royal Collection.

Henrietta Rae 1859–1928 Rae was born in Hammersmith, London to a middle-class family and was the first female student at Heatherley’s School of Art, a well-known preparatory school for the Royal Academy schools. In 1877, following five unsuccessful attempts, Rae received entry to the Royal Academy schools where she met and married fellow student Ernest Normand. The couple settled in the artistic enclave of Holland Park, and Rae was a regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy from 1881 onwards. In 1893 the couple moved to a custom-built studio house in Upper Norwood. Rae regularly carried out portrait commissions but specialized



Appendix 1

203

in classical subject paintings. She was the subject of a biography by art critic Arthur Fish in 1905. Twenty of Rae’s paintings are currently held by public art collections in the United Kingdom; the majority of these are portraits of civic figures.

Ethel Wright 1866–1939 Born in London, Wright trained with Seymour Lucas and Solomon Joseph Solomon in London and then at the Académie Julian in Paris. She first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1888 and achieved recognition at the 1893 summer exhibition for her painting Bon Jour, Pierrot, depicting a French harlequin. The work was purchased by the city of Oldham for its municipal gallery. Wright primarily worked as a portraitist and gained a reputation for her skill in depicting men; her sitters included Leopold de Rothschild and John Yorke, the 7th Earl of Hardwicke. In the late 1890s Wright lived and worked from the studio first built for Royal Academician John Pettie. Wright continued to show genre and neo-classical pictures at the Royal Academy in the first decades of the twentieth century and she was a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters and the Society of Women Artists. In 1898, Artist magazine published a profile on Wright, in which it advocated for her election to the Royal Academy. Wright left an estate worth £1,800 upon her death in July 1939, which she donated to the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution. Wright was an active suffragist, and her portrait of Dame Christabel Pankhurst (1909) now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Appendix 2

A Selection of Price Comparisons between Male and Female Artists of the late Victorian and Edwardian Period

Portraits: Average commission rates 1880–1899 Louise Joping: 25–150 guineas Ethel Mortlock: £25–£150 Hubert Herkomer: £500 Frank Holl: £600 Edward Hughes: £500–£800 John Everett Millais: 800–2,000 guineas

1900 William Orpen: £120–£200 Charles Furse: £100–£300

1915 George Hall Neale: £400 Lucy Kemp-Welch: £100

Emmeline Stewart Wood The Hill, Hampstead (1863–1937)

The Wood, Thornton c. 1915 Manor

Ruth Hollingsworth (1880–1945) 1916

37.5 × 45.5

38.2 × 36

97.5 × 138.6

Midsummer Morn, Bushey Park

George Dunlop Leslie (1835–1921)

1905

120 × 242.5

Gypsy Horse Drovers 1895

Career Status

Oil on panel

Mid to late career

Oil on canvas Early career

Oil on canvas Late career

Oil on canvas Early career

Dimensions (cm) Medium

Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869–1958)

Year

Title

Artist

Landscape, garden and animal pictures

Sold at Royal Academy summer exhibition to Sir Frederick Harris Purchased by William Lever from the artist Purchased by William Lever from the artist Purchased by William Lever from the artist

Sold via

8.8

30

200

60

Price (£)

Appendix 2 205

Title

Laura Knight (1877–1970)

The Green Feather

Hubert Herkomer The Last Muster – (1849–1914) Sunday at the Royal Chelsea Hospital Louise Jopling Five O’clock Tea (1843–1933) Frank Holl Newgate, Committed (1845–1888) for Trial Helen Allingham The Lady of the Manor (1848–1926) Edith Hayllar Crumbs from a Rich (1860–1948) Man’s Table Stanhope Forbes Off to the Fishing (1857–1947) Ground Maude Goodman Un Chant D’Amour (1860–1938) Jessica Hayllar Fresh from the Alter (1858–1940) Thomas Gotch Twixt Life and Death (1854–1931) Harold Knight A Cup of Tea (1874–1961)

Artist

Watercolour and Mid career gouache Oil on board Early career Oil on canvas Oil on canvas Oil on canvas Oil on canvas Oil on canvas

1880 36 × 48

1886 119.5 × 156 1889 Unknown 1890 53.3 × 80 1890 Unknown 1905 71 × 98.5 1911 214.7 × 153.5

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

1878 71 × 91

1881 20 × 25

Oil on canvas

1876 111.8 × 144.2

Mid career

Early to mid career

Mid career

Mid career

Early to mid career Mid career

Early to mid career Mid career

Oil on canvas

Mid career

1,200

Price (£)

Sold at the Society of British Artists Purchased by the Walker Art Gallery Purchased by the Leggatt Brothers Sold at the Royal Academy summer exhibition Purchased by George McCulloch Purchased from the artist by Frank Dicksee for the Brisbane Art Gallery Purchased by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

400

100

300

210

250

350

13.13

Purchased from the artist by 400 Agnews Purchased from the artist by 1,050 Edward Hermon MP Sold via Vokin’s Gallery 220

Purchased by CE Fry

Career Status Sold via

1875 214.5 × 159

Year Dimensions (cm) Medium

Subject and genre pictures

206 Appendix 2

1873

Sintram

Louisa Starr (1845–1909)

153.7 × 123

Psyche at the Throne 1894 of Venus

Eleanor Fortescue The Forerunner Brickdale (1872–1945)

1920

Evelyn De Morgan Life and Thought 1901 (1855–1919) Have Gone Away Herbert Draper The Kelpie 1913 (1863–1920) John William The Decameron 1916 Waterhouse (1849–1917)

Henrietta Rae (1859–1928)

59.6 × 122

101 × 159

135 × 193

165 × 292.5

194.3 × 304.8

Career Status

Oil on canvas Mid to late career

Oil on canvas Mid to late career Oil on canvas Mid to late career Oil on canvas Late career

Oil on canvas Mid career

Oil on canvas Established late career

Oil on canvas Early career

Dimensions (cm) Medium

Frederic Leighton Captive Andromache 1886–8 197 × 407 (1830–1896)

Year

Title

Artist

Classical subject and late pre-Raphaelite pictures

Purchased from the RA by the Corporation of Liverpool Purchased from the artist by the Friends of the Manchester Art Galleries Purchased by George McCulloch prior to exhibition at RA Purchased by William Lever from the artist Purchased by William Lever from the artist Purchased by William Lever through Arthur Tooth and Sons Purchased by William Lever from the artist

Sold via

315

735

400

600

1,000

4,000

200

Price (£)

Appendix 2 207

1895

Speak! Speak!

