Framing the Hayllar Sisters a Multi-Genre Biography of Four English Victorian Painters

Framing the Hayllar Sisters A Multi-genre Biography of Four English Victorian Painters

Mary Gabrielle Hayllar

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

University of New South Wales School of Arts and the Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

August 2012 PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Hayllar

First name: Mary (K/A Marygai) Other name/s: Gabrielle

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: School of Arts & The Media Faculty: Arts & Social Sciences

Title: Framing the Hayllar Sisters: A multi-genre biography of four English Victorian painters

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE) This is a multi-genre biography of the sisters Jessica, Edith, Mary and Kate Hayllar, artists who worked in England from the 1880s until the end of the nineteenth century. It examines relevant historical details and documents based on and around the Hayllar sisters’ lives and examines their paintings closely. It includes fictional vignettes at the conclusion of each chapter based on the information and discussion in that chapter, drawing together facts and issues raised there and focusing on examples of their work. As an imaginative reconstruction of particular incidents and family relationships, the fiction has the potential to enhance an understanding of the circumstances surrounding the sisters’ art production. In the small body of scholarship on the Hayllars, they are recognised as women whose only training was at home with their father, and they are primarily perceived as artists whose representations of women supported the hegemonic belief in domestic femininity. This biography, while accepting that their lives and work embody contemporary attitudes and traditions, suggests that the sisters were in many ways modern women, who painted to earn an income, and whose pictures exploited and occasionally subverted those prevailing beliefs. The dissertation examines the Hayllar sisters in relation to their Victorian and familial context, their education, the influences affecting their work, and their reception by their contemporaries. It also looks critically at the small group of scholars who have more recently discussed examples of the sisters’ work. While their story is unique in its family aspects, it is similar to, and so throws some light on, the lives and limitations of many English women artists of this period.

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I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dissertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only). I have either used no substantial portions of copyright material in my thesis or I have obtained permission to use copyright material; where permission has not been granted I have applied/will apply for a partial restriction of the digital copy of my thesis or dissertation.'

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This is a multi-genre biography of the sisters Jessica, Edith, Mary and Kate Hayllar, artists who worked in England from the 1880s until the end of the nineteenth century. It examines relevant historical details and documents based on and around the Hayllar sisters’ lives and examines their paintings closely. It includes fictional vignettes at the conclusion of each chapter based on the information and discussion in that chapter, drawing together facts and issues raised there and focusing on examples of their work. As an imaginative reconstruction of particular incidents and family relationships, the fiction has the potential to enhance an understanding of the circumstances surrounding the sisters’ art production. In the small body of scholarship on the Hayllars, they are recognised as women whose only training was at home with their father, and they are primarily perceived as artists whose representations of women supported the hegemonic belief in domestic femininity. This biography, while accepting that their lives and work embody contemporary attitudes and traditions, suggests that the sisters were in many ways modern women, who painted to earn an income, and whose pictures exploited and occasionally subverted those prevailing beliefs. The dissertation examines the Hayllar sisters in relation to their Victorian and familial context, their education, the influences affecting their work, and their reception by their contemporaries. It also looks critically at the small group of scholars who have more recently discussed examples of the sisters’ work. While their story is unique in its family aspects, it is similar to, and so throws some light on, the lives and limitations of many English women artists of this period. Acknowledgments

This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of many people. I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my supervisors, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Anne Brewster and Assoc. Prof. Dr Alan Krell, who have given me invaluable assistance, support and guidance over the past eight years. Thanks to Dr. John Golder, Visiting Senior Research Fellow, for his clear, useful instructions on referencing. I am grateful to various institutions in Great Britain: the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, for allowing me access to their invaluable collection of nineteenth century art journals; the Royal Academy of Arts whose staff provided me with initial information and has responded generously to my requests for information ever since; the Corporation of London’s Guildhall Art Gallery, for giving me access to the work by Kate Hayllar. There are also people in England who supported me in my research. I am grateful to the descendants of Edith Hayllar who kindly took me into their homes and showed me their photograph albums and collections of Hayllar paintings. Among these, I would like particularly to acknowledge Neil McKay, now sadly deceased, who sent me copies of family documents and wrote me encouraging letters in relation to this project. Also thanks to Christopher Wood who allowed me access to his Hayllar family albums, and to Abigail Large, who gave me a copy of her MA thesis on the Hayllar sisters and photographic slides of their work. Thanks to the residents in Wallingford, in England, who assisted me: Anthony Wilder who wrote his own book about the Hayllars and generously shared all his information with me; Ray Johnson who offered me hospitality as well as all his Hayllar resources; and the owners of Castle Priory, Wallingford, who allowed me to visit the home where the Hayllar sisters did most of their work. Thanks to my friend, Sarah Sharkey, who kindly let me stay at her home on my many research visits to England. My deep gratitude goes to my family for their patient support over a period of eight years. Tom, my husband and Von, my mother, have endured eight years of preoccupation on my part, but have remained supportive. Tom has taken me on walks and holidays to keep me calm and well, and Von has produced baked dinners and casseroles. My daughters and their families have also assisted me greatly: Connie gave encouragement and useful advice, and she and George have dined and entertained us when I have not had time; Elizabeth and Poly kindly checked details of my research when I could not return to England; and Josephine read and commented helpfully on the first drafts of all my chapters. Table of Contents

Introduction...... 1 Chapter 1 A Multi-genre Biography ...... 13 Chapter 2 Victorians...... 42 Chapter 3 Education...... 83 Chapter 4 Home ...... 120 Chapter 5 Influences...... 156 Chapter 6 Reception ...... 197 Conclusion...... 220 Afterword...... 247 Bibliography ...... 251

Introduction

This biography of the Hayllar sisters, four English artists who painted at the end of the nineteenth-century, is a multi-genre text which explores the rich possibilities of the intersection between biography, art history and criticism, and fiction. The latter, an imaginative reconstruction of particular incidents and family relationships, has the potential to enhance an understanding of the circumstances surrounding the sisters’ art production. Because there is little personal information on the Hayllar sisters, the dissertation locates them in their historical, social and familial contexts, and considers how these contexts would have impacted on their art. While the sisters’ work does reflect contemporary beliefs in relation to issues such as class and imperialism, I propose that they were in many ways modern women who, rather than being aligned with the dead weight of tradition and the conservatism associated with women’s role in modernity (which is indeed a specific accusation made against the Hayllar sisters by recent scholars) were, rather, women who embodied the complexities and uncertainties of modernity by their diverse and overlapping roles and practices as family members (including their functions as daughter, sister, mother and aunt), and as consumers, workers and artists. They were modern in their willingness and capacity to earn money, their consumption of the mass media and their desire to have what Virginia Woolf famously identified as ‘a room of their own’.

While engaged in my studies of the Hayllar sisters, I visited my sister- in-law in the Australian country town of Oberon. After conversation and tea she showed me around her house. In one of the bedrooms I was amazed to see a large framed print of Jessica Hayllar’s Autumn Sunlight (1891) (Fig. 1). There was the enticing setting Jessica Hayllar often repeated in paintings, an enfilade of rooms, the view moving 2

back through open doorways to give a strong sense of depth. The walls of the rooms in the painting were a rich coral and each room was drenched by sunshine pouring in through high windows. In the nearest room a vase of tall golden sunflowers stood on the floor on the left foreground and in the right foreground was a seated woman drawing the sunflowers. Between the sunflowers and the artist was the long hallway leading through three receding rooms to a doorway. My sister-in-law had bought the picture in a print and framing shop in the western suburbs of Sydney because she loved that sense of retreating rooms and a whole world just beyond what she could see. The artist’s name was nowhere to be found, but the title Autumn Sunlight was printed on a sticker on the back of the frame. In their time the Hayllar sisters’ work was hung in the best venues; Autumn Sunlight had been hung in the 1891 Royal Academy of Art1 Summer Exhibition, and over one hundred years later their paintings are still sold in print form. Nonetheless, at times their work is not even attributed to them, and there are only a few traces of the sisters in the pages of art historical scholarship.

Jessica, Edith, Mary and Kate Hayllar were successful women painters living and working in Wallingford, a provincial English town, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Taught by their artist father, James Hayllar, and living next door to another successful artist, George Dunlop Leslie, they produced most of their work in the 1880s and 1890s. I discovered their work through finding a print by James Hayllar. The fact that the name of this family is the same as my married family name interested me, and gradually, as opportunities arose to discover more, I pursued them.

An initial search revealed that the Hayllar sisters and their father are the subject of two magazine articles and one honours thesis and that there are references to the Hayllar sisters in some more recent writing

1 Royal Academy of Art, abbreviated to R.A. 3

dedicated to women artists. Their work is displayed in a few art galleries and has been shown in some exhibitions of Victorian women’s art since the 1970s. Nonetheless, little is known about their practices, influences and the amount and range of their work.

Some original works by the sisters are hung in art galleries. A still life by Kate Hayllar, Sunflowers and Hollyhocks (1889) (Fig. 2), is in the Guildhall Art Gallery in London. Mary Hayllar’s The Lawn Tennis Season (1881) (Fig. 3) is at the Southampton Art Gallery. The provincial Wycombe Museum, in High Wycombe, has a small still life painting by Jessica Hayllar, entitled No 3 Rhododendrons (Fig. 4). In the Wallingford Town Council Collection there are two paintings by Jessica Hayllar, The Lemonade Drink (Fig. 5) and Thomas Frederick Wells Esquire,1837-1907 (Fig. 6), and one by Edith Hayllar, a portrait of her father, James Hayllar (Fig. 7). In the Rochdale Art Gallery, Lancashire, there is a work by Jessica Hayllar, There Came to My Window a Robin (1910) (Fig. 8). The National Museum of Women and the Arts in Washington DC has Edith Hayllar’s portraits of her parents, James Hayllar (1896) (Fig. 9) and Ellen Phoebe Hayllar (1896) (Fig. 10). A work by each of the four sisters was in the Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art,2 for many years on display in Battersea House, in South Chelsea, London. These works were Jessica Hayllar’s A Coming Event (1886) (Fig. 11), Edith Hayllar’s A Summer Shower (1883) (Fig. 12), Kate Hayllar’s A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever (1890) (Fig. 13), and Mary Hayllar’s For a

2 The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art was initiated in the late 1960s with the objective of collecting examples of work by the most important artists of Queen Victoria's sixty-three-year reign. To be sure that the pictures had been considered significant by the art experts of the time, the collection was limited to paintings exhibited at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition, the most important display of the work of living artists in the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century. Available at: http://www.christies.com/special_sites/forbes_feb03/pressinfo.asp (Accessed 18 September 2011). 4

Good Boy (1881) (Fig. 14). When the paintings in the Forbes Collection were sold, those by Edith and Kate Hayllar were exhibited in the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the R.A., London, in November 2003 before entering the private collection of the composer and lyricist Sir Andrew Lloyd Weber. Other exhibitions which have included works by the Hayllar sisters have taken place, but for the most part most works shown were the four paintings from the Forbes Collection.

Besides the few publicly accessible paintings mentioned above, there are some albums of small black-and-white photographs of paintings, evidently taken by the sisters, or other members of the family, to keep as a record of their work. Most albums are owned by the Hayllars’ descendants, but photographs of one set of the albums are in the Witt Library, at the Courtauld Institute, and copies of these are available on open access shelves.3 The albums photographed by the Witt Library were in the possession of Christopher Wood, a specialist in Victorian art, who wrote the first history of the Hayllar family in two articles in the April and May 1974 editions of The Connoisseur. Since Wood’s main source of information was Joan Batt, nee Mackay, Edith Hayllar’s youngest daughter, the albums in his possession were probably hers. The other photograph albums of which I am aware are still in the possession of descendants of Edith Hayllar.4 While it is not clear whether most of the sisters’ paintings are recorded in these albums, the existing paintings and photographs, and the further information held by the Witt Library in the form of photographs and cuttings from published material, particularly sales catalogues, do give an excellent overview of the Hayllars’ work and will give substance to any discussion of it

3 The Witt Library, at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art, with its photographic files of English artists, is an invaluable source of information on the Hayllar paintings. It has many photographs of them, mostly copies of the black-and-white photographs in the albums owned by Christopher Wood. There are also some coloured copies, usually cuttings from the catalogues of auctions by such dealers as Christies. These resources provide a good record of the sisters’ work and are more easily accessed than the albums, which are in private hands. 4 Examples of pages from those albums: Fig. 15, Fig. 16, Fig. 17, Fig. 18 5

There are some primary sources from the lives of the Hayllar sisters besides their own and their father’s paintings. The most important of these is a fourteen-page manuscript given to me by Neil MacKay, Edith Hayllar’s grandson. He sent me at different times two photocopies of this manuscript written in two different hands, but identical in wording. The manuscript has obviously been written from notes made by Jessica Hayllar, James Hayllar’s eldest daughter, circa 1920s or 1930s. It has been copied by descendants of Edith Hayllar. One copy is headed ‘From notes made by Jessica Hayllar’ (Hereafter referenced as Hayllar). It is primarily a biography of James Hayllar, but does include information on the art education he gave his daughters. There are various family genealogical charts also written by hand, and some letters written by Kate Hayllar to her niece, Margaret (Peggy) MacKay, the eldest daughter of Edith Hayllar.

There are newspaper articles published during the lifetime of the Hayllars. One two page article about Jessica, Kate and Edith is from the Lady’s Pictorial of December 28, 1889. Short, but substantial, and written while the family lived at Castle Priory in Wallingford, it describes the family home, art training with their father, some individual artworks, and refers to contacts with their neighbours, the Leslies, also a family of painters. This article was copied and republished by the Berks and Oxon Advertiser 31 January 1890. Writers about the Hayllars have referred to the Lady’s Pictorial article in some detail, as I will. The Berks and Oxon Advertiser and the Wallingford Times were local newspapers which included, mainly in the 1890s, occasional brief items giving information about the family, their art and their social activities.

National art periodicals of the times, such as The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, after 1890 known simply as The Artist, and The Athenaeum Journal of Literature, Science, The Fine Arts & Drama, reviewed exhibitions, including the R.A.’s Summer Exhibition. Over 6

the 1880s and 1890s these journals regularly included comments about the work of James Hayllar and his four daughters.

The earliest significant writings on the family that I will be discussing are the two articles by Christopher Wood for the Connoisseur as mentioned above. Wood concludes the first article, a summary of James Hayllar’s life and work, by saying that Hayllar was by no means a great artist, and many of his paintings stray from sentiment to sentimentality. There was a demand for such works and he was content to satisfy it. He did, however, produce some very charming observations of Victorian life, and four talented daughters, and so deserves to be remembered.5 Wood’s reference to Hayllar’s daughters as ‘talented’ was reaffirmed in his second article in which he notes that the sisters ‘were talented amateurs’, whose works ‘deserve to be remembered ... as among the best documentary records of Victorian family life in the country’.6 I propose that the Hayllar sisters were not amateurs in the modern sense, and I will argue that their paintings, more than just documentary records of their life, include subjects deliberately selected for their market appeal.

In the introduction of her honours thesis on the Hayllar sisters (1996) Abigail C. Large discusses their rediscovery in the early 1970s, as part of the revival of interest in Victorian paintings. She refers to Christopher Wood’s estimation of the sisters’ art as ‘among the best documentary records of Victorian family life in the country’,7 but supports Deborah Cherry’s contrasting view, presented in Painting

5 Christopher Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part 1: James Hayllar’, The Connoisseur, April (1974), 266-73 (p. 272). 6 Christopher Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part 2: Jessica, Edith, Mary and Kate’, The Connoisseur, May (1974), 2-9 (p. 9). 7 Abigail C. Large, ‘The Hayllar Sisters’ (unpublished BA (Joint Honours) Art History and History, Visual Art Department, The University of Wales Aberystwyth, 1996). 7

Women: Victorian Women Artists, 8 that while their paintings may seem accurate and unposed, they were instead carefully constructed. Drawing on Cherry’s analysis Large states that: [p]aintings by the Hayllar sisters can be located in the context of numerous depictions produced by nineteenth century women artists, showing middle-class women caring for children, reading, sewing, or sitting quietly at home. Many of these images were publically exhibited and they promoted domesticity as the ‘preferred mode’ of womanhood, constituting it as the ‘difference’ of femininity.9 Large appears to be in overall agreement with Cherry’s assessment that the Hayllar sisters were promoting domestic femininity and analyses their work from Cherry’s position. She includes the generally known facts about the family and some discussion of their paintings. Her examination of the influences on the Hayllar sisters includes their father, the fashion for eastern decoration and photography. At the time of writing, Large’s short thesis was the most substantial account of the family. While a good starting place for a biography of the Hayllar sisters, there is more to consider even about their lives from the various sources that do exist and certainly more to be said in relation to the iconography of their paintings.

In the more recent Victorian Artists of Wallingford, A Tale of Two Dynasties: The Hayllar and Leslie Families,10 artist and art teacher Anthony Wilder writes about the painters in that town, particularly the Hayllars and the Leslies. Wilder and his family have lived in the Wallingford area for generations, and his parents were practising artists. His knowledge of life and art in the district is therefore well- grounded. He maintained a website on Wallingford artists for some

8 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 138. 9Large, ‘The Hayllar Sisters’, p4. 10 Anthony Wilder, Victorian Artists of Wallingford, A Tale of Two Dynasties: The Hayllar and Leslie Families (Wallingford: Pie Powder Press, 2006). 8

years and gave talks focusing on these two families. In May 2002 many of the descendants of the Hayllars travelled to Wallingford to hear Wilder’s talk. Neil McKay, Edith Hayllar’s grandson wrote to me in March of that year: ‘Last Friday evening, my sister, brother, nieces, cousins, spouses and I attended a talk in the Wallingford Town Hall on the Hayllar family.’11 Wilder later showed me the slides, gave me a copy of his notes, and repeated for me the talk he presented at that gathering. He has had personal contact with one of the descendents of Mary Hayllar who lives in the town, and he has also photographed the paintings of Mary Hayllar still owned by her descendents. He has also spoken with an elderly resident of the town who knew Kate Hayllar when she was a nurse. While some of his information on the Hayllars may be sketchy and anecdotal, combined with his long-term study of the local artists it adds up to a considerable store of information.

Clarissa Campbell Orr, in the Introduction to the edited collection of essays, Women in the Victorian Art World (1995), mentions the Hayllar sisters under a sub-heading ‘Art and Women’s Work in Public and Private’. She explains that some Victorian women artists worked at home with their father, or husband, a method of training and working more prevalent at the beginning of the century, but which, for example in relation to the Hayllar sisters, still existed in the 1880s.12 This fact is regularly mentioned and sometimes, as in Orr’s book, is the only point made about the Hayllars, because art education in art schools had become more available to women throughout the nineteenth century making the Hayllars’ situation unusual. While their art education at home is often mentioned as though it is their only distinguishing feature, the real significance of that home training has never been explored. I will argue that training and working at home with its obvious advantages and disadvantages sheds light on much about the Hayllars and their art

11 Personal correspondence with the author: letter dated 14 March 2002. 12 Clarissa Campbell Orr, ed., Women in the Victorian Art World (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 11. 9

Whitney Chadwick addresses the way in which Victorian women artists, including the Hayllars, represented domestic interiors and women at home where they should be, thus confirming the status quo of middle-class women.13 As an example she includes a reproduction of Edith Hayllar’s Feeding the Swans (1889) (Fig. 19), a painting that depicts the female members of the family arranged in ascending order from the children by the river, to the decorous courting scene at the top of the stairs, to the three older women taking tea inside the summerhouse.14 Deborah Cherry also includes this image in Painting Women to confirm her argument about the Hayllars’ conservative beliefs about women’s place in society. I propose a different reading of this work in Chapter 2.

Deborah Cherry’s 1993 study of Victorian women artists remains the most significant commentary about the Hayllar sisters. Cherry cites them as examples of women artists whose training was solely at home; as women who had parental support and found it very productive to work at home; as women who produced portraits of their sisters painting; and who used their family, including their children as models.15 Cherry further refers to them in her discussion of domestic servants and imperialism. She suggests that Edith and Jessica Hayllar’s 1880s paintings representing the servants in dark, neat, uniforms, wearing caps and aprons, exemplified the idea of a well-run household and that their art contributed to the process of confirming working-class women as servants.16

Another role of the Hayllars’ art, Cherry implies, one adopted by Abigail Large in her thesis as described above, and also found in Chadwick’s work, is the important role the depiction of domestic

13 Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992). 14 See Women, Art and Society, p. 171. 15 Painting Women, pp. 22, 138, 126. 16 Painting Women, pp. 149-50. 10

themes played in defining the social spaces and rituals of middle-class women, reaffirming those values as barriers against the pressures of economic and social transformation. Cherry also claims that the depiction of these social rituals belonging to home and family were becoming more elaborate; she mentions the formal afternoon teas, and weddings with all the accessories and ceremonies being developed. Jessica Hayllar did produce at least two paintings about the wedding and the wedding dress. The white garments, the veil, the flowers symbolised the pure, virginal bride. Cherry suggests that this lavish spectacle was associated with the consumption of goods produced by the colonies, and that the idea of the purity of the bride went hand in hand with this to reflect the purity of the race.17 In stating unequivocally that the Hayllars’ paintings kept servants in their place, kept woman enshrined, but restricted, in the home, thus reinforcing the ideology underlying imperialism, Cherry portrays the Hayllars as conservative, passive women. An examination of them in their historical and social contexts, as well as a close study of their paintings, may support some of Cherry’s ideas, but my readings of the Hayllar sisters’ work will suggest that such an estimation neglects certain important factors about their lives and objectives. When these details are known it is possible to argue that while the Hayllars were women of their time, they were also modern young women looking forward to the future and becoming part of the movement towards change (at least for middle-class white women).

In Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (1987), Susan P. Casteras makes deductions about many aspects of the lives of Victorian women from a study of paintings produced at the time.18 She includes a full-page black-and-white reproduction of Jessica Hayllar’s A Coming Event (Fig.11) accompanied by a detailed discussion. Liana Piehler in Spatial Dynamics and Female

17 Painting Women, pp. 138-40. 18 Susan P. Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (London: Associated University Presses, 1987). 11

Development in Victorian Art and Novels: Creating a Woman’s Space (2003) analyses the same painting;19 these readings will be examined in my Conclusion.

In Chapter 1 of this dissertation, I discuss questions of biography and autobiography, particularly focusing on feminist concerns with traditional biography, and explaining how I have attempted to avoid the traditional approach. I also explain my inclusion of fictional excerpts as a feature of this multi-genre biography. In Chapter 2, I consider documentation on James Hayllar and what it reveals of his values and lifestyle, and the effect of these on his four artist daughters. I refer to some discourses on women’s place in the Victorian period and compare the rhetoric associated with the idea that women’s place and work should be in the home with the reality of what many women actually did with their lives. I draw conclusions about the sisters’ work, income, lifestyle and circle of acquaintances. Chapter 3 examines the art education generally available to men, the various alternatives of art education available to women and compares these to that received by the Hayllar sisters. The centrality in their education of producing art as a commodity is emphasised. In Chapter 4, I focus on the milieu in which the Hayllar sisters worked at Castle Priory, Wallingford, and the impact of this on their work. I also challenge certain critical positions taken by Deborah Cherry about the sisters’ pictures of one another painting. In Chapter 5, I discuss influences on the iconography of the Hayllar sisters’ work, including in the first instance that of their father, James Hayllar, and neighbour, George Leslie, and also subjects that appeared in the art journals and were legitimised by them, such as contemporary domestic design, New Imperialism, orientalism and photography. Chapter 6 provides an overview of the contemporary critical reception to the Hayllar sisters’ work, a matter that is touched on throughout the dissertation. In the

19 Liana F. Piehler, Spatial Dynamics and Female Development in Victorian Art and Novels: Creating a Woman’s Space, Series: Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, V20 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003). 12

Conclusion, I present critical analyses of some of the Hayllar sisters’ paintings, particularly in connection with the ‘gaze’. The Afterword outlines some final biographical details. 13

1. A Multi-genre Biography

In 2005 I learned that there was a work by Kate Hayllar, Sunflowers and Hollyhocks, 1889 (Fig. 2), at the Guildhall Art Gallery, owned by the Corporation of London. It was not then on display so I wrote asking to see the painting. A week later the curator took me to a large storage room containing rows of sliding walls covered in pictures. There in a central space, separated from the other works and arranged for viewing was Kate Hayllar’s work.

It is a still life, a dark oak table and chair against a background of a cream Chinese screen. A tall dark blue Japanese vase, decorated with gold outlines of pagodas, trees and people in kimonos, stands on the table, a few purple hollyhocks are in it and two large yellow sunflowers lie on the table in front of it. On the floor is a similar vase, holding more sunflowers and clusters of pink and purple hollyhocks. The flowers supply the title, but every object in the painting is sumptuous. The dark timber table has a carved pattern on its border and fat round decorated legs. The chair, also ornately carved, is upholstered in textured pale gold fabric. On the floor are the dark browns and creams of a Persian carpet. A strip of floral curtain, with large gold flowers on a teal blue background, stretches from the floor to the ceiling. Finally, richer and more exotic than anything else in the image, is a swatch of embroidered silk draped across the chair and arranged to fall to the floor so that half the foreground is filled with an embroidered border of pink and blue flowers against a background of pale lemony gold fabric. The painting, a celebration of the colours, shapes and textures of luxurious domestic things, glowed in that monotone storage area.

I asked the curator her opinion and she responded that the picture was one she liked particularly, although she knew almost nothing about the 14

artist. That previous curators and probably the visiting public had admired the work was supported by the fact that upstairs in the Gallery shop there were book marks, writing pads and sets of stationery all with the whole or part of Kate Hayllar’s image on it. I was given the only information the gallery had about the painting, a letter with details about the origins of the chair and table.1 Later I would send to the gallery copies of the more comprehensive information I had already collected in the hope of facilitating a broader understanding of the Hayllar sisters and their work.

Retrieving information about women’s lives from the past has been a feminist project for at least fifty years. Most reflections on this process of recovery, however, emphasise the need to do more than simply reveal a tradition of women’s achievements. Feminist writers often argue the need to also expose the forces that have worked to suppress and/or neglect women’s lives and their accomplishments. Kristen B. Neuschel puts it thus: of greater importance to the task of constructing a history of women has been the theoretical task … of investigating gender as a category of historical analysis and as a component of human culture through time. … Attention to the construction of gender roles and ideologies about gender in past societies has revealed material and ideological processes by which women’s experience in the past was shaped.2

The noted art historian, Griselda Pollock, works to undermine the assumptions upon which the discourse of art history has been built and

1 In a letter dated 7 July 1997 and addressed to Vivien Knight, Guildhall Art Gallery, Aldermanbury, Mathew Winterbottom, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Furniture and Woodwork at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, described the chair and table depicted as unexceptional, their ‘style and quality indicat[ing] standard good quality middle-class furnishings’. A copy of the letter is held by the author. 2 Kristen B. Neuschel, ‘Creating A New Past: Women and European History’, in Women and a New Academy Gender and Cultural Contexts, ed. by Jean F. O’Barr (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), pp. 8-21. (p.9.) 15

to expose them as ideological assumptions and not truths.3 She accepts the importance of reinscribing women artists, but states that it is insufficient to include stories of token artists to fill the gaps in the canon, which has been built on the assumption that men were the artists and that women must always be outside this category because they will always be that other, ‘women artists’.4

The title, ‘Framing the Hayllar Sisters’, not only places the sisters in their social, cultural and familial background, but also points to the fictional vignette at the end of each chapter, which serves to ‘frame’ the sisters in the colloquial sense of ‘making up’, or contriving evidence to incriminate falsely. I have no intention of incriminating the Hayllar sisters, but reference to this informal meaning draws attention to the imagined, contrived nature of the vignettes.

In order to develop an appropriate form in which to tell this story I refer to the difficulties women have experienced with both autobiography and biography, as writers and as subjects. I discuss women’s difficulties in the representation of life and self in these traditional generic forms. Strategies for avoiding these difficulties have lead to the development of this multi-genre biography. Autobiography has been of interest to feminist theorists for some decades. Sidonie Smith states that successful autobiography has conventionally been based on the belief that the auto-biographer is a significant person in the arena of public life and discourse. She continues: Yet patriarchal notions of women’s inherent nature and consequent social role have denied or severely proscribed her access to the public space; and male distrust and consequent repression of female speech have either condemned her to public silence, or profoundly

3 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 2003). 4 Pollock, p.55. 16

contaminated her relationship to the pen as an instrument of power. As she presumes to claim a fully human identity by seeking a place in the public arena, therefore, she transgresses patriarchal definitions of female nature by enacting the scenario of male selfhood.5 Women have been silenced because generally they have been denied a role in public life. Furthermore, the traditional autobiographical model operated to confirm patriarchal criteria as to which characters and which experiences are important. These have not given women a structure, a language, or a voice that appropriately reflects their own experience.

The literary history and critical theory of autobiography have analysed how women have been silenced, or have spoken within the framework of patriarchal discourse. Many of these problems that women have experienced with autobiography also exist with biography. The conventional belief that the story should be about the exceptional life of a subject successful in the arena of public life has existed for both genres, because the traditional model for biography is also a patriarchal one. Smith points to the difficulties of diverging from this model, when she describes it as ‘potentially catastrophic’ for a woman to write about herself as a rebel: To call attention to her distinctiveness is to become ‘unfeminine’. To take a voice and to authorise a public life are to risk loss of reputation. Hence distinctiveness may never be attractive in and of itself.6 For a woman ‘to take a voice’ by writing a biography, and for her to ‘authorise a public life’, by deciding what life is sufficiently distinctive to write about, has therefore also been ‘potentially catastrophic’ for both the female author and female subject of biography.

5 Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), p.7. 6 Smith, p.10. 17

Biography’s current popularity suggests that it plays an important role in contemporary culture. It proliferates in all forms of media, in books and magazines, on television and film. David Ellis affirms this, stating: ‘In the Times Literary Supplement more space is occupied by reviews of new biographies than of new fiction.’7 Liz Stanley explains how the following conventional aspects of biography have been shown to be problematic for women as biographers and as biographical subjects. (1) Traditionally biography has been about ‘great’ people, usually but not always men, and their ‘great’ achievements. (2) The narrative of the biography has been linear, telling the person’s life in a chronological order of events, often from the cradle to the grave. (3) Also assumed is the idea that the subject had a unitary and coherent self, which can be delineated in the text. (4) There is an assumption that the text is referential of the subject, in other words there is a relationship between the written product of biographical research and the lives it investigates. Biography usually presupposes that the events of the subject’s life are recreated so that what was experienced in relationships and events is accurately described for the reader. Furthermore, Stanley emphasises the need to recognise that the biographer, ‘a socially-located person, one who is sexed, raced, classed, aged, to mention no more’ produces only ‘one more interpretation from among a range of possibilities.’ 8

This multi-genre biography uses certain strategies to avoid these difficulties. The traditional assumption that a fitting subject for biography is a person who has made an important contribution in the arena of public life and discourse, has resulted in the traditional subject of biography representing the powerful in society, the wealthy or famous, usually white, upper-class men. Since most women have

7David Ellis, Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 1. 8 Liz Stanley, The auto/biographical I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 6-11. 18

until recently been denied powerful positions in the public arena, biographers of women must advocate a belief in the value of a range of different lives and their stories. Also the focus on the ‘great’ biographical subject has often exaggerated his achievements and tended to ignore the contributions and achievements of others. It has especially tended to exclude the important role of social groups, such as family, friends and professional colleagues that form essential supports in and give meaning to a person’s life.

Alternatively, my biography of the Hayllar sisters places their familial and communal experiences at the centre of the narrative: it focuses on women living in regional England, where their participation in society centred on their local community. The generally domestic subject of their work, situated in a small geographical area around their home testifies to their confined life style. They were skilful painters, and while their work was hung in prestigious galleries and reviewed in the art journals, they continued to live a quiet life in the country away from the London art world and any personal recognition they might have received there.

The linear narration of events has been an important aspect of traditional biography. The conventional narrative structure of biography has been based on an examination of the child and of the parents and other forces that shaped the child into a ‘great’ person, and the chronological listing of events and achievements of that person. This approach implies causality between events that may of course be quite inaccurate. Any life is more than a simple progression of events; any one event may be overdetermined by many complex events, feelings and relationships that intertwine on any day in a life. The linear biographical narrative also tends to focus on the life of the subject to the exclusion of those who move briefly in and out of the central story. Such a simple representation denies the richness and complexity of a real life, in which other people provide the obstacles, the influences and the support that shape the subject’s life. 19

These ‘other people’, possibly those who have given essential moral and day-to-day support to the biographical subject, such as a wife, have sometimes been only briefly included in traditional biography, or sometimes referred to only in footnotes. In my biography, in an allusion to this practice, I have made references to Grace Hayllar, the sister who did not paint professionally, in footnotes. This relegation to the footnotes occurs in the core section of the text, but not in the fiction sections where I have included her as much as any member of the family. In such a family of hard working professionals, Grace could have been the daughter who most supported her mother, who took on many of her sisters’ household tasks and maybe even enhanced the respectability of the family by being the daughter disassociated from any money-making activity in relation to painting.