153.7 × 306 231.1 × 182.3

1897

1900

1908

Colt Hunting in New Forest Two Crowns

Marie Antoinette 77.5 × 133.3

71.1 × 52.1

The Morning Bath 1896

167.6 × 210.8

115.6 × 64.1

1890

Lock Loved Out

Watercolour on paper

Oil on canvas

Watercolour on paper Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

Oil on canvas

189.2 × 622

Oil on canvas Oil on canvas

157 × 94

Medium

174 × 153.7

1877

Harmony

Frank Dicksee (1853–1928) John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) Frederic Leighton (1830–1896) Anna Lea Merritt (1844–1930) John Everett Millais (1829–1896) Mildred Butler (1858–1941) Lucy Kemp-Welch (1869–1958) Frank Dicksee (1853–1928) Mary Gow (1851–1929)

Dimensions (cm)

Carnation, Lily, 1885–6 Lily, Rose The Bath of Psyche 1890

Year

Title

Artist

Purchased by the Chantrey Bequest

Mid to late career Late career

Early career

Mid career

Late career

Mid career

Late career

Mid career

Early career

Career Status

Price (£)

2,000

250

Genre portrait

300

History painting 2,000

Animal painting 525

Animal painting 50

Genre picture

Classical figure

Historical genre 367 picture En plein air genre 700 picture Classical figure 1,050

Subject

208 Appendix 2

Year

3,3275

300–4006

30,0007

4,0768

12,0009

Luke Fildes 1876 (1843–1927)

Late 1870s

1880–1885

1882

1882

Louisa Starr (1845–1909) John Everett Millais (1829–1896) George Elgar Hicks (1824–1914) Hubert Herkomer (1849–1914) Portraits and subject pictures

Portraits

London and Income entirely made up of portrait country commissions estate Bushey, Income predominantly made up from Hertfordshire portrait commissions

Portraits and London genre pictures Portraits and London genre pictures

London

Jopling’s income derived from the sale of thirteen pictures in 1872, with an average price per work of £26.4 All but £100 of this sum derived from picture sales. Approximately £1,217 of Fildes’ income for this year went to expenses.

Notes

Appendix 2

Mid to late career

Late career

Established late career

Early career

Mid career

Portraits and London genre pictures

Early career

London and Kent

Genre painter

Mid career

London

Location

Portraits

Primary Style/genre

Mid career

Yearly Income (£) Career Status

John Hanson Early 1880s 1,000–2,0001 Walker (1844–1933) George Bernard 1870 1,0002 O’Neill (1828–1917) Louise Jopling 1872 3203 (1843–1933)

Artist

Yearly incomes

209

Mid career

1,80014

George 1910 Lambert (1873–1930) William Orpen 1915 (1878–1931)

Established late career

21,00013

Frederic 1893 Leighton (1830–1896) Charles Furse 1900 (1868–1904) Mid career Mid to late career

1,00015

8,72916

Mid career

49412

Louise Jopling 1884 (1843–1933)

Mid career

1,10310

Louise Jopling 1883 (1843–1933)

Portraits

Portraits

London

London

Portraits and London subject pictures Classical subject London pictures and sculptures Portraits London and Surrey

Portraits and London genre pictures

Of this, £7,700 came from portrait commissions.

This figure includes Leighton’s income from both art sales and investments. Furse painted an estimated fourteen portraits in this year. Furse’s wife noted that £600 of this income went to art-based expenses.

As can be seen from her entries in this table, Jopling’s income fluctuated significantly year-toyear, depending the number of commissions she received. In 1883, Jopling painted her portrait of the actress Ellen Terry, as well as the ‘fancy head’ Phyllis, the type of painting she ‘padded out her annual exhibition appearances with’.11 This was also the year that Jopling lost a portrait commission to John Everett Millais.

210 Appendix 2



Appendix 2

211

Notes 1 Belinda Morse, John Hanson Walker: The Life and Times of a Victorian Artist (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1987), 72. 2 Greg Andrew, The Cranbrook Colony (Wolverhampton: Central Art Gallery and Laing Art Gallery, 1977), 47. 3 De Montfort, Louise Jopling, 70. 4 Ibid. 5 Dakers, The Holland Park Circle, 168. 6 Canziani, Round about Three Palace Green, 30. 7 Gaunt, The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy, 185. 8 Allwood, George Elgar Hicks, 52. 9 Herkomer, letter to Lieber Hans, dated 24 July 1882, 130. 10 Cherry, Painting Women, 101. 11 Pamela Gerrish Nunn, ‘We Are Not a Muse: Women Artists and the Russell Cotes Collection’, in Art in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Wealth of Depictions, ed. Marks Bills (Bournemouth: Russell Cotes Gallery, 2001), 69. 12 Nunn, ‘We Are Not a Muse’. 13 Dakers, The Holland Park Circle, 5. 14 Katharine Furse, Hearts and Pomegranates: The Story of 45 Years, 1875–1920 (London: Peter Davis, 1940), 201. 15 Gray, Art and Artifice, 46. 16 Arnold, Orpen, Appendix A.

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Hudson, Derek. Arthur Rackham. London: Heinemann, 1960. Hunter Hurtado, Shannon. Genteel Mavericks: Professional Women Sculptors in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012. Hutchison, Sidney. The History of the Royal Academy, 1768–1968. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1968. Huyssens, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Janzen Kooistra, Lorraine. Poetry, Pictures and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011. Jenkins, David Fraser and Chris Stephens, eds. Gwen John and Augustus John. London: Tate Publishing, 2004 Jenkins, Emily. ‘Trilby: Fads, Photographers and “Over Perfect Feet”’. Book History 1, no. 1 (1998): 221–67. Lamb, Joseph Frank. ‘Lions in Their Dens: Lord Leighton and Late Victorian Studio Life’. PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1987. Lang, Engel Gladys and Kurt Lang. Etched in Memory: The Building and Survival of Artistic Reputation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Larson, Margali. The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977. Lawton Smith, Elise. ‘The Art of Evelyn De Morgan’. Woman’s Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1997/8): 3–10. Lawton Smith, Elise. Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the Allegorical Body. London: Associated University Presses, 2002. Lee, Vernon. Vernon Lee’s Letters. Privately Printed, 1937. Lees-Maffei, Grace. ‘Professionalisation as a Focus in Interior Design History’. Journal of Design History 21, no. 1 (2008): 1–18. Lloyd-Morgan, Ceridwen, ed. Gwen John: Letters and Notebooks. London: Tate Publishing in association with the National Library of Wales, 2003. Lundin, Anne. Victorian Horizons: The Receptions of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway. London: The Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, 2001. Maas, Jeremy. Gambart, Prince of the Victorian Art World. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1975. MacCarthy, Fiona. The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination. London: Faber and Faber, 2011. Macleod, Dianne Sachko. Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Macleod, Dianne Sachko. ‘Art Collecting and Victorian Middle-Class Taste’. Art History 10, no. 3 (1987): 328–50. Macleod, Dianne Sachko. ‘Women as Patrons and Collectors: 1900–1940’. Oxford Art Online, 2009. http:​//www​.oxfo​rdart​onlin​e.com​.ezpr​oxy.l​ibrar​y.uq.​edu.a​u/sub​scrib​er/ ar​ticle​/grov​e/ar t/T2022267.

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Mahoney, Bertha, Louise Payson Latimer and Beulah Folmsbee, eds. Illustrators of Children’s Books, 1744–1945. Boston: The Horn Book Inc, 1941. Malatesta, Maria. Professional Men, Professional Women: The European Professions from the Nineteenth Century until Today. Translated by Adrian Belton. London: Sage, 2011. Marsden, Jonathan, ed. Victoria and Albert: Art and Love. London: Royal Collections Publications, 2010. Marsh, Jan and Pamela Gerrish Nunn. Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. London: Virago, 1989. Miller, Delia. The Victorian Watercolours and Drawings in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen. London: Philip Wilson, 1995. Moore, Henrietta. Space, Text and Gender. London: Guilford, 1996. Morris, Barbara. ‘Liberty’s Pioneer Designer’. In Mary Seton Watts: Unsung Heroine of the Art Nouveau, edited by Veronica Franklin Gould, 11–14. England: Watts Gallery, 1998. Morton, Tara. ‘Changing Spaces: Art, Politics and Identity in the Home Studios of the Suffrage Atelier’. Women’s History Review 21, no. 4 (2012): 623–37. Nead, Lynda. Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1988. Nelson, Claudia. ‘Growing Up: Childhood’. In A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Herbert F. Tucker, 67–81. London: Blackwell Publishing, 1999. Nicholson, Nigel, ed. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Ormrod, David. ‘The Origins of the London Art Market, 1660–1730’. In Art Markets in Europe, 1400–1800, edited by Michael North and David Normand, 167–86. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998. Orr, Clarissa Campbell, ed. Women in the Victorian Art World. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Parker, Rozsika and Griselda Pollock. Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880. New York: Routledge, 2002. Perry, Gill. Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and Feminine Art, 1900 to the Late 1920. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Peterson, Linda. Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pointon, Martha. Strategies for Showing: Women, Possession and Representation in English Visual Culture, 1665–1800. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pollock, Griselda. Differencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories. New York: Routledge, 1999. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art. London: Routledge, 1988.



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Prieto, Laura R. At Home in the Studio: The Professionalisation of Women Artists in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Read, Benedict. Victorian Sculpture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Redfoot, Alison. ‘Victorian Watercolourist Ella Du Cane’. Masters thesis, University of California, 2011. Rendell, Jane. ‘Gender, Space: Introduction’. In Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, edited by Iain Borden, Barbara Penner and Jane Rendell, 15–24. London: Routledge, 2000. Ringelberg, Kirsten. Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Painting: Work Place/Domestic Space. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Rosenfeld, Jason. John Everett Millais. London: Phaidon Press, 2012 Rosenthal, Angela. ‘She’s Got the Look! Eighteen-Century Female Portrait Painters and the Psychology of a Potentially “Dangerous Employment”’. In Portraiture: Facing the Subject, edited by Joanna Woodall, 147–66. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Rothenstein, John. Stanley Spencer, the Man: Correspondence and Reminiscences. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979. Ruth, Jennifer. Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel. Columbus: Ohio State University, 2006. Shone, Richard. ‘The Friday Club’. Burlington Magazine 117, no. 866 (1975): 279–84. Smith, Greg. The Emergence of the Professional Water Colourist: Contentions and Alliances in the Artistic Domain, 1760–1824. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Spalding, Frances. Vanessa Bell. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983. Spencer, Gilbert. Stanley Spencer. London: Gollancz, 1961. Stephenson, Andrew. ‘Edwardian Cosmopolitanism, ca. 1901–1912’. In The Edwardian Sense: Art, Design and Performance in Britain, 1901–1910, edited by Morna O’Neill and Michael Hatt, 251–86. New Haven: Yale Centre for British Art, 2010. Stevens, Maryanne. ‘A Quiet Revolution: The Royal Academy, 1900–1950’. In The Edwardians and After: The Royal Academy, 1900–1950, edited by Maryanne Stevens. London: Royal Academy of Arts/Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988. Strobel, Heidi. ‘Royal Matronage of Women Artists in the Late Eighteenth Century’. Woman’s Art Journal 26, no. 2 (2005): 3–9. Swinth, Kirsten. Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Tanner, Jeremy, ed. Sociology of Art: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2003. Taubman, Mary. Gwen John. London: Scolar Press, 1985. Thirlwell, Angela. William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Tickner, Lisa. Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000.

220

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Tickner, Lisa. The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907–14. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Timmers, Margaret and Anna Emmett. British Posters in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Haslemere: Emmett Publishing, 1989. Tucker, Amy. The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Usherwood, Paul. ‘Elizabeth Thompson Butler: A Case of Tokenism’. Woman’s Art Journal 11, no. 2 (1990/1): 14–18. Valentine, Helen. Art in the Age of Queen Victoria. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1999. Waldrep, Mary Carolyn. By a Woman’s Hand: Illustrators of the Golden Age. New York: Dover Publications, 2010. Walker, Lynne. ‘Vistas of Pleasure: Women Consumers of Urban Space in the West End of London, 1855–1900’. In Women in the Victorian Art World, edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr, 70–88. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Walker, Lynne. ‘Women Patron-Builders in Britain: Identity, Difference and Memory in Spatial and Material Culture’. In Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland, 121–36. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Walkley, Giles. Artists’ Houses in London, 1764–1914. London: Scolar Press, 1994. Waterfield, Giles. ‘Paintings from the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth’. The Magazine Antiques 155, no. 6 (1999): 858–85. Waterfield, Giles. Palaces of Art: Art Galleries in Britain. London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1991. Weisberg, Gabriel. Beyond Impressionism: The Naturalist Impulse. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992. Wisely, Nancy Ann. ‘Making Faces: A Sociological Analysis of Portrait Painting’. PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1993. Wood, Christopher. ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar. Part Two: Jessica, Edith, Mary and Kate’. Connoisseur (May 1974): 2–9 Woolf, Virginia. ‘Professions for Women’. In Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf, edited by David Bradshaw, 140–4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. London: Chatto and Windus, 1984. Wortley, Laura. Lucy Kemp-Welch, 1869–1958: The Spirit of the Horse. Woodbridge: Antique Collector’s Club, 1996. Wortley, Laura. ‘Lucy Kemp Welch: The Hunt for the Artist behind the Horses’. Antique Collecting (February 1997): 13–15. Zakreski, Patricia. Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848–1890. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.



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221

Online resources Exhibition Culture in London, 1878–1908. University of Glasgow (2006), http:​//www​ .exhi​bitio​ncult​ure.a​rts.g​la.ac​.uk/.​ The London Gallery Project. Bowdoin University (2007. Revised 2012), http:​//lea​rn.bo​ wdoin​.edu/​fletc​her/l​ondon​-gall​ery/i​ndex.​html.​ Louise Jopling (1943–1933): A Research Project. University of Glasgow (2012), http:​// www​.loui​sejop​ling.​arts.​gla.a​c.uk/​.