I have avoided a simple linear narration of their lives because of a paucity of information, but more importantly because the brief interlude when they were all active painters is the focus of this account. It is the effects of the Victorian context on their work, their art training, their conditions of art production, the influences on their iconography, the reception of the art and some close description and discussion of the paintings which are my focus in this dissertation.

The chapters are organised around the issues just listed, rather than forming part of chronological narrative of the sisters’ life stories. Each chapter is structured so that it begins with a detailed description of one of the sisters’ paintings. The iconography of the work then leads into key issues in the chapter. Fictional vignettes related to the production of particular art works by one or more of the sisters conclude each chapter drawing together features and ideas mentioned in that chapter and maintaining the focus on the sisters’ painting and the socio- cultural issues that they raise about their lives and the period in which they worked. 20

While I do not suggest the causal relationships between events in the Hayllars’ lives and I do not delineate a chronological description of significant life events, I do draw conclusions and make links between events and characters based on the documentary material. There can be no biography without such conclusions; however, their status as informed guesses and imaginative conjecture, rather than fact, is always emphasised.

I only give a brief sketch of the lives of the sisters before they started to paint and after their painting careers. I mention dates of births and deaths and I briefly refer to husbands and children, in the case of Edith and Mary who married. My biography is about four sisters and their painting at a particular artistically productive period of their lives. Like novels of the period it focuses on the women’s lives before they married. I have included references to parents, neighbours and many other factors that may have been significant to the sisters and their work. While I can only guess at the effect of these factors on the sisters and their paintings, the fictional episodes extrapolated from what is known about them fill out this aspect of the narrative. Each episode centres on one of the four sisters, but usually includes at least one other sister. In this way I hope to reflect the intimacy of their lives, living in the same house, painting one another, or painting the same treasured household objects, usually examples of those valued by the Victorian middle-class.

I am interested in the assemblage of fragments of the story rather than the smooth uninterrupted progression of lives characteristic of traditional biography. The fictional episodes take into account what is known about the sisters, but they are transparently fictions. Their inclusion also suggests the fragmented nature of many women’s lives, characterised by their multiple priorities over the course of a whole life, but also on any one day. Parents, children, a partner, housework, paid work and even time spent tending to one’s own interests all ensure that a woman’s time and attention will be continually divided 21

into relatively brief periods. This is also a reminder that for many creative women, their art was not at the centre of their lives, but one of several significant activities that occupied them.

The use of fiction in autobiography and biography is significant because it was in novels that women writers made the first successful public attempts to describe their lives. Liz Stanley identifies nine types of writing about lives and includes fiction as two of them.9 One is fiction built using autobiographical information and the other is fiction built on biographical information. The latter is what I attempt here in the fictional vignettes centred on biographical and contextual details from the lives of the Hayllar sisters. While it may not be recognised that a character in a novel and her fictional experiences are based on a person who exists or has existed, an examination of the obstacles that character encounters and the experiences she endures have sometimes revealed legitimate obstacles and issues in the lives of real women. Presented through the medium of fiction such obstacles and issues have often been more clearly understood and have generated more empathy than if they had been described in autobiography and biography. Women fiction writers demonstrated realities of women’s lives without appearing either self-aggrandizing, or complaining, both accusations levelled at women who wrote about their own lives.

Autobiography written by women of the nineteenth century and earlier presented many difficulties. Not only was the matter of women’s lives seen as insignificant, but the act of writing about it was regarded as immodest and boastful. There were women who wrote autobiographies; however, they could not choose the common path of autobiography with its unconcealed focus on the ‘significant’ aspects of the life. Women were occupied with the task of having to justify writing about their lives. Their determination to be considered decent

9 The auto/biographical I,p.24. 22

and unpretentious, often resulted in their biographies being distorted both in material and style, so that the genuinely significant issues in their lives were hardly represented at all, or discovered only by reading between the lines and noting the tone. In The Private Lives of Victorian Women, Valerie Sanders presents many of the excuses offered by Victorian women for writing their life story: it was written for the glory of God, who had provided the inspiration to write, which was still a dangerous approach since it suggested excessive self- absorption; it was written to prevent some unscrupulous biographer adapting aspects of the life story into something strange and unacceptable; it was written as a series of letters directed to a friend, or to one’s child or children, thus appearing to be aimed at an acceptably small, personal audience; it was structured as a family history, justifiably supplemented by personal journal entries in which one could present oneself more boldly; it was written to reflect on the family, particularly the cheerful aspects of life, appropriate for a woman’ subject matter.10

Margaret Oliphant (1828-1897) and Elizabeth Sewell (1815-1906) were successful Victorian novelists, who also wrote autobiographies. The difficulties they had in representing themselves in a way that reflected the vital realities of their lives illustrate the problems with the genre for Victorian women. Oliphant wrote about her economic and family commitments, significant because she supported her own family and her brothers and their families, by her writing. Also she believed that she should write primarily about amusing things in her autobiography.11 However, while the autobiography of a successful novelist might be expected to focus on the development of the writing, Oliphant did not feel justified in doing this because it would be viewed as conceited. Sanders quotes statements by Oliphant, however,

10Valerie Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 75-102. 11 Margaret Oliphant, The Autobiography and Letters of Mrs M.O.W. Oliphant, ed. Mrs Harry Coghill (London and Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1899), p. 65, quoted by Sanders, p. 87. 23

which reveal her pleasure in writing. Oliphant admits to being ‘ever more really satisfied by some little conscious felicity of words than by anything else’, but she is still careful to deny a professional approach: I have always had my sing-song, guided by no sort of law, but my ear, which was in its way fastidious to the cadence and the measure that pleased me; but it is bewildering to me in my perfectly artless art, if I may use the word at all, to hear the elaborate ways of forming and enhancing style, and all the studies for that end.12 Oliphant’s family life, a more acceptable topic at the time, was a tragic one. As one by one her family, including all her children, died, her writing kept collapsing into grief. This added an unevenness of tone to the already random nature of the subject matter. Further to this, Sanders suggests that Oliphant’s concern about her audience’s judgment caused her to give her real opinion and then to qualify it to make it acceptable: ‘Her problem throughout the narrative is to say what she feels, while retaining the sympathy and trust of her always potentially critical audience’.13 This is evident when Oliphant describes how much she had assisted her brother’s children, then stops herself, apologising for boring her audience. ‘But it’s not likely that such family detail would be of interest to the public’. Then she qualified this again, saying: ‘And yet as a matter of fact, it is exactly those family details that are interesting, - the human story in all its chapters’.14

Elizabeth Sewell, another successful Victorian novelist, structured her autobiography as a family history, including her journal entries as a supplement. Her autobiography centres on family relationships and financial difficulties. Like Oliphant, as a successful novelist she became the main financial support of her brothers and their children. Also, as with Oliphant, Sewell’s pleasure in her writing shows through

12 Oliphant, Autobiography, p.86, quoted by Sanders, p.90. 13 Sanders, p. 90. 14 Oliphant, Autobiography, p.122, quoted in Sanders, p.91. 24

her protestations. She claims that she was going to make her motherless nieces the one interest of her life, replacing ‘any desire for literary society, or any craving for literary fame’.15 The words ‘desire’ and ‘craving’ suggest Sewell’s passion for her writing and the world of literary society. Her interest is highlighted here in her denial of it. Her need to express herself according to the social conventions of the time was also often in conflict with her real feelings. For example she describes her father as ‘irritable and cold-mannered, but most benevolent and really tender-hearted’.16 Sanders describes Sewell’s prose as following this ‘formula of prohibited outspokenness followed by dutiful apology’.17

Victorian women had to reassure their audiences that they had a morally acceptable reason for writing an autobiography, or imply that it was not really an autobiography at all. Autobiographers who were professional writers assured their audience that they had not been hardened or masculinised by their literary career, by only referring briefly to their practice of writing. The shape and style of their work was sometimes contorted so that honest opinions were often excused or changed by a statement that reflected the imperatives brought to bear on how women should think and write. The result was often an ambivalent tone which to a contemporary reader can appear insincere.

Their approaches to autobiography show that it was an area fraught with obstacles for women. However, Charlotte Riddell’s novel A Struggle for Fame (1883) examined the joys and trials of a woman novelist in a way that autobiographies did not.18 It traced the fate of its protagonist, a fiction writer, Glenarva Westley, who was determined to write in spite of a lack of training or encouragement. The character, Westley, published anonymously and when her name was revealed

15 Elizabeth Sewell, The Autobiography of Elizabeth M. Sewell, ed by her niece, Eleanor L. Sewell (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1907), p.84, quoted by Sanders, p.84. 16 Sewell, Autobiography, p. 9, quoted in Sanders, p. 85. 17 Sanders, p. 85. 18 Charlotte Riddell, A Struggle For Fame (London: Richard Bentley, 1883). 25

she felt violated by the public exposure. In the narrative she was criticised for ambition, for her choice of subject matter and later for her success. This illustrates how women’s fiction can reveal the difficulties encountered by successful creative women better than their autobiographies.

Fiction may not have provided an outlet for women to present all their immediate and intimate life concerns, but it did provide the chance for them to focus on important aspects of their lives. Courtship and marriage, for example, subjects about which they were emphatically silent in autobiographical accounts, dominated women’s fiction. Oliphant, in her autobiography, refers to her refusal of her husband’s proposal, and of changing her mind six months later. ‘“It is not a matter into which I can enter here,” she insists tartly’.19 This omission, however, emphasises how women autobiographers presented incomplete accounts of reality, because finding a husband was a matter crucial to women’s life. Marriage provided them with support and security, and unmarried women who needed to work to support themselves, or else be dependent on male relatives, often lived difficult, deprived lives. The stuff of women’s lives, often rejected in autobiography, found a place in fiction. It seemed apposite to me therefore to include episodes of fiction in my biography of the Hayllars, as it has been a form of writing in which women have been able to effectively represent themselves and the significant and compelling aspects of their lives.

Writing fictional fragments about the creation of particular paintings by the Hayllar sisters is one method I use here, but there are pitfalls in this approach. The idea that the day to day lived experiences of the embodied life of biographical subjects is lost more in fiction than in traditional biography is one that Drusilla Modjeska presents in

19 Sanders, p. 74. 26

Stravinsky’s Lunch (1999). She considers the question of casting the story of the Australian painter Grace Cossington Smith into fiction: It would be a great deal easier if she were a character of fiction, if I could show her to you as a young woman playing tennis in the garden in the first summer of the Great War, the ping of the ball as she lobbed it back across the net, or running with one of her sisters towards their mother watching from a chair on the veranda. Modjeska considers a few fictional scenarios, but firmly rejects the idea: The danger of turning real people into fiction is that fiction takes life from wherever it can find it, so the fictional being swells with well-nourished certainty while the original person, the person we want to understand with all the hesitations and awkwardness of real life, can be replaced in our imaginations as if she were indeed real; the necessary mystery is lost and, knowing too much, we forget how little we know.20

Instead Modjeska represents Cossington Smith using the biographer’s tools, referring in detail to all the evidence she can find, quoting from letters and interviews, and supplementing these with her own readings of the paintings. Nonetheless, Modjeska admitted that Cossington Smith’s private life remained elusive: Her paintings swell with the superabundance of life, they are the wonder of her, they are absolutely her, or at any rate hers; but the actuality of her daily life, her daily being slips away behind them. Grace Cossington Smith, once a sister, a daughter, a sweet Christian lady, and now a cultural icon, exists in an extreme state of contingency. I can’t tell you how she walked, or laughed, or sneezed. I

20 Drusilla Modjeska, Stravinsky’s Lunch (Sydney: Picador, 1999), pp. 209-11. 27

can’t tell you what was in her head when she painted Trees.21 Modjeska recognises what she does not know and she keeps imagining, empathising with and extrapolating from what she does know, or what she can see from the paintings themselves. She writes of the painting Firewheel in a Glass Bowl (1937), explaining how it seems to her a metaphorical self-portrait done by the artist: This to my mind is as close as Grace gets to a self-portrait during that decade. It isn’t of course a self-portrait at all, but it is how I have come to see her at this point in her life. The fiery energy of the firewheel is fed by the water we can see in the glass bowl; fire and water are thus contained – not retrained - but given a shape that is at once sufficient unto itself, absolutely satisfying, and reaching out towards the frame like the long knobbly leaves that could, but don’t, topple the composition.22 This reading of a painting as a self portrait is intriguing; however, Modjeska’s attempt to capture Cossington Smith here is not far removed from fiction. It is generated by the biographer trying to explain the passion and character of her subject in some concrete way from the limited factual information she has gathered; ultimately her description is her own imaginative reading of the situation.

Both biography and fictional biography, however, have one common function that may prove valuable in the case of the biographies of artists and writers, in that by bringing the reader closer to the biographical subjects and their art production, they may bring the reader closer to the subjects’ work. This is, therefore, another justification for my including fiction in the biography of the Hayllar sisters.

21 Stravinsky’s Lunch, p. 211. 22 Stravinsky’s Lunch, p. 203. 28

While it was not appropriate for Victorian women to write autobiography, many who were not professional writers wrote about themselves and their affairs in letters, journals and diaries. Most fictional episodes included in this dissertation are presented from the third-person limited point of view, a method of storytelling in which the narrator knows only the thoughts and feelings of a single character while other characters are presented only externally. Third person limited narration grants a writer more freedom than first person but less than third person omniscient narration. However, one fictional fragment in this biography is in the form of a diary and another of a letter. This is done to represent the importance of these traditional forms of women’s life writing.

A distinguishable motif has been given to each sister in the fictional episodes, to create a sense of difference between the women. Kate, the youngest of the Hayllar sisters exhibited her work for 13 years. However, when in 1900 at the age of 35 she was still unmarried, she left home and took up nursing. Lois Jenkins, granddaughter of Edith Hayllar ‘has clear memories of Great Aunt Kate taking the children swimming in the river and drying them all vigorously afterwards’.23 Kate seemed to care about her meticulously executed still-lifes, but that adverb, ‘vigorously’ and her career in nursing influenced my fictional presentation of her as a person with physical energy, perhaps more interested in doing something for people than being a painter.

Mary Hayllar painted approximately 24 paintings in the short period of five years between 1880 and 1885 when she married. Her story provides evidence of how marriage put an end to women’s painting careers, in Mary’s case possibly ending the exercise of a more adventurous and innovative talent than that of her sisters. I have based my fictional representation of Mary on the evidence of her talent, as

23 Wilder, p. 66. 29

well as on her youth when she painted, being only 17 when she first had work hung in the Royal Academy of Arts.24

Edith Hayllar painted at least 43 paintings in the two decades of the 1880s and 1890s, until 1897 when she married.25 She produced still- lifes and images of women and children at home; however, she moved beyond these subjects, producing images of the different classes, of men and of sports. As her images of outdoor activities are greater in number than any of her sisters, I have based my fictional representation of her on what I have imagined must have been her desire to push beyond the limitations of the home and produce images showing a less confined lifestyle.

Jessica Hayllar, the most prolific of the Hayllar sisters, produced at least 84 works and exhibited many of them from 1879 to 1915. She remained with her parents, moving with them to a much smaller home in Bournemouth in 1899. After her mother’s death she stayed with her father and looked after him. James Hayllar seems to have stopped painting sometime in the 1890s, but Jessica, although crippled in a carriage accident in 1900, continued painting and exhibiting into the twentieth century, possibly supporting herself and her father. She never married and she lived with her father until he died in 1920. In spite of producing more works than her sisters, she presented a narrower range of subject matter, specialising in still life, flowers and images of women and children in the home. As the most prolific artist, her work is discussed most often in this biography and more fictional excerpts are from her point of view. Her motif is that of a dedicated artist, and also that of a nurturing oldest sister.

While the fragments of fiction contribute to the absence of a continuous linear structure they are arranged in chronological order.

24 The Royal Academy of Arts, discussed in more detail in Chapter 3 and Chapter 6, was the most important art venue in England. 25 This information is garnered from pictures that come up for sale, or are referred to in reviews, programs, books and from the copies of photographs in the Witt Library. 30

This evokes the passing of time and of development in the characters. Jessica is represented as more submissive in the early 1880s, but by the end of the decade when she is older and has more experience and success, she is shown with more confidence and speaks to her father with more self-assurance and more humour.

Returning to the conventional aspects of biography that Liz Stanley mentioned as problematic for women as biographers and as biographical subjects, I want to focus again on the assumption in conventional biography that the subject had a unitary, coherent and invariant self, which can be caught and accurately and unambiguously represented. However, as a biographer I want to acknowledge that there is no such unitary self. In this biography of the Hayllar sisters it is in the fictional episodes that I reveal that the characters may have had conflicting opinions about particular matters and particular people. In an episode about Jessica’s production of the painting Christmas Comes but Once a Year (1881) (Fig. 20), I make it quite clear that she feels obliged to heed her father’s advice. She is grateful for his advice and interest, but nonetheless feels that he does not understand her intentions for the painting. Also she is a different person in her relationship to her father than she is in her relationship to her younger sister. Since in the fictional episodes the production of various paintings is written from the point of view of different sisters, it becomes clear that besides a person feeling as though she is a different person herself at various times, she can also be seen differently by different people.

The reconstruction of a life, with the assumption that the text is directly and unmediatedly referential of the subject, has been problematised by critics such as Liz Stanley. Traditionally biographers have assumed that by researching aspects of the subject’s life and presenting those in a meticulous and thoughtful reconstruction that they can correctly depict the biographical subject’s life. However, they have simply presented one version of what may have happened. 31

This can be related to a further noteworthy aspect of biography discussed by Liz Stanley, which is that the biographer herself who selects the biographical subject, the authorities consulted and decides how the biography is to be constructed, thus produces her particular version of the subject’s life. As the biographer, with my own sex, age, personal history and social and cultural background, I am aware that I am going to produce my own version/understanding/imaginative conception of the Hayllars’ lives. Thus I insert myself into the biography and offer here a dramatised autobiographical fragment which connects me to the biographical subjects. ======

Why the Hayllar Sisters?

‘It’s so warm and cheery,’ said my friend. ‘I’ll buy it.’ We were in a small shop crammed with brick-a-brac in Bermagui, a town on the south coast of New South Wales, but I refused to even glance at the small, framed print my friend was showing me. ‘Not now, for goodness sake. The kids are in the car! Let’s go.’ ‘Hang on!’ My friend bought the print, and later at the hotel, over a glass of wine, produced it for us to examine. It was only small, about ten by eight inches, surrounded by a white border and framed in a shiny mock wooden frame. In that small picture there were five children, a mother and two grandparent-aged people, all sitting or standing in a low ceilinged room. In the centre of the painting was a small window, through which light flooded, lighting up a spherical wreath of red and green flowers being held up by the mother and a young child, and admired by almost everyone else. The characters were dressed in nineteenth- century clothes, the little girls in black stockings and pink dresses 32

covering the knees, the women in long dresses and aprons, the old man in some sort of smock and cap. We peered at the picture. ‘What’s it about?’ I asked. ‘What’s the odd flower arrangement? Nice warm room, though, red brick floor, lots of sunlight.’ ‘May Day.’ My friend read out the title. ‘Some sort of May Day celebrations, I guess. Oh, look! James Hayllar (1829-1920). A relation of yours maybe!’ I grabbed the print and peered at the tiny inscription under the title. “How about that! The same spelling and everything! Tom, have you heard of any painting relatives?” Tom hastily denied any knowledge of his extended family and their activities, but I held the print tightly, excited by the idea of a painting Hayllar. ‘Let me have it. I’ll buy it from you.’ My friend, however, insisted on keeping the picture and hanging it in her own home. Whenever I noticed it I commented that it should really be mine since I had married a Hayllar. When that approach was not successful I tried another, pointing out that it was only a tiny print, difficult to see and, on top of that it had a faux wooden frame. The print remained hanging on the wall of my friend’s house. It was Germaine Greer who later introduced me formally to the Hayllar sisters. Sometime in the 1980s I participated in the founding of the Jessie Street Women’s Library, Australia’s first library dedicated to collecting and preserving Australian women’s writing. An exciting project! After the first few meetings we rented a tiny room high in the Trades and Labour Council Building in Liverpool Street, Sydney. There we stored the beginnings of the collection, a few cardboard boxes full of books. Among them was a hardback edition of The Obstacle Race, by Germaine Greer and I asked permission to borrow it. There was some reluctance to allow the infant collection to be endangered, but it was finally decided that the principles of the library, propagating the writings of women particularly among women, should be practised from the very birth of the library. Thus I became one of the Library’s first borrowers. The book was a good 33

read, interesting, full of new information at least for me, and full of pictures. ‘The Magnificent Exception’, the chapter about Artemisia Gentileschi, fascinated me. Everyone has heard of her now and there is at least one novel and one film allegedly based on her life, but I had never heard of her before I read Germaine Greer’s book in the 1980s. One of the chapters about women’s art in nineteenth century England mentioned the Hayllar sisters and the fact that they had been hung in the Royal Academy of Arts. It included a black and white print of a painting, Feeding the Swans by Edith Hayllar, in which family members of different ages gathered on the steps of a summerhouse, which lead to the dark depths of a river. Greer suggested that the deep dark waters at the foot of the steps, with rippled reflections of the swans and the children, represented the subconscious repressed desires of the painter. 26 A few years later I saw the same painting in another book about women and art. The text referred to the Hayllar sisters as being among those women artists whose ‘paintings of domestic interiors all contributed to shaping representations of domesticity without challenging widely held beliefs.’ It referred to Feeding the Swans as emphasising ‘the symmetry and order of the well-run household’, and to ‘the orderly human pairings within and the clearly demarcated stages of female life’.27 The spelling of Hayllar, with an ‘a’ as in ‘Hay’, rather than an ‘e’ as in ‘Hey! is what interested me. It was an unusual spelling and in Australia every person whose surname had that spelling of Hayllar was related quite closely, within a generation or two at the most, to my husband.

26 I have always believed that this first information I received about the Hayllar sisters was in Germaine Greer’s The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (1979). Everything I have written here is exactly as I remember it. When I looked up the book again to get the wording right and reference the page number there was no mention of the Hayllars, although the chapter on Artemisia Gentileschi is as I remember it. It is as though I imagined the whole thing. In retrospect I think the book must have been Whitney Chadwick’s Women, Art and Society (2007), although she makes no reference to the unconscious. Thus the unreliability of memory in autobiography and biography is unintentionally highlighted. 27 Chadwick, p. 85. 34

I mentioned my discovery about the sisters to Tom, who still showed no interest. He advised me rather, to stay away from anything to do with the extended family, as he really could not face the exhausting social occasions my interest might generate. In 1996 Tom, my three daughters and I travelled to England for the Christmas holidays. As we walked down Piccadilly wrapped in overcoats, gloves and hats against the icy winter weather, heading for the delights of high tea at Fortnum and Masons, we passed The Royal Academy of Arts. ‘Oh!’ I halted and gazed through the gates. ‘We should have contacted them about the Hayllar sisters! You know, written them a letter saying we would call in or something. To see what we find out!’ ‘Mm,’ everyone appeared to be agreeing with me, but they were still walking, willing me to forget the matter and move forward to shiny silver teapots full of steaming scented tea and china cups and saucers, and three tiered cake plates piled high with sandwiches, biscuits and cakes. ‘Maybe we could just go in and make some enquiries,’ I said. ‘It seems a shame to miss this opportunity.’ I turned towards the entrance. ‘It might be interesting.’ There were strong protests. ‘Why? What reason would you give?’ ‘Hi, my name’s Hayllar, so I’d like to look up a few artists who just happen to have the same name! Oh please!’ ‘I mean, how embarrassing!’ ‘What about the English tea we were promised?’ ‘Yeah, what about it? It’s freezing standing here!’ Tea at Fortnum and Masons was expensive and delicious, but I promised myself that next time I came to England I would write a letter to the Royal Academy first, introduce myself, and ask if I could come and investigate the Hayllar sisters. Three years later I was in England again, this time by myself, with a whole day in London before returning to Australia. Again I found myself outside the Royal Academy. Of course I had not written, 35

neither had I thought of it again, but there it was and I was sure at that stage that Germaine had mentioned the Hayllar sisters in relation to this institution. It was my only lead. Before I had time to feel self conscious and foolish I turned and walked briskly through the Academy gates, across the forecourt, up the steps and into the foyer. People were moving up the next staircase to see the current exhibition, but I looked around, saw the information desk and walked over to it. ‘Can I help you?’ The accent was so plummily English, that my Australian accent sounded doubly pungent in comparison. ‘Yes, please. I would like to make a few enquiries about some women who exhibited here in the late 1800s.’ ‘And what time is your appointment with the library?’ ‘Well, I… I haven’t actually made it yet.’ ‘It is essential to make an appointment. Just write explaining the details of your research, and I am sure the library will be able to assist you.’ Sometimes it is better to be an ignorant, pushy colonial. ‘Well, that’s no good because I am going back to Australia tomorrow. I may not be back for years. This is my only chance to do this research.’ I was pleased that she had given me the word ‘research’. It gave my spontaneous enquiry more weight. ‘I’m sorry, but it is essential that you make an appointment.’ The young women gave me one of those no eye contact dismissive smiles and started moving towards another patron ready with a request. ‘No, wait!’ She turned and focused on me again. Was there a faint look of annoyance in her expression? I needed to improve my whole performance. ‘I realise how inconvenient this enquiry is,’ I said smiling and refining my accent as much as possible, ‘And that the Library of the Royal Academy must be very busy.’ Was I having any effect? ‘Would it be possible to ring the library now to see if they might have a minute any time today for a brief enquiry?’ 36

Reluctantly she made a call, then she placed a telephone on the reception desk and I was connected to a librarian. Three or four people, all sure to have more reasonable and acceptable requests for the Enquiries Desk than mine, stood in the queue listening to me while waiting to make their enquiry. I turned away as far as the phone cord would allow and asked my question as quietly as possible. ‘My name is Marygai Hayllar.’ I did not announce my nationality. The English always knew where I was from. I explained that I was doing some research on a family of Victorian women artists who had been hung in the Academy. ‘What is their name?’ asked a pleasant male voice. ‘Uh, Hayllar.’ I was embarrassed that the artists’ family name was the same as my own. I felt sure that I appeared to be a desperate Australian with an unsavoury background trying to find some respectable ancestry in the mother country. ‘Just a minute please.’ There was a pause, and then, ‘I am sorry, no Hayllars have been members of the Royal Academy.’ ‘Maybe not members, but their paintings were definitely hung here. One of the names is Edith Hayllar, and the father James Hayllar was also an artist. He had paintings hung in the Academy too. I read about them in a book by Germaine Greer.’ Oh, God, naming another outspoken, pushy Australian! There was a long silence at the other end of the line. I wondered what I had been thinking when I came in here with so little information. ‘Just catch the lift to the third floor and say that you have an appointment to see James. The library is on the left as you come out of the lift.’ Such a delightfully friendly voice! Feeling vindicated, even a little smug, I thanked the receptionist for her assistance and followed James’ instructions. He was waiting for me at the library door; a young man, with a pleasant face, a fashionable haircut and a gold stud earring in one ear. He was quite excited. ‘I’ve found them. The father and four sisters! Look!’ 37

He lead me into a room lined with dark wooden book shelves, filled with impressively bound volumes, and sat me at a long polished wooden table in front of an open book. At the top of the open pages was the heading ‘The Royal Academy Exhibitors’, the pages were numbered 42 and 43, and there they were, father and four daughters with the dates they exhibited and the names of the paintings exhibited on those dates. Edith’s full tally was not there, it was continued from page 41. Then James, Jessica, Kate and Mary were there with so many paintings between them that they filled both pages. I was pleased, but James was delighted. He looked up another book, a dictionary of British artists, and discovered even more. ‘There’s an article about the Hayllars, by Christopher Wood. Oh, not here, but in The Connoisseur April-May 1974. An art magazine,’ he explained to my blank face. ‘If we had it, I would photocopy it for you, but there will be a copy at the Westminster Library. It’s not far. A short walk.’ It was after midday, and I had been walking around London all morning on tired, sore feet. I couldn’t walk much further. James read my mind. ‘Really! Not much more than five minutes away. Wait here a moment.’ He took the two books with him and left me in that large quiet room. I sat back in the chair looking around and feeling pleased to have reached this inner sanctum. When James returned he had photocopied the relevant pages of Hayllar information, and also a few pages from the London A-Z, maps of the streets in the area. ‘Now, here we are. Just walk out the door, turn left, across Piccadilly Circus, to Leicester Square, and the Westminster Library is in that little side street just there.’ It did look close. Maybe I could do it. ‘Will I have to ask somebody about the art magazine?’ ‘It’s right there on the shelves, but ask if you can’t find it.’ I rose to go, but James was not finished. ‘And this map shows how you can get from the Westminster Library … here see… to the Witt Library on the Strand. Here. It has copies of most British paintings. So you can see the Hayllar’s work.’ 38

I was overwhelmed with the idea of tramping all over London, and something of that must have been reflected on my face, because James again insisted. ‘You’re going back to Australia tomorrow, right?’ The front desk had given him this information. I nodded. ‘Well, do it today. You’ve taken the first step with this enquiry, and when you’re back in Australia you’ll be so happy if you’ve followed it up.’ James was right. He was right about how I would feel when I got back home, about how close the library was, and about how easy it would be, after a brief enquiry, to find the Connoisseur magazines on the shelves. They were bound into volumes of all the editions published over a year or two, and as soon as I found them I pulled the books containing the 1974 April and May editions off the shelves. Without even sitting down, I started eagerly leafing through to find the relevant editions. They were both there, quite long articles and filled with large black and white, and coloured prints of Hayllar paintings. So far I had only seen the coloured print hanging on my friend’s wall, and the small black and white print in Chadwick’s book. I had to have a closer look, but I could stand no longer. I went to a table, took off my coat, dumped my bag on the floor nearby, and collapsed on the chair. Then with a long deep sigh I pulled the Connoisseur magazines towards me and started to slowly turn the pages, looking at the pictures. The article in the April edition, ten pages of words and pictures, was headed ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar Part 1. James Hayllar’, and under that was a print of a self-portrait by James Hayllar; a young man with a beard and a moustache, wearing a white hat with a wide brim, set at an insouciant angle. There was a decided resemblance to my husband, particularly around the generous nose and the dark heavy eyebrows. I found this quite exhilarating, but then decided that maybe I was seeing what I wanted to see. I flicked through the rest of the article. I was in fact a bit too excited to read it properly at that stage and anyway I intended to photocopy it so I could read it at my leisure. 39

The pictures were of family groups and of country people. They seemed generally well executed and attractive. That was my first impression. Without further ado, I looked for Part 2. Jessica, Edith, Mary and Kate, in the May edition. As the first pages of the article fell open, I gasped. There was a large portrait of a person who closely resembled my husband as he appeared in a photo taken when he was a young man. Surprisingly it was the photo of a woman, Mary Hayllar, but her thick dark hair was pulled back from her face, above her ears and restrained at the back of her head, so that at a glance it resembled a man’s short hair. Her expression was serious. It was this picture of Mary Hayllar that convinced me that there was a close connection between this family of artists and my husband. How could such a likeness occur otherwise? I glanced at the pictures of the other sisters and samples of pictures done by them all, but I did not take in much except that they were always of very charming family scenes and also perfectly executed. I wanted to photocopy the articles and get to the Witt Library, which James had assured me was not impossible to reach. In about twenty minutes I was back on the street, map in hand. I found that I was indeed close to the National Gallery and thus to Trafalgar Square and the Strand. James had assured me that this would be so, but my knowledge of the geography of London was of areas that surrounded particular tube stations. I had never joined all those isolated sections of information together. James had also said that while the Witt Museum was quite a way down the Strand, I could catch a bus, and so not feel the distance at all. In this James was wrong. The Strand was being ripped up. There were cars and red buses crowding down the left side of the road towards Trafalgar Square, but in the direction I was travelling there were workmen using jackhammers, street digging machines, people trying to cross at all sorts of unsafe places, policemen and workmen trying to direct people, but not one vehicle. I hobbled all the way to Marlborough House and walked into a gallery on the right of the entrance. The Courtauld 40

Institute! I felt cheated. All that way and I was in the wrong place! However, on asking I was directed across the entrance to another smaller doorway. I walked through that, down some steps and through quite a small door on the side of the stairway. There it was, the Witt Library, a small library, creating a record, copies, no matter how small, or black-and-white, of the work of British artists, so that knowledge of this heritage will not be lost. I found a suite of warm rooms with rows of boxes on shelves. ‘Hello,’ I spoke to the librarian at the small counter near the entrance. ‘I would like to look for the work of some artists please.’ ‘Certainly.’ The librarian smiled. ‘Their names?’ Now, the Artistic Family Hayllar may have been known to Christopher Wood, and miscellaneous print makers, but I had come across them so rarely, that I assumed they must not be well known. The librarian, however, seemed very familiar with them. ‘The Hayllars. Easy peasy japoneasy! That shelf … on the right … yes … alphabetical order.’ It was as easy as that. I did not have to pay. I did not have to give any proofs of identity. I was free to look to my heart’s content. There were a few boxes, one dedicated to the father, and at least two to the sisters. It was more than I could take in at that time, but I enjoyed sitting in a comfortable chair looking, at that stage more it must be admitted, for figures who carried a resemblance to my family, than anything else. There were some resemblances, but none as strong as that picture of Mary Hayllar I had found in the Connoisseur article. Mostly there were only small, quite poor black and white copies of paintings, but each was stuck on an A4 sheet of paper, with presumably the only known details, written by hand underneath them. There were some coloured copies, usually cut out from a Christie’s sale catalogue. I photocopied some prints myself and picked out a few coloured copies that I thought might be nice blown up into A4 photocopies, a painting by each artist, even if it did cost one pound per coloured copy, so I could give the family at home some idea of the Hayllars’ work. 41

While I was permitted to do the black and white photocopies myself, I had to go to a counter to have to coloured copies made. The prints were quite small, but I explained to the young man what I wanted, an attempt to enlarge them on nice quality paper. ‘This may take some time. Come back in ten minutes.’ I felt slightly irritated by this. How long did it take to make a few photocopies! However, when I returned the young man was beaming with satisfaction. ‘Well, I think these came out quite nicely.’ He held out to me five beautifully reproduced A4 coloured prints on shiny paper, each one good enough to frame. Certainly worth two tired aching feet and five English pounds. I returned to Australia in triumph! ====== 42

2. Victorians

There is a work by James Hayllar, called variously A Family Group (1864) (Fig. 21), or The Artist’s Family, 1 which presents a view of the Victorian family premised on patriarchy and domestic femininity. A father, mother and three children are presented against a dark background that brings them into focus. The father standing slightly to the left dominates the figures of his seated wife and his children, although he looks down on them benevolently. His dark hair and the shadows of the background frame his face. His mouth is partly obscured by a moustache and beard, but he has smile lines in his cheeks and under his eyes. His wife, sitting on the right side of the painting, has her head bent and eyes modestly downcast as she looks at the baby on her lap. Her acceptance of the responsibilities of mother and guide of the children, rather than any role outside the family, is signified by her loving expression and the direction of her gaze. Standing on chairs on either side of the father are two other children. A son of about three or four years is between the parents. Because his mother is sitting, he is already on a higher level than her. He does not look at any member of the family, but rather at the painting his father is showing him. His expression of concentration suggests his understanding that the work is serious. He is being taught that his future is that of a man involved in the world of work. On the left of the father is a little girl of about four or five, possibly a portrait of Jessica Hayllar, born in 1853. She is the most animated member of the group, in that she is grasping the back of the chair with two little white arms, and her head is turned as she looks, not at the painting, but at her father, as though waiting for direction. She exemplifies the

1 Both names have been attributed to an 1864 painting by James Hayllar. According to the National Gallery of Canada website, ‘[t]his painting likely depicts the artist himself with his young family’. A Family Group, painted by James Hayllar in 1864, and since 1964 in the National Gallery of Canada. Available at http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=6616 (Accessed 11 July 2011). 43

concept of the daughter looking inwards towards her family, rather than outwards at the world.