Select primary sources Bateson, Margaret. Professional Women Upon Their Professions: Conversations. London: Horace Cox, 1895. Bevan, R.A. Robert Bevan, 1865–1925: A Memoir by His Son. London: Studio Vista, 1965. Birch, Lionel. Stanhope A Forbes ARA and Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes ARWS. London: Cassell and Co, 1910. Blackburn, Henry. The Art of Illustration. London: W.H. Allen & Co, 1896. Bradshaw, Percy. Drawn from Memory. London: Chapman and Hall, 1943. Burne-Jones, Georgiana. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. London: Macmillan, 1906. Butler, Elizabeth. An Autobiography. London: Constable & Co, 1922. Canziani, Estella. Round about Three Palace Green. London: Methuen, 1939. Cartwright, Julia. The Life and Work of George Frederick Watts, R. A. London: Art Journal Office, 1896. Chiozza Money, L.G. Riches and Poverty. London: Methuen, 1905. Clayton, Ellen. English Female Artists. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876. Collyer, Margaret. Life of an Artist. London: Philip Allan, 1935. Du Maurier, George. The Young George du Maurier: A Selection of His Letters. London: Peter Davis, 1951. Eastlake, Charles. Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts with a Memoir Compiled by Lady Eastlake. London: John Murray, 1870. Fish, Arthur. Henrietta Rae. London: Cassell and Co, 1905. Frith, William Powell. My Autobiography and Reminiscences. London: Richard Bentley and Sons, 1887. Furse, Katharine. Hearts and Pomegranates: The Story of Forty-five Years, 1875 to 1920. London: Peter Davis, 1940. Hale, Kathleen. A Slender Reputation: An Autobiography. London: Penguin, 1994. Halle, C.E. Notes from a Painters’ Life: Including the Founding of Two Galleries. London: John Murray, 1909.

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222

Housman, Laurence. The Unexpected Years. London: Jonathan Cape, 1937. Hughes, Alice. My Father and I. London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd, 1923. Jopling, Louise. Twenty Years of My Life, 1867–1887. London: John Lane, 1925. Knight, Laura. The Magic of the Line: The Autobiography of Laura Knight DBE. London: William Kimber, 1965. Knight, Laura. Oil Paint and Grease Paint. London: Macmillan, 1936. Layard, G.S. and M.H. Spielmann. Kate Greenaway. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905. Mackenzie, Tessa. The Art Schools of London. London: Chapman and Hall, 1895. Massey, Gertrude. Kings, Commoners and Me. London: Blackie and Sons, 1934. Meeson Coates, Dora. George Coates: His Art and His Life. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1937. Merritt, Anna Lea. Love Locked Out: The Memoirs of Anna Lea Merritt. Boston: Museum of Fine Art, 1981. Reynolds, Ada. The Life and Work of Frank Holl. London: Methuen and Co, 1912. Rossetti, William. Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti. New York: Charles Scribner, 1906. Rutter, Frank. Art in My Time. London: Rich and Cowan, 1933. Stephens, Frederic G. Artists at Home. New York: Appleton and Co, 1884. Stirling, A.M.W. William De Morgan and His Wife. London: Thornton Butterworth Ltd, 1922. Ward, Henrietta. Memories of Ninety Years. London: Hutchinson and Co, 1924. Ward, Henrietta. Mrs Ward’s Reminiscences. London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1911 Watts, Mary Seton. George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life. London: Macmillan, 1912.

Select newspapers and journals The Academy The Argosy Art Journal Artist The Athenaeum Belgravia Bow Bells The English Illustrated Magazine The Englishwoman’s Review Illustrated London News Ladies’ Realm



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The Ladies’ World London Society Ludgate Monthly Magazine of Art The Manchester Guardian Myra’s Journal The New York Times Nineteenth Century The Pall Mall Gazette The Speaker The Times The Windsor Magazine The Woman’s Herald The Woman’s Signal Women and Work The Young Woman

Archives Bushey Archive, Bushey Museum and Art Gallery Glasgow School of Art Archive National Art Library Tate Archive Victoria and Albert Archive of Art and Design Watts Gallery Archive Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths University

223

Index Aberigh-Mackay, Mary  66 Académie Carmen  200 Académie Julian  27, 203 The Academy  127 advertising  14, 29, 178 aesthetics  10, 34 n.10, 59, 62–3, 97, 102, 106, 109 n.26, 150, 151, 167, 168, 169 Agnew’s  120, 126, 130 Aird, John  199 Alexandra (Queen)  153–5, 160 n.72 Allingham, Helen  25, 49, 122, 126–8, 133, 134, 138 n.63, 162, 164, 166–7, 183 n.8, 195, 196 Allingham, William  196 almanacs  166, 168, 199 Alma-Tadema, Laura  42–3, 152–3 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence  43, 75, 92, 118 Alpine Club  101 amateur artists  5, 9, 22, 101–2, 133, 191 amateurism  2, 8–9, 33, 77, 78, 102, 191, 193, 195. See also female amateurism Anderson, Sophie  133 animal sculptors and artists  51, 99, 173 Appleton, Honor  187 n.87 applied art and design  45, 47, 49 apprenticeship programs  29, 30, 33 Argosy  169 aristocracy  77–82, 86 n.14, 142–3, 150, 154 Arlington Galleries  201 Armstrong, Elizabeth. See Forbes, Elizabeth art business  116–19. See also under artists; women artists art-buying public  4–6, 89, 113 n.93, 114, 118, 122, 125, 130, 142, 180, 193 art commerce  4, 6, 13, 65, 68, 90, 106, 115–19, 132, 136 nn.24, 29 art critics  5, 7, 9, 76, 82, 91, 93, 104, 114, 118, 126–7, 129, 144, 166, 168

art dealers  1–2, 4–5, 7–8, 13, 21, 76, 82–3, 93, 114, 117–20, 124, 126–33, 142, 147, 163, 194 art education  2, 5, 22–9, 31–2, 86 n.14 art history  8–10, 32, 41, 65, 77 Artist  64, 87 n.27, 178, 203 artists  22, 30. See also male artists; women artists and art societies  89–90 business side  1–2, 4, 114–16, 118–19 careers  5, 142 identity  45–6, 54, 63, 68 relationships with commerce  115 working environments  59 Artists at Home (Stephens)  69 n.1 Artists’ General Benevolent Institution  203 Artists’ Guild  101 Art Journal  23, 32, 69, 91, 112 n.82, 113 n.90, 114, 118, 120, 122, 127–8, 132, 150, 164, 168, 172, 181, 196 art market  3–5, 12, 13, 22, 40–1, 84, 89–90, 93, 96, 104, 116–20, 122–3, 134, 136 n.22, 155–6, 161, 194–5 art prices  1, 25–6, 81–2, 91–2, 94, 96, 104, 123, 128, 143, 145–8, 164, 204–10 art schools  5–6, 21, 27, 28, 33, 33 n.3, 69, 78, 192–3 Arts Council of Great Britain  200 art selling  1, 3–7, 9, 13–14, 48, 82, 90, 115, 117, 119, 134, 142, 144, 155–6, 192, 194 art societies  13, 76–8, 81–2, 83, 84–5, 89–90, 90–102, 105–7, 109 n.26, 125, 193 Art Students League of New York  198 art teaching  32, 66 art world  1, 3–8, 10, 12–13, 24, 32, 75–6, 79, 81–3, 98–100, 104, 107, 126, 130–1, 142, 151–2, 164–5, 169, 174, 176, 191, 193

Index Ashbee, Charles  32, 67 atelier-style training  27 The Athenaeum  23, 65, 128, 139 n.71, 143 Atlantic Monthly  191 Attwell, Mabel Lucie  168–9, 172, 177, 180 auction houses  117, 129 Aunt Judy’s Magazine  164 The Autocar  171 autonomy  41–2, 54, 142 avant-garde art  84, 94, 102, 109 n.26, 158 n.31 Avenue Studios  66–7 Bancroft, Louisa  100 Barham, Sybil  180 Barton, Rose  105 Belgravia  130, 143, 168, 170 Bell, Vanessa  94, 97, 101–2 Bellucci, Giuseppe  27, 197 Bennett, Harriet M.  176–7 Beresford, Louisa  3 Bingen, Leily  177–8 Birn Brothers  177–8 Blackburn, Henry  30, 162 Blackie and Sons  168–9, 173, 198 Blow, James  184 n.28 Bogart, Michele  163 Bolton Studios  67 Bon Jour, Pierrot (Wright)  203 Boyle, Eleanor Vere  183 n.8 Brickdale, Eleanor Fortescue  25, 67, 122 British Artists’ Exhibition  145 British Parliamentary Recruiting Committee  201 Brooks, William Cuncliffe  145 Brown, Ford Madox  41 Brown, Frederick  94–6 Brown, Lucy Madox  42 Browning, Robert  199 Brydon, J. M.  65 Bubble, The (Allingham)  166 Bubbles (Millais)  179 Buckingham Palace  153 Burges, William  61 Burlington House  78, 81 Burnaby, Fred  148 Burne-Jones, Edward  32, 45, 150

225

Butler, Elizabeth  27, 62, 66–7, 79–80, 82, 87 n.27, 120–1, 131, 133, 155, 196–7 Butler, William  197 Bystander  171 Camden Town Group  97 Canziani, Estella  43 Carfax Gallery  95 Carline, Hilda  54 Carlyle Studios  67 Cassandra (De Morgan)  152 Cassell Publishing  168, 174 Cassell’s  30 Caxton, Adelaide  161 Celtic mythology  45 Chamberlain, Joseph  148 Chant D’Amour (Goodman)  130 Chantrey Bequest Fund  80–1, 88 n.42, 201 Chantrey Trust  153 Chaplin, Charles  27, 200 Chase, William Merritt  198 Chenies Street Chambers  66 Chenil Gallery  200 Chester Studios  67 Cheyne Walk studio  64 children’s books and magazines  165, 167–70 Chloe Boughton-Leigh (John)  95 Christmas books  166, 168 Christmas cards  31, 36 n.55, 175–81, 184 n.28 Chromo Lithographic Art Studio  31 The City and Guilds of London Institute  30 City Art Gallery  100 Clareville Studios  67 Clayton, Ellen  172 co-educational class  23, 192 Cole, Henry  30, 176 Colt Hunting in the New Forest (KempWelch)  80–1 commercial art  163, 164–5. See also art market infrastructure  117 occupation  31 commercial galleries  1–2, 4–6, 13, 117–26, 131, 133–4, 142, 144, 163, 194

226 Index commercialism  3, 62, 92, 108 n.8, 115, 127, 131, 163 commissions  6–7, 48–9, 63, 82, 84, 91–2, 116, 126, 131, 142–3, 145–9, 153, 154, 155–6, 163–4, 165, 167, 169, 171–2, 177, 178–9, 191, 204 Compton Potters Art Guild  46 contemporary art  11, 77–8 Copping, Harold  25 copyright  121, 129, 130, 131–2, 167 Cornelissen, Marie. See Lucas, Marie Seymour cosmopolitan art  4 Court Circular  154–5 Cowham, Hilda  168 Coxon, Raymond  97 Crane, Walter  45, 170 creativity  14, 23, 43, 47, 59, 106, 144, 167 criticism  7–8, 11, 75, 77–8, 104, 115, 120, 163–4 Crumbs from a Rich Man’s Table (Hayllar)  28 cultural feminism  10, 16 n.36 Cunard, Lady  151 Cundall, Joseph  176 Dacre, Isabel  99 Daily Chronicle  173 Darwin, Francis  96 dealer-critic system  4–6, 9, 116, 133 Declaration in Favour of Women’s Suffrage  197 decorative art  45, 47 De Morgan, Evelyn  47–9, 132, 152, 197 De Morgan, William  47, 49, 197 de Rothschild, Annie  147 de Rothschild, Charles  147 de Rothschild, Constance  147 de Rothschild, Evelina  147 Derrida, Jacques  11 Dickinson, Violet  167 Dicksee, Frank  81 Dicksee, Herbert  99 Dickson and Co  80 Dierken’s Art Gallery  148 domestic images  28, 50, 96, 103 domesticity  9, 26, 28, 53, 62–3, 68, 151, 163

domestic space  39–40, 42–3, 46, 54, 96 Dore Gallery  123, 124 Dowdeswell Gallery  32, 121, 122, 124, 133, 137 n.38 du Cane, Ella  128, 153–4 Dudley Gallery  48, 91, 125, 126, 138 n.63, 165, 176, 197, 201 du Maurier, George  187 n.84 Earl, Maud  81 Eastlake, Lady Elizabeth  157 n.7 Edgeworth, Maria  198 Edith Grove Studios  67 education  12, 21, 33, 84, 89, 93–4, 96, 127, 143, 163, 192–4. See also art education Edward (King)  153–4 Edwards, Mary Ellen  161, 168, 169–70, 171, 173, 183 n.8 employment  31, 36 n.55 Endicott, Mary  148 English Spelling Book, The (Greenaway)  166 The Englishwoman’s Review  31, 65, 192 ephemera  175–81 Epps, Ellen  41–3 etchings  89, 92 Evans, Edmund  165, 184 n.35 Examiner  77 exhibitions  5, 7, 35 n.28, 48–9, 53, 67, 75, 77–9, 80–1, 82–3, 86 n.14, 89–102, 104–7, 114, 120–1, 122, 123–4, 126–7, 131–3, 137 n.36, 141 n.111, 142–3, 147, 155, 167, 175, 193–5 familial relationships  39–41, 53 family studios  40–1, 51–3 fashion illustration  29 Faulkner, C. W.  177, 180 female Academicians  80, 83–4 female amateurism  3, 21, 24, 28, 80, 97, 111 n.53, 115, 134 female exhibitors  75, 77, 79, 81, 84, 97, 123, 132–3 female hobbyists  25 female nude  23 Female School of Design  36 n.50 female students  24–6, 31, 33