The father is standing, not behind his wife, but behind a large wooden stand, obviously a folio of his paintings. There is a glimpse of a corner of one of the canvases, a tantalisingly pale and interesting triangle, which is all that can be seen of the artist’s work in the dark wooden folio. There are other references to painting as a profession. There is a pale, but quite large picture on the wall in the background and the artist, rather than having his hand on his wife’s shoulder or on one of his children, is holding one of his canvases in both hands. He is making a strong, proud statement about his occupation as an artist by holding a painting and including a folio of his art works in his family portrait.

James Hayllar would eventually have nine children. Two boys, Ernest and Reginald, were born before Jessica and Edith and the two youngest, Thomas and Algernon were born after the painting was completed. The boy in the painting is not the age of any son in the Hayllar family at the time the painting was executed. Grace was born in 1862 and Mary in 1863, so there were more daughters than are represented in the portrait completed in 1864. The one boy depicted emphasises male involvement in the outside world, while the little girl and the baby fill different roles in the family portrait, the little girl reflecting the delightful, biddable daughter, and the baby representing the blank slate whose role is yet to be clarified, but whose presence highlights the mother’s role as carer. Leaving some of his children out of the family portrait supports the idea that James Hayllar was not producing a portrait of his family, but rather while following his practice of using family members as models, was intending to represent the ideal of the Victorian family.

Also noteworthy is the elegant, expensive clothing worn by the family members. Hayllar is in a dark, well-cut jacket, his boy in blue velvet, 44

with lace and ribbon at his neck, and his daughter in a red velvet dress, with lace-trimmed frills on its sleeves. The baby is in a generous, white pleated dress, with white stockings and neat little shoes. The showiest aspect of the clothing, however, is the mother’s dress, which is made of pale, shiny, luxuriant fabric. It has voluminous sleeves and its huge expanse of gathered skirt occupies a quarter of the painting. This has the effect of counterbalancing the dark shadows around the heads of the family members, while suggesting a significant level of prosperity. The father here, although not a professional man such as a doctor, lawyer, or churchman is announcing that his occupation is both admirable and profitable. He is, declares the portrait, a Victorian ideal: the strong, dominating, reliable man who loves and provides for his family.

James Hayllar lived until 1920, but he was a nineteenth-century Victorian gentleman and that reality greatly affected the lives and work of his four artist daughters. There are pitfalls of course in discussing the father of talented daughters as part of their biography. Wagner-Martin warns against the trap of the stereotype, of the good father who took an interest in his daughter’s ability, and who often receives as much attention and maybe even much of the credit for his daughter’s achievements: The first question society (still) asks of many women is whose daughter she is. Steeped in connotations of dependency both financial and emotional, the question reifies the patriarchal pattern that the loving father first supports his daughter and then chooses (or at least approves) the man to whom he ‘gives’ her in marriage.2 Almost every reference to the life of the novelist, Louisa May Alcott, for example, includes a description of her father and infers that it was his generous education of his daughters that caused them to be

2 Linda Wagner-Martin, Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 21. 45

successful: ‘The implication is that notable as Louisa’s life was, Bronson Alcott better deserves the biography.’3

This trap could easily snare a biographer of the Hayllar sisters. Their father was their only art teacher, his daughters used materials that he provided, and they exhibited where he did. As well, there is more documentary information about Hayllar and many more of his paintings exist. In an 1889 interview for a women’s magazine the sisters discussed the training their father gave them;4 and when Jessica Hayllar related the family story her main focus was her father’s career as an artist.5 When Edith and Mary left home to be married, and when Kate left to become a nurse, each gave up painting, in spite of their previous successes. Jessica stayed with her father until he died and she painted throughout that period. Each woman only painted seriously when living in her father’s house. Evidently then Hayllar was an important influence on his daughters’ painting careers. So how can information about James Hayllar best develop his daughters’ biography rather than simply serving to focus attention on his story? In Chapter 3 he is discussed in relation to his art education and by contrast to emphasise aspects of his daughters’ art education. In this chapter a consideration of James Hayllar’s emergence as a nineteenth- century Victorian gentleman, his development as an artist, and what these meant to his family in both prestige and income, are introduced to expand what can be observed and deduced about his daughters’ lives and work.

Born in Chichester on 3 January 1829, his family was of Sussex yeomen stock, and related to Richard Cobden.6 The mention in Jessica Hayllar’s notes of the connection to Cobden, the eminent nineteenth century radical, liberal statesmen, could be seen as part of a pattern

3 Wagner-Martin, p. 23. 4 M.W., ‘Lady Artists, Nos. 30 to 32, the Misses Hayllar’, Lady’s Pictorial, 28 December 1889, pp. 944-945, (944). 5 Hayllar MS, pp. 1-10. 6 Brian Stewart and Mervyn Cutten, Chichester Artists (Canterbury: Bladon Press, 1987), p. 22 and Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part 1’, p. 266. 46

establishing a respectable family background. James’s grandfather Hayllar had already risen above the yeomanry, becoming Mayor of St Pancras in Chichester in 1808. His father seems to have continued the family’s upward social mobility, because he is described not only as a farmer, but also as a miller and a coal merchant.

Jessica described her father as being interested in art from an early age. Her treasured family anecdotes follow traditional biography by focusing on the early development of one who becomes a high achiever in a specific field.7 However, she also comments that James’ family ‘were not in favour of an artist’s career for him – too much uncertainty of making a living at it in those days’.8 It was understandable to be concerned about a man making his living only from painting, but there were possibly other concerns in the family related to the Hayllars’ gradual rise in class. Artisans were generally working class, or lower middle class, and for James Hayllar to be making his living from painting might have been seen as a step back down the social ladder. He had art lessons in Chichester, but when he was older, his ambition to be an artist naturally met with little encouragement from his father, (nevertheless) he was reluctantly allowed to enrol at Cary’s Art School in Bloomsbury, London.9 It is not clear how the authors of this booklet on Chichester artists sourced their information, but they reflect the same family reluctance that Jessica described. James Hayllar may have produced this 1864 family portrait highlighting the artist as a gentleman and good provider, as a response to this lack of enthusiasm or belief in his chosen career.

7 For Christopher Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part 1’, p. 272, James Hayllar was not a great artist: ‘Hayllar was by no means a great artist, and many of his paintings stray from sentiment to sentimentality. There was a demand for such works and he was content to satisfy it.’ Hayllar’s family, however, obviously had a different opinion. They saw him as an artist, a man who had dedicated his life to art, and one who was financially successful in his chosen career. 8 Hayllar MS, p. 1. 9 Stewart and Cutten, p. 23. 47

Hayllar did well at Cary’s Art School and became good friends with his teacher, Francis Stephen Cary (1808-1880) and his wife. While there he started to support himself with his art; Jessica Hayllar explained that he ‘painted portraits of friends and relatives at small prices in leisure hours, to keep the pot boiling and help pay his way.’10 This comment, possibly one that Hayllar handed down himself, points to his and his family’s pride in his ability to earn money from his work. One of these portraits may have been the drawing he made of Cary, which is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. In the late 1840s Hayllar moved to the Royal Academy Schools, the best career move he could make, as it was the most prestigious art school in England. A portrait, Son of R. Staples Browne Esq (1851) was his first work to be hung in the R.A.. He was 22 years of age.

Hayllar’s private life also flourished at this time. At Cary’s Art School he met John Cavell,11 another art student, and after completing their studies at the Academy Schools they travelled together to Italy to extend their art education. Hayllar also met Ellen Phoebe Cavell, John Cavell’s younger sister, to whom he became engaged. However, it was to be a long engagement because, after meeting her, Hayllar and Cavell were away in Italy for two years.

This detail raises the matter of Ellen Cavell and her general neglect in the Hayllar chronicle. It must have been difficult for her to wait two years with no career of her own to distract her. Her situation focuses on the difference between men and women in the nineteenth century. The former were encouraged to go on the grand tour, to experience life, but women generally remained at home. There were women who travelled to Europe to study art, one of whom12 is mentioned later in this dissertation, but they were the exception. I argue that in many

10 Hayllar MS, p. 1. 11 According to the Hayllar MS, pp. 2-3, ‘John Cavell’s third son, Fred, went into the church (became a minister of the Anglican Church) and was the father of Edith Cavell, who was shot by the Germans for helping her fellow countrymen to escape to England from Brussels, where she was head of a hospital.’ 12 Elizabeth Thompson Butler. See pp. 103-104. 48

aspects the Hayllars were not the stereotypical Victorian family; however, what is known of Ellen Hayllar, née Cavell, suggests that she fitted almost every aspect of the ideal Victorian wife and mother. She waited for two years to marry James Hayllar, she was the model and inspiration for many of his paintings, she bore him nine children and while she may have had interests other than her home and family, it is not evident in the family records. However, since the biographical notes presented by Hayllar’s family followed the traditional linear development of the singular great person, Ellen Hayllar was possibly just omitted in the conventional patriarchal prioritising of relevant material.

When Hayllar returned to England he ‘lived with the Carys, painted, helped in the art school, and got little commissions now and again.’13 In 1854 he took a studio in Berners Street, presumably because he was earning sufficient to pay rent. He painted a portrait of the man who was to be his father-in-law, acclaimed as an excellent likeness. He also painted a portrait of his fiancée, Ellen, Lady Mynzomdie (Mine Some Day),14 which was exhibited at the R.A. in 1854. It was not until 8 March 1855 that James Hayllar and Ellen Cavell were married. By then he was apparently able to support himself and a wife, although possibly his father still assisted him financially. In this wait for financial viability Hayllar confirmed that he was a proper Victorian gentleman, following the accepted dictum of ‘prudence’ and ‘postponement’, that a man must not marry until he could support a wife. An 1885 pamphlet, ‘How to Woo, when, and to whom’, explains: Worldly circumstances need not be very excellent, or sufficient for superfluity, let it suffice if they be enough for competence; but at the time of marriage they should

13 Hayllar MS, p. 2. 14 Whereabouts unknown. 49

present a reasonable probability of increase, or at least of a firm certainty.15 Hayllar had sufficient, but no more. The Cavells may not have been so willing to let their daughter marry a struggling artist, except that their tolerance, indeed acceptance, may have existed because their son, John Cavell, was also an artist and Hayllar’s good friend.

From this period Hayllar exhibited regularly at the R.A. and records there show his address as 15 Mecklenburg Square.16 One source says that he inherited money when his father died in 1863 enabling him to take a house in Mecklenburg Square with its own studio.17 However, Jessica Hayllar explains that the father-in-law left money to build the studio: he had a studio at Langham Chambers, where several artists friends had too ... After the death of his father-in- law in 1863 he was able to turn a sitting room at the back of 15 Mecklenburg Square into a studio by making a north skylight, and gave up the rented studio.18 It seems that Hayllar was left helpful sums of money from his father and father-in-law, which enabled him to improve his living and working conditions. Nonetheless the early doubts of Hayllar’s family about painting not being a lucrative career seem justified, as he needed the inheritances to acquire those comfortable living and working conditions. From then he earned sufficient income to support his rapidly growing family with portrait commissions and with history subjects typical of that period, such as The Queen’s Highway in the Sixteenth Century (1864) and Granville Sharp, The Abolitionist, Rescuing a Slave from The Hands of His Master (1864).19

15 Ward and Lock, ‘How to Woo, when, and to whom’, 1885, p. 6, quoted in J.A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning among the Victorian Middle Classes (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), p. 36. 16 Wilder, p. 34. 17 Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part 1’, p. 268. 18 Hayllar MS, p. 4. 19 Both held in the Victoria and Albert Museum Collection, London. 50

Perhaps because Hayllar’s home was full of children or because portraits and history subjects were not proving sufficiently successful, in 1866 he produced Miss Lily’s Carriage Stops the Way for the R.A.’s Summer Exhibition and it changed his fortunes. A tiny girl, three or four years old, stands on a step, dressed for a party, her chin lifted slightly so the maid can tie the ribbons of her bonnet. Miss Lily is the focus because the tall, beautiful maid is bending down to her level, as though bowing to a princess. Lily, in her lacy white dress, stands out from the tans and browns in the background like a star. A watermelon pink ribbon placed around one shoulder and tied on the opposite side, is like a decoration worn by royalty. She is trying to be perfect, standing up straight and demure, her white gloved hands by her side, with one grasping a tiny fan. The title suggests something not seen, that out in the street the whole of London waits for this precious child to board her carriage, so the traffic can start to flow again. The painting is now in a private collection, but it was so well-liked that it was engraved20 and many prints were sold. 21

A recent comment on the picture stated that [t]he poise of the child’s stance on the stairs is beautifully observed and the amount of space occupied by the maid’s dress makes for an interesting composition.22 More interesting are Hayllar’s concerns with class and status. Images of adult servants or people of the ‘lower orders’ being humble and servile while attending to young but wealthy children, and thus reaffirming the higher status of the child, recurred in James Hayllar’s paintings. In 1867 Hayllar produced two more images of Miss Lily,23 which were also engraved and the prints sold well. These three works made him a successful artist who from then seems to have supported

20 Engraving involved a skilled worker inscribing designs or writing onto a surface by carving or etching and then making prints from the engraving. 21 ‘Many of his (James Hayllar’s) pictures were engraved and published by old Graves (Robert Graves ARA) who also bought and commissioned him for some child subjects.’ Hayllar MS, p. 8. 22 Wilder, p. 36. 23 First Flirtation and Miss Lily’s Return From the Ball. 51

his family easily. The promise of financial success suggested in the 1864 painting, A Family Group, came to pass in 1866 and 1867.

The next step to being a successful artist was to become a member of the Royal Academy of Arts and in May 1867 W.P. Frith proposed James Hayllar as an Associate of this prestigious institution. Either Eyre Crowe, or Alfred Elmore seconded the proposal; versions differ.24 Disappointingly for Hayllar, his election failed by one vote. It may be that his subject matter did not fit the hierarchy of so called prestigious subjects, categories identified in Art Journal of 1863: History – Sacred and Secular, Subjects - Poetic and Imaginative, Portraits, Scenes Domestic – Grave and Gay, Outdoor Figures – Rude, Rustic, and Refined, and finally Animal Painting.25 Thus James Hayllar never ‘moved into the elect circles of the Academy world’.26 For a man pursuing a career as an artist this must have been profoundly disappointing. The prestige itself would have been gratifying, but opportunities to move in elevated circles and obtain lucrative commissions were also denied him. This not withstanding Hayllar and later his daughters did exhibit at the R.A. for many years.

Not having been elected, Hayllar perhaps freed himself of any compulsion to abide by the values of those exponents of high art associated with the R.A. Instead, after this time, he painted potentially lucrative popular subjects, such as children, servants with children, country labourers and country scenes. His aim seemed to be financial stability and respectability, rather than prestige as a great artist. Also as Renate Brosh in her paper on gender and visualisation notes, the rise of the middle-class to affluence and power was causing the art market to turn from historical paintings, often too large and semantically inaccessible, to still-lifes and genre-scenes which were

24 Christopher Wood and Anthony Wilder both mention Alfred Elmore; the Hayllar MS, however, p. 7, names Eyre Crowe. 25 ‘The Royal Academy’, Art Journal, 1 June 1863, pp. 105-16. This lengthy article reviewed the offerings at the Academy’s Summer Exhibition, under headings that clearly outlined the order of importance of subject matter. 26 Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part 1’, p. 268. 52

more suited to middle-class homes.27 Possibly Hayllar was realistic enough to see his available career options and make the most of them. I suggest that his daughters followed his lead in this, as presumably they were encouraged to.

Hayllar became a member of the Royal Society of British Artists (R.B.A.) in 1876, sometimes placing the letters RBA after his name. He exhibited with the society regularly and served on the society’s council in the 1880s. In 1890 the council minute book shows that he resigned his membership in January 1890 and apparently after that date neither he, nor his daughters exhibited with the society again.28 This abrupt break with a society in which he had been so involved may hint at the possibility that Hayllar could be difficult, but existing reports about him were written by loving daughters, so only assumptions about his temper and behaviour can be made.

Failure to be elected to the R.A. is possibly one of the reasons why James Hayllar moved his large family to the country and was therefore less and less in London. Jessica Hayllar glosses over these professional problems suggesting the opposite order of events: ‘By leaving London every year for so many months James Hayllar began to lose touch with his fellow artists. There is no doubt that it did away with his chance of membership with the R.A.’.29 Whatever the reality, Hayllar painted until he was an old man and since he and his family seemed to live a contented and active life, it appears that he accepted his rebuff and moved on with a positive attitude.

Even before his rejection by the R.A. Hayllar spent long holidays in the country. In 1865, he rented ‘Carlton Rookery’, in Suffolk. The family, including the nine children, the last born in 1868, left London

27 Renate Brosh, ‘Imagendering II: Gender and Visualisation’, Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies,13 (2006) Available: http://www.genderforum.org/issues/imagendering-ii/looking-at-women- looking/ (Accessed: 30-9-2011, p. 2.) 28 Wilder, p. 36. 29 Hayllar MS, p. 6. 53

and lived in Suffolk for five or six months for some years. They then returned to Gower Street in London for two years from 1872. During this period ‘the five girls went to a day school in Gower Street in connection with Bedford College’.30 Hayllar’s sons would definitely have gone to school, maybe even boarding school, because that was standard in middle-class families, but for a man to invest money in his daughters’ education was rare.

Country life, however, suited the Hayllars better than city life and in August 1875, ‘to the great delight of his wife and family’,31 they moved to Castle Priory, a large house on the banks of the Thames in the provincial town of Wallingford. Hayllar’s old teacher Francis Cary and George Cavell, a brother of Ellen’s, assisted by signing the lease for him. There was already a branch of the Cavell family there, which may have added to its attractions. Also Wallingford, while offering all the benefits of country life, was still close enough to London for an artist who needed to access its galleries and art markets.

Jessica Hayllar’s descriptions of country life sound idyllic. Not only the country, but the company of their father, seems to have made holidays hugely enjoyable. Of Suffolk she says: It was a paradise for the children with a horse and two ponies, duck, dogs and pigs, an orchard with pond, kitchen garden, lawn and flower garden and run of park adjoining. She describes her father’s painting and leisure activities there: Here a studio was built in the orchard and here he continued his child subjects introducing village models into them and occasionally painting what he most loved, landscape with or without figures. He worked hard but found time to teach his children one after the other to ride,

30 Hayllar MS, p. 7. 31 Hayllar MS, p. 8. 54

running by their side till they could ride out with him with the leading rein.32 The same sentence combines the concept of James Hayllar working on his painting and spending time with his children. Certainly Jessica, the oldest of the Hayllar sisters, not only described her father as loving and attentive, but in some way associated this with his life as an artist. There are more memories of Hayllar’s outdoor activities including time spent with his children: He rented a little shooting [sic] and used to get invited to shoot by neighbouring farmers, starting off before breakfast often … He not only taught his children to ride and drive, but wrote little plays for them to act.33

Jessica describes outdoor activities as continuing when the family moved to Wallingford. James Hayllar taught his children to row and punt and swim. … Castle Priory had a long frontage to the river, and a summer house over the boathouse, which held a large fishing punt and randan (row boat) in which later he taught his four eldest girls to row at 7am so that they blossomed out as accomplished oarsmen to the town inhabitants – the swimming was taught at night as bathing in public without a proper bathing place was not looked upon favourably at that period, though a few years later bathing by day in the warm sun became the fashion.34 Hayllar did have to save two of his children who fell into the Thames while it was in flood,35 and obviously the swimming lessons were to help keep them all safe. Nonetheless this combination of encouraging his children to be involved in sports and at the same time of keeping up appearances was emblematic of Hayllar’s approach to the upbringing of his daughters. They were encouraged to participate in

32 Hayllar MS, p. 5. 33 Hayllar MS, p. 6. 34 Hayllar MS, p. 9. 35 Hayllar MS, p. 8. 55

many activities, but at all times they had to conform publically to Victorian society’s expectations of women.

In contrast to this image of a benevolent father is the fact that his sons did not stay at home. The 1881 Census taken while the Hayllars were at Castle Priory indicates that James Hayllar, aged 52 was home, also Ellen Hayllar, his wife, aged 55, Jessica aged 22, Edith aged 20, Grace aged 19 and Mary aged 18. Kate was not at home when the census was taken, and neither were any of the sons. Obviously the older boys, Ernest and Reginald, were over 22 and probably working, but even the sons who were younger than the sisters, Thomas, approximately 15 and Algernon, approximately 13 were absent. Perhaps they were at boarding school, which might explain their apparent lack of closeness to the family. Wood made the only comment about Hayllar’s sons in 1974: Hayllar’s sons did not turn out so well, only one, Algernon36 became an artist, and the other three did not perhaps find the Victorian discipline so agreeable. Nothing is known of their careers, and it is thought that they may have resorted to the ultimate escape of Victorian sons from their fathers – emigration.37 A letter sent to me by Neil Mackay, Edith Hayllar’s grandson,38 enclosed a photograph of Thomas as a four-year-old boy, and states that he was born on 18 April 1866 and died on 26 July 1904 in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. The suggestion that the boys emigrated is supported in his case at least. While Jessica’s memoir suggests a kind and attentive father, the fate of his sons implies that he may have been a firm disciplinarian, harder on his sons than his daughters. Perhaps his daughters accepted his discipline because there was no alternative, while the sons escaped as soon as possible.

36 Algernon Victor Hayllar, born 1868, trained and practised as an engraver. Some of his engravings were hung at the R.A. Summer Exhibitions, for example in 1889 as discussed below in Chapter 6. There are no further details known about him. 37 Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part 2’, p. 2. 38 Personal correspondence with the author: letter dated 25-9-2001. 56

As discussed, Ellen Hayllar née Cavell is rarely mentioned in Jessica’s family narrative and never after reference to the Hayllars’ marriage in 1855. Besides the biographical tradition of neglecting wives, there is another explanation for this; that after their marriage they had nine children in fourteen years. When Jessica was born, in 1858, there were already two sons, so the two older boys were born in the three years before Jessica. Edith was born in 1861, Grace in 1862, Mary in 1863 and Kate in 1865. The last child was born in 1868, so Ellen had two more children in three years. Ellen Hayllar became pregnant almost immediately after she was married and, considering the high death rate of Victorian babies, the Hayllars seem to have had great fortune in keeping their children alive. No miscarriages are mentioned, but that does not mean there were none. Even if there were none, between 1855 and 1868, Ellen Hayllar was pregnant for at least 81 months out of 168 months, fully half the time. She may not be in the family anecdotes because as a mother, either pregnant, or just having delivered a baby, it is hard to see how she would have time, or the physical strength to go riding and shooting with her husband and older children.

Census figures for 1881 and 1891, collected when the Hayllars lived in Wallingford, indicate that there were three live-in servants - a cook, a needlewoman and a housemaid - to attend to the housework and probably the child minding.39 While Ellen Hayllar’s delivery of nine children in fourteen years is possibly the reason for her invisibility in the family story as it has been told, she may have been more with her children in their day-to-day lives than is recorded. Paintings of her as an old woman, and of her with her husband when they were old, show a dignified, self-possessed woman.40 She may have been the traditional wife and mother, the Victorian ideal, but considering the

39 Wilder, p. 37. 40 See Edith Hayllar, Phoebe Ellen Hayllar (Fig. 10) 57

Hayllars’ family life, as described by Jessica, she may have become more involved in family life as the children grew older.

Hayllar found satisfactory subject matter in Wallingford, in particular the rural workers. He dressed them up in the garments of servants and farm workers from an earlier period, probably in order to evoke a more bucolic time before the advance of the industrial revolution. Jessica Hayllar’s memoir reveals her father’s kindly, but patronising attitude towards these subjects: His pictures from now on were subjects to bring the poor and well-to-do together, kindly acts and interest shown in various ways. He found many good old characters heads both men and women, and used to hear and recount delightful little tales and incidents in the lives of his poor old models. He used to hear and remember and retail (retell) them now and again, and they used to enjoy sitting in his quiet warm studio and having a both [sic] of food and payment (probably about 1/- (one shilling) an hour.)41

The Hayllar family lived in Wallingford for the next twenty-five years, and since Jessica, Edith, Mary and Kate were growing into adults and artists in that time, my focus will henceforth be on them. The sisters lived in Victorian England and how much the conventional separation of men and women into public and private spheres was enforced and how much it was mitigated in middle class families and in the Hayllar family in particular can be deduced to some extent when the few sources of information on the family are considered. Like Hayllar’s 1874 family portrait, the public face of the family was not the full picture, and the way women were expected to live and how they lived, were not necessarily the same either. So what did Victorian society expect and what ideological pressures did it exert?

41 Hayllar MS, p. 9. 58

Throughout the nineteenth century the conventional role for a woman was to be gentle, submissive and subject to her husband.42 The husband’s position as lawgiver and provider for the family was a responsibility, possibly also a burden, but generally he had more social mobility than his wife, and his word in his own home was law. The model of the perfect Victorian woman changed over the nineteenth century. Earlier in the century she was expected to be an active participant in the family, fulfilling all vital tasks around the home and also helping her husband with his business if possible, although her primary responsibility was bearing and raising the children. As the century progressed the ideal woman was no longer to be concerned with the physical work around the home; her duties were limited to supervising the servants who did that work. She still had to bear the children, but then they were managed by wet-nurses, nannies and governesses. The middle-class man had to work in the competitive outside world, but he found refuge in his home, a sanctuary where his wife looked after his moral and physical needs and kept his children pure and safe.

These expectations were promoted by the church, enshrined in legislation and supported by education. For men of the church it was evident from the Genesis creation story, that woman is in a position secondary and dependent; for the woman was created after the man, made for the man, and, in fact, derived from the man. … She owes him both the air she breathes and the name she bears.43 The story of the Fall provided a further traditional argument for woman’s subservience. St Paul’s opinion was that ‘Adam was not

42 Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home (London: Croom Helm, 1975), pp. 6-7. 43 William Landels, Women’s Sphere and Work Considered in the Light of Scriptures (London: J. Nisbet, 1869), p. 10, quoted in Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauderback Sheets and William Veeder, The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883, Vol. 2 Social Issues (New York: Garland, 1983), pp. 165-74, 168. 59

deceived, but the woman being deceived was in transgression’.44 Victorian writers reaffirmed this idea, explaining that even when men lapsed, it was caused by the feminine, easily seduced, elements in their characters: As the historical fall had its origin in the surrender of women, so does its reiteration in her descendants come of a corresponding surrender of the feminine elements of themselves.45 Although there were writings by women and by some men objecting to these interpretations of the scriptures, during the Victorian period these beliefs were engrained and supported by institutional structures.

Law in nineteenth century England affirmed women’s position as inferior to men, although constant agitation by women and some enlightened men did assist in effecting changes.46 At the beginning of the century the father was the rightful custodian of the children, and while women were gradually allowed custody rights, the father’s word continued to be dominant. Women only won rights over earnings and inherited property towards the end of the century. Separation and divorce was allowed by the middle of the century in cases of cruelty and adultery, but while the husband could divorce his wife for adultery, a wife could only obtain a divorce in extreme conditions. Also, in spite of much writing and agitation women were not given the vote in England by the end of the nineteenth century.47

Some Victorian scientists also affirmed a socio-biological notion of sexual difference, arguing that sexual difference was a product of man’s successful adaptation to social survival. Women’s putative arrested development permitted the conservation of their energies for

44 1 Tim. 2:14-15. 45 William H. Holcombe, The Sexes Here and Hereafter (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincot, 1869), p. 68, quoted in Helsinger, Lauderback Sheets and Veeder, pp. 165-74, 170. 46 The case is explained and supported in the collection of documents by Helsinger, Lauderback Sheets and Veeder, pp. 3-55. 47 Women wrote and agitated throughout the nineteenth century for the female franchise, but they were not given the vote in England until 1918. 60

reproduction. The argument was that the more highly developed the society, the greater the difference between the sexes, and the greater the difference the more likelihood of women producing superior offspring. Any woman therefore who tried to change her status was in effect adversely affecting her children. Many women seem to have accepted (at least on face value) this terrible and destructive conclusion. The writer, Margaret Oliphant, tended to blame herself for the tragic deaths of her children,48 and she remembered meeting the poet Mary Howitt (1799-1888): a mild, kind, delightful woman, who frightened me very much, I remember, by telling me of many babies whom she had lost through some defective valve in the heart, which she said was connected with too much mental work on the part of the mother, a foolish thing I should think, yet the same thing occurred twice to myself.49 This shows the pain and guilt that such beliefs caused women, and suggests how those beliefs may have inhibited their creativity. Charles Darwin in his Decent of Man (1871) did not support such theories explicitly, but some of his were deployed in effect to reinforce them. He proposed that males competed for females and that as a result, over time some males developed secondary sexual characteristics and came to differ more and more from females. These putative socio-biological differences, such as mental endowment, were strengthened, he argued, by use and transmitted in greater amounts to male offspring. There was an overt suggestion in his theory that males were more fully evolved.50

Speeches and writings of men regarded as society’s intellectuals were a further factor supporting the concept of the angelic domestic ideal. John Ruskin, influential art critic and essayist, in his famous speech,

48 Oliphant, Margaret: Autobiography, p. 36, quoted by Sanders, p. 89. 49 Ibid. 50 Jane Lewis, Women in England, 1870-1950: Sexual Visions and Social Change (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1984), p. 83. 61

‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ (1865)51 confirmed the different socio- biological identities and separate spheres for men and women. The man had to brave the outside world, and the woman to be ruler of the home; however, this privilege necessitated the woman reaching impossibly high standards: But do not you see that to fulfil this, she must – as far as one can use such terms of a human creature – incapable of error? So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise – wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation; wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side; wise, not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, modesty of service – the true changefulness of women.52 Women’s wisdom, as far as it is comprehensible in this tortured argument, exists only as she supports her husband in everything.