Index femininity  6, 8–10, 53, 62–3, 68, 104, 109 n.26, 144, 151, 155, 156, 168 fine art  23, 27, 44, 49, 78, 163, 164, 174 ‘Fine Art Gift Books’  168 Fine Art Society (FAS)  48, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124–8, 131, 133, 137 n.36, 153, 166–7, 196, 197, 199, 201 Finsbury School of Art  199 First Step, The (Ward)  50 Fish, Arthur  67, 129, 203 Fishburn, Joseph  124 Fitzroy Street Group  97 Five O’clock Tea (Jopling)  130–1 flower paintings  96, 103, 122, 156, 178 Foote, Mary Hallock  170 Forbes, Elizabeth  51–2, 104, 152, 198 Forbes, Stanhope  51–2, 198 Forman, Alfred  173–4 Fowler, Mary  129 Fraser’s Magazine  118 Freewoman  117 French Gallery  130, 199 Fresh from the Alter (Hayllar)  28 Friday Club  101–2 Frith, William  80, 150 Frowde, Henry  169 Fry, Roger  102, 118 Furse, Charles  204 Gambart, Ernest  126 Garrett, Agnes  65 gender  6–9, 24–5, 64, 76, 84, 97, 98, 102–4, 114, 128, 133, 145–8, 162, 172 Gentlewoman  173 George III (King)  87 n.18 Gertler, Mark  150 Gibson, Josephine  92, 99 gift books  166, 168, 178, 180 Gillies, Margaret  133 Girl’s Own Paper  21, 29, 36 n.55, 170 Girls’ Realm  185 n.47 Goode, Louise. See Jopling, Louise Goodman, Maude  129–30, 134, 180, 195, 199 Goodman, Walter  60 Good Words  30 Gosse, Edward  41–2

227

Gosse, Sylvia  41, 97 Goupil Gallery  122, 125 Government School of Design  30–1 The Graphic  164, 166, 169, 171, 196 Graphic Society  90, 108 n.8, 200 Graves Gallery  153 Greenaway, John  165 Greenaway, Kate  62–3, 92, 125–6, 128, 162, 164–7, 169, 184 n.35, 185 n.39, 199–200 Greenfield, Robert  184 n.28 greeting cards  175–6, 178 Grosvenor Gallery  3, 48, 131–3, 141 n.111, 146, 152, 197, 198–9, 200 Guild of Handicraft  32 Gypsy Horse Drovers (Kemp-Welch)  81 Hales, Jane  197 Hamilton, Lady Ian  151 Hammond, Christina Demain  173–4, 198 Hammond, Gertrude Demain  105, 169, 171, 198 Happy England of Helen Allingham, The (Allingham)  196 Harding, Mary Elizabeth  66 Hardy, Evelyn Stuart  173 Harwood, Edith  32 Hayllar, Edith  27–8, 53, 58 n.66 Hayllar, James  27–8, 52–3 Hayllar, Jessica  27–8, 53 Hayllar, Kate  27, 53, 58 n.66 Hayllar, Mary  27, 58 n.66 Hearth and Home  29–30, 98 Heathcote, Evelyn  128 Heatherley’s Art School. See Leigh’s School of Art Helen of Troy (De Morgan)  152 Herford, Laura  196 Herford, Sarah Smith  196 Herkomer, Hubert  149, 201, 204 Herkomer School of Art  180, 201, 202 Hicks, George  7 history painting  23, 43, 50 Hobhouse, Emily  7, 65 Hobson, Mabel  92 Hodder Stoughton  181 Hodgkins, Frances  121–5 Holl, Frank  146, 149, 204

228 Index Hollyer, Frederick  61 Holme, Charles  121 Home Arts and Industries Association (HAIA)  46 home studio  39–41, 50, 52, 54–5 Horses Bathing in the Sea (KempWelch)  80–3 Horsley, John  176 Hudson, Nan  97, 111 n.53 Hughes, Edward  204 Huish, Marcus  108 n.8, 120, 126, 127–8, 196 Hunt, William Holman  165, 170 Idler  198 Illustrated Archaeologist  32 Illustrated London News  56 n.28, 75, 169, 174 illustrations  29–33, 62–3, 161–3, 181, 187 n.84, 196. See also press and book illustration Illustrators of the 1860s (Reid)  170 Imperial War Museum  201 Imrie, William  152 Institute of Painters in Water Colours  199 International United Arts Club  90 Ismay, Henry  150 J. A. Dent and Co  172–3 J. M. Kronheim  171 James, Henry  119, 137 n.35, 161 John, Augustus  26, 64, 95–6, 150, 151, 200 John, Gwen  26, 94–6, 151, 200 Johnson, Charlotte  201 Johnson, Edward  173 Johnson, Laura. See Knight, Laura Jopling, Joe  61–2 Jopling, Joseph  200 Jopling, Louise  8, 25, 27, 43, 49–50, 61–2, 67, 81, 83, 90–1, 105–6, 117, 130–3, 140 n.98, 145–7, 149, 152, 155–6, 158 nn.26, 31, 194–5, 200–1, 204 Judy  161 Kemp-Welch, Lucy  27, 80–3, 99, 105–6, 113 n.96, 149, 152, 155, 201, 204 Kings, Commoners and Me (Gertrude)  202

Kingston, William  199 Kiralfy, Imre  100 Knight, Harold  51, 201 Knight, Laura  25, 27, 38, 51, 52, 83–4, 151, 152, 192, 195, 201–2 Kurtz, Andrew  142 La Chambre sur la Cour (John)  95–6 Ladies Dwelling Company  65–6 Ladies Field  113 n.100 Ladies Residential Chambers. See Ladies Dwelling Company Lambert, George  116 Lambeth School of Art  30, 173, 198 landscape painting  6, 42, 50, 52, 166 Language of Flowers, The (Greenaway)  166 Leggatt Brothers  130 legitimacy  7–8, 22, 26, 39, 62, 68, 76, 77, 78, 79, 107, 117, 178 Leicester Gallery  198 Leigh’s School of Art  27, 202 Leighton, Frederic  1–3, 7, 63, 82, 125, 136 n.29, 153, 194 Leslie, G. D.  79, 118 Lever, Charles  170 Lewis, Mabel Terry  92 Leyland, Frederick  150 life study  23, 24–5, 27–8, 34 n.10 Lindsay, Coutts  131–2 lithography  31, 33 Little Folks  170 Liverpool Corporation  100 Loftie, William  125, 165 London Exhibitions Limited  100 London Group  96–7 London Sketch Club  177 London Society  30 Love Locked Out (Merritt)  153 Lucas, Marie Ellen  129 Lucas, Marie Seymour  168 Lucas, Seymour  27, 83, 203 MacColl, D. S.  89 McCulloch, George  150, 152–3, 198 Macgregor, Jessie  117 Mackenzie, Tessa  21 McKie, Helen  171–2

Index Macmillan and Co  169, 173, 174, 198 Magazine of Art  24, 34 n.18, 60, 91, 104, 118, 176 Magnus, Emma  99–100 Maguire, Bertha  179 Maitland, Ann  66 male artists  3–4, 7–8, 25–6, 28, 34 n.10, 77, 94, 98, 101, 105, 162 interiors scenes  96 professional identity  6, 191 RA membership  25–6 studios and  40 success of  6 Manchester Academy of Arts  99, 100, 111 n.63 Manchester School of Art  27 Marcus Ward and Co  165, 177, 184 n.28 market-specific training  29–30 market value  5, 12, 21, 61, 77, 80–1, 95, 142. See also value Marrable, Madeline  115 marriages  26, 41–2, 44–7, 49–54, 61 Married Women’s Property Acts  40 Mary (Queen)  154–5 Massey, Gertrude  51, 153–4, 195, 202 Massey, Henry  51, 202 May, Grace  66 Mayall, J. P.  69 n.1 Mayo, Eileen  38 Mayo, Isabelle Fyvie  170 Meeson, Dora  68 Mendoza Gallery  130 Mere Fracture, A (Orpen)  95 Merritt, Anna Lea  60–1, 65, 106, 133, 153 Meynell, Alice  43, 197 military paintings  27, 121 Mill, John Stuart  115 Millais, Effie  145 Millais, John Everett  7, 67, 81, 82, 129, 145–6, 149, 153, 158 n.26, 165, 172, 179, 201, 204 Miller, Florence Fenwick  75, 77 Miller, Fred  87 n.27 Milman, Helen  128 miniature painting  90, 92, 109 n.21, 122, 143, 154, 156 Mirror, The (Orpen)  95 mixed sex exhibiting societies  91, 102, 121

229

modern art  84, 97, 102, 116, 151, 195 Modern Gallery  122, 124–5 modernism  34 n.10, 102 modernity  64, 69, 96, 109 n.26, 151 Monkhouse, Florence  99 Montalba, Clara  133 Moody, Fannie  169 Moore, George  150 Moran, Mary Nimmo  93 Morell, Lady Ottoline  151 Morgan, Fred  130 Mortlock, Ethel  148, 204 Mott, Alice  92 Munnings, Alfred  84, 99 Myra’s Journal  25, 144, 162, 172 National Art Competitions  32 National Art Training School  29, 31, 44, 125 National Exhibition  171 National Gallery  32, 82, 88 n.42 National Museum of Wales  200 National Portrait Gallery  201, 202, 203 Neale, George Hall  204 neo-classicism  23, 145 New English Art Club (NEAC)  26, 28, 89, 93–6, 102, 110 n.48, 121, 181, 200 New Gallery  106, 133, 197, 198 Newlyn Art Gallery  201 Newlyn School of Art  198 The New York Times  164 Nichols, Catherine Maude  93 91 Club  106 Nisbet, Ethel  32 Normand, Ernest  100, 202 Nottingham School of Art  27, 192, 201 nude model  23, 33, 34 n.10 Oakley, Violet  185 n.47 The Observer  125 oil paintings  28, 51, 66, 169, 174, 181 Omega Workshop  97 Once a Week  164 Orpen, William  7, 94–6, 128, 204 Osborne, Emily  122 The Outlook  88 n.48, 94

230 Index Painting Book (Greenaway)  166 paintings  2, 5, 28, 48–9, 53, 55, 92, 96, 125, 128, 130–2, 134, 181. See also specific entries Pall Mall Magazine  198 Pankhurst, Christabel  203 Pankhurst, Sylvia  67 Paris Salon  197, 200 Parkinson, Ethel  177 Parsons, Beatrice  155 pastels  89–90 patronage  5–8, 26, 29, 82, 86 n.14, 89, 96, 103, 129, 130–1, 134, 142–3, 150–6, 157 n.7, 191, 194 Patterson, Helen. See Allingham, Helen Pearson’s Magazine  198 Pennell, Joseph  161, 173 People’s Magazine  125 Pettie, John  63, 203 philanthropy  46 Phyllis (Jopling)  149 Pickering, Evelyn. See De Morgan, Evelyn Pictorial World  30 politics  75, 82–4 Portrait of the Artist (John)  94–5 portrait painting  29, 50, 90, 96, 103, 143–4, 154, 178 portraiture  95, 143–9, 156 postcard illustration  177–9 pottery  46, 49 Poynter, Edward  1, 3, 92, 160 n.72 press and book illustration  14, 29, 31, 162, 163–75, 178, 194 Preston, Chloe  181 Prideaux-Brune, Gertrude  122 Prinsep, Valentine  83, 146 printing  29, 161–2, 167 Proctor, Dod  38, 51 Proctor, Ernest  51 professional art/artists  2–6, 22, 40, 44, 49, 53–4, 61, 69, 80, 114–15, 169 professionalism  2, 3–6, 8–9, 11, 13, 14, 22–8, 38–9, 44, 49, 53, 60–1, 63, 68, 76–9, 84–5, 89, 97, 102–3, 107, 115, 117, 119, 133–4, 155, 182, 192–5 Psyche at the Throne of Venus (Rae)  152 publishing  14, 161, 173, 175, 177, 181

Pyke-Nott, Isabel Codrington  122 Pyle, Howard  185 n.47 Queen  171 Quinn, John  26, 151, 200 The Quiver  114 Rackham, Arthur  172 Rae, George  150 Rae, Henrietta  25, 81, 100–1, 133, 144–5, 148, 152, 156, 176, 195, 202–3 Raphael Tuck  168, 180, 199 The Reader  86 n.14 Ready for the Ball (Goodman)  130 Reason, Florence  66 Redgrave, Richard  139 n.83 remunerative work  9, 178, 194 Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848–1890 (Zakreski)  9 reputation  2, 4–6, 8, 25, 91, 99, 117–18, 120–1, 124–6, 128, 132–4, 142–3, 145–6, 149, 152, 154, 164, 165 Robert Santer’s School of Art  30 Rodd, Frances  122 Roget, John  92 Roll Call (Butler)  67, 79–80, 131, 197 Romer, Frank  200 ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (Woolf)  38 Ross, Charles  161 Rossetti, Gabriel  3, 32, 64, 150 Rossetti Studio  30 Rowe, George  200 Royal Academy (RA)  1, 5, 6–7, 13, 22–8, 33, 35 n.28, 50, 52, 53, 66–7, 75–85, 86 nn.14, 17, 87 nn.18, 23, 27, 88 nn.42, 48, 89–90, 92–3, 97, 103, 106, 114–15, 120–1, 125, 129–33, 136 nn.23, 29, 139 n.83, 146, 148, 152–3, 164, 175, 180, 192–4, 196–203 Royal Academy schools  145, 173, 187 n.87, 196, 198, 202 Royal Academy summer exhibition  98 Royal British-Colonial Society of Artists  99 Royal Charter  87 n.18 Royal Collection  197, 202