Studies of the Victorian middle classes reflect that this ideology of domesticity propagated by law, science, clerical and secular moralists, as summarised above, was, in fact, at variance with reality. While the weight of these beliefs might seem to have placed women in a position where conforming was the only alternative, society was beginning to change. Education became more available to women throughout the century,53 and women began to write and speak about their lives and to read and hear what others had to say, promoting the agitation for changes that did eventually occur in law and society. Also great increases in the population in England occurred over the century. The working class experienced the greatest increase in size, but there were

51 ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’ was delivered as a lecture on 14 December 1864, and published in Sesame and Lillies in 1865. 52 John Ruskin, ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’, in Sesame and Lillies , Unto this Last and The Political Economy of Art (London, Paris, New York, Toronto & Melbourne: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1907), pp. 61-95 (p. 74.) 53 Joan Perkin, Victorian Women (London: John Murray, 1993), pp. 45-50. 62

also increases to the middle and upper middle classes, those to which the Hayllars belonged. Another vital factor changing lifestyle was the material culture, which in nineteenth century England became significant as the ownership and display of contemporary material goods became an important indicator of social status.

Patricia Branca defines the upper middle classes as those earning over £300 per year and the middle class as those earning between £100 and £300. She compares Patrick Colquhoun’s 1803 study of class and income in A Treatise on Indigence with R.D. Baxter’s similar 1868 study, National Income, and after adjusting details in the studies to approximately equate occupations, she compares numbers in the different occupation and income categories.54

The upper middle classes were the merchants, manufacturers, warehousemen, shipbuilders, civil officers, lawyers, clergy, educators and lunatic keepers. From 1803 to 1867 this group increased by almost two thirds. The middle classes were the surveyors, engineers, shopkeepers, inn-keepers, civil officers, clergy, artists, scientists, educators, naval officers, army officers and theatrical workers. Branca emphasises, however, that most of these earned well below £300. From 1803 to 1867 the number of middle-class families increased more than threefold.55 The expansion of the middle class indicates a growth in the number of families receiving a greater income. As their income grew, so did their ability to make choices about how they would live their lives. Also, their rise in wealth and consequent ability

54 Colquhoun’s A Treatise on Indulgence (London: J. Hatchard, 1806) and Baxter’s National Income (London: Macmillan, 1868) are quoted in Branca, p. 44. 55 The upper middle classes were those earning more than £300. Except for about 2000 very wealthy merchants who earned £2600, the highest income was £800. There were 64, 840 of these upper middle class families in 1803, and 150, 000 in 1867, an increase of almost two thirds. The middle classes were those earning between £100 and £300, although most earned well below £300. Branca had deliberately cut artisans, those with such occupations as tailors, out of this category because they worked with their hands. There were 197, 300 of these middle class families in 1803, and 637,875 in1867. Not only had the middle class families increased more than threefold, but also Branca states that in this category the professional classes had increased by 185%. 63

to consume, led to a rise in advertising. Sophisticated advertising and magazines became another, newer factor shaping people’s opinions, offering the ability to consume as a new form of acquiring status in society.56

As my investigation of James Hayllar suggests, the Hayllars were a middle-class family, one of the thousands of upwardly-mobile families growing into gentility and money. Branca omitted artisans, those who worked with their hands, from her description of the middle class, presumably reflecting Victorian beliefs that such people did not qualify for that class and, as has been mentioned, this may explain the Hayllars’ reluctance to let their son become a painter, namely that he might be simply an artisan. However, the ‘Arts’, viewed as respectable, were included in the lists of the middle classes and the Hayllars, as artists, came to fit this more elevated category. Certainly when the Hayllars lived in Wallingford their lifestyle and connections and probably their income located them in the middle class, even the upper middle class. Further, the available information on the four Victorian women artists, Jessica, Edith, Mary and Kate Hayllar, indicates that while they may have personified middle-class ideal women in some aspects, in other aspects they diverged widely.

While Patricia Branca discusses the middle classes, Jeanne Peterson discusses gentlewomen, whom she regards as the upper middle classes.57 Both suggest that the image of the Victorian woman promulgated in the contemporary writings quoted above does not withstand close examination.

Branca analyses budgets and evidence of lifestyle based on income, cost of goods and services and availability of services, to argue that

56 See ‘Victorian Consumer Culture’, the opening chapter of Lori Anne Loeb Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (New York: OUP, 1994), pp. 3-15. 57 M. Jeanne Peterson, Family, Love and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989). 64

the life of women in families earning between £100 and £300 never matched the Victorian ideal. Her analysis of budgets based on an income of £150, which she calculated was an average for those in the £300 – £100 per year families, indicates that these were not women living luxurious lives, waited on by servants and collecting all the paraphernalia of gentility desired by the aspiring middle-class wife. When the family had paid rent, bought food and clothes, there was not much money remaining. On such a budget most families could afford only one servant, so the wife was not relieved of the task of housework. Such a budget could not afford schools or governesses for their daughters, who were compelled to acquire what education they could get at home. These families paid with difficulty for the new labour saving devices, such as plumbing that brought water to the house, washing machines and kitchen stoves, sometimes paying them off over a period of years.

Branca also attacked the myth of the retiring, submissive woman, showing that the wife did have some control. It was she who budgeted the money. Support for this statement exists in the fact that by the end of the century advertisements in magazines were directed almost exclusively at women.58 Branca explains that in childcare matters these middle class mothers did not, as they are reputed to have done, resort to wet nurses extensively, as there were too few wet nurses available. Instead of clinging to the past they embraced the new, adopting birth control practices rapidly towards the end of the century, using chloroform during birthing, exchanging midwives for doctors, often using bottles and powdered milk, in spite of campaigns advising them to return to breast feeding. These women also shared the general decline of interest in religion reflected in the steep drop in church attendance. The above study reveals much more practical, active and

58 S. Mayston, ‘How to Reach the Woman at Home’, Advertising World, February 1913, p. 210, refers to the wife as the ‘chancelloress of the family exchequer’. The term is quoted by Loeb, p. 9. 65

involved women of the middle classes than the stereotype of the ideal and the male writers’ descriptions of them may suggest.

Peterson examines the upper middle classes, presenting a study of three generations of women59 in an extended family of Victorians, including their friends and acquaintances.60 The men were in the professions, the law, the church, the universities, and the upper ranks of medicine and they earned above £300 per year. Again the reality of these women’s lives was at variance with the social ideal. True to beliefs about middle-class women at the end of the century, they did not do all the housework themselves, but rather managed household affairs, did the marketing and shopping and directed the cooking. While they were usually educated at home mainly by their mother or older sister, there was much individual variation in education programs. Often fathers took considerable interest in their daughters’ education, tending to teach their own particular interest or expertise, such as biblical studies, astronomy, Greek, Latin, French, literature and history. Some fathers directed their daughters’ physical education, teaching them to swim and row. Some families could afford education outside the home, sharing a governess with another family, or sending their children to small private day schools. A few wealthier families sent their daughters to private boarding schools patronised by the aristocracy. Universities were not open to women, but in a haphazard way many of these women, because of their passionate interest in particular subjects, did acquire further education. Some attended lectures on such subjects as botany, art history, science, anthropology, languages, even economics. These were sometimes public lectures, but women also attended lectures at Cambridge University, where they acquired knowledge in many areas if not the qualifications. Eleanor Ormerod, studying to help her brother and then encouraged

59 While every case discussed by M. Jeanne Peterson is specific, with names and dates included, there are so many names and dates that the study does provide a comprehensive view of a wide circle of women and can be seen as representative of a class. 60 Family, Love and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen. 66

and supported by her father, became an entomologist who did original research on insects harmful to British agriculture. She published papers and a textbook, gave lectures on the subject and became a consultant for many eminent people and organizations, including, from 1882, the Royal Agricultural Society.61 These women illustrated books and wrote pamphlets and books on such topics as Christian literature for children, embroidery and folklore. Women novelists and auto-biographers have been mentioned previously, but Peterson names other women, some who wrote fiction and one or two who wrote about music or social issues.

Women also worked outside the home, doing charity work, such as visiting the poor and teaching Sunday school. Many women were physically energetic in spite of a perception to the contrary. Not only did fathers teach their children physical activities, but wives sometimes travelled with their husbands. These women rode horses and often walked as a form of exercise; sometimes simply around the area in which they lived, but at other times they took long walks when on vacations in such places as Wales. Many of these activities indicate that upper middle-class women regularly crossed the divide between the private and the public sphere. In practice the dominant ideology of domestic femininity was undermined on many levels, as will be shown to be the case with the Hayllar sisters.

Most women studied music and art as social accomplishments, but a few went well beyond that. Lydia North, a gifted musician, trained by the best teachers, was invited to take up a concert career, but she refused, not liking the prospect of publicity.62 Her excellence in music went far beyond mere accomplishment, but she conformed to convention in her unwillingness to draw attention to herself by performing in public. The art of many women also exceeded accomplishment standards and since this is a study of women artists, it

61 Peterson, pp. 145-51. 62 Peterson, p. 50. 67

is relevant to mention a few names of women painting at about the same time as the Hayllar sisters. Ellen Busk had a portrait of her father hung in the Linnean Society’s rooms in Burlington House and between 1873 and 1889 she exhibited thirteen portraits at the R.A.. Elise Paget exhibited twenty-one of her paintings in major London exhibitions between 1877 and 1888. Henrietta Huxley exhibited at the R.A. in 1887 and 1888.63 Marianne North, after studying flowers with professional teachers, combined her interest in art with those of a naturalist and travelled the world painting the flora of foreign environments. Her observation was such that she discovered new species, which were subsequently named after her.64 Other women took an interest in the new technology of photography, with some taking classes and a few exhibiting their photographs.

The law may have given women no control over money in marriage, but Branca’s research revealed that in practice women did have some control over household finances. As discussed they did the budgeting. Also many women inherited money left totally in their control. Fathers often secured money on their daughters, stating explicitly in the will that it was not for the use of the husband. Husbands themselves left their wives money; sometimes their total fortune was left to the wife.

The Victorian middle class strongly disapproved of women working for payment because it did not sustain the veneration of the home and the idea of women and children as helpless dependants. Elizabeth Sewell, while arguing that being a governess was an admirable thing, accepts that it was not perceived that way because she was paid: ‘My friends think I am lowered in social position and they are right.’ However, she points out: ‘I should be admired if I worked

63 Peterson, pp. 47-8. 64 Peterson, pp. 50-1. 68

gratuitously. I should be thought as a saint or a heroine.’65 Goodness and decency depended on not being paid. Eleanor Ormerod, the entomologist, refused a salary when working for the Royal Agricultural Society, although she had a salaried male assistant.66 Ultimately Peterson states that Ormerod’s work cost her far more than she was ever paid for it.67 She also states: The women of this study were typical of their class in that none needed to earn a living. Fathers, brothers and husbands provided for their material needs.68 Again: The women in the Paget circle epitomize the possibility of artistic activities and sometimes careers among gentlewomen, not as a bohemian alternative to respectability, nor out of a need to earn a living, but as an integral part of upper-middle-class life.69 ‘Artistic activities’ and even ‘careers’ were acceptable, but combined with ‘a need to earn a living’ they were seen as vulgar and unnecessary.

Several aspects of the lives of upper middle-class women, or gentlewomen, as Peterson describes them, apply to what is known of the Hayllar sisters: they attended a girls’ school in London for a period of time;70 they were educated at home and their father took a significant role in that education; they painted and showed their art in major exhibitions; they were physically active; and their sporting, social and employment activities would have caused them to cross the

65 Elizabeth Sewell, Principles of Education (1865), pp. 208-9, quoted in Helsinger, Lauderback Sheets and Veeder (eds), pp.109-64, 119. 66 Peterson, p. 147. 67 Peterson, p. 148. 68 Peterson, p. 132. 69 Peterson, p. 152. 70 Jessica mentions that the school was ‘connected to Bedford College’, which was, as she would have been aware when naming the college, a significant fact, because it was the first institution of its kind in the United Kingdom, being founded in 1849 for the liberal and non-sectarian education of women. James Hayllar’s relatively unusual gesture of sending his five young daughters to school when the family lived in London suggests a man committed to having his daughters educated. 69

private, public divide more often in reality than might have been acknowledged in contemporary patriarchal prescriptions for women.

Aspects of middle-class women as described by Branca also apply to the Hayllars. Most notable was their father’s middle-class occupation; he was artist, as of course were they. However, while women from the upper middle classes occupied in potentially lucrative vocational activities, were determined not to undermine their position as ‘gentlewomen’ by accepting money for their work, the Hayllars sold their paintings. Later it is shown that drawing popular subjects and avoiding the waste of painting materials were lessons included in the art education provided by their father; his teaching emphasised the importance of making money. The Hayllar’s home was opened to the community, including journalists, for exhibitions displaying theirs and their father’s work.71 It could be argued that Hayllar and his daughters carefully negotiated the nature of publicity the sisters received in their local community, because by exhibiting their work in their own home they carved out a public sphere for their work but one that remained nested so to speak within the domestic sphere. Nonetheless the exhibition was still organised to sell their paintings and later in this work72 it is shown that the sisters exhibited and sold their work extensively in both regional art galleries and in the most prestigious galleries in London.

James Hayllar’s occupation as an artist may be described as middle- class, but his income seems to have been greater than £300. In 1863 he exhibited four paintings with the R.S.A.,73 two of which were valued at £10, one at £35 and one at £63. If he sold these he would have earned £118, more than one third of the annual income of a middle-class family as defined by Branca. By 1889 he exhibited five works at the R.S.A. valued together as £270. In some years he entered

71 These exhibitions at Castle Priory are discussed in Chapter 4 and Chapter 6. 72 Presented in detail in Chapter 6. 73 Wilder, p. 77. 70

up to nine works so profits could have been considerable. One of Hayllar’s paintings was valued at £210.74 These were simply asking prices and the works may have sold for less or not at all; however, the R.B.A. exhibition was not the only one Hayllar entered, he also sent work to the R.A. and to regional galleries.

From 1881 Hayllar’s daughters were also exhibiting and selling their work. An item in the January 1881 issue of The Artist and Journal of Home Culture listed the prices achieved by the paintings that sold at various exhibitions.75 At one exhibition of the Society of British Artists Jessica Hayllar sold A Sketch for £6.6.0, The Winning Colour for £7.7.0 and More Ornamental than Useful for £15.15.0;76 Edith Hayllar sold Crumbs from a Rich Man’s Table for £13.13.0 and Mary Hayllar sold The Summer House for £21.0.0. The total of £64.1.0 was a fifth of the £300 income needed to live a comfortable middle class life and it was the amount earned at only one exhibition. This confirms the sisters’ significant contribution to the family’s income. These figures substantiate that the family’s annual income was well above the £300 and Jessica’s description of the Hayllar family’s lifestyle, first in their home in London, with holidays in the country, and then in a beautiful home in Wallingford with a river frontage, support this. As mentioned earlier, the family had not one, but three household servants and they had the time and money to participate in sports.77

In spite of constricting conventions, Peterson reveals that upper middle-class Victorian women often lived very fulfilling lives and this appears to be true of the Hayllar women. It was their painting for profit that seems to indicate the greatest difference between them and other upper middle-class women. The Hayllars were living an

74 Ibid. 75 ‘Art Sales’, The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, 3 January 1881, pp. 12-14. 76 The first two works by Jessica Hayllar mentioned here are unknown and not included in the lists of her works. They suggest that other paintings by the sisters currently in private hands are yet to come to light. 77 Wilder, p. 37. 71

agreeable lifestyle but, it must be emphasised, they were obliged to work. This work surely contributed to the family income and family lifestyle. James Hayllar had no independent income, his inheritance was already spent, and the family had become accustomed to a comfortable lifestyle which they wished to maintain.

As James Hayllar’s portrait A Family Group reflected the ideal Victorian family, rather than the actual Hayllar family, so the Hayllar sisters’ paintings reflected images of this ideal family, representing some, but not all the realities of their own lives. Deborah Cherry asserts that the Hayllar sisters’ art confirmed middle-class women’s domestic role, sanctioning the patriarchal values it reflected and creating a defence against the pressures of changing values in society, including feminism.78 While this is one interpretation of the sisters and the iconography of their paintings, another, based on a greater understanding of their lives, is that they painted what would sell; their choice of iconography was a well-considered commercial decision. The Hayllar sisters might even be seen as more modern than many of their contemporaries, because they abandoned ideas of it being ‘unladylike’ to earn money, ideas that clearly separated them from many upper middle-class women. Instead, in what seems to have been an abandonment of Victorian values in favour of a very twentieth- century frame of mind, they produced the commodities that would sell most profitably.

Edith Hayllar’s Feeding the Swans (1889) (Fig. 19) is referenced by Cherry and Chadwick as evidence that the Hayllars gave the imprimatur to hegemonic beliefs about women in society. I would like to suggest that while the picture might reveal the Hayllar sisters’ willingness to exploit Victorian beliefs on femininity in the middle- class family, it also subtly undermines those beliefs, by challenging the confining, restrictive position that society prescribed for women.

78 Cherry, pp. 138-9. 72

In this it might be seen as reflecting their upbringing which appeared to conform to conventions yet which in fact allowed them active lives. Their money earning capabilities possibly empowered them to offer some criticism of those conventions. Cherry describes the riverside steps of a garden pavilion as representing the stages in femininity from youth to old age, each one signalled by dress and activity. The composition arranges a rising progression from girlhood to courtship, motherhood and widowhood.79 Chadwick agrees that the image emphasises the symmetry and order of a well-run household, with the architectural setting and deep banks of foliage stressing the orderly human pairings and the clearly demarcated stages of female life.80

I suggest that while the summerhouse, the stairs down to the water and the women are lit with sunlight, they are surrounded by a contrasting barrier of dark trees, which branch over the roof, cutting out much of the sky, and press against the walls of the summerhouse, while dark green shrubs reach over the stairs. Adding to the sense of imprisonment is the lack of a clear path leading away from the summerhouse, and the black, dangerous water at the foot of the lowest step. These confining surroundings allude to the dangers for women of breaking away from the established order. However, the encroaching, even menacing vegetation and the deep, dark water could also be interpreted as a comment on the harshness and of such restrictions, possibly even a protest against them.81 If indeed this was in some measure a reality acknowledged in the painting then perhaps the painting suggests that the sisters were not simply compliant with the constrictions in which they, as Victorian women, found themselves but also side-stepped them where possible.

79 Ibid. 80 Women, Art and Society, pp. 170-1. 81 Art teacher, Anthony Wilder, confirms this sense of entrapment in the painting, saying that the swans can swim away, but there is no escape for the people. Victorian Artists of Wallingford, p. 53. 73

In Rita Felski’s Gender and Modernity she explains how ‘modernity’ has been identified with the public sphere of men, while women were located within the separated sphere of the household, untouched by fundamentally masculine aspects of modern life ‘such as industry, consumerism, the modern city, the mass media and technology’. 82 She suggests, however, that ‘divisions between public and private, masculine and feminine, modern and antimodern were not as fixed as they may have appeared’.83 The belief in the separate spheres was ‘undercut by the movement of working-class women into mass production and industrial labour’, and also [th]e expansion of consumerism in the latter half of the century further blurred public/private distinctions, as middle-class women moved out into the public spaces of the department store and the world of mass-produced goods in turn invaded the interiority of the home. 84 From the images of the rooms the Hayllar sisters depicted, crowded with household items such as furniture, oriental screens and vases, trays, pewter ware, silverware, chinaware, fabrics and carpets, it can be inferred that they did circulate within the public sphere created by the department store to buy and then visually reproduce the mass produced goods that filled their home.85

The question of the Hayllars’ class and income may well provide the answer to another question, namely why the sisters only painted when they were living with their father. As previously discussed, Mary and Edith ceased painting when they married. Possibly their secure financial position made the work unnecessary. Of course it could be that their husbands frowned on painting as a profession, reflecting the upper-middle class value that women should not work for money.

82 Rita Felski, Gender and Modernity (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 17. 83 Felski, p. 19. 84 Ibid, 85 Mathew Winterbottom’s letter dated 7 July 1997 describing the furniture in Kate Hayllar’s Sunflowers and Hollyhocks, 1889 (Fig. 2) as having ‘style and quality indicat[ing] standard good quality middle-class furnishings’ confirms the contemporary and commonly available quality of their furnishings. 74

When Kate chose the profession of nursing thus securing herself an income, she did not paint again. Jessica did not marry, but remained with her parents, and after her mother’s death stayed with her father and took care of him. James Hayllar seems to have stopped painting sometime in the 1890s, but Jessica, although crippled in a carriage accident in 1900, continued painting and exhibiting into the twentieth century, possibly supporting herself and her father. The Hayllar sisters seem to have accepted their father’s idea that a life of gentility was the most important goal. They worked diligently and exhibited successfully, but essentially saw their art as a means of securing a sound income. When they achieved that income and the privileged lifestyle that attended it by alternative means, they ceased painting. ======

1879/1880 - Castle Priory Wallingford Diary of Mary Hayllar Wednesday 17th of September 1879 Today is a “red-letter” day!

It was chilly on the river at 7 o’clock this morning and all I wanted was to return to my warm bed. But Papa was there organising us and we had to scramble into the boat and start rowing. We work so well as a team now that the satisfaction of rowing together overcame me. Pull relax, pull relax and the randan just slipped through the water. I soon warmed up and the river and the morning were delightful. The river seemed to be almost overflowing with water, and the grasses along the river banks were full of flowers. The willows glided by and behind them the trees in their autumn shades coloured the background. The river flickered with the reflections of golden trees and pearly sky. There can be no river as fine as the Thames on an autumn morning. 75

Papa was so gratified. He said that we are blossoming into accomplished oarsmen, and that with all our practice we have a chance to win the end of season regatta. He was in such a capital mood after our practice that I decided to seize the moment! I waited until my sisters had hurried inside to prepare for breakfast and then I helped him pull the randan out of the water and walked with him back to the house. I reflected for a while about how to ask, then I began. ‘All that rowing has given me an appetite,’ I said, ‘and not just for breakfast. I feel like working this morning.’

Usually Papa follows such comments with a brief speech on the virtue of work and the dangers of idle hands, but today he nodded and smiled, very likely a measure of how well our rowing practice went. I continued. ‘Papa, I was wondering about the Summer Exhibition.’ He looked at me. ‘What were you wondering, my expert rower?’ He was being so kind. In truth, I felt quite nervous. ‘Jessica said that you said that... that... you’re going to let her submit a painting for the Summer Exhibition next year ... at the Academy.’ I was almost stuttering!

Papa was unaware of my plot. He strolled along enjoying the morning, hardly listening to what I was saying. ‘Mmm’, he said, ‘her painting in the R.B.A.86 did well last year ... some nice comments and it sold well. A good start! I think she should try for the Academy next year.’ We were close to the house and I had still not made my point, so I just blurted it out. ‘Could I submit something for next year’s Summer Exhibition too?’

He was surprised, he demurred and then he listed all the reasons why it was not a good idea; Jessica trying a lesser exhibition in her first year, Edith being older than me and yet deciding against trying for the Academy next year, me being only seventeen.

86 Royal Society of British Artists 76

I had the feeling though that he was not annoyed that I had asked, so I made another attempt. ‘You said the other day that I was doing good work Papa and that I needed more commitment.’ I hurried on apprehensive that if he said something it would be no. ‘If I thought I was producing work for the Academy I would be more dedicated.’ Then incredibly he said yes. Well almost… He said that I could try and, if the painting was good enough, he would consider letting me submit it.

So I am beginning my first submission to the Royal Academy today. I am feeling inspired and trying to think of a wonderful subject and I am going to chart its progress in my diary.

Thursday 18th of September 1879 I am resolved to keep a record of ideas and progress on my first submission to the Summer Exhibition. Here is a list of ideas so far, keeping in mind Father’s idea that a good painting must be something that people will enjoy and wish to buy. Something endearing - small child, kitten, dog A snug room - where people would like to be Something pretty – tea things, flowers, a pretty girl Show my skill with light, shadows, all of that! Autumn colours – autumn trees I have been painting the wonderful autumn colours in my note book, so I will remember them. I know Papa says that I should try something small and charming that suggests an interesting story – a table set and waiting for the people, a hat and basket by a chair, something like that - but the trees looked so glorious today that I would love to try including them in my canvas. I think I’ll ask my sisters and then I’ll walk around the house and garden and plan some ideas.

19th of September 1879 Today I spent time doing the usual drawing exercises, copying a vase, some flowers and a statue that Papa arranged for us, but I have not yet 77

started the real painting because I haven’t decided on the subject. I did discuss my plans with the others but taken as a whole I feel that my sisters could be more encouraging. Edith said that since she, at 19 years of age, with all her extra time studying and practising, does not feel ready for the Royal Academy she cannot believe that I am ready. Grace was rather unkind saying that I am being silly! Kate was very agreeable and even though she is only 16 and has just finished school she was much more sensible in her comments. She said she is sure I will paint something so wonderful that I will be selected and hung on the line where everyone will see what a wonderful artist I am. She is an excellent sister and I hope what she says may be true. Jessica was so absorbed in her work that she did not listen to our chatter. I will ask her for her opinion when the others are not present.

Tuesday 21st of October 1879 When Papa visited our studio today, he asked Jessica about the progress of her work for the Summer Exhibition. The work shows a pile of household things on a chair ready to be taken to the pawnbrokers. She and Papa talked quietly for some time and afterwards he did glance at me, but I paid close attention to my painting as though unaware of his presence. I haven’t done enough work to prove that I’m serious and I don’t want to discuss it until I have something to show for all the assurances I made in the autumn. When Papa and the others left, Jessica and I had the studio to ourselves. I admitted to her that I had not chosen a subject for my entry to the Summer Exhibition. She gave me a kind answer saying that I was a fine artist and very capable of producing something so charming that the Hanging Committee would feel compelled to select it. Of course we both laughed when she said that, but I felt that she really meant it and was not making fun of me. Then she went through my sketch book and said she liked the sketches and colour combinations I had made of the trees in autumn. She thought I might put something like that in the painting, or at least in the background or out a window. She suggested that such a subject would need a slightly 78

bigger canvas than hers as she was only thinking of a still life. She even discussed with me the size of my work and left her own work to help me select an appropriate canvas. We put aside one that was 16 x 11 ½ inches. That is actually bigger than the picture of 9 ¾ x 6 ¾ inches that she thinks she may enter. I am delighted that I have started to make some progress. I now have a canvas and a background, but I still need a subject for the foreground.

Monday 10th of November 1879 It was cold in the studio this afternoon and when Mama suggested that Kate and I walk to the village to buy her some thread I was delighted. A walk and a shopping expedition were just what I needed. Of course it was even colder outside and rather bleak because the trees and shrubs are all bare and the sky is white, but if one runs to keep warm it is only five minutes to the Market Place and then to Pettits in Mary Street. Inside Pettits it was all light and warmth and there were so many delightful articles to look at that we dawdled a little. I thought that since it is getting close to Christmas we could get some ideas for gifts and then we could tell mother about them.

Everything you could think of was there; fashionable hats, glove boxes, games, purses, scrap books, but best of all were the pretty dress fabrics and ribbons and lace. Finally we bought mother’s thread and ran home again. As we were rushing along Hart Street Ruff our little dog suddenly ran out from somewhere and started barking. Poor little dog must have followed us into the village then lost us when we went inside the haberdashery. He was either on his way home or waiting for us out there in the cold. He is only a little dog so I gave the packages to Kate, picked him up and carried him home. Mama was pleased with the threads we chose and impressed with Ruff’s adventure and his intelligence in being found again. She got Kate to sit him by the fire and brush him until all the cold wet clinging mud was gone and he was warm and dry. By then the tea tray had been brought in, and as Mama poured herself a cup of tea she saw Ruff watching her closely 79

in that way dogs do when they know that you have food. She picked up a little morsel of cake and held it out to him. ‘Come on. This is for you; you are such a good boy.’ Ruff jumped up and took the food daintily as mother has trained him to do.

It was such a cosy scene with Mama and the dog inside and the cold world outside the window behind them! It immediately came to me that it was just the subject I wanted. I did a few sketches in my sketch book, and when Jessica came in to tea I told her about it. She was very encouraging and urged me to make a few more sketches and notes on colour and so on immediately, so that I could recall all the elements I liked when I started to seriously plan the work. I feel very pleased with my decision because I think that this could be just the sort of picture Papa recommends, charming and full of warmth and joy.

Monday 5th of January 1880 We have been so busy with all the Christmas and New Year celebrations that I have not done much on my painting, nothing really! Nonetheless I made a resolution on New Year’s Day and now that all the festivities are over, I will concentrate on my work.

Monday 12th of January 1880 Papa went to London today to attend the funeral of one of his greatest friends Mr Francis Stephen Cary, a great art teacher. Papa studied with him, even lived with him for some time when he was a student in London. Mister Cary died on the 8th and the Athenaeum which arrived today included a short note announcing his death. Mr Cary had his own art school in Bloomsbury when he taught Papa and other artists such as Millais and Rosetti. Of course Papa had heard the news before the Athenaeum arrived because he was always close to Mr Cary and his family and they had contacted him. He was most distressed and last night when I told him I was working on my Royal Academy entry he took me aside for a quiet talk. He told me that in the ‘50s Mister Cary became Professor of Drawing at the Bedford College and that for 80

twenty years he had taught a life class there to women students. Of course Papa did not approve of such classes for women, but in all other ways he agreed with Mister Cary that women should have excellent educational opportunities. Papa reminded me of how he had tried to give us all a good art education right here at home. Anyway, Papa said that he and Mister Cary had often discussed our education and that while he had never felt inclined, or indeed quite wealthy enough to send us to study art in London, he wanted to honour Mister Cary’s memory by encouraging me to go on with my painting. ‘And how is that work for the Summer Exhibition coming?’ he asked me. I told him my idea and he said it sounded delightful and that he would look at it when he returned.

Friday 30st of January 1880 I have begun my R.A. entry. I have sketched in the shapes, the table, the window, the woman on the chair holding out the treat for the dog. I know that a good picture needs much care taken at the beginning. When Papa looked at it he reminded me to include all the attractive things that people would like, the table set with a silver tea pot, china cups, even a cake so that the image appeals to other senses, like smell and taste. ‘Remember Mary if you want a painting to sell, you must include all those features that make people want to hang it on their wall. A buyer needs to look at the painting and sense the atmosphere of elegance, comfort and warmth. It must be something they want to live with.’ Papa has said words like this to us often and of course he is right. I will have a silver tea service, some pretty china cups, and a pound cake, maybe with a slice cut out, to make it look tempting and delicious.

Thursday 12th of February 1880 Jessica and I have been working on our Summer Exhibition paintings for the last week, as well as doing our other exercises. She now has two works she is thinking about. They are still life paintings, the pile of goods for ‘my uncle’s’ and another which is a chair and table under 81

a cottage window. The window is set in a slanting roof and so there are great contrasts between the lit areas under the window and the darker sections. On the table is a humble meal, a loaf of bread, cut of course to look more enticing, a flask of water and a glass, all presenting a quiet moment. The water flask and the glass reflect and distort all the other images cleverly. When I commented on this Jessica answered that it is always worth displaying one’s skills in painting, with such things as reflections, light etc. Of course the image must be attractive, but it can also show technical skill. Such a work must be more desirable, more likely to be hung, more likely to be bought. So now I am thinking how I can include something clever.

Monday 1st of March 1880 My work for the Summer Exhibition is almost finished, but I wanted to add some final touches today. I was in the drawing room, with my easel, my paints, my chair and so on, checking on all the details, the light behind the table, the light on the tea things and their reflections in the mirror at the side of the window. I had included the mirror and reflections after my conversation with Jessica about some special, clever aspect of my painting. It was to be a quiet morning with no visitors and I was deeply engaged when oh horror, Mama hurried in, telling me of unexpected visitors in the driveway. I must take myself and all evidence of my work away. ‘Come back when you are respectable.’ That’s what she said! I had to seize the easel and the painting, Mother snatched my paints and other paraphernalia and I was hurried out the door. I could hear Grace and Kate in the drawing room all ready to receive the visitors, so then I took my time, putting my painting away carefully, cleaning my paints, taking off my work smock and making sure I had no paint smudges anywhere. Then I slipped into the drawing room and chatted and smiled charmingly. Such are the trials of a great artist!

Thursday 4th of February 1880 82

Today I finally completed my R.A. picture and I am quite pleased with it. The lady sits at her tea table under the window and holds up a morsel for the little silky terrier, which stands charmingly on his back legs to beg. I am pleased with the silky fur on the dog’s back and all the warm darkish colours inside, the red carpet, the elegant brown legs of the little table, the golden timber shutters on each side of the window and the rich dark dress of the lady. Then outside are all autumn trees. I wanted it to look cold, so the trees have only a thin layer of yellow leaves. Nonetheless it looks light and bright outside compared to the inside, and the light coming in the windows illuminates everything from the other side. I have named it ‘For a Good Boy’87 after my dear Mama’s words which initially inspired it.

Wednesday 24st March 1880 We worked hard all day preparing the studio for Studio Day, the local exhibition of our work. The most important items are the paintings to be submitted to the R.A., but there are paintings by everyone in the family, certainly many by Papa. His painting for the Royal Academy, ‘A deputation of villagers presenting a wedding gift’, is a group of his village characters presenting a wedding gift. Jessica’s is ‘Going to my uncle’s’88. Papa liked ‘Cottage fare’89, but he liked ‘my uncle’s’ for the R.A. because of the interest generated by that miscellaneous collection of objects. Why were the violin, the silver tea pot, the fan being pawned? On the back of the picture Jessica wrote ‘The Goods and Chattels I have selected as those most likely to be amongst the first to be sacrificed to the Pawnbrokers’. And mine, of course. These three entries had pride of place in the exhibition. Papa will take them to London at the end of March. Then we must just hope for selection. Oh I do so hope! ======

87 Mary Hayllar, For a Good Boy (Fig. 14). 88 Jessica Hayllar, Going to My Uncle’s (Fig. 22). 89 Jessica Hayllar, Cottage Fare (Fig. 23). 83

3. Education

The Christie’s (London) Catalogue of Friday 1 November 1985, Fine Victorian Pictures, displays on the cover Jessica Hayllar’s The Hallway (1882) (Fig. 24), a quintessential Victorian scene. The painting is reproduced again inside as Lot 102. A length of hallway leading to an ascending staircase is rich with objects: an intricately patterned Turkish rug on the floor, a sofa on the left, a sideboard on the right and a gold, fringed ceiling-to-floor curtain framing the stairs. Rusty reds, browns, and golds predominate, except for splashes of green potted palms on either side of the staircase. Two windows, one on the right side of the hallway and one behind the landing on the staircase, are filled with amber glass so that there is a warm yellow light in the room but no view of the outside world. It is a Victorian space, cluttered and claustrophobic, yet also opulent and inviting. The work could be seen as an exercise in perspective and the accurate reproduction of detail. The hallway, the objects in it and the staircase all retreat into a distance exactly and geometrically produced by converging lines. Everything, the carpet pattern, the ornate furniture including the inlaid sideboard, the Chinese pots and vases, the palms and curtains, the pictures on the walls and the suspended wicker bird cage are reproduced meticulously. The instruction in painting the Hayllar sisters received, evident in this work, is the focus of this chapter. The individual nature of their instruction is emphasised by contrasting it to that of their father, James Hayllar, their neighbour, George Dunlop Leslie, and to the art training of other women living and working at the time.

Sexual difference was institutionalised in England in the nineteenth century, where professionalism in government, commerce and religion was coded masculine because men were educated and thus eligible for positions of power. This extended to art education, art administration 84

and art societies, in which women were excluded, admitted in restricted numbers, or limited in their access to membership and services.

In the 1870s and 1880s when the Hayllar sisters were learning to paint at home with their father, formal art education for men in England had been developing over the previous hundred years. Until the establishment of the Royal Academy of Arts (R.A.) in 1769, English men gained their visual and aesthetic education in Italy, or attended private art schools. St Martin’s Lane Academy, the most prominent of these, offered drawing from the nude and from casts of antique statues, as well as tuition in painting, sculpture, engraving and design. From 1758 the Sculpture Gallery at Richmond House offered drawing opportunities, and a few art societies offered prizes and some teaching.1 The R. A. was the first English public institution to offer a comprehensive art education for British students. Its facilities were free and open, but being selected to attend was a privilege retained for the most talented and eligible men. Otherwise there were private art schools and access to exhibitions limited only by talent and income. In the 1820s and 1830s, Mechanics’ Institutes, Lyceums and Schools of Design offered lessons in a variety of artistic skills. Both Hayllar and Leslie, however, had good early training and qualified for the Royal Academy Schools, thus gaining an art education with rigorous technical training, and art history and theory lessons. To complement the latter, they had opportunities of viewing and copying antique works of art, as well as the company and example of successful contemporary artists.

Family stories depict the young Hayllar with a flair for drawing and painting and making models, and eager for formal instruction in art. Jessica’s description of her father’s art education is mingled with miscellaneous items of family history, but the whole gives a clear idea

1 Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Art and the Politics of British Culture, 1760-1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), pp. 5-7. 85

of Hayllar’s progress towards his career as a painter. According to Jessica, presumably quoting family folklore and selecting those aspects of the story relating to his field of success: An artist of the name of Joy2 lived in the town, and he [Hayllar] used to go to his studio to watch him paint and get some instruction. His parents were not in favour of an artist’s career for him, too much uncertainty of making a living at it in those days, however his father eventually sent him to a school in London, Cary’s in Bloomsbury St3 ... From there he went on to the Royal Academy Schools for a year or so ... and in October 1851 ... he went to Italy for two years art study, took a studio in Rome, and met many fellow students, Leighton amongst others, who was painting his famous ‘Cimabue’ (bought later by Queen Victoria), and John Cavell, his fiancé’s brother, who was then with James Hayllar, sat for the head of Cimabue, he being a handsome young man with good features.4 (A pencil profile of his head was given him by Leighton.)5

On leaving Rome James Hayllar and John Cavell tramped through Italy with their knapsacks and painting materials, meeting with all sorts of uncomfortable and unpleasant

2 Two artists, William Joy (1803-c1860) and John Cantiloe Joy (1805-1859), were brothers, both born in Yarmouth, and educated at Wrights Southtown Academy. Captain Manby, a school friend of Nelson’s and a patron of the arts, who commissioned many marine artists, befriended them. He had an art collection in a room at the Royal Hospital, Yarmouth, which overlooked the sea, and he encouraged them and other artists to copy works in the collection by such painters as Pocock, Francia, Sartorius and the Chichester artist, Martin Powell. The Joys became masters of marine painting, and it would have been one of these brothers, or both, that James Hayllar visited to get his first painting lessons. See Stewart and Cutten, Chichester Artists, p. 22. 3 Francis Stephen Cary (1808-1880) was an historical painter who took over Henry Sass’s Art Academy in Bloomsbury in 1842. He is remembered mainly as a teacher, particularly of such students as Millais and Rossetti. See Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part I’, p.266. 4 Frederick Leighton’s Cimabue’s Madonna carried through the Streets of Florence. Christopher Wood suggests that this story is probably apocryphal. See Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part I’, p. 267. 5 Hayllar MS, p. 2. 86

sleeping accommodation amongst peasants in out of the way places.

On the way home they crossed the Stelvio in a snowstorm. James Hayllar spoke Italian almost like a native by Oct 1853 on his arrival home...6

His family’s resistance to the idea of a painting career for their son may have been an obstacle for Hayllar to overcome, but from then the disparity between his opportunities and those available to any women wanting to be an artist were considerable. As a young man he could visit the studio of the artist, Joy, without other members of the household being conscripted to accompany him, which was the lot of the single woman. As a man he needed an occupation, and his persistent desire to be an artist finally caused his family to accept it. Women were permitted art lessons, but typically at home, and only to enhance the skills and pleasures associated with being an amateur painter. However, Hayllar, a young man who had to work, was permitted to live in London and attend a professional art school, Cary’s, which accepted very few female students.7 Being in London allowed access to the stimulation and encouragement presented by galleries and art exhibitions. The R.A. Schools, which he attended, did not accept women. Finally, as we heard from Jessica’s account above, he travelled abroad with a friend, and without the close supervision required for a young woman of equal age. He lived in studio accommodation in Rome, mixing with artists such as Frederick Leighton and having access to the artworks available in Italy.8

6 Hayllar MS, p. 2. 7 Eliza Fox (1824-1903), who later gave art lessons to women, was one of the few women known to have attended the school when it was Sass’s Academy (later Cary’s Academy) from c1844 to 1847. See Cherry, p. 55. 8 According to Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar’, Part I’, p. 267. ‘Hayllar spent the time industriously making drawings from the antique and the old masters, many of which survive in a family scrapbook. Although typical student drawings of the period, some of them reveal remarkable technique.’ 87

English women in Italy could study the art, but only if they were with their family, or in suitable accommodation and with the costs of a chaperone included. For a middle class person, the freedoms permitted to a man in this situation were much greater than those allowable to a woman. Finally Hayllar walked across Europe on his return to England, having the time and leisure to paint along the way, and gaining a much wider understanding of people and landscape as possible material, than a women hurried along in closed transport could begin to know. The Hayllar sisters were studying in the 1870s, twenty years after their father began his art education and while there were more opportunities for women, generally the limitations described above still existed.

Born into a family of practising artists, George Dunlop Leslie (1835- 1921) had more opportunities for art education than Hayllar. His father, Charles Robert Leslie (1794-1859), was an artist who had been a student of the R.A., an Associate Member, a Member and a Professor of Painting. He had three children who were painters. The eldest, Robert Charles Leslie (1826-1901), a successful marine painter, exhibited at the R.A., and one of his daughters, Mary Leslie (1833-1907), was also an artist.9

George Dunlop Leslie, youngest of the three, received family encouragement for his artistic pursuits, as well as opportunities and contacts provided by his father. In late August 1852, when George was about seventeen, his father wrote in a letter: I am quietly out of town and enjoying myself at this beautiful place. We are about a mile from Hampton Court, where George and I go every morning. He is copying pictures in the palace.10

9 Wilder, p. 11. 10 Charles Robert Leslie: Letter of 29 August 1852, in Tom Taylor, ed. Autobiographical Recollections of Charles Robert Leslie (Wakefield: EP Publishing Limited, 1978), p. 305. 88

In 1857, in another letter, Charles Robert Leslie describes enjoying the gardens at Hampton Court and copying Raphael’s cartoons in the palace. Again he mentions his son sharing these privileges: George is a very good boy, and he is getting on well as a painter. He sold a little picture lately to Mr. Moncton Milnes, who has taken a good deal of notice of him, asking him to dine and c, and he is going in a few days to Bristol to copy a picture for an American gentleman.11

George Leslie attended Cary’s Art School and entered the R.A. in 1855, a few years after Hayllar. From then he remained at the R.A. benefitting from all its opportunities for lifelong art education, exhibition and patronage. After 1857 he exhibited his work annually. In 1868 he became an associate of the R.A. and in 1874, an academician. In 1914 he published The Inner Life of the Royal Academy, in which he described such opportunities as being an assistant to Sir Edwin Landseer and seeing Turner retouching his paintings on Varnishing Day.12 Before moving to Wallingford he lived for many years in St John's Wood, North London, gaining experience and enrichment from his participation in the St John's Wood Clique, which included practising artists, P.H. Calderon, H. Stacy Marks, G.A. Storey and W.F. Yeames.

While art instruction was increasingly available to women, differentiation between artists because of their sex continued. Art was offered at the Mechanic’s Institutes established in 1823, and from 1830 these admitted women. Drawing was offered to women as well as men at the Lyceums founded in 1838, along with reading, writing, arithmetic, sewing and singing, all at an elementary level. In 1837 the Head Government School of Design was established to assist Britain to compete in the production of items of ornamental manufacture, because in France there were already eighty schools of design, and in Bavaria there were thirty-three. In 1843, by which time women were

11 Leslie: Letter of 1857, in Autobiographical Recollections, pp. 312-3. 12 Wilder, p. 13. 89

considered suited to occupations in industrial design, the School of Design, Female School was established. The fine art skills of working class women could be exploited in manufactured products, but they could never give full reign to any other artistic desires and neither were individuals given much credit or profit for their labour. The first rule of the school stated that tuition was only available to those studying commercial art for use in industry. It was not for young women wanting to study drawing as a cultural accomplishment. Wealthier women could learn art as a social accomplishment and working class women could be trained as producers of industrial design for use in manufacture. No matter what a woman’s socio- economic class, she was not regarded as a potential artist.

Following the establishment of the School of Design, Female School in London, provincial design schools, such as those in Birmingham, Newcastle and Glasgow also established female classes. Drawing from lithographs, ornament and castes, copying geometrical figures, drawing for wood engravings and porcelain painting were offered at the Head Government School of Design and the School of Design, Female School. However, figure classes in the Female School were from casts, whereas at the Head School figure classes for male students used live models. The belief that it was unfit and immodest for females to draw from live models prevailed throughout art institutions in Britain in the nineteenth century. Paintings by women were often criticised for their lack of anatomical accuracy, a matter of frustration for ambitious women because including figures in paintings was essential in the depiction of historical, biblical and mythological topics, the subject matter of so-called serious artists. Jan March and Pamela Gerrish Nunn stress how this prohibition on life drawing lessons was one of the most significant disadvantages in women’s art education: Access to the life class was a key issue. The Slade’s principal in his first address noted ‘the difficulty which has always stood in the way of female students acquiring 90

that thorough knowledge of the figure which is essential to the production of work of a high class.’13

A contemporary review reveals the derision accorded to artists who did not represent figures realistically. ‘The Royal Academy Second Notice’ in the 8 May 1886 issue of the Athenaeum offers a critique of Mr Long’s Pharaoh’s Daughter (115). The main criticism is that his work is like a woman’s because the figures are so poorly represented. It referred to Mr Long’s ‘attempt to illustrate the Bible’, then stated: Angelica Kaufman14 herself never painted a milder or more wooden princess and more boneless attendants doing nothing with a genteel air. There are no masculine qualities in Mr Long’s art, and he wisely confines himself to painting women; but the smoothness of his damsels does not diminish the difficulty we have experienced in trying to explain the mechanics of their skeletons.15 The review included much more about Long’s female figure, about her ‘extreme ineptitude’ in holding the baby and ‘her wooden legs’. The mockery and rejection of women’s rendition of figures implicit in this review never takes issue with the convention according to which women were not permitted to attend the life classes which assisted in developing these skills.

The Head Government School of Design moved to South Kensington in 1857 and became the National Art Training School. Since women were now permitted to become art teachers they were admitted to this school from its commencement, but instructed separately. The Female School at this time ran into financial difficulties when the government withdrew support, with the excuse that the school was merely offering

13 Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), p. 19. 14 Angelica Kaufman (1741-1807), a Swiss-Austrian Neoclassical painter went to England and worked there under the patronage of Sir Joshua Reynolds. She painted many figures in her history paintings in her determination to be a serious artist. Hoock, pp. 31-2. 15 ‘The Royal Academy (Second Notice)’, The Athenaeum, no. 3054 (8 May 1886), 620-2 (p. 621). 91

accomplishment art for wealthy students. The Queen granted her patronage, money was raised, and in 1862 it became known as the Royal Female School of Art. However, the emphasis was still on training for a career in design, or training to be an art teacher. Upper class women without financial support had for some time used their accomplishment in art as one of the skills with which to sell themselves as governesses and now there was an opportunity for women to teach in the art schools for females. However, since their art education was inadequate, their teaching would be limited, a further restriction on their students’ instruction.

There were private art schools, such as Henry Sass’s School of Art, in Bloomsbury, later Cary’s School of Art, the school that James Hayllar attended. Eliza Fox (1824-1903)16 studied there from 1844 to 1847, and Henrietta Ward (1832-1924)17 studied there briefly at the end of the decade. When Eliza Fox left Cary’s School of Art she set up evening classes in which ladies could gain experience in drawing from the nude, which suggests that the opportunity had not been available at the school. Whatever the case, it was such an expensive school that only the richest could attend.

James Mathew Leigh conducted one school that did offer an equal art education to men and women, including anatomy and life classes. This was Dickinson’s Academy, known from 1848 as James Mathew Leigh’s General Practical Art School. Anna Blunden (1830-1915)18

16 Eliza Florence Fox (1824-1903), figure painter, gave drawing classes at home and exhibited at the R. A. from 1859 to 1871. She was an activist for women’s rights, signing the 1859 Women’s petition to the R. A. See Cherry, pp. 47-8, 55, 922, 136, 217, 225. 17 Henrietta Mary Ada Ward (1832-1924), figure painter, was an activist for women’s rights. She exhibited at the R. A. and after the death of her husband gave art classes for women. See Cherry, pp. 33, 35-6, 43, 55, 93-4, 130, 221, 224. Also see p. 128 b.elow.sbsssseeSsee25was 18 Anna Elizabeth Blunden (1830-1915), figure and landscape painter, working in oils and later water-colour. She worked as a governess for a year, but then she trained at Leigh’s classes. She was interested in social issues; her most famous painting is 'Song of the Shirt', which, by presenting a drawn, exhausted seamstress with sympathy, emphasised the ways in which these women were overworked and exploited. She signed the 1859 Women’s petition to the R. A. Many of her works 92

and Laura Herford (1831–1870), the first woman student at the R.A., attended this school, as did Kate Greenaway (1846-1901)19 and Louise Jopling (1843-1933).20 These were the first women to be accepted into the Academy Schools. It could be that these women attained entry into the Academy because they had been given the same art education that male students had been receiving; however, their admittance also depended on changes in the Academy itself.

The Society of British Artists opened an art school in 1847, which included life classes for women, although the figures were to be classically draped. Two colleges for women’s secondary education, Queen’s College and Bedford College were founded in the late 1840s and offered art classes, and in 1854 a life class was offered in Bedford College. Frances Cary, the teacher and friend of James Hayllar from his days at Cary’s Art School, was the Professor of Drawing at the College for twenty years, and he established the class. Barbara Smith Bodichon (1827-1891),21 a successful artist and great social reformer for women’s rights studied in this Art Department. The Society of Female Artists, founded in 1856/57, provided a venue for women to exhibit their work and established an art school which offered a life class with a costumed model. The Slade School, which opened in 1871, treated both sexes equally.

While students at the Royal Academy Schools enjoyed the most comprehensive fine arts tuition available in the British Isles women were not accepted there until 1861, when Laura Hertford submitted were destroyed during the bombing of Exeter in WWII. See Cherry, pp. 145, 153-7, 216, 225. 19 Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), watercolourist and illustrator, produced her first book, Under the Window, an illustrated collection of verses for children, in 1879, and it created her reputation. Cherry, p. 218. 20 See below, pp. 105-106. 21 Barbara Smith Bodichon (1827-1891) received a general liberal education and a fairly comprehensive art education and she was independently wealthy. An artist and social reformer, particularly in the area of women’s rights, she provided significant financial backing to the Society of Female Artists, to the English Woman’s Journal, to Girton College, the first women’s college to provide tertiary education for women, and to the art studio at Bedford College. Cherry, pp. 28, 47-8, 92-3, 97, 104-9, 187-9. Orr, pp 169-70. 93

her work under the name L. Herford.22 The institution had been under attack for some time for not accepting females and since their response had been that women had not applied for admittance, they were forced to admit Laura Herford. Females could be admitted from then, although the academicians still used a variety of strategies to keep the number of female students to a minimum.23

Herford’s manner of gaining entry to the Academy Schools illustrates that women did much to help themselves be accepted into the schools and received as members. This is evidenced in an item of correspondence, ‘Ladies and the Royal Academy’, in a January 1880 issue of The Artist and Journal of Home Culture, in which the writer urges the R.A. to accept women on an equal footing to men, not just as students but Members of the Academy. She proposes that this would allow women students to attend ‘life school’ because women academicians could supervise such classes: Sir, - If it is true that the Royal Academicians are contemplating electing women as Honorary Female Associates, could not ‘women’ be substituted for the unpleasant adjective ‘female’? But better still would it be to admit women on the same footing as men. Art is not an affair of sex. And if the duties of R.A.s prevent women from sharing the honours of the Academy, why not institute a life school for women students, to be visited by women Academicians? This would give the women members a ‘duty’ equal to those men fulfil, and would be an immense advantage to women students, who have to pay dearly for the necessary studies, which the men

22 Hoock, p. 34. 23 Pamela Gerrish Nunn, ed., Canvassing; Recollections by Six Victorian Women Artists (London: Camden Press, 1986), p. 5.and Charlotte Yeldham, Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France and England: Their Art Education, Exhibition Opportunities and Membership of Exhibiting Societies and Academies, with an Assessment of the Subject Matter of their Work and Summary Biographies (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1984), II, p. 123. 94

students receive in the regular school course. Your obedient servant, A Lady Artist24 Except for the two founding female members of the Academy, Mary Moser 25 and Angelica Kauffman, however, it was not until 1936, when Laura Knight was elected, that a woman became a Member of the Royal Academy.26

By the 1880s, in spite of increases in the number of art schools and societies admitting women, they were still regarded as amateur, or at least as a separate group, the ‘female’27 artists, from whom less was expected and to whom less was given. They were largely taught in separate classes and there were still few life classes. Elizabeth Thomson,28 attended the Royal Female Art School, one of the new educational institutions available to women, but she found it unsatisfactory because she felt restricted by exercises limited to copying. Consequently she left and took private art lessons. While a male could progress along the well-defined path of private art school and then Academy schools, women had to patch together what experience they could from private lessons and from lessons in one of the schools which did accept women. While men, having decided on their career, could often pursue it uninterrupted, accomplished women artists who married and had a family, had to attend to that family as a matter of priority. Sometimes, with the approval and support of their husband, they could continue, but at other times they gave up art altogether.

24 Letter to the Editor, ‘Correspondence’, Artist and Journal of Home Culture, 15 January 1880, p. 29. 25 Mary Moser (1744 – 1819), a flower painter, whose father George G. Moser, was the first Keeper of the Academy. The Keeper supervised the schools, staff, and general discipline of the academy for £100 per annum and had an apartment in the RA. Mary Moser may have lived on the premises. 26 Hoock, p. 32. 27 See letter above in which ‘A Lady Artist’ objects to this title, with the suggestion that it emphasised difference. 28 Elizabeth Thompson Butler (1846-1933), a woman who was a successful artist in her own time. For more details see below pp. 103-4. 95

Long apprenticeships with well-trained professional teachers were not available for women at art schools, but rather in the studios of successful practising artists. If a male artist approved of his daughter, sister or wife painting, then they had more chance of being successful, as he could provide instruction, work space, equipment and supplies, as well as access to exhibitions and other sales venues. In nineteenth- century England many relatively successful women such as Grace Cruickshank (1860-1894),29 Lucy Madox Brown (Mrs W.M. Rossetti) (1843-1894) and Catherine Madox Brown (1850-1927) 30 fitted this category, and so did the Hayllar sisters.

Pamela Gerrish Nunn states that Hayllar, as his daughters’ art teacher, guided them in what they produced, interestingly using language which supports my claim that their education was directed towards producing a specific commodity: The Hayllar sisters, born in the middle of the century, achieving success in the 1880s, were a product of their father’s devotion to painting ... he moulded (them) to the production of a streamlined and unified product, oil scenes of middle-class idylls, usually domestic.31

Deborah Cherry32 and Clarissa Campbell Orr33 both emphasise that although there were educational institutions at the end of the century providing women with an art education, Hayllar still kept his daughters at home. His motives may have been economic; he was a man whose income depended on his art and he had a large family to

29Grace Cruickshank (1860-1894), miniature painter, learned to paint when sketching in backgrounds, draperies and accessories for her father. See Cherry, Painting Women, pp. 22, 217. 30 Lucy Madox Brown (1843-1894) and Catherine Madox Brown (1850-1927), both painters of figure subjects in watercolour, learned their trade helping their father with preparatory work and by producing the duplicates necessary to increase his income. They did have some formal classes. They used their families as models. Both gave up art when they married. See Cherry, Painting Women, pp. 21-3, 40, 216. 31 Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Victorian Women Artists (London: Women’s Press, 1987), p. 32. 32 Painting Women, p. 22. 33 Women in the Victorian Art World, p.11. 96

support. While the Academy Schools were free, keeping four daughters in London would have involved considerable cost. Possibly since Hayllar’s focus was on commercially successful work rather than ‘great’ art, he felt that there was no need for them to attend the Academy Schools. Alternatively his reasons might have been those of a conservative Victorian father, believing that his daughters would be safer and less likely to be exposed to the corrupting influences of the city if they stayed at home. Whatever his reasons, Hayllar, was a well trained, dedicated teacher who knew the essential steps in the progressive development of technical skills. He provided his daughters with a long and comprehensive apprenticeship.

The two documents giving detailed descriptions of the Hayllar sisters’ art education are Jessica Hayllar’s memoir, written in the 1920s or 30s, thirty to forty years after the period of art training, and an article in the December 1889 Lady’s Pictorial, written when the sisters were at the height of their success. The article describes their lesson schedule in the present tense and gives specific details about paintings and exhibitions, suggesting that it was written soon after a personal interview with the sisters.

In her memoir Jessica Hayllar explained that her father took his daughters’ tuition so seriously that he provided a separate, properly established studio of their own for when they left school. It was furnished with all the essentials, large windows to let in light, plaster castes, copies of classical paintings and still life arrangements: He turned an old dry laundry attached to the house, with three dormer windows, into a studio by putting in a skylight facing north and getting plaster castes etc etc, and in the intervals from his own work he found time to teach and superintend and arrange subjects for his daughters.34

34 Hayllar MS, p. 10. 97

The sisters spent regular hours in the studio daily and on summer days they were only free at four o’clock in the afternoon to enjoy all the water activities and sporting activities available to residents of a house in the country and on the Thames. In winter they also had evening lessons:

Their studio hours are, as a rule, from ten o’clock till four, while in the winter evenings they make a point of carrying on some kind of art work, such as modelling in clay, etching or mezzotint engraving on copper. 35

Not only was there a designated work place, the studio, but working hours were also dictated, so that the Hayllar sisters were trained in habits of regular work. By the time they had come to the post-school studio lessons, they had already had some thorough instruction, which Hayllar continued to build on as part of their career preparation. He taught them a wide variety of skills, not just drawing, but modelling and etching. His lessons appear to have been thorough and well programmed, so that his daughters could build up their skills with a logical developmental approach:

Mr. Hayllar superintended his daughters’ studies from the days when they were quite children, first insisting that they should learn to draw with accuracy and correctness in black and white. They worked at first from the common objects with which they were surrounded. The chief points upon which Mr. Hayllar insisted were close observation and great completeness. He made his pupils draw everything that was seen beyond and behind the objects they were studying with the same exactness and truthfulness as the objects themselves.36

35 Lady’s Pictorial, 28 December 1889, pp. 944-945 (p. 944). 36 Ibid. 98

In later years Jessica added to this detail in a tone of admiration and gratitude, explaining how her father, a perfectionist in technical matters, trained his daughters to be the same:

James Hayllar’s method of teaching drawing was never to let anything pass that was not quite correct in form or relation to its surroundings, and by this intensive means of training the eye enabled the pupil to dispense with months of time spent in waste of paper and paint, and begin to do things worth exhibiting, and that found ready purchasers. In the winter evenings he gave lessons in perspective. He was a most patient teacher and chary of giving praise so that one felt he meant it when he did give it.37

The writer of the article in the Lady’s Pictorial made it clear that the art education received by the Hayllar sisters was regarded as successful, at least in the narrow definition given here:

The three sisters, Miss Jessica, Miss Edith and Miss Kate Hayllar, commenced their artistic career with the intention of making their works carefully realistic and literal as possible, and from this determination they have never departed, with the excellent result which is now well known to all who take an interest in the success of women painters.38

Hayllar was not intending his daughters’ art to be only a social accomplishment; such rigorous training would hardly have been necessary to produce works for a scrapbook. Jessica Hayllar’s words quoted above emphasise that they were expected to produce ‘things worth exhibiting, and that found ready purchasers’.

37 Hayllar MS, p. 11. 38 Lady’s Pictorial, p. 944. 99

James Hayllar’s directions to his daughters to reproduce exactly what they saw resulted in paintings so meticulously executed that black- and-white copies look very much like photographs. The sisters themselves testified to this effect in their interview with the Ladies Pictorial: The faithful and painstaking reproduction of the smallest detail, which so largely characterises the work of all three sisters, may be traced, in the first place to their early training with their father.39 Abigail Large, an art historian, has added to this: James Hayllar’s skilled draughtsmanship, sharp, carefully observed detail and smooth finish had its parallel in the minute detail, polished finish and naturalness of observation evident in his daughters’ work. 40

Nevertheless as Large would go on to note, the sisters’ work differed from their father’s. Besides being larger in scale, his work included signs of his more academic training, in composition, numbers of figures, representation of light and shade, and depth: Compared to the sisters’ work, paintings by James Hayllar tended to be much larger in scale, involving more elaborate and ‘academic’ compositional formats, more figures, and a greater sense of ‘chiaroscuro’ and spatial depth. His figures were more sculptural or rounded in treatment. Such features reflected the nature of his training compared to that of his daughters – his education had involved extensive study from life and the antique.41

It is reasonable to assume that another factor in the training of the Hayllar sisters was the example and influence of George Dunlop Leslie. As we have seen, the Hayllars moved to Wallingford in 1875

39 Ibid. 40 ‘The Hayllar Sisters’, p. 14. 41 Ibid. 100

and the Leslies arrived next door in 1883, when the sisters were most engaged in their painting. The families socialised and the men were artists and good friends; that they were aware of one another’s work would seem obvious.

Wilder suggests that the Hayllar sisters may have been sitters for some of Leslie’s work, referring specifically to The Language of Flowers (RA 1885), now in the Manchester City Art Gallery, which includes two girls who look like Jessica and Edith Hayllar.42 To sit for a painting is to take an interest in its progress and since the Hayllars were painters themselves, their attention to Leslie’s technique would have been closer than that of an ordinary sitter. Wilder also comments on Mary Hayllar’s work differentiating examples of her style from that of her sisters, and pointing out aspects of her work similar to Leslie’s. In Poppies Among the Corn (1883) (Fig. 25), an image of two children near a farm gate in a field of corn, Wilder notes: In this small painting the brushwork is very reminiscent of George Leslie’s in The Lass of Richmond Hill.43 The figures are finely worked but the landscape is effectively and loosely handled on buff ground – quite different from her sisters’ technique.44 Mary, a younger sister, may have been less restricted than her older sisters and wandering from studio to studio may have picked up a painting style different to that taught by her father. 45

The Hayllar sisters had a well-regulated, thorough art education in technique, although, except in this example of Mary’s paintings,

42 Victorian Artists of Wallingford, p. 19. 43 This painting, completed in 1877, was George Dunlop Leslie’ Diploma Picture, for the RA, and it is still in the R.A.’s collection. In it a young lady sits wistfully with a basket, and the sloping land behind her suggests the hill. 44 Victorian Artists of Wallingford, p. 60. 45 In A River Bank (Fig. 26) two children play by a river and a boy close to the water picks flowers for a little girl at the top of the bank. From the black-and-white photocopy, it appears to have just the loosely handled brushwork and background as Poppies among the Corn. Later paintings of Mary returned to the more finely worked style. 101

without the opportunity to study or try using other styles. Considering the formal art education available to women in the nineteenth century as outlined previously, the sisters had opportunities that many women could not access. While the development of a meticulous realism may have assisted the Hayllars to excel in that style, and almost certainly prevented them from developing any other approaches to painting, it seems to me that their production was more determined by commercial concerns than anything else.

While the sisters had instruction in technique, although not of course in life painting, they do not appear to have received formal instruction in art history and theory, nor the informal education that came from wider experience either abroad or at home. It is likely that they travelled to London in at least some of the years when their work was hung with the R.S.A. and later in the R.A., but there are no family documents relating to this and while the two articles mentioned above, particularly that in the Ladies Pictorial, give specific details about what paintings were hung in which exhibitions, there is no mention of seeing them there, nor any reference to other painters.

The Hayllar sisters do not seem to have had much exposure to original classical works, however there are copies of such works in their paintings, indicating that they did know some classics. Kate Hayllar included a black-and-white copy of Raphael's Madonna della Sedia in A Thing of Beauty is A Joy Forever (1890) (Fig. 13) and the same print in the same frame is in a still life by Jessica Hayllar entitled Lilies of the Field (1905) (Fig. 27). Two more of Kate’s paintings include classic works. The Age of Innocence (1894) (Fig. 28) includes a framed print of Joshua Reynolds’ The Age of Innocence (circa1788) and Roba di Roma (1892) (Fig. 29) includes an Italianate image of a turbaned boy. While the Hayllar pictures are abundant in colour, the old masters in them are often reproduced in black-and-white, which may suggest the form in which the sisters came across them. 102

I often refer to the Hayllar sisters as a group because their art training, home life, and the lessons and constraints placed on their behaviour were common. Nonetheless, there were differences in the iconography of their work, even though their images occasionally included identical places, rooms in their home and the summer house, and particular objects, such as vases, chairs and tables.

Kate Hayllar had a much smaller output than her sisters with only about 15 of her paintings known. This may have been a result of her meticulous working method in which she sometimes used a magnifying glass and took months to produce a painting. She produced small still-lifes, with arrangements of ornaments, pots and flowers. As mentioned above, her still-lifes often included other framed paintings, sometimes by her father, or their neighbour George Dunlop Leslie, or more famous classical works no doubt seen in reproduction such as those previously mentioned. One or two paintings included images of children.

Mary Hayllar’s images of rooms, some occupied and some not, occasionally incorporate a view outside a window or door to where people are playing tennis in the garden, or with a view of fields in the distance. These suggest a life not restricted to the house. She also painted the outdoors and children playing in the garden, or by the river. As discussed, she was the only sister to experiment with a different style, trying something looser and more relaxed than the exact, closely worked paintings typical of the family.

Edith Hayllar painted still-lifes, images of women and children, of them having tea, or reading in the garden, or the green house, or playing tennis. She produced, however, a wider range of subject matter than her sisters: her paintings showing a relationship between the working and middle classes; images of house servants; pictures of 103

hunting and punting; and studies of men relaxing and eating after hunting. Edith was also a portraitist.

Although Jessica Hayllar was the most prolific of the sisters, she had a narrower range of subject matter, specialising in still-life, flowers and images of bourgeois women and children in the home. Sometimes it is the spaces in the home which seem to be her main subject matter and in almost every canvas she included large arrangements of flowers. Like Edith she too was a portraitist.

The range of educational opportunities available to certain other women artists, compared to those of the Hayllar sisters, clarify how their training differed and the types of opportunities they missed. The more privileged women, for reasons such as wealth, ample leisure time and supportive families, were able to afford private painting lessons and to travel and study abroad. Their family conditions varied greatly, but were nonetheless distinguished by a certain open mindedness, which supported the artists in their study of painting, and the alternative lifestyle it often required. Elizabeth Thompson Butler was such an artist. Louise Jopling was not wealthy, and did not have leisure time; however, the conditions of her hard life did give her other opportunities and freedoms, which the protected Hayllar sisters could not access.

Elizabeth Thompson Butler (1846-1933) was a successful artist whose art education was assisted by the wealth and the open mindedness of her family. She was born near Lausanne, and her father, who seemed to be on a permanent Grand Tour, enjoyed his leisure and educating his two daughters. As children they spent their time between Kent, Surrey and different villas in Italy. Her father, impressed by the work in her sketchbook, encouraged Thompson’s art. She attended the South Kensington School of Art, which was one of the places that did offer women an education in art, but significantly she left the school because its standards were not high enough. At a private studio in 104

Bolswer Street, she had the chance to take life classes, drawing from nude female models, a rare and valuable opportunity for a woman training as an artist. Her education in the history and theory of art was developed by the artists she worked with, such as the Academician Bellucci, with whom she studied in Florence in the 1860s. On visits to Paris she encountered the modern French school of painters, including popular battle and history painters. Travelling between England and Italy they saw a great variety of countryside, which she sketched. Matthew Lalumia says: ‘In all cases, Thompson's preparation in art emphasized good drawing. A confident line and a mastery of human and equine anatomy marked her subsequent production’.46 In 1877 she married a soldier, William Butler, and after that travelled regularly to such places as Egypt and Africa.47 Her painting, Calling the Roll After an Engagement, Crimea (The Roll Call), exhibited at the RA in 1874, was one of the three most sensational Academy ‘hits’ of the century in relation to its coverage in the papers as well as the crowds it drew to the exhibition.48 It was an extraordinary subject for a woman at that time. A group of men in uniform, some in tall fur hats, obviously part of the uniform, stand together in the snow after a battle. Many are wounded, bandaged and leaning on crutches. One man lies dead in the snow, and another is on horseback in front of them. The painting speaks of the hardships of war as endured by the common soldier and was received with great acclaim for its accuracy as well as for its drama. More training and wide experience defined the artist’s subject matter and particular skills, which were very different to the Hayllar sisters.49

46 Matthew Lalumia, ‘Lady Elizabeth Thompson Butler in the 1870s’, Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring - Summer, 1983), pp. 9-14, (p. 9.), available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/1358095 (Accessed 07/05/2012) 47 Nunn, ed., Canvassing, pp.70-8. 48 Usherwood, Paul, ‘Elizabeth Thompson Butler: A Case of Tokenism’, Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Autumn, 1990 - Winter, 1991), pp. 14-18, (p. 14), available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/3690693 ( Accessed 7/5/2012) 49 See Cherry, pp. 43, 65, 88, 93, 96, 98, 99, 103, 220. Delia Gaze, ed., Dictionary of Women Artists, Vol 2 (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997), pp. 335-7. 105

Louise Jopling (1843-1933) did not have supportive parents encouraging her to take up art; rather she was one of nine children, orphaned at an early age and never independently wealthy. She married at seventeen and in 1865 travelled with her first husband to Paris with their two sons. There Jopling’s art education began when she took painting lessons in Chaplin’s, a studio that specialised in teaching women. She met other English women, who were later to become well-known artists, such as Henrietta Ward (1832 – 1924),50 Mary Ellen Edwards (1838-1934),51 and the flower painters, Martha Darley Mutrie (1824-1885) and Annie Feray Mutrie (1826-1893).52 On their return to London she continued painting. Her first husband left her in 1871, and in 1874 she married Joseph Jopling (1831-1884), a practising artist, who knew artists such as John Everett Millais (1829–1896) and James McNeil Whistler (1834–1903). This contact with successful contemporary artists assisted Jopling’s art education, both in enabling her to see a range of their work and hearing and participating in conversations about art. Louise Jopling seemed to enjoy this social life, and as a portrait painter she benefitted from the contacts it brought her. When her husband died in 1884 she set up a school for female art students, where she employed mainly female teachers. Jopling was the first women elected to the Royal Society for British Artists.53 Always the need to earn money dominated her work and she painted many portraits, but perhaps because her life had not

50 Henrietta Mary Ada Ward (1832 – 1924), history and genre painter, born into a family of painters, had art lessons with her mother, at Sass’s Academy and with artist Edward Mathew Ward, whom she married. She submitted her work to the R.A. in 1850 and regularly for many years after that, combining a successful career as an artist with a happy family life. See Cherry, pp. 35-6. 51 Mary Ellen Edwards (1838-1934), figure painter and illustrator, trained with Royal Academician and historical painter, Edward Armitage, then briefly at the South Kensington School of Art, then she worked on her technique with a group of friends to improve her technique. She successfully illustrated magazines and books for many years. Available at: http://meadowsfamilytree.net/Mary-Ellen-Edwards-MEE-and-her-family (Accessed 23/8/2012) 52 Martha Darley Mutrie (1824-1885) and Annie Feray Mutrie (1826-1893) were both successful still-life artists, mainly painting flowers. They studied at the Manchester School of Design as well as having private lessons, and they exhibited in the R.A.. They were both signatories to the petition for women’s access to the Royal Academy Schools. See Cherry, p. 45, 67, 218-9, 224. 53 Gaze, pp. 753-7. (p. 756) 106

been easy she understood hardship and did paint at times challenging images about the lives of women.54 Weary Waiting (1877) pictures a beautiful woman in a long pale dress, sitting at a desk.55 She is not working, but is resting her head on her elbow and looking discontentedly past the viewer, presumably watching for the person for whom she is waiting. At her feet sits a little girl staring at the doll she is nursing, quite disengaged from the woman. Both are slumped in an attitude of lassitude. They are in a dark room, which is filled with furniture and knick-knacks merging into the shadows. There appear to be no doors or windows behind them, so there is a real feeling of entrapment, which the expressions and body language of the two subjects confirms. Perhaps suggested here is the stifling, blighting effect of patriarchal authority on the life of a trapped, weary woman who is depending on a man, presumably, for her living, certainly for her life to resume its progress and meaning. This bold questioning of women’s lives would not have been so explicit with the Hayllars, who lived narrower, but also more financially secure and more protected lives.

For these two successful women prevailing beliefs on women’s role in society did not weigh so heavily as on the Hayllar sisters, because of privilege and wealth, an unconventional family background, or hardships which caused those mores to be rejected in favour of survival. Nonetheless, while the Hayllar sisters’ art education was provided by their father in the privacy of their home, that element of their training which insisted that their art be a commodity guaranteed that their work, if successful, would ultimately circulate in the public sphere, just as the work of James Hayllar, George Leslie and the women mentioned above was seen in public galleries and exhibitions. The Hayllar sisters were being placed in a position in which their work as artists would allow them to actively bridge the divide between their private world and the public world.

54 See Cherry, pp. 34, 36-7, 62, 89-90, 93-4, 97, 104, 170., Gaze, pp. 753-7. 55 See Cherry, Plate 19. 107 ======

1881 - Castle Priory, Wallingford

Jessica shivered as a rush of chilly air brushed by her. The green terraced lawns by the river in front of the house had seemed like a playground during the day. Golden sunlight had warmed the air and, filtered by the leaves, had drawn shifting patterns on the lawn. She and her sisters had rowed in the early morning and in the afternoon, after work, they had relaxed in the summerhouse with their mother, sipping tea and observing the birds and the boaters. Nonetheless this evening there was a cold, clammy draft coming from the river, a reminder of the recent winter. She walked over to the shutters to close them more firmly, then went to the fire to warm her hands before returning to her seat and continuing her drawing exercise. The living room was well lit by candles, as Papa insisted that they could not work without good light, or they would harm their eyes. Nevertheless, Jessica felt that it was the fire dancing in the hearth that caused the best light in the room. It created interesting splashes of illumination, which flickered on the highly wrought patterns carved into the polished wooden furniture, and lit up people’s faces. Mama, in her dark dress, with the white collar framing her face, looked quite flushed as she sat tranquilly stitching a piece of embroidery. Only she and Grace were sewing. Edith, the sister nearest Jessica in age, and Mary and Kate the two youngest sisters were, as Jessica was supposed to be, doing exercises in perspective. Papa had given a few instructions and now he was walking around the room and looking at their work, offering comments and advice. An Evening of Industry, thought Jessica, or No Idle Hands Here, that’s what she could call such a painting. She would have all the heads, hair pulled back and secured on top, bending over the work. The dresses could all be in darkish colours that suggested night-time, 108

cherry red, dark navy, a satiny brown, each corresponding to a different colour in the carpet, and shaded according to the reach of the firelight, so that the carpet and the firelight unified the scene. Perhaps Papa could be standing, creating the interest at another level. He could be looking over Kate’s shoulder. He was looking over Kate’s shoulder. Jessica smiled to herself as she focused on the two of them and saw that neither fitted the peaceful picture in her imagination. Papa was looking irritated and Kate’s hair was a mass of unmanageable curls, not at all elegant, and certainly not secured neatly at the top of her head. ‘Trust what you see,’ Papa was reminding Kate as he peered at her work, ‘what you see, not what you know to be true. Yes that far door is as big as this one, but it looks smaller. However, the angles of the door frames here’, he took her pencil and made a correction, ‘should be the same as the ones in the background, because they are in line see.’ Kate did not move or speak, but Jessica saw her bite her lip. Jessica knew how these lessons in perspective annoyed Kate. She would complain about them later. ‘I want to paint what I want to paint,’ she would say, ‘not keep drawing the same rooms, the same hallways over and over again.’ At seventeen Kate was the only daughter who ever uttered a rebellious thought. ‘What about Ernie and Reggie,’ she would grumble, referring to the two elder boys in the family. ‘They’re not here always drawing and studying. They’re away working, and when they come home they just go to parties, have fun. Even Algie,’ she spoke her younger brother’s name with indignation, ‘is away at school.’ Kate glanced up and saw Jessica watching her. She grimaced at Jessica, who smiled encouragingly, hoping to calm her. There was no point in being rude to Papa. For one thing, as Jessica had often said to Kate, his instructions were helpful. As well, if Kate ever objected to what he said even mildly, Mama would call them together the next day and give a lecture about respect and gratitude that tried even Jessica’s patience. 109

Jessica knew that her father would not find fault with her own work. She had outlined the procession of receding doorways perfectly. She loved that long prospect leading from room to room. It was best in the daytime with the sun pouring through the large windows that ran across the front of Castle Priory filling every room with light, so that even as the rooms receded in her painting she could represent glimpses of each one furnished and decorated, suggesting spaces with infinite possibilities for action and drama. They had moved to the house four years ago, and its roominess and those wonderful Georgian windows, reaching to the ceiling and recessed slightly so that the folded shutters of golden timber framed each one, still filled her with pleasure. At night the doors lead from room to darker room, and it was a more mysterious prospect, not so delightful perhaps, but intriguing.

James Hayllar inspected the work of each of his daughters. He did pat Jessica on the shoulder as he stood behind her and when she looked up at him he nodded. As he walked back to his chair by the fire, Jessica glanced at Kate again, and Kate seeing her father’s back turned, poked her tongue out at Jessica, and then composed her face again. Mary also saw the cheeky face and bent to hide her smile.

It was a relief when Wakeling, the housemaid, came in with the tea trolley. Grace, who had never painted seriously, had voluntarily become part of the household help. She put her stitchery down and got up to pour the tea. She knew exactly how each parent and sister liked it and she took time over each cup, serving first Mama, then Papa, then Jessica, Edith, Mary and Kate in order. Jessica knew that Grace enjoyed suppertime, because everybody stopped working, or discussing art, and had a conversation in which she could be included.

James sipped his tea, then placed the cup carefully back in its saucer. ‘Girls, now that you have stopped working we can have a discussion.’

It was a relief to drop the pencil and sink back into the chair. Jessica rubbed her eyes, flexed her fingers and picked up her cup and saucer. 110

‘The Summer Exhibition is coming around,’ James Hayllar stated. ‘As you know I have been working on paintings of the new baby at the cottage, and I will probably submit them both. However, you should be thinking of submitting as well. Certainly Jessica should submit something, and since Mary did so well last year, I think she should try again.’ He smiled at Edith. ‘I know you want to wait another year,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should send work to the Royal Society of British Artists this year. That’s how Jessica began. They will consider your work because I am a member, although,’ he nodded reassuringly at his second daughter, ‘Your work is good enough to be accepted on its own merits.’

‘Thank you Papa.’ Edith acknowledged the reassurance.

‘Well, I don’t want to enter anything,’ stated Kate, ‘since Papa always finds fault with my work.’

Mama and Grace gasped, and the others looked up, but said nothing. They spent hours with Kate in the studio and were often entertained by her outspoken opinions, which, while quite unorthodox, always seemed to hold some kernel of truth, or to reflect their feelings in a way they hardly dared to think about, let alone express. Still, thought Jessica, there will definitely be a lecture from Mama tomorrow.

Only their father seemed unperturbed. He gave his full attention to his cup of tea, lifting it to his mouth and then sipping it.

‘Kate,’ Mama reprimanded her daughter. ‘How can you speak to your father that way? After all the time and effort he has spent helping you?’

‘I’m tired of lessons in perspective,’ said Kate defiantly.

‘Nonetheless, Kate, you have not yet mastered perspective,’ said her father mildly.

‘Well, you never like anything I do.’

Even Jessica felt shocked at Kate’s persistence. 111

James Hayllar drained his teacup, placed it deliberately on the saucer and ran his fingers outwards to smooth his moustache. Then he looked at Kate and said seriously, ‘Kate that is wholly untrue. Your paintings of fabrics and woodwork and flowers are always very proficient. You are already an accomplished painter in many ways. But you are still young, are you not? If you can master perspective your paintings will be finer, more beautiful, more saleable. We must consider such things.’

Jessica realised that her father’s answer was typical of how he had managed them all. He rarely praised, but just when they were ready to despair, he would offer some warm words which would renew them. She saw that Kate was feeling that conflict between gratitude for the praise and resentment of the criticism.

She thought she should intervene, distract everyone’s gaze from Kate. ‘Papa, I thought about submitting some flower paintings. Azaleas and poppies are in full bloom at the moment, and I might cut a bunch of those. Flower paintings sell, and I always enjoy doing them.’ Jessica sat back, almost sure of a favourable answer.

James Hayllar’s patience, however, was spent. ‘This is the Royal Academy we are talking about Jessica.’ He spoke rather stiffly. ‘There will be flower paintings enough on display. We need something slightly more challenging than that.’ He paused for a minute. Everyone in the room was silent. Then he continued. ‘I liked that sketch you did on Christmas Day. Develop that. You could start on it tomorrow.’

The following afternoon Jessica sat inside, in the same position she had been in when she made that Christmas Day sketch. However, having set up her easel, she did not start the drawing, but sat mesmerized by the sunlit world outside the front door. The spring sun had transformed the drab olive green grass into bright emerald. She loved the effect of sunlight on plants and flowers; it made them appear to radiate light. She gazed out the door for so long that when she turned back to her canvas her eyes took time to adjust to the darker 112

inside light. She sighed. Her father had liked the idea of this picture since she first conceived it on Christmas Day. She had done some quick outlines in her notebook, and in the afternoon when the gifts were unwrapped and everyone was resting except for her mother and the servants in the kitchen preparing Christmas Dinner, she had sat down to draw a more detailed sketch. She produced an outline of a picture showing all the delightful mess of gifts strewn carelessly on chairs and tables and of wrapping paper drifting across the furniture and onto the floor. Papa was right; the picture did have potential. She studied the Christmas Day sketch for a few minutes, peered at the initial drawings she had made, examined the rooms themselves and then picked up her pencil. In a few minutes she was totally immersed. The gifts, mainly unframed canvases, and the wrapping paper would be in the foreground, in the first room, but to the left, taking up almost half the canvas would be the two dark wooden archways, and through them, and framed by them would be another room, spacious and well lit, and at the far end of that room another door. That final door was going to be open, leading even further away, although it would not be clear where it lead. She was so absorbed that her father had to knock a few times to get her attention before he came in. As he walked over, Jessica sat back. Now that she had begun the work she wished she could be just left to do it, but she pushed that thought away. James Hayllar looked at the picture taking shape in the faint pencil outline. Then he examined the preliminary Christmas Day sketches. ‘I was right. Was I not?’ He did not wait for her agreement, but continued. ‘I understand that you enjoy the rooms just as they are, but I think you need something more, a story; perhaps a young mother on a chair, showing a toy to her child, or two children playing. Ah yes! A mother with her baby, a reflection of the Christmas story.’ Jessica felt a twinge of dissatisfaction at her father’s lack of understanding. It was not about the sacred side of Christmas at all. Perhaps it was about the secular side, the gifts and the wrapping, the 113

waste really, and the sense of being worried beforehand about what to give, and so overloaded with good things afterwards, that what would normally be treasured was just cast aside because another attraction had been offered. One thing she felt strongly was that the room should be empty. ‘Papa, I am not sure whether I want people in it,’ she began tentatively. ‘Anyway, I am just starting. Let me think about it.’ He was silent. Jessica examined the pencilled beginnings of her picture. Maybe she should try to explain. ‘I’m having the wooden table here in this first room, and I think I’ll have an unframed picture standing on it, leaning against the wall, a Christmas present perhaps. Above them I’ll have another painting, properly framed and suspended from the picture rail. I wonder what was hanging there.’ She picked up one of the sketches and studied it. In a house full of painters the pictures on the walls were constantly being moved, either to be sold, or to give some other painting a place of honour. Sometimes one of the resident artists removed one painting to hang another, whose content would add another layer of significance to a work currently being prepared. ‘Oh,’ exclaimed Jessica, pleased. Your painting of the deer lying down and the baby fawn nuzzling her was actually there. So whatever else I include, I will incorporate at least that mother and child. Just a subtle reference. What do you think?’ Jessica knew that her father liked it when their paintings included one of his, and she watched him trying to balance his pleasure at this new suggestion, with his irritation at her rejection of his other ideas. ‘Papa, I will think about your suggestions. I promise.’ She turned back to her work. Feeling relieved when he left, she returned her attention to the picture. That view through the doorway into the farther room was becoming interesting. The suggestion that an unseen window lit the farther room would create a satisfying sense of depth. Jessica became deeply absorbed. “Jessica, there you are.’ 114

Jessica jumped in surprise as Mary pranced in through the doorway. ‘Hard at work, of course. Oh, on the Christmas one!’ Mary stood behind Jessica, studying the outlines. ‘Mm, wonderful perspective, Jess!! I won’t mention it to Kate though!’ ‘Mary!’ exclaimed Jessica. ‘Don’t start that again! Have you been working?’ ‘Well, sort of working. I’ve been walking round the garden,’ Mary answered, ‘to get ideas for my R.A. picture. It didn’t help though. Any suggestions?’ ‘I thought you were going to enter The Contents of Tommy’s Pockets,’ said Jessica. ‘That pleasant room with the light coming through the curtains and ...’56 ‘Yes, yes! An engaging title and Papa is satisfied,’ Mary sighed, ‘but it’s just another room full of furniture. I want something ... more!’ Mary had asked the question carelessly, but Jessica was an artist. If someone asked about subject matter for her work you had to take it seriously. She put her pencil down. Mary was only seventeen last year when she submitted her first painting, For a Good Boy, to the R.A. and it had been selected and hung, a great achievement for one so young. Jessica thought about Mary’s painting, a woman, sitting next to a table, covered with a lacy cloth and laden with a tea tray. The woman was focused on a little dog in front of her, training it to sit up and take a treat. But it wasn’t just the subject, the arrangement and execution of the painting also distinguished it. The woman and her dog were inside, but above the tea table was a large window looking out at the green lawns, with a yellow autumnal tree and a golden hedgerow running parallel to the riverbank. To show all the light and gold of the outside world and still suggest elegance, warmth and companionship in the contrasting rich brown shadowed world inside, and to have the two so in harmony, was a great achievement.

56 Fig. 30 Mary Hayllar, The Contents of Tommy’s Pockets 115

‘You know, Mary, maybe you should try another of those inside/outside pictures, like last year’s. It was beautifully done and well received.’ Mary, who was dragging a chair over so she could study the picture more closely, frowned. ‘You and Papa have been plotting!’ Jessica laughed and patted her sister on the shoulder in reassurance. ‘No, we haven’t, but I am pleased to hear that he and I are in accord.’ ‘So is he pleased with this so far?’ asked Mary, leaning over Jessica’s shoulder to study the sketch. She knew that her father would have checked on Jessica’s progress. He often took time from his own work to examine the development of his daughters’ paintings. ‘Mmm.’ Jessica tried to focus on the sketch. She did not want to discuss her father’s objection with her outspoken younger sister. ‘What didn’t he like?’ pursued Mary. Jessica realised her sister understood only too well, and was not going to be fobbed off. She chose her words carefully. ‘Well, this is only an outline, so of course he has made no objections, but he did suggest the types of people I might include. He was very positive and helpful.’ ‘So? Are you including a family? Children? What?’ Jessica stopped trying to work. She handed two small sketches to Mary and indicated a nearby chair. ‘Tell me what’s happening.’ Mary concentrated on Jessica’s sketches. After a thoughtful minute she started slowly. ‘Well, it could be a few days before Christmas, during the wrapping of the presents, trying to decide what pictures to give, or ... after the unwrapping on Christmas Day. Many of the presents strewn around on the table and chairs, even on the carpet, are canvases, but that on the floor looks like wrapping paper. The rug on this chair could be a gift, or it might have been used to keep someone warm. I like the sprig of holly above the doorway. That reminds one of the season, but otherwise … Maybe everyone has gone off to have Christmas dinner ... Actually, there are no children’s toys, or books, so I guess it’s not about children. I like the door open in the 116

far room too. It suggests that there are people around, just going, or just coming, but beyond what one can see.’ Jessica could have hugged her sister. ‘So now who do you think I should put in the picture?’ Mary considered the sketch again. ‘Well, whatever you put in will decide what story you want.’ Jessica nodded. ‘Yes, but what if I want all the stories. If I want the people looking at my painting to get involved in the picture like you have done, then shouldn’t I just leave it alone? Then everybody can put in their own interpretation. Instead of having the artist saying exactly what is in the painting, viewers can decide for themselves.’ Mary smiled. ‘Jessica that is such a nice idea!’ Jessica realised that this conversation with Mary had clarified her ideas. When her father had suggested the types of characters she might include in her painting, she had felt strongly that she liked the room with no one there; that it was the absence and all the things that the absence suggested that she liked. It was that exact image of an empty room that had caught her imagination on Christmas Day. After Mary had told her some of the possible stories associated with the room, Jessica realised that she liked that idea that others could get involved, work out their own interpretation, for the very reason that she had not presented them with the whole story. It was not a cold, lonely, empty, but a room where something had just happened or was about to happen. ‘You know what you could do. And it might help to satisfy Papa,’ said Mary, still examining one of the sketches. ‘You could put a person in the far doorway, the open one.’ ‘Oh,’ Jessica was a bit disappointed at this suggestion. She thought that Mary had understood her. ‘Would I have such a person coming, or going?’ “Well, not coming,” said Mary, ‘because it’s obviously a room that has recently been inhabited. The person, a woman, would be leaving, but … maybe she could look back. You know …’ 117

‘Yes, that’s good.’ Jessica felt her enthusiasm for her sister’s suggestion growing. Mary did understood perfectly. ‘Perhaps the departing person is thinking about what she has been doing, or what they have all been doing, or making sure everyone is gone before her.’ ‘Or,’ Mary continued, ‘perhaps there is somebody back here where the artist is, and the woman going through the door is urging him or her to hurry. Anything!’ The two were standing looking at the sketch when they heard Kate calling. Then she actually burst through the real doorway whose image they had been discussing. They laughed at the way life was reflecting the art. ‘What’s so funny?’ asked Kate, but she was too full of her message to care. ‘It’s four o’clock. Papa said that we are going to play lawn tennis and have tea in the summerhouse. He and Grace are already outside with the rackets and balls.’ Kate dashed away again, but Jessica, well trained by her meticulous father, started to pack away her gear and Mary, who usually did everything with Kate, signalled her interest in their conversation by staying to help. Jessica put her pencils in their case and untied and folded her apron, while Mary replaced the chairs and folded her sister’s easel. Then Jessica opened the work cupboard in the corner of the room and Mary carefully placed the equipment inside. The two sisters then walked through the dark archway Jessica had sketched earlier and into the sunlit room beyond. From there they could see outside, through the wide, high Georgian windows to the green lawns and the line of trees that marked the riverbank. They could see their father standing on the grass showing Grace how to bounce a tennis ball on her racket, training her to keep her eye on the ball, while waiting for everyone to join them. Inside, under the window, was a desk, its polished surface gleaming in the afternoon light. The carved detail on the legs and back of the nearby wooden chair glinted in the sunlight. 118

‘There’s a good inside/outside picture,’ said Mary. ‘Although Papa is too far away to be…’ She grabbed Jessica’s arm, to stop her and make her look. ‘I could do that … just have people in the background playing tennis and the inside empty. What do you think?’ Jessica looked. ‘Lovely of course, but what’s happening? Is it just people outside playing lawn tennis.’ As they stood there Kate entered the picture outside, with more rackets and tennis balls. She walked towards her father and sister practising on the lawn. ‘What if there were balls and rackets inside, or one racket, just there on the chair. Someone’s come inside for some reason.’ ‘Maybe it’s very warm outside. You could have a cool drink on the desk, some cake …’ ‘Tennis shoes on the floor, even …’ Mary was watching her mother join the family gathering outside the window, ‘… a parasol, still open, just put down on the table.’ ‘Oh, I like the open parasol.’ Jessica was enthusiastic. ‘A colourful parasol would give a focus, and suggest that someone has just come inside.’ ‘It might be too hot outside; or there might be a quiet conversation inside, even an assignation, you know, while everyone else is occupied with the tennis.’ ‘Mary!’ Jessica laughed and gave her younger sister a friendly push. ‘You can suggest stories, without implying clandestine behaviour!’ Mary giggled and started walking towards the door. ‘I can see it now,’ she said. ‘I’ll call it The Lawn Tennis Season.’57 Outside they had started to hit the balls back and forth and as Jessica stood there gazing out the window, she saw Mary appear, snatch one of the rackets and join the game. The colour of the afternoon sunlight was softer. It had changed from its midday brightness to a soft haze that seemed to drift among

57 Mary Hayllar, The Lawn Tennis Season, (Fig. 3). 119

the trees and drench the scene with pale green. Jessica had been happy working on her picture, planning it, but Mary’s idea for a painting sounded wonderful and full of summer. She sighed and then laughed at herself. I can do it, she said to herself. I’ll enjoy doing it too. I’ll call it Christmas Comes but Once a Year.58 ======

58 Jessica Hayllar, Christmas Comes but Once a Year (Fig. 20 ). 120

4. Home

The Hayllar sisters produced most of their art in the period when they lived as young women in their family home, Castle Priory, at Wallingford. This chapter considers aspects of their lives during their period of residence in Wallingford and examines how the geographical and physical location of the Hayllar sisters’ art practice was central to the content of their work. Such an examination reveals how the contradictions between the hegemonic forms of femininity and the regime of professional art practice in their lives shaped the subject matter in their work. While most of their work presented domesticity as the preferred mode of womanhood, I argue that this was not because they unquestioningly supported and followed that way of life, but rather because representing it maintained their status as ‘genteel’ woman, while allowing them to generate the merchandise that would be most commercially successful in a bourgeois market. Further, in their portraits of one another painting, they produced work which subtly challenged the dominant constructions of femininity by modifying the visual codes of its representation.

Jessica Hayllar’s Teaching (1895) (Fig. 31) shows the use the Hayllars made of their home and family in their work, as well as demonstrating how they supported the convention of domestic femininity. In the painting a child stands at her mother’s knee. Both have serious, but interested expressions as they look at the book open on the mother’s lap. The mother, in a black dress, with a white lace ruffle at the front of the bodice and white cuffs, has dark hair pulled back from her face. In contrast the child has golden hair, which is lit up by the light from the window behind them. This scenario, however, occupies less than a quarter of the painting. The absorbed couple are seen through a doorway in a farther room and while they occupy the left hand side of the canvas, in the first room, on the right hand side is a spectacular 121

white azalea plant standing on a small table. This azalea takes up more space than the mother and child. Each flower has been painted with meticulous detail and the plant has been placed against a black screen so that the mass of white flowers, lit up by the daylight coming through an unseen window on the left, is the first feature of the picture to catch the viewer’s eye.

The focus of the painting, however, once the viewer’s eye goes beyond the azaleas, is not the flowers or the mother and child, but the vista through a succession of open doorways leading to other rooms, which are also illuminated by daylight shining through the windows on the right. The reddish topaz colour of the walls and carpet in these receding spaces causes the rooms beyond to look warm and enticing. Tantalizing glimpses of the far rooms can be seen - a chair, the end of a table with a white tablecloth – and, at the far end of the corridor, a painting too small and far away to be clear. All these draw the eye past the foreground.

Jessica Hayllar, understanding that a painting must appeal to the middle-class market, has included in her painting the image of mother and child, the exquisite still-life of azaleas, and the elegant interior of a house belonging to a prosperous, stylish family. These are agreeable subjects and they reflect the sexually differentiated terrain of a bourgeois residence. All the objects and colours are in balance, producing a sense of beauty and harmony, and the light coming from the window is painted with great skill, so that the areas of light and shade in the rooms combine with all the other elements to convince the viewer that the whole is a faithful reproduction of a warm, indeed a perfect familial moment.

It is likely that the mother and child are Jessica’s sister and niece.1 The fact that the people depicted were related to the artist may also

1 The entry for Teaching in the Sotheby’s New York catalogue attests to the artist’s signature, the date and the measurements, and also states: ‘The setting for this 122

have contributed to the desirability of the paintings. Deborah Cherry writes: A middle-class sitter, especially a friend or family member, was considered to guarantee the purity and respectability of the image and to provide a suitable subject for a respectable women’s gaze – as an artist and as a visitor to a public exhibition.2 Notes on the relationship of the subjects to the artists accompany most Hayllar paintings for sale in modern catalogues, probably acquired from nineteenth-century sales information, or from information disseminated by the Hayllars possibly for just the reason Cherry suggests, to add to the respectability of the painting and the artist by acknowledging that the sitter was a member of her family.

Castle Priory, the house to which the Hayllars moved in 1875, had a prime geographical position close to the town centre and the ancient Wallingford Bridge. It also had an eminent history, having been built by Sir William Blackstone in 1759, and then occupied by him for many years.3 There are differing reports about whether James Hayllar bought or rented Castle Priory and it remains unclear. His daughter Jessica states that it was bought.4 However, somewhat confusingly, Anthony Wilder writes that, while it was ‘purchased’, George Cavell

painting is probably Castle Priory at Wallingford on Thames, the house of the artist’s father and teacher, James Hayllar, R.B.A., where members of the family or locals from the village typically served as models.’ These details are taken from the black-and-white photocopy of an unidentified page of a Sotheby’s New York catalogue held in the Witt Library. The woman in Jessica Hayllar’s Autumn Sunlight, described in the Introduction and discussed later in the chapter, is referred to in the Sotheby Parke Bernet, London Catalogue: ‘The model may be her sister Kate, a skilled still-life artist.’ Again, the details are taken from the black-and-white photocopy of an unidentified page in a Sotheby Parke Bernet, London catalogue, held in the Witt library. 2 Painting Women, p. 127. 3 Sir William Blackstone was a lawyer and notary who delivered a course of lectures on English Law, which were recorded as the ’Commentaries on the Laws of England’, (1765). This work made English Law readable and intelligible to the lay mind. It was also influential in the writing of the American Constitution. 4 According to Hayllar MS, p. 8. ‘In 1875, longing to get away from London, James Hayllar bought a large house on the Thames at Wallingford.’ 123

and James’ old teacher Francis Cary signed the lease for him.5 If Hayllar leased the property, then it is possible that he did not purchase it. In his Wallingford: A History of an English Market Town, J.S. Hardman traced its owners from the time of Sir William Blackstone quite specifically, but then becomes vague around the time of the Hayllars’ residence merely saying that he ‘occupied’ the house.6 Finally a photocopy of three typed sheets of unknown authorship which I obtained from the Wallingford Information Centre in 2006 includes diverse facts about who owned Castle Priory at different times and the sales of various attachments around it such as the Malt house, garden and orchard. A handwritten note at the bottom of one page, presumably made by the researcher, added that Hayllar ‘did not purchase but rented the property’.7

The question of leasing or owning is significant. If Hayllar owned Castle Priory his attitude to earning income for the family would have been more relaxed than if he was leasing it. Having to pay rent as well as other costs may have increased the demands on him to expand the family income and it may well have increased the expectations he placed on his daughters to produce paintings that would produce a ready market. If leasing, Hayllar may have simply remained silent on the matter. The ambiguity of this situation perhaps indicates how high the stakes were; Hayllar’s status in the town may have been elevated if he was regarded as the owner of such a fine property.

5 In Victorian Artists of Wallingford, p. 37, Wilder writes: ‘James Hayllar purchased Castle Priory in 1883 and George Cavell and James’ old teacher Francis Cary appear to have assisted them in some capacity as they both signed the lease.’ 6 J.S. Hardman, Wallingford: A History of an English Market Town (Wallingford: J.S. Hardman, 1994). ‘Between 1872 and 1880’, Hardman writes, ‘the property seems to have changed hands on several occasions. However, by 1883 the house was occupied by James Hayllar who lived there until 1899 when he moved to Bournemouth following the death of his wife.’ p. 99 7 ‘According to writings relating to the Hayllars, they did not purchase but rented the property. Cavell (related to the famous Edith) and Cary were in the same group of artists as James Hayllar and possibly remained his landlords. Further research on this would be interesting.’ 124

Owned or leased, Castle Priory provided an elegant, comfortable and evidently beloved family home for the Hayllars. When the family took up residence in 1875 Jessica was 17, Edith 14, Mary 12 and Kate 11 years old.8 The family remained in the house for the next 24 years until 1899, and although Mary left in 1885 when she married and Edith in 1897 when she married, they both lived with their husbands in Wallingford and were regular visitors to Castle Priory, as the paintings of Mary there with her children confirm. This long period of residence, beginning when the sisters were such an impressionable age, coincided with a long interlude of what was apparently, for the sisters at least, a contented family life. In this home the Hayllar sisters grew up with their parents and siblings, they entertained their neighbours, the Leslies, and others and they had art lessons with their father. They swam, rowed, punted, practised archery and played croquet and tennis; some of these activities would feature in their paintings.

Castle Priory was a spacious home with a suite of open living areas connected by wide archways. These rooms had elegant timber panelling and decoration, fashionable Victorian furnishings and many windows to let in light. In addition to the main building, there was a summerhouse and green house and they all overlooked wide lawns and the river. The family’s attachment to their home is evident not just in Jessica’s memoir, but in all the paintings the sisters made of it.9 Their images suggest affection, not just for the elegant, ordered rooms and vistas and light throughout, but also for the objects in the house, many of which they kept reproducing in their art. There were Persian carpets, generally in warm reds, richly carved cupboards, sideboards and étagères, a table of dark wood, maybe teak or walnut, with turned fluted legs, and some very ornate oval pedestal tables elaborate with inlays and gold paint, many polished chairs, a Japanese screen in

8 Grace Hayllar, the sister who did not become a professional painter, would have been 13 years old. 9 Hayllar MS, p. 8. 125

white and gold and another in black, various Japanese and Chinese vases and even small azalea trees and palms in pots. There were numerous pictures on the walls, which appeared in the paintings; some were engravings of works by classical artists, and some were originals by the Hayllars themselves. Most of the canvases by the Hayllar sisters included figures; a number of these showed the people only in the distance and others had the figures occupying the central space, but the figures never dominated the space. The domestic spaces were as much the subject of the paintings as the characters in them.

Jessica Hayllar painted more domestic spaces than her sisters, not just in the 1880s when the sisters were at home together, but throughout the 1890s, so that at first her sisters, and then her sisters and their children, were depicted in those spaces. Teaching is one of a series of paintings she produced with a similar background, windows on the left letting in light and doors opening into the enfilade of rooms. The placement of carpets, chairs, plants and paintings changed and the foregrounds changed: a woman in the second room with a child at her knee as described above; Wallace’s Exit (1882) (Fig. 32), a party dress spread out on a chair; A Coming Event (Fig. 11), a wedding dress spread out on a chair; An Early Cooper (1882) (Fig. 33), a large canvas of a pastoral scene in a heavy golden frame leaning against a screen; and Autumn Sunlight (Fig. 1), a woman in the first room sitting on the right hand side, with a child looking over her shoulder at the sketch she is making. Jessica’s replication of paintings with the same distinctive background, even though they were done over a period of ten years, suggests the awareness of reproducing a desirable consumer item which she could generate proficiently and which would hopefully sell.

Mary, like her sister Jessica, would also revisit a presumably desirable image. Her canvas, Little Flora’s Wreath (1884) (Fig. 34), was exhibited at the Royal Academy. It depicts a little girl, dressed in dark 126

clothes covered with a white pinafore, and black stockings. She is standing on a chair, the one depicted in Kate’s A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever (Fig.13), near a window, reaching upwards. She is holding a long floral wreath, as though she is decorating. A bird cage, complete with bird, sits on the wide sill of the curtained window. In an album of photographs of the sisters’ works there is a copy of another 1884 painting entitled Little Flora (1884) (Fig. 35). The same child is in the same position on the same chair, but in this work there is no bird cage.

There were other vistas throughout the house which Jessica, Edith and Mary painted, in which the view from one room would lead through a wide archway into another sunlit room, or outside into the garden. The people in the pictures, always beautifully dressed, were placed near vases of flowers, sat at tastefully set tea tables, played musical instruments, read books, instructed or played with children and sometimes painted pictures. Kate Hayllar’s work was different to that of her sisters in that she used the items of furniture, the screens, paintings, vases and flowers, but she rarely included people, or whole rooms. Her output was not great, but with few exceptions she produced still-lifes of domestic items, harmoniously composed.

The comfort and elegance of the interior of Castle Priory and the beauty of its summer house and green house added to the appeal of the paintings. Nonetheless, although these were paintings of the family home and full of images of family members, they were produced for sale. This is why the best vistas, the most attractive things, the most popular subjects were included time and again. This is why the family models, both adults and children, were always elegantly dressed. They were not depicted as people genuinely pursuing everyday activities; they were models. Their portraits were included, not to illustrate and preserve their likeness, but to represent a character whose beauty or activity against an acceptable background would add to the desirability of the product. 127

Paintings of their home life imply that the family was a close one; however, posed portraits of people in carefully arranged backgrounds are not necessarily true records of the life they lived. It is important to note that the Hayllars seem to have regularly photographed these images before they were sold. I have seen three collections of photograph albums, two in the hands of Edith’s descendents, and one with Christopher Wood probably acquired from Jessica Hayllar’s niece, Joan Batt. Most of the black-and-white photographs were developed in multiple prints, presumably so each sister had a collection of her own and her sisters’ work. This suggests that each wanted to own a set of family records, while accepting that the originals were produced for sale. There was possibly also the pride of the artists here keeping a record of their work, and maybe the albums even represented a business-like practice of keeping a record of their work to avoid or even to enable duplication.

Jessica Hayllar’s Teaching, (Fig. 31) depicts a woman instructing her child; however, the woman in the painting reflecting that ideal of bourgeois femininity was not Jessica Hayllar. Jessica was the artist. She worked at her painting as she had been taught by her father, choosing and arranging scenes and subjects, and completing her work to a state of highly detailed finish. She prepared canvases for exhibitions in London, Manchester and Liverpool. She participated in activities designed to promote her work, such as Show Day at Mr. Hayllar’s Studio, when the public and local paper were invited to come to Castle Priory to see the particular works the Hayllars were to enter in the R. A. Summer Exhibition.10 She participated in interviews with writers from national newspapers, such as the Ladies Pictorial, which described her art training and her exhibition record. These are the activities of a professional artist, not a housewife.11

10 Wallingford Times, 31 March 1888. 11 Lady’s Pictorial, 28 December 1889, p. 944. 128

Abigail Large describes the contradiction in the situation of the Hayllar sisters: There was also a contradiction between the lived femininity of the woman artist and that represented by the images she produced. Women artists such as the Hayllar sisters were situated in contradictory relationships to domesticity. It could be said that their images represented bourgeois women as wives and mothers and promoted or reinforced middle-class ideals, but their daily routines were structured around work – on studies and paintings for exhibition and sale – as opposed to full-time devotion to child care and household management.12

There were nineteenth-century women who were artists producing representations of bourgeois femininity, not just because such representations had popular appeal, but because the artists themselves needed to be identified with the women they portrayed, to assist in preserving their own gentility. In such cases the private and public spheres were not separated, their private identities as women and public identities as artists intertwined with and depended on each other. The Hayllar sisters and many other women painters were in that situation. Henrietta Ward (1832-1924), a figure painter who came from a family of painters and married a painter, had family approval and encouragement for her work. She lived in London, exhibited regularly and was one of a group of women artists who worked for women’s rights in art. For example in the 1840s she protested against the Royal Academy Schools’ exclusion of women by attending its public lectures. Unlike the Hayllars she was well known in the London art scene, so when she painted an image of herself as the ideal wife and mother, her face was familiar to many in her London audience. Deborah Cherry refers to God Save the Queen (1857), a painting by Ward which depicts:

12 ‘The Hayllar Sisters’, p. 6. 129

a middle-class woman teaching three children to sing the national anthem, while a nursemaid takes charge of a younger child. ‘God Save the Queen’ is at once a self- portrait and a modern-life painting. … For while Henrietta Ward organises feminine respectability around motherhood and patriotism, drawing on and feeding into mid-century discourses on the home as the cornerstone of empire, this is also a depiction of a recognisable individual with a public identity as a professional painter.13 Cherry suggests that Ward is implying that while she is a dutiful mother teaching her children the most important values, she is also a well known professional artist. It can be argued that the reverse is also true; she is affirming her respectability, suggesting that while she is a professional painter, she can still be a good mother.

While Teaching demonstrates the conflict between bourgeois femininity and professional art practice in the lives of Victorian women artists, Christmas Eve (Fig. 36) by Mary Hayllar reveals a further complication specifically connected to the Hayllar sisters’ physical location and art practice. Christmas Eve is an outdoor scene suggesting a cold evening darkening rapidly as night draws in. There is snow on the grass in the foreground and a man walking beside a horse and cart along a country lane in the middle ground. He is walking away from the viewer, but approaching the viewer is a woman carrying a large bundle of firewood and next to her is a small child. These characters in their tasks and clothing look like decent, hard-working poor. The lane leads diagonally across the canvas from the bottom right corner towards the far left, where there is a large dark brick three storey house. The house does not dominate the picture as it is in darkness and on the left edge of the picture, behind some broad tree trunks. As it is evening the large trees along the sides of the lane and the trees, shrubs and low square church tower in the distant

13 Painting Women, p. 85. 130

background are seen as almost black silhouettes against the pink sunset. The approach of darkness and the misty hazy horizon under the pink and white sky suggest extreme cold.14

In 2006 the present owners of Castle Priory gave me the opportunity to visit the house where the Hayllars lived for so long. It is behind a high wall on Thames Street and it is about five minutes walking distance from the centre of Wallingford. There are houses crowding close by on two sides of the property, but compared to the close packed terraces and narrow streets of Wallingford, Castle Priory is a large house on a generous piece of land, approximately five acres,15 and the driveway from the front gate to the house is a comparatively long one. As I walked along the driveway past a small clump of trees between the house and the front gate I realised that a section of this driveway was actually the lane depicted in Mary Hayllar’s Christmas Eve. Castle Priory was the dark house that had appeared so remote in the painting, at least in its function of foregrounding the poor people trying to get to their homes before dark. Mary Hayllar may have suggested a remote cold country lane, but in reality she had not moved beyond the gardens of her home to find the subject matter for her painting.

In my tour of Castle Priory I saw the rooms on the ground floor with tall windows all facing the lawns leading down to the Thames, and the enfilade from one room to another along the front of the building, revealing that vista which Jessica reproduced so often. I was also shown the south side of the house, an older section constructed earlier than the rest.16 According to my guide it had been an old farmhouse

14 Wilder, p. 60, writes: ‘Christmas Eve … is a particularly striking work which really conjures the cold of winter. The warm colours of the sunset make the scene appear even colder.’ 15 Notes on the owners and occupants of Castle Priory state that in June 1919 the house was advertised ‘as including five acres of gardens’ (Hardman, p. 99). 16 A description of Castle Priory, in a paragraph of architectural jargon so dense as to be almost incomprehensible to the lay person, gives the following slightly more comprehensible phrase about this section of the house: ‘Subsidiary service wing at right-angles to rear right: probably early C18. Red brick; old plain-tile half-hipped 131

before the rest of the house was built. This older section was built of brick and had a flagstone floor. From certain points in the yard to the south of the old farmhouse the rest of the house was not visible. From there one has a strong sensation of being in a real farm yard, enclosed on two sides by a rustic red brick building, with a steeply sloping red tile roof containing a few dormer windows.

The Hayllars had obviously appreciated that potential farmyard setting and had used it in some of their paintings. Three works produced by Edith Hayllar, Meal Time (1832) (Fig. 37), A Quiet Pipe (Fig. 38) and As Hungry as a Hunter (1882) (Fig. 39), each feature the same old man. Both A Quiet Pipe and As Hungry as a Hunter have exactly the same background, the red brick farm buildings and a wooden outhouse seen from exactly the same angle. These suggest that any other angle would include intrusive elements from the later additions to the house, which would interfere with the illusion of a rural scene. As Hungry as a Hunter depicts a row of dead game in the foreground; two rabbits and four birds, possibly pheasants, are arranged carefully on the ground. Two large black shot guns are leaning conspicuously against the cream timber outhouse on the right. A man in a brown jacket, presumably the hunter, is in the centre of the painting walking towards the farmhouse. He has a rabbit in one hand and a bird in the other. A Quiet Pipe shows an old man dressed in farmer’s clothes and boots, with bushy side whiskers and a broad hat, sitting in the foreground on a wooden wheelbarrow and enjoying a pipe, while a woman in white stands in the background watching him. In Mealtime the same old man stands in a much smaller area of the farmyard; he leans against a red brick wall, looking down at the food in his hands. A coat is flung over a section of fence and a broom leans against the wall. Part of the same wheel barrow is nearby. These paintings do not roof; brick ridge stacks. Single storey and attic.’ (P.S. Spokes, ‘Some Notes on the Domestic Architecture of Wallingford\, Berkshire’, Berkshire Archaeological Journal, 50 (1947), available at http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-249334-castle-priory-college-wallingford (Accessed 10 September 2011)). 132

directly depict farming activities, but they do suggest country life, and I had at first assumed that they had been painted in the countryside. In Jessica Hayllar’s Duck and Green Peas (1882) (Fig. 40), the same inference is made. A basket full of fresh green peas and two freshly killed ducks have been left on flagstones at the end of a short covered walkway leading to what appears to be the kitchen door of the farm. Again the visit to Castle Priory revealed that these paintings were all produced in the privacy of the Hayllar’s own home and garden.

I did not see the pavilion that appears in many paintings by the sisters. It used to be in Castle Priory grounds, but is now a bar for Wallingford Rowing Club. It appears in Mary Hayllar’s The Rendezvous (1882) (Fig. 41), and in Edith Hayllar’s The First of October (1888) (Fig. 42) and The Sportsmen’s Luncheon (1891) (Fig. 43). While this pavilion appears in some works as a summer house near the river, in the paintings named above it appears as a hunting lodge in remote woodland. Once again the apparently rustic settings represented by the sisters were derived from their own garden.

It is likely that the few pictures where the connection to their home and grounds at Castle Priory is not so obvious were nonetheless also painted there. Mary completed three paintings of children playing in long grass in a field, or near the banks of a river and Edith at least one.17 There are meadows on the other bank of the Thames directly opposite the house, so all three could have been painted at home. Edith also has one painting of a hunter on foot being directed by a farm worker to a track between some trees, ‘e went that way, Sir (Fig. 46), but this is simply a scene of two men standing on fallen leaves with a few trees in the background. It could have been done anywhere. Edith Hayllar did include men and outdoor activities in some of her canvasses but the location depicted is still the Castle Priory grounds.

17 Mary Hayllar, Poppies among the Corn (Fig. 26), A River Bank (Fig. 27) and Out of Bounds (Fig. 44), Edith Hayllar, Punting Party (Fig. 45). 133

Amateur artists painting in the countryside in the nineteenth century were participating in a respectable activity, the Hayllars, however, were known as professional artists and producing pictures in public might have drawn attention to the need to paint for money. To be a ‘lady’ was by definition to be someone who would never work for money, because she did not need to. The Hayllar sisters’ position is clarified by considering life in the town where they lived.

Wallingford, as its name indicates, was located at a point where the Thames could be crossed. It still has many relics from its history: its street layout and earthworks from the time of King Alfred in the ninth century; some ruins of the castle built in the time of William the Conqueror; a charter granted by Henry II allowing the town to have its own Guild and Burgesses and to hold regular markets. These traditions continue. Wallingford is proud of its past and the Hayllars participated in its activities and contributed to its history.

By re-locating to Wallingford and living at Castle Priory James Hayllar moved himself and his family into the upper middle classes that controlled the social, mercantile and administrative life of the town. In this society many factors would influence the family’s status. Their prestigious residence on the river would have helped. Nonetheless, while Hayllar was a financially successful artist, he was not a doctor, or lawyer, or one of the more highly respected professions. Thus he possibly needed to work harder to establish his gentility. This laid a particular weight on all members of the family to behave appropriately, but particularly the women.

According to Deborah Gorham in The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal females in a middle-class family could make a significant contribution to the family’s status: Females played a crucial role in the functioning of the family as an indicator of social status. In the Victorian period, in theory at least, only middle class men could 134

achieve status... But middle-class females none the less had a role to play in determining social differences. Women, not men, managed the outward forms that both manifested and determined social status. Through the creation of an appropriate domestic environment, and through the management of social life, women at all levels of the middle class were responsible for assuring that the private sphere acted as an effective indicator of status in the public sphere.18

This comment indicates that genteel women were not only private individuals limited to the private sphere at home, because their reputations circulated in a very real way in the public sphere. Hayllar would have been aware of the impact his daughters could have on the family’s reputation and it must have confirmed his resolve to be watchful over their behaviour.

The daughters of James and Ellen Hayllar were only young when they arrived in Wallingford, and whether they were educated at home or in a school, they had intensive art lessons at home and the serious business of producing art for exhibition and sale began four years after their arrival. From 1879, when Jessica first exhibited, for a period of at least 20 years the Hayllar sisters had their work hung and sold at the Royal Academy and other prestigious venues. In spite of this, however, and possibly aided by the fact that they accepted the restrictions placed on where they could paint, the family were well assimilated into the social life of the town.

Two of Hayllar’s daughters married successful men. Mary Hayllar married Henry Wells, the son of Edward Wells, one of the most powerful people in Wallingford. A brewer and banker and as such an employer of many people in Wallingford, Edward Wells was a Justice of the Peace and Member of Parliament for the Borough from 1872 to

18 Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (London: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 8-9. 135

1880, and four times the Mayor of Wallingford. His son, Henry Wells, later became the Mayor of the Borough himself in 1902, so for a period Mary was the mayoress of Wallingford. Edith Hayllar married the Reverend Bruce MacKay who was the Rector of St Leonard’s Church in Wallingford.19

Besides these marriages, proof of involvement with the best society the town had to offer, the Hayllars participated in an active social and sporting life with eminent citizens of Wallingford, including Royal Academician, George Dunlop Leslie, as already explained. There are traces of the Hayllars’ participation in various social events in Wallingford. On 2 June 1893, the Berks and Oxon Advertiser reported that the Hill and Valley Archers had recently competed against St John’s College Oxford, and won by 678 points. On the team were James Hayllar, Mr and Mrs Henry Wells (that is Mary and her husband), Miss Edith Hayllar, Mr R. Leslie (presumably George Dunlop’s nephew), Robert Leslie,20 and a Miss Freely. James Hayllar continued to encourage his daughters’ participation in sport and he found friends and neighbours who also approved of and participated in such sports. The fact that they played in competition with a team from a college at Oxford University is another indication that they had considerable social mobility.

The Hayllars were active members of the Anglican parish in Wallingford. The Berks and Oxon Advertiser of 15 February 1895 recorded a series of social events in the town, including the following: ‘Dr Walter also had a starring role in the fund-raising entertainment organised by the Misses Hayllar at Church House (St Leonards). He

19 Grace Hayllar, the sister born in 1862, a year before Mary, also made a successful marriage. Grace had never claimed to be a painter. In the 1881 census records James Hayllar, Jessica Hayllar, Edith Hayllar and Mary Hayllar were all described as painters. Kate was not present. Grace was described as having no occupation. Although Grace did not pursue an artistic career, Anthony Lester claims in a video he made for Scope at Castle Priory, a copy of which is in my possession, that he has seen some very fine paintings done by her. Grace married Robert Fletcher Leslie, a nephew of the Hayllar’s Wallingford neighbour, George Dunlop Leslie. 20 He married Grace Hayllar. 136

apparently brought the house down with his numerous songs.’21 The sisters did more than simply attend this fund-raising function; they organised it.

Besides these records, the Hayllars’ works testify to their knowledge of the ‘correct’ social rituals, appropriate behaviour and sporting activities in which the upper middle classes, including the sisters themselves, participated. The inclusion of these subjects in their paintings reflects not only how they lived, but also their awareness of the desirability of these activities as appropriate subject matter. Making visits and receiving visitors were important activities for bourgeois women.22 Some of the protocols of calling and leaving cards with servants to indicate a willingness to become involved in social intercourse are reflected in Edith’s painting Kind Enquires (date unknown) (Fig. 47), in which a maid at the door greets two women and one of the visitors hands the maid a visiting card. There are many representations of people taking afternoon tea near the river, in the summerhouse, and in or near a greenhouse. There is always a table covered in a white embroidered table cloth, a silver tea pot and cups and saucers and cake. The women are always dressed for a formal social occasion including making visits, or entertaining visitors. Such paintings include Edith’s Afternoon Tea (1895) (Fig. 48), Intruders Made Welcome (1898) (Fig. 49), Caught (1899) (Fig. 50), and A Cosy Chat (? 1890s) (Fig. 51). Besides these inviting, intimate greenhouse tea parties, there were also images of the ‘at home’ afternoon tea, the ceremony important to the ladies who saw socialising as a duty.23 Such an event is suggested in Jessica’s Tea or Coffee (1882) (Fig.52), in which a young woman, stylish and ceremonial in a long white dress, sits at a table set with all the tea accoutrements, looking at the audience and holding up a silver teapot in the act of offering a cup of

21 Dewey, Judy & Stuart, and David Beasley, Window on Wallingford, 1837-1914: Life in a Thames-side Market Town (Wallingford: Pie Powder Press, 1989), p. 180. 22 Rona Randall, The Model Wife Nineteenth-Century Style (London: Herbert Press, 1989), pp. 14-6. 23 Randall, pp. 16-7. 137

tea. It seems that at the Hayllars’ wine and cake were also served on social occasions. In Edith’s The Single Married, The Married Happy (1887) (Fig. 53), five people are sitting around a table that holds cake and fruit and decanters of wine. The older couple is obviously James and Ellen Hayllar whose appearance is the same here as in many portraits done of them, and Mr Hayllar is standing up and holding up his glass of wine as though in a toast. Three young women, one with a glass of wine, are sitting smiling, obviously enjoying the occasion.

Edith Hayllar also painted men’s gatherings. They were, however, still situated in Castle Priory or its grounds. Seniores Priores (1885) (Fig. 54) shows a room where a table covered with a white tablecloth is set with a leg of ham, wine glasses, plates and a carving knife. One man sits at the table while the host can be seen through the door greeting another guest. A female servant, with her face in shadow, but her status identifiable because of her white cap and apron, holds the door open for the two men. All three men are dressed as gentlemen in formal attire and the rooms are elegant and luxuriously furnished.

There were not only depictions of entertaining at home, but also of hosts farewelling their guests after functions, such as Jessica Hayllar’s Best of Friends Must Part (1881) (Fig. 55), and The Last to Leave (1884) (Fig.56). There were as well images of women dressed to go out, such as Choosing a Spray (? 1890s) (Fig. 57) and The Finishing Touch (1894) (Fig. 58). In both of these a woman, stylish in evening clothes and gloves, is preparing a spray of flowers to pin to her garment. Even here, in paintings about attending social events, the background is not a public venue, but Castle Priory, with its recognisable rooms, screens and flowers.

Sport for women was still closely monitored in the community and competitive games were regarded as unfeminine. Practices in girls’ schools in the 1870s and 1880s reveal this: 138

Some schools frowned upon certain kinds of sports and athletic activity as unladylike. In Cheltenham Ladies College in the 1870s, girls were allowed to play lawn tennis if they wanted to, but more generally encouraged to take their exercise by going walking in the countryside or doing ‘gentle callisthenics’.24 and: At Worcester High School Miss Ottley [Headmistress from 1883-1912] allowed the younger girls to form a cricket club, but insisted that it was most unsuitable for girls over fourteen.25 Hayllar obviously felt strongly that sport was good for his daughters even when they were young women, and there were principals of some girls’ schools who believed the same thing. Not all schools looked askance at the idea of competitive sports or cricket, and at some new ‘public’ schools for girls sports were seen as ‘a healthy antidote to the feminine frailties or sentimentalities’.26

Lawn tennis became popular in England in the 1870s amongst the moneyed middle classes and Hayllar added that game to the rowing, punting27, swimming and other sports which he and his daughters enjoyed. Unsurprisingly then there are references to the game in the sisters’ paintings. In Mary Hayllar’s The Lawn Tennis Season (1881) (Fig. 3), there are tennis balls and a tennis racket on a chair in front of a table with refreshments on it. The room is unoccupied, but two men and a woman playing tennis can be seen through the window behind the table. Mary also painted The Tennis Party (1880) (Fig. 59) and Marking the Tennis Court (1882) 28 In Edith’s A Summer Shower (1883) (Fig. 12), tennis players are indoors having a break from the

24 A. Huth Jackson, A Victorian Childhood (London, Methuen, 1932), p. 67. 25 M. James, Alice Ottley, First Headmistress of the Worcester High School for Girls, 1883-1912 (London: Longmans, 1914), pp. 98-9. 26 Jackson, p. 68. 27 See Edith Hayllar, A Punting Party, (Fig. 57) 28 Mary Hayllar, Marking the Tennis Court, image and whereabouts unknown 139

game during a shower of summer rain, while Jessica’ Sunshine (1884) (Fig. 60) shows a still life with chair, racket and tennis balls in the foreground and people, tiny, very much in the background, playing tennis outside in the garden. These figures are dominated by the elegant white portico with its columns and archways through which they can be spied. In 1884 Edith painted The Tennis Players (1884)29 and also the still life Hand Parcels (1884) (Fig. 61), depicting a collection of items which could be carried by hand; a portmanteau, a bundle strapped tightly by two leather straps, a covered basket on a table and behind all these, leaning against the window is a tennis racket and a hockey stick. They are all flooded with sunlight pouring through the window behind them.30

That the Hayllars succeeded in becoming well accepted, active members of the Wallingford town community is evidenced not only by the marriages already mentioned and their successful social life, but by James Hayllar’s involvement with the Town Council. He painted the portraits of seven eminent men in the town, including that of his neighbour Leslie, to be hung in Wallingford Town Hall. James Hayllar’s portrait, marking him as one of these worthy gentlemen, is also there painted by Edith in a style identical to his own. Further, for the town’s commemoration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, Hayllar proposed to the Jubilee Committee that he and Robert Leslie should collaborate on a portrait of the queen that would go on to hang in the Town Hall. It was agreed that the portrait could be painted from a photograph, rather than an attempt being made to ask Her Majesty for a sitting. The Wallingford Times reported that

29 Edith Hayllar, The Tennis Players (1884), image and whereabouts unknown. 30 Tennis was possibly even more popular than other subjects related to home and family, and it seems to have remained popular because Mary’s The Lawn Tennis Season and Edith’s A Summer Shower are two of the few paintings by the Hayllar sisters whose whereabouts are known, perhaps because they have been regarded as valuable and worth preserving. An exhibition entitled ‘Court on Canvas’, which explored the social history of tennis and which included Mary Hayllar’s Lawn Tennis Season, was held at the Barber Institute, Birmingham, in August 2011. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/8698001/Court-on-Canvas-at- Barber-Institute-Birmingham-review.html (Accessed 2 January 2012). 140

the Mayor … was sure that not only the committee but the whole town would be highly gratified at the very handsome offer of Mr Leslie and Mr Hayllar – (applause). He proposed that they accept it with thanks.31

Refurbishing the Town Hall was an important aspect of the town’s jubilee commemorations, and the renovations and the Hayllar/Leslie portrait of the Queen were completed and celebrated on 4 November 1887. The Wallingford Times reported the grand occasion which was attended by the wife of the local Member of Parliament, the mayor and other eminent citizens. James Hayllar and Robert Leslie were thanked for their ‘noble picture of our good Queen’ and part of Hayllar’s response was quoted: I am obliged for the kind and flattering remarks you have made. I can only say it has given me great pleasure in doing it, and you are most thoroughly welcome to all I have done.

Leslie also spoke and he gave the credit to Hayllar, not only for suggesting the idea but for having painted the best part of the picture.

He (Mr Leslie) found Mr Hayllar’s work so admirable that he was afraid of spoiling it, and therefore he had done very little, the lion’s share being done by Mr Hayllar.32

These comments hint at the possibility that not only the bulk of the work on the portrait but the idea also came from Hayllar, who may have needed Leslie’s status to promote the project. This may indicate Hayllar’s continuing need to establish himself as an eminent personality in the town.

These paintings and two others by James Hayllar still hang in the Wallingford Town Hall. One is a portrait of Mary Hayllar’s distinguished, influential father-in-law, Edward Wells. Edith Hayllar’s

31 Wallingford Times, 18 February 1887, quoted in Wilder, p. 105. 32 Wallingford Times, 5 November 1887, quoted in Wilder, p. 106. 141

portrait of her father (Fig, 7) also hangs in the Town Hall, as do works by Jessica Hayllar, Portrait of Thomas Frederick Wells (1908) (Fig. 6), Hills outside Wallingford33 and The Lemonade Drink (Fig. 5).34 In tours of the Wallingford Town Hall these paintings by James Hayllar and his daughters are still pointed out with pride.

Discussing the production of pictures of domestic life in Victorian society, Deborah Cherry writes about women who were practising artists: Complex social forces made it appropriate and possible for them to produce pictures which contributed substantially to the processes by which marriage and motherhood became the preferred definitions of womanhood.

The status of domesticity was not attained by the imposition downwards of a dominant ideology; rather its hegemonic position was secured through and challenged by a range of cultural practices including the interventions and representations by women.35

According to Cherry it was not only dominant Victorian beliefs that kept women confined to the home, but rather that there was a range of narratives and myths generated by the middle classes themselves in order to enhance their status. These included the painting of domestic life by women artists, and as mentioned earlier, Cherry makes this claim specifically about the Hayllar sisters and their repetitive paintings of home and family: It was in this process of continual reiteration and variation that a regime of representation was constructed to define the social spaces and rituals of femininity within the

33 This painting of children on a country picnic on a hillside outside Wallingford has a number of perspective problems. It is very unlike any other work by Jessica Hayllar, and it may possibly be the work of James Hayllar. 34 Date unknown. 35 Painting Women, p. 125. 142

sexually differentiated terrain of the bourgeois residence. Their works contributed to the process in and by which domestic femininity was maintained as a predominant form against the pressures of economic and social transformation and the challenges of feminism.36

The Hayllars’ pictures may have been reinforcing hegemonic forms of femininity in some degree, in their representations of bourgeois domesticity as a desirable way of life, but Cherry herself had already acknowledged that this position was a strategic career choice as much as dedication to a belief in domestic femininity: Women artists made strategic choices to construct their professional careers around the art perceived as particularly appropriate for them. Far from reflecting their own lives, or indeed the lives of the majority of middle- class women, these works actively defined femininity as domesticity and mapped its social terrain as the bourgeois home.37

Cherry use of the word ‘strategic’ here is emphasising that professional women artists did not simply reflect the life around them, but rather deliberately chose to depict the domestic spaces and rituals of femininity, because that subject matter would be seen as acceptable for them to produce and also, importantly, for decent women to consume. Of course their domestic paintings probably did affirm aspects of the sexually-differentiated way of life they represented; however, they were produced not to support the values the paintings reflected but rather to exploit them as has been discussed in detail in this chapter and mentioned in Chapter 2. They themselves would not have wanted the narrow way of life they reproduced in paintings to be maintained in reality. Instead of constituting a conservative force resisting economic and social change, the focus by the Hayllar sisters

36 Painting Women, p. 138. 37 Painting Women, p. 127. 143

on profitability could be interpreted as a modern approach, supporting the economic and social transformation taking place, in particular in relation to women’s position in society, and as enabling their entry and (albeit limited) mobility in the public sphere.38

The Hayllars, as already mentioned, also produced portraits of one another painting at home. Cherry has drawn attention to images of women artists by women artists saying that they were produced in and contributed to a dispersed and contradictory regime of representations of bourgeois femininity which intersected with definitions of respectability, professionalism and high culture. Self portraits … were engaged in articulating women’s visible presence as professional practitioners and respectable women.39

For Cherry, the act of women painting women painting cuts across the conventional expectations of respectable women, of the definition of professional artists and of what could be defined as high art. Self portraits, and portraits of serious, reputable women painting, redefined professional identity as feminine. While Cherry here is suggesting that these women artists were breaking down stereotypes, in her discussion of the Hayllar sisters she contradicts this view: The occasional paintings portraying one of the sisters at work do not fracture this regime of representation but rather contain women’s art practice within the domestic interior.40 While other women artists producing images of women painting in the home were destroying stereotypes, the Hayllars with their portraits of one another painting were not. Cherry asserts here that the images they produced of women painting in the home simply confirmed painting as an accomplishment activity appropriate to the home.

38 Cherry, p. 138. 39 Painting Women, p. 83. 40 Painting Women, p. 138. 144

This can be disputed. The Hayllar sisters were known to be professional artists and while the greater part of their oeuvre included images of the home and women in the home, they did, as I have said, depict one another painting, reflecting images of their professional selves. They may not have been permitted to do their work away from their house and garden, but they could show themselves working in their residence and they produced at least three known pictures of this subject. They put their skill and their professionalism on display, to some extent resisting and contradicting the social ordering of power reflected in many of their paintings. Three canvasses, Jessica’s Finishing Touches, (1887) (Fig. 62), Edith’s Sister Arts (1891) (Fig. 63) and Jessica’s Autumn Sunlight (1891) (Fig. 1) all depict women in the home producing art. The three are set in Castle Priory reflecting the background, the vistas and the household objects reproduced in many of their other paintings, but the subject matter of these works is professional women artists.

Jessica Hayllar’s Finishing Touches shows a woman said to be her sister Edith, sitting in front a large framed picture attached to a heavy professional looking easel. She is resting her palette on her lap with her left hand, holding her paintbrush in her right hand and gazing with great concentration at the work in front of her. The woman and her easel are on the left of the space and on the right is a table strewn with flowers that hint at the subject matter of her work. Behind the table is a view through an archway into another room, where there is a window to the outdoors. Behind the artist is an oriental screen. The screen is pale compared to the darker shades in the rest of the interior, and because it is placed behind the artist it frames her and draws attention to her even though she fills only a quarter of the canvas. The artist’s clothes are formal, dressy, hardly the clothes of a working artist, but the title explains that the painting is complete except for the finishing touches. The domestic space is presented in careful detail, but the focus on the artist caused by the pale oriental screen behind 145

her and the artist’s absorption in the work both suggest the importance of the canvas. Further, the canvas in that expensive, gleaming picture frame is obviously not an accomplishment production for an album, or a folio to be examined in a drawing room over tea and conversation; the size of the work, the elaborate frame, the suggestion in the title that the work needs just a finishing touch before it is submitted for exhibition or sale, all imply that this is a professional work.

Edith Hayllar’s Sister Arts shows two women, one painting and one playing a guitar. The musician casually strumming the guitar with no sheet music in sight, perched on a chair near a window on the left, is a lady dabbling in an accomplishment activity if ever there was one. However, the artist, standing in front of an easel taller than herself, holding a palette and a long paint brush, is in the foreground at the centre of the room and the picture. The artist and her work stand side on to the viewer, so the subject matter on the canvas cannot be seen. It is the woman herself, the serious absorbed artist who is the focus of Sister Arts. Behind her easel is an open door leading to the garden and light. The painting is being done indoors, but the diagonal line of the easel on which it rests draws the viewer’s eye to the world outside, as though suggesting that that is where painting can lead.

Autumn Sunlight by Jessica Hayllar, referenced in the introduction, depicts the same enfilade of rooms as in Teaching discussed at the start of this chapter. The rooms are lit by sunshine pouring through the windows on the left, making squares of light on the carpet in the shapes of the glass window panes. These squares of light on the carpet grow smaller in the retreating rooms adding to the impression of depth. The dominant colour is the deep coral of the walls and carpet. The view into the second and third rooms is framed and emphasised because it is outlined by a high dark timbered door frame. In the first room, on the left, a woman sits on a chair sketching a tall vase of golden sunflowers that stands under the window in the right foreground of the painting. A small blond boy stands by the woman, 146

leaning his head on her arm and looking down at her sketch. Both are very formally dressed: the woman, with her hair up, is in a neat, pale blue dress, with a high neck, long sleeves and elegant folds of pale blue fabric falling to her feet and the boy is in a black velvet suit with a white lace collar and a golden sash. He is holding a small sunflower in his hand. Behind them on the wall are two framed landscapes and the lower one has a wide golden frame. Not just the sunlight and the closeness between the mother and child, but the colours of the painting, the predominant coral red, the gold of the sunflowers, sash and frame, and the dark brown of the furniture and door frame suggest warmth and security.

The critic of the 1891 Summer Exhibition in the Athenaeum wrote: Miss J. Hayllar’s neat and daintily furnished view of an interior range or handsomely furnished modern rooms, seen through a succession of open doorways, and dashed with brilliant spaces of Autumn Sunlight (1073) pouring through the windows on to the carpet. It is touched with rare firmness, and hard and pure.41 The reference here to ‘handsomely furnished modern’ rooms hints at one possible marketable aspect of this work, its ‘modernity’ and it also indicates that the Jessica Hayllar’s work was part of the process of commodifying features of the home. The subject matter of this image, however, would be approved by almost any bourgeois Victorian audience and would therefore appeal to those buyers who wanted to enjoy such a charming representation of the sexually-differentiated terrain of a middle class residence. The affluent home is crowded with beautiful objects; rich carpets, paintings in golden frames, an oriental vase, elegant chairs, and bookcases full of books. It is a well regulated peaceful home as everything is neat and there is a sense of peace and warmth. The woman and her child are elegantly dressed, and they are close together, in other words, although she is rich enough to have

41 Athenaeum, ‘The Royal Academy (Fourth Notice)’, 30 May (1891) No 3318 (704- 706), p. 706. 147

servants to keep her house in order, she is a good mother taking responsibility for her child. He is holding a sunflower, and sunflowers filling the vase are the subjects of her painting, implying that they may have recently gathered the sunflowers together.

While these features seem to support the dominant discourse of bourgeois femininity, the work needs to be considered more closely for its subversion to be recognised. Autumn Sunlight is a painting made by a known professional woman artist depicting another woman who is also painting.42 The scene is not a plausible one from everyday life in that the attire of the woman and child is too fine to be worn during a session of serious art production; neither does the presence of a child leaning on the artist suggest a believable work session. It is unlikely that a child could maintain such absorbed interest for very long, especially when the woman’s attention is so entirely away from the child, and directed instead on the vase of sunflowers and her sketch of it, but in this picture the artist suggests that it is possible. The focus on artistic work rather than on the child challenges the hegemonic forms of femininity by breaking with the visual codes of its representation. Also the painting clearly shows that the woman, who is sketching with such concentration, can live in an affluent household, be in control of it, be a good mother to her children and still produce works of art. Jessica produced paintings with similar backgrounds, such as Teaching discussed above, with the mother teaching her child, but in Autumn Sunlight the woman has directed her attention away from the child who is still well behaved, well dressed and obviously content. A woman can do both, be a good housewife and mother and be a successful painter; that is what this painting suggests. Considered together these three paintings literally demonstrate women taking control of the representation of themselves as women.

42 The Hayllars did not hide their occupation, declaring in the 1881 and 1891 censuses that they were artists, and participating in newspaper interviews about their work. Lady’s Pictorial, 28 December 1889, p. 944. 148 ======

1882 - Castle Priory, Wallingford

Edith gazed around her. After weeks of rain and confinement, the cold, wet weather was gone. Instead of a drab green and grey wash over the landscape, it was painted in countless different greens; clumps of olive dark trees, lime and emerald fields, hedgerows of jade. And everything flecked with yellow sunlight. ‘At last!’ Edith’s picture was interrupted by Mary’s exclamation of relief, not at the weather, but at reaching the end of the soggy lane after collecting all the farm produce their mother had ordered, and finally stepping back onto the main road between Crowmarsh and Wallingford. Like Kate, Edith carefully placed her produce laden basket on a flat rock by the roadside. Mary, however, almost threw hers down. ‘Mary, take care. The eggs!’ Edith did not want future farm excursions curtailed because they had smashed all the eggs. ‘I don’t care about the eggs? I have mud everywhere! Anyway, Kate has them!’ Mary stamped her feet to express irritation and shake off layers of mud at the same time. “What a horrid lane”. Edith laughed. ‘It’s only dirt and water. Easily washed away! And it’s so bright and balmy after all those dreary days trapped in the house. ‘Ready? Let’s go.’ They had walked back along the road towards Wallingford before, but today the scene was more captivating. The puddles on the road were steaming and the cluster of buildings and church spires were not a blur against a grey backdrop, but framed crisply by a periwinkle sky. Perhaps it was the change in the weather, or perhaps the knowledge that this year she was expected to start exhibiting, but Edith was thinking about her painting. Even Mary, two years younger, 149

had exhibited at the Academy, while she, the older sister, had submitted nothing. Kate, at 17 was the only other sister who had not exhibited in any London galleries. Edith, now twenty one years old, had been painting vases, flowers, chairs, tables and various arrangements of these since she left school, but she had not felt ready to exhibit. Today she realised that it was because she had not been satisfied with her subjects. She had been searching for something more interesting, more arresting than furniture and vases, and now she knew what it was; this luminous outdoors. Later having tea with her mother and sisters she decided to broach the possibility of painting outside. ‘Mama, I know Mary said it was muddy and sticky on the walk and that the baskets were heavy ...’ ‘And Kate agrees with me!’ insisted Mary. ‘Don’t you, Kate?’ ‘Well I rather enjoyed it,’ admitted Kate. ‘Of course it was hot, but so nice to get out. You said yourself you liked the exercise!’ ‘That was five minutes after we left home, when we were still carrying empty baskets.’ ‘... but everything was so picturesque.’ Edith tried to ignore her sisters’ interruptions. She wanted her mother to understand. ‘The farmyard was full of interesting subjects and ...’ ‘The farmyard was a smelly, muddy swamp,’ contradicted Mary, connected to the main road by a long mucky lane.’ ‘... and the scenery!’ persisted Edith, frowning at Mary. Why wouldn’t Mary let her speak? ‘I could do some paintings of the farmyard and some of the countryside on the other side of the river, looking back at Wallingford. I could take my ...’ Edith was irritated to see Jessica shaking her head in warning. She noticed that her mother looked slightly confused, so she tried again to clarify her position. ‘I know what you are thinking, that Father will not allow it, but if I explain ...’ ‘Edith,’ Jessica’s tone was an admonition, ‘you know we cannot work outside.’ 150

Jessica sanctimonious tone caused Edith to feel both annoyed and defensive. ‘Papa often puts us outside to work, painting vases of flowers, old chairs and their shadows, that sort of thing.’ ‘Our garden is suitable, but not in public.’ Just because Jessica had no ambition to work outside the house did not mean that everyone was so unimaginative. Edith was determined to make her point. ‘Papa has taught us so much and I feel that I could do something less stultifying than rooms and furniture! That view from the Street looking back at Wallingford is so airy, so unconfined.’ ‘From the Street?’ Ellen Hayllar sat forward in her chair. ‘My dear Edith what do you mean? How could you paint from the Street?’ Edith noticed that Mary, Kate and Grace who had been laughing and talking, became silent. They heard their mother’s puzzled tone. Mary caught her mother’s last words and giggled. ‘Edith, surely you are not still thinking of sitting and painting by the side of the road in all that heat and dust!’ Edith realised from her mother’s bewilderment and then dismay as she comprehended Mary’s words that she must disavow her original intention. ‘No, no, although one could make an attractive picture... but no. I thought I might ... make a few drawings, from different angles. Then I could try painting from the drawings.’ She shook her head. A few hasty sketches would be so inadequate! How could she create from them the airy, spacious images the scenery had created in her imagination? She sat in silence, while her mother and sisters looked at her, then not knowing how to explain herself, she raised her cup of tea to her mouth and sipped. She looked at Jessica. ‘A few quick sketches would be hopeless. I could not paint all those greens from ...’ ‘Just in time, I see.’ Edith saw her father stroll into the room and survey his wife and daughters benevolently, missing the tense atmosphere. ‘What a delightful picture. Mother and daughters relaxing together. A sight to give pleasure to any man.’ 151

As her mother leant back in her chair, Edith sighed with irritation. No one seemed to understand. All that time spent learning to paint! She would ask her father. ‘Papa, I had an idea today. I thought ...’ ‘Yes, thank you, Grace, you know how I like it.’ Her father, responded to Grace’s questioning look, more interested in the afternoon tea, Edith thought, than my idea. ‘And a small slice of that delicious fruit cake.’ Finally he turned. ‘An idea Edith?’ ‘We went to the farm today and ...’ ‘Yes,’ Edith’s mother interrupted, sitting forward in her chair again. ‘Edith suggested that she and her sisters walk to the farm today to collect the eggs and dairy goods. It was a fine day and exercise is so good for them. And Edith said it was a very pretty walk, didn’t you my dear?’ Edith nodded. She knew her mother only intervened when it was important, but it was time something was said. ‘It was a pretty walk, Papa, and I would like to paint sections of it. I would like to sit under a tree and paint ... the fields, the river, the town, everything.’ She talked quickly, while she still had the courage to speak. ‘I know you don’t like the idea, but I don’t see why. I have seen little groups of two or three young women sitting in the shade painting, along the river bank, near the Castle ruins. And more than once! And they looked extremely respectable!’ Sensing the silent, disapproving reception to her words, Edith fell silent herself. Edith’s mother was about to speak, but her father raised his hand. ‘I too have seen, from time to time, those charming gatherings of young women painting en-plein-air.’ He looked around at all his daughters and then at Edith, who refused to drop her stare. ‘I know you know what I am about to say, Edith, and I am sorry that you have felt the need to raise this question again.’ Edith heard her father sigh, but she thought indignantly that she had never worked up the courage to ask the question before, although she did know his answer. 152

‘They are dilettantes. They are producing something nice for their scrap book. You Edith, and Jessica, Mary and Kate’, he included them all with a sweep of his hand, ‘are not dabblers, you are proficient artists. You have had, are still having, a thorough art education. Your paintings are hung in exhibitions. And finally, most importantly, your work is good enough to buy. And people do buy your paintings. And that, as you know, is the heart of the matter. I am an artist myself, I have no great fortune to leave you, but I give you this gift, the ability to support yourself and to assist your family.’ Unconsciously Edith breathed out heavily, resentfully. James Hayllar looked sharply at her, but he continued evenly. ‘Respectable women must not be seen to be money earners.’ But we do earn money. People buy our paintings. Edith could not say it, but she thought it. Her father’s response suggested that he had heard her thoughts. ‘Your work is good. People want to buy it, they should be allowed to buy it, but it would be crass for you to be seen in the High Street creating work for sale. Vulgar! I cannot permit that. You live in an agreeable house, surrounded by attractive gardens. There is material enough here for any artist.’ With that James Hayllar put his cup down, stood up and left the room. Edith saw Grace look anxiously at the fruitcake she had sliced for their father and handed to him on a china plate. It sat untouched on the table next to his chair. A few weeks later Edith was painting a basket of eggs which were on a chair in the kitchen. Her father had pointed them out to her as a good subject. She felt he had not forgiven her for that indignant question about painting outside Castle Priory, and while she had been an obedient daughter and held her tongue, she had not forgiven him either. She was sitting in front of the basket of eggs on the chair, with her easel and her paints and, as she had been trained, she was perfecting the detail of every stick and woven strand of the basket, and of every creamy egg that could be seen through the basket slats. On 153

the left on the canvas a shadowy hallway lead to another room where a window provided a square of light. In front of the chair, on the warm expanse of red brick floor was another basket packed with fresh farm goods. A pale blue folded umbrella leaned against the chair, and a bright red jacket was tossed over its back. They created the idea that the bearers of the baskets and umbrella had just carried the eggs from the farm. She would call it Farmhouse Butter and Eggs.43 It was a nice little canvas. She knew that. And it would sell. Father was right about that. Edith put her paintbrush down, sat back in her chair and sighed. The problem was that the picture of a person crossing the field on a sunny day, actually bringing the basket of eggs from the farm, with the luscious greens of the countryside all around, would be a picture she would prefer to paint. Jessica had visited a few minutes ago and said kind things about the picture. Edith knew that Jessica was expressing sympathy with her, but she felt nonetheless that Jessica might have supported her a little more! Still, Edith knew that Jessica was happy doing her rooms and flowers. She rubbed her eyes and sat staring at her work. ‘Jessica said you were here.’ Edith heard her mother walk up behind her and then felt the warm hand on her shoulder. ‘Come outside and get some fresh air.’ ‘Thank you, Mama, but I should finish and tidy up here before I do anything else.’ ‘Five minutes!’ Her mother took her palette from her. ‘Come and find some of that sunlight you love so much.’ Edith thought that the reference to sunlight might be related to the infamous tea conversation of a fortnight ago and its joking tone made her feel that her mother understood nothing of her frustration. She slouched outside. Edith had been painting in the oldest section of Castle Priory. It had been an old farmhouse and going outside was like going into a

43 Edith Hayllar, Farmhouse Butter and Eggs (Fig. 64) 154

farm yard. The space was surrounded on three sides by the farm building, and there was some gravel and patches of cobbles and a scrubby tree or two left from when it had been a busy farm yard. However there were no longer farm animals there, nor farmyard smells, except for the few rabbits in the hutch. ‘This used to be a farmyard, you know.’ Edith found her mother’s comment strangely irrelevant. ‘I know,’ she said walking beyond the shade to get into the warmth of the sunshine. ‘Come over here, I want to show you something.’ Her mother walked towards the far side of the old yard, then turned and beckoned. Edith thought her mother was acting rather strangely, but she walked over and stood beside her so that she was looking in the same direction, back at that part of the Priory which had been the old farm house. ‘If you stand here you can’t see the rest of the house. See. Just the sky above that nice red farmhouse roof.’ ‘Mmm.’ Edith listened to her mother. Was there a purpose to her words? ‘You could be in the country, in a farm yard. It might be many miles to the nearest town. You could paint here and to all intents and purposes it could be your farmyard painting.’ Suddenly Edith realised that her mother did understand. But nonetheless, this was not what she wanted. She wanted to sit in the country and feel the space around her. Her mother interrupted her thoughts. ‘Now walk with me.’ Edith followed her mother to the summer house by the river. ‘Now look from here,’ her mother said. ‘If you eliminate the river and paint tall trees in the background, and there are many trees to copy, you could be in the country, maybe at a hunting lodge. A pleasant country scene, don’t you think?’ Edith wanted to agree with her mother. She was being so kind, so sympathetic, but she did not seem to appreciate that it was not the same. Edith wanted to paint real outdoor scenes, just as her father did. 155

After all it was he who had developed their affection for the outdoors with all the riding, the rowing and the tennis he had encouraged. ‘My dear, you are a lovely painter and a good girl.’ Her mother rested her hand on Edith’s arm. ‘However, you must remain a proper young woman. Your reputations are so important. No one will marry a girl without a good reputation. And more than that,’ her mother looked at her, ‘acceptance for our whole family by the people we like and esteem depends upon the modesty of our daughters.’ Edith could find no answer to her mother’s words. She saw that the late sunshine had lit up the lawns and touched the tips of the trees. The river glinted a little where the setting sun touched it. Everything not in the sun was in cool blue shadow. A breeze blew across the lawn and rustled the trees. Edith shivered. Her mother put her arm around Edith’s shoulders. ‘We should go in,’ she said. ‘You need to finish up your work and I need to check on the dinner.’ ====== 156

5. Influences

Edith Hayllar’s A Summer Shower (1884) (Fig.12), exhibited at the 1883 Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy, is the best known of any Hayllar sisters’ work. It was part of the Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art until 2003, when it was sold by &KULVWLH¶V IRU ǧ Painted at Castle Priory it depicts tennis players having a cool drink and some conversation inside during a shower of summer rain. In the foreground on the left sits a young woman in casual tennis clothes, a watermelon pink dress protected by a white pinafore and flat black tennis shoes. She holds her racket across her lap and looks up at a young man standing close to her. Clothed casually in a white shirt with rolled up sleeves, and grey knickerbockers belted by a reddish pink sash, he is leaning on the wall looking down at her as they converse. The racket he holds loosely in his hand is resting on the floor. These two absorbed young people could be the focus of the painting, but the viewer’s eye is drawn past them. The room they occupy leads through a high archway into another room where a window at the centre of the painting, opens on to the bright, showery world outside. A young woman in a pale green dress sits in this further room and a young man, all in white, is standing at a table pouring drinks. Outside the window a woman in a red raincoat stands under a black umbrella. She is looking in and chatting comfortably to a young woman standing inside. The luminous summer light coming through the window fills both rooms, lighting up the dark timber of the walls. Beyond the women conversing at the window is the lawn and then the river and beyond that are meadows, suggested by a small square of hazy pale green. The dominant colours are the dark brown timber walls, the touches of watermelon red in the clothing and the silvery white light flooding through the window, illuminating the white tiled floor and being reflected in the glass protecting the framed paintings on the walls. 157

While the description so far suggests a romance budding during a peaceful interlude between games of tennis, other aspects of this work invite the viewer to enjoy the moment and the place more fully. The timber panelling on the walls is carefully reproduced. The unlit sections of wall are almost black. They occur above the archway separating the two rooms and on the far left of the painting, and combined with the strip of red patterned carpet along the bottom of the picture they frame and accentuate the scene. The darkness of the unlit sections of wall is echoed in the furniture; the ornate legged table holding the drinks, the chairs on which the young ladies are sitting and the side of a small table in the right foreground on which sits an equally dark coloured jug.

The sense of a game of tennis interrupted is created not only by the rackets in the hands of the young couple in the foreground and the casual clothes worn by all the people depicted, but also by a tennis racket propped against the archway between the two rooms and three tennis balls lying on the tiled floor. Two balls are against the wall, but a third stands out, because it has rolled to the middle of the floor; light shining through the window causes the racket and balls to cast shadows on the white tiles.

A Summer Shower is evidence of many of the influences on the Hayllar sisters. Of course it reflects the techniques learned from their teacher, James Hayllar, with its meticulously produced, almost photographic realism, the suggestions of a story created by props and characters and the upper-middle class life style with its emphasis on the social spaces of bourgeois femininity. These features of the sisters’ iconography, however, were confirmed by other factors; their neighbour, the artist George Leslie, prevailing attitudes in the society around them, the ‘New Imperialism’, orientalism and photography. I suggest that the significance and appeal of all these trends as material for subject matter was regularly reflected in and reinforced by the 158

national art journals, which in their range of articles and the values manifested in them extended the Hayllar sisters’ knowledge and gave the imprimatur of the art world to their iconography.

James Hayllar and George Dunlop Leslie encouraged the Hayllar sisters to paint portraits, domestic scenes and still-life, including arrangements of flowers not only because of their appropriateness for women, but by example. Topics considered suitable for male artists - biblical, historical, literary or classical - were deemed weighty and meaningful;1 however, these two men arrived at a stage in their careers when they preferred to paint the subjects often regarded as appropriate to the apparently limited skills and scope of women.

James Hayllar, as previously discussed, started his career painting the conventionally important subjects; however, in 1866, with Miss Lily’s Carriage Stops the Way, his work became popular, was engraved for mass production and lead to his prosperity.2 His consequent failure to be elected as an Associate to the Royal Academy apparently liberated him from the production of ‘serious’ paintings, allowing him to concentrate on families and children and scenes from village life. These experiences evidently influenced what he taught his daughters. He encouraged them to choose subjects ‘having a special story or interest’, which were ‘suitable for exhibition and readily found purchasers’.3 This lesson is reflected particularly in their early work.4 Jessica Hayllar’s Going to ‘My Uncle’s (1880) (Fig. 22) depicts a pile of folded blankets, fringed fabrics and an embroidered cushion on a chair. On top of these are a violin and silver tea pot. The phrase ‘my uncle’s’ was slang for a pawnbroker, so the suggestion was that the objects in the picture were being pawned. Jessica’s House Cleaning (1882) (Fig. 65) shows a pile of quilts and bedspreads folded and

1 ‘The Royal Academy’, Art Journal, 1 June (1863) (pp. 105-116), p. 105, reviewed the offerings at the Academy’s Summer Exhibition, under headings that clearly outlined the order of importance of subject matter. See p. 51 of this work. 2 Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part I’, p. 268. 3 Ladies Pictorial, 28 December (1889), p. 944 4 Ladies Pictorial, 28 December 1889, pp. 944-5. 159

placed on the cobbled ground against a courtyard wall. A door in the wall, slightly open, gives a glimpse of the world beyond, pebbled ground and greenery lit by mild sunlight. Edith Hayllar’s A Present from the Farm (1881) (Fig. 66) shows a chair, with the intricate carving and decoration of its high back illuminated by sunlight shining through the nearby window. On the chair is a basket of eggs and leaning against it is an umbrella. Mary Hayllar’s Wedding Presents (1881) (Fig. 67) depicts a corner of the room near a lace curtained window where a table, two chairs and the carpeted floor are crowded with household things, vases, platters, a silver teapot, sugar bowl and milk jug and an umbrella. The combination of these titles and images clearly evoke strong narrative possibilities.

Not just Hayllar’s ideas, but his work also influenced his daughters’ early paintings. While each gradually developed an individual iconography, some of their early works are similar to his in subject matter. Edith Hayllar’s Blackberry Tart (1885) (Fig. 68) is obviously an imitation of James Hayllar’s Perplexed (1874) (Fig. 69). They both depict a young girl on a chair working at a table situated under a cottage window, accompanied by a standing woman, whose attire indicates that she is a servant. The two are working together on a project. There are, however, interesting differences. In Hayllar’s painting the servant is perplexed by a question related to school work. Her ignorance reflected in her bewildered expression is the joke in the painting, one based on belittling the illiterate working class woman compared to the clever middle class child. In Edith Hayllar’s painting, by contrast, the child and the woman are both dressed in aprons and are more equal in their companionable interest in rolling the pastry.

Of all the sisters Edith Hayllar’s subject matter was the most influenced by her father’s work. Hayllar’s later paintings concentrated on images of the lower classes around Wallingford, including Rival Drinks (1881) and Musical Honours (1886), pictures of men in the town, sitting around a table, Wedding Bells (1882), with men tolling 160

church bells, and Mabet’s Pensioners (1884), showing men at the old pensioners’ home being visited by a well-dressed little girl. An article in the Berks and Oxon Advertiser summarising James Hayllar’s work described him as wanting to reflect ‘the sympathy existing between the well-to-do and the labouring classes.’5 He produced images of children in company with working class people, and he also painted servants as in The Best of Friends Must Part (1895) in which an old man sits with a prettily dressed little girl, while a servant girl, identifiable only by her uniform, is standing in the shadows of an open door behind them, presumably waiting to take the child away. Edith also produced images of the lower classes, such as Christmas Dinner at the Rectory (1883) (Fig. 70), in which the figures sit at a large table of food generously provided by the more well to do. Like her father she included servants standing in shadows on the edges of rooms, as in Seniores Priores (1885) (Fig. 54).

Mary Hayllar painted some subjects similar to those of her father. In The Thorn (?1884) (Fig. 71) for example, Hayllar depicts a little girl standing in a wheel barrow accompanied by an old gardener who is extracting the thorn in her finger, while in Mary Hayllar’s Helping Gardener (1884) (Fig. 72), an old gardener is pushing a wheelbarrow along a garden path accompanied by two little girls. The arrangement of characters in the garden settings differs in each picture, but the old gardener working with the beautiful little mistresses is the same, with his hat, waistcoat and mutton chop whiskers, the wheelbarrow is the same one and the little girls in both works are dark-haired and identically dressed, each in a pink dress, a white pinafore, black stockings and a pink sun hat. It is not difficult to imagine the father and daughter painting in the garden together, possibly on the same day.

5 Berks and Oxon Adviser, 8 September 1899. 161

Instances of the sisters’ art incorporating copies of their father’s paintings further illustrate how they used his work as a model, and also to generate their own ideas. In Finished and Framed (1888) (RA 1179) (Fig. 73), Kate reproduced her father’s The Cliffs, Bawdsey, Suffolk (RA 1857), and a copy of another of his works, the image of a deer being nuzzled by a fawn, appears in Jessica’s Christmas Comes but Once a Year (Fig. 20) and also in Kate’s Eleventh of August (1887) (RA 1057) (Fig. 74). Both sisters use this work by their father to add a further layer of meaning to their own, but Kate uses it for an unexpected purpose, perhaps reflecting other influences and opinions in society. The title indicates the start of the hunting season and while her father’s image of the deer and fawn fills two thirds of hers, the objects depicted in front of it, an open gun case containing a gun and an oil jar, suggest that when game hunting begins such creatures are not safe. The doe lying on the ground could be interpreted as being dead. Thus Kate seems to have used her father’s painting to make a protest against hunting.

Even in works by the sisters with some similarity to their father’s there were key differences. Much of Hayllar’s work after he moved to Wallingford represented an idyllic rural life, a romanticised past for a market anxious about the impact of industrialisation on the social fabric. The sisters, by contrast, painted scenes from their daily life, idealised of course in that the models were dressed in formal clothes even though involved in everyday activities, but less sentimental than their father’s work because their figures were realistic portraits of the family involved in activities the sisters in all probability pursued in their own home, even if the paintings represented only a careful selection of those activities.

Like Hayllar, George Leslie’s early paintings were literary and historical subjects such as The War Summons, 1485 (1863) and Willow, Willow (Othello) (1867). However, when elected a full Royal Academician in 1876 his Diploma Picture, The Lass of Richmond Hill 162

(1876), depicted a subject indicative of his work to come. A beautiful young woman attractively dressed and with a basket of red roses, is sitting on the ground, with the hill sloping upwards behind her. Such women were regularly the subjects of Leslie’s paintings with such titles, as Daughters of Eve (1883) and The Language of Flowers (1885). As a member of the Academy his work was commonly regarded as accomplished and sold well. An article, part of a series on ‘Our Living Artists’ in the Magazine of Art Illustrated, 1879-1880, focused on Leslie’s work and confirmed this subject matter not only as acceptable, but also as praiseworthy: As for our own age, its needs are various enough, but none of these perhaps is more pressing as the need for sweetness and cheerfulness of heart. The painter therefore who, towards the end of a melancholy century, gives us the images of free and serene happiness, has understood his art and his time, and his work is as welcome as are flowers from the March woods in the wintry streets of London. Mr Leslie has not chosen the mission of his art without deliberation of purpose; he has appreciated the arts of his day. “My aim in art,” he says, “has always been to paint pictures from the sunny side of English domestic life, and as much as possible to render them as cheerful companions of their possessors. The times are so imbued with turmoil and misery, hard work and utilitarianism, that innocence, joy and beauty seem to be the most fitting subjects to render such powers as I possess useful to my fellow creatures."6 The writer is claiming that Leslie’s paintings are actually performing a service for the nation. He expands this idea, positioning Leslie’s work as distinctly national, by comparing him to ‘the pre-Raphaelite masters’ who ‘who never forsook the country and the time which were

6 Wilfred Meynell, ‘Our Living Artists – George Dunlop Leslie, R.A.’, Magazine of Art Illustrated, (1879-1880), 232-4, (p. 232). 163

familiar to them, and of which their representations had the value of sincerity and sympathy’ because they gave the spirit of their Umbrian hills to the scriptured scenes they painted … In the same way, Mr Leslie, even when his subjects are not English – and that is seldom enough – prefers to give them a distinctly English character, rather than to simulate the past by an antiquarian erudition which would have little interest for succeeding generations. 7 While comparing Leslie to the Italian pre-Raphaelite masters certainly elevates his work, this article is redolent of a sense of the traditional English way of life being under threat and of Leslie being an artist who, with his images of English girls apparently representing an English way of life, provided a bulwark against the social and political changes occurring in England towards the end of the century.

Ruskin inspecting the display at the Academy in 1859 saw Leslie’s School Revisited and he too approved its display of English values. The painting showed a group of girls in the garden receiving the call of a lately married companion who has bloomed into an elegant and exquisite lady... ‘I came upon this picture early, in my first walk through the rooms,’ says Mr Ruskin, ‘and I was so delighted with it that it made me like everything else I saw that morning. It is altogether exquisite in rendering some of the sweet qualities of English girlhood; and, on the whole, the most easy and graceful composition in the rooms.’8

While such subjects were considered fitting for women because they reflected the limited domestic sphere of women’s responsibilities and capabilities, when a man such as Leslie, with all his Academy respectability painted them, they were highly regarded, indeed

7 Wilfred Meynell, p. 233. 8 Wilfred Meynell, p. 234. 164

praiseworthy, almost performing a public service to the nation. Such subjects also show the responsibility placed on women, their appearance and behaviour, to help maintain patriarchal class values. The Hayllar sisters may have deduced from Leslie’s work and its reception in such articles as this one that representing attractive people in attractive spaces was not only profitable, but praiseworthy.

Leslie’s serious academic father is quoted in the same article as saying, ‘Well at least you need never starve, for you can paint a pretty face.’9 The comment is significant as while the ‘