Index Royal Commission (1863)  78 Royal Female School of Art (RFSA)  24, 29, 31–2, 36 nn.50, 55, 66, 196, 199 Royal Glasgow Institute  197 Royal Institute  99, 198, 199 Royal Institute of Oil Painters  203 Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour  92, 169, 178, 197, 198 Royal Society of British Artists  91, 99, 200 Royal Society of Painter-Etchers  198 Ruskin, John  67, 199 Russell-Cotes, Merton  149, 152–3 Rutter, Frank  84 Sadler, Kate  176–8 St Nicholas Magazine  181 St Paul’s Magazine  198 St Paul’s Studios  198 Sands, Ethel  97, 111 n.53 Sargent, John Singer  118 The Saturday Review  23, 127 Scanes, Arthur  199 sculpture  44, 92 Segantini, Giovanni  100, 111 n.69 self-promotion  13, 62, 90, 107, 128, 132 Seth, Gertrude. See Massey, Gertrude Shaw, Richard Norman  62, 199 Short, Percy  25 show Sundays  59–60, 63, 67, 81 Sickert, Walter  111 n.53, 113 n.93, 122, 150 Simpson, Annie  179 single-sex art societies  102–3, 105–7, 111 n.53 Sketch  121, 174 Slade Composition Prize  94–85 Slade School of Art  23, 26–8, 33, 44, 47, 94, 96, 192, 196–7, 199–200 Smith, Jessie Willcox  185 n.47 Smith-Dorrien, Theo  92, 99 Society for Promoting the Employment of Women  30 Society for the Employment of Women  30–1

231

Society of Animal Painters  99, 201 Society of Miniature Painters  90, 92–3, 99 Society of Painter-Etchers  89, 92 Society of Painters in Watercolour  92, 196, 198 Society of Portrait Painters  90, 106, 200 Society of Women Artists (SWA)  103–6, 113 n.90, 115, 143, 154, 178, 197, 198 solo exhibitions  5, 7, 32, 82, 95, 120–2, 124–6, 129, 133, 134, 166, 196, 198 South Kensington School  171, 187 n.87, 198–9, 201 South Kensington System  30–1 Sowerby, Millicent  169 spaces  14, 38–9, 41–2, 50–1, 54, 67, 101–2, 115, 117, 120, 124–5. See also domestic space; workspaces speciality art schools  29 Spencer, Stanley  54 Spielmann, Marion  86 n.17 Sporting and Dramatic  173 Squire, Alice  176–8 Stanhope, John Roddam Spencer  197 Stanhope, Anna-Maria Spencer  47 Staples, John Charles  170 Starr, Louisa  25, 42–3, 133 Steeple, John  144 Steer, Philip Wilson  94–6 Stephens, F. G.  69 n.1, 123 stereotypes  2, 80, 119, 162 Stillman, Marie  133 Stokes, Marianne  152 The Strand  56 n.24, 127 studio  12, 38–9, 41, 54, 59, 81, 191, 193 life for women artists  60–9 married life in  41–51 Studio  121 Sugar, Fanny  100, 111 n.63 The Sunday Times  84 Swinton, George  95 Swynnerton, Annie  27, 67, 84, 133 Swynnerton, Frank  172 Tate Britain  200 tempera paintings  32

232 Index Terry, Ellen  146, 149 Thackery, William  198 Thompson, Elizabeth. See Butler, Elizabeth Thomson, David Croal  95, 126 Thurloe Studios  67 The Times  32, 75, 78, 104, 114, 122, 142, 155, 176 Tonks, Henry  26, 94–6 Trafalgar Studios  68 Tuck, Adolph  178 Tuck and Sons  176, 177 Tyrwhitt, Ursula  95 Tytler, Mary Fraser. See Watts, Mary Under the Window (Greenaway)  165, 167, 199 Upton, Florence  68 Usherwood, Paul  79 Valentine and Sons  180 valentines  31, 165, 175–81 value  3, 5, 8–10, 40, 63, 94, 120, 125, 146. See also market value Victoria (Queen)  1, 50, 80, 153, 197 Walker, Ethel  64 Walker, Fred  172 Walker Art Gallery  48, 53, 100–1, 126, 153, 197 Wallis, Henry  130, 199 Want to See the Wheels Go Round (Goodman)  130 War Artists’ Advisory Committee  202 Ward, Edward  50 Ward, Henrietta  49, 50, 67, 82–3 Ward, John  184 n.28 Ward, Marcus  125 Ward, William Hardcastle  165 watercolour paintings  28, 66, 89, 90, 122, 128, 153, 165, 167, 169, 196 Watts, G. F.  44–6, 56 n.28, 63 Watts, Mary  44–7, 51 Watts Mortuary Chapel  46 Weatherley, Fred E.  170 Whistler, James  200

Winch, W. R.  147 Windsor Magazine  129 Wolff, Albert  59 Woman’s Herald  105 The Woman’s Signal  32, 98 Women and Work  162 women artists  2–4, 6–7, 33, 141 n.111. See also individual entries in art societies  90–102, 106–7, 109 n.26 business side of  10, 12, 114–17, 119, 155 career  10, 39, 41, 43, 60, 66, 80, 114, 116, 125, 164 depreciation  75 as designers in cards and ephemera  175–81 domestic responsibilities  39, 41–2, 50, 54 education in art  21–8 engraving as profession  30–2 gaining gallery exposure  121–3, 131, 133 in illustrations  161–75, 183 n.9 interaction with commercial market  117–18 market-specific training  29–30 patronage and commissions  142–3, 150–6 portrait painting  143–9 professional identity  8–9, 11–12, 39, 44, 62, 69, 102–4, 115–17, 119, 133, 136 n.20, 163, 192, 194 relationship with art dealers  128–9, 131, 133 and Royal Academy  75–6, 78–84 single-sex art societies  102–6 studio access  38–40, 53, 60–4, 69 Women’s International Art Club (WIAC)  105–6 The Women’s Penny Paper  98 Women’s Social and Political Union  67 Women’s Work Bureau  114 Wood, Emmie Stewart  152 Wood, T. Martin  95

Index wood cutting and engraving  30–1, 33, 130–1, 161 Woodward, Alice Bolingbroke  173 Woolf, Virginia  38, 101, 117 Work and Leisure  65 workspaces  12, 42–3, 44, 53–4, 60–1, 64, 68

233

Wright, Ethel  27, 63–4, 81, 87 n.27, 148, 156, 195, 203 Wyatt, Kate  155 The Year’s Art  124 The Yellow Book  198 York Street Chambers  66

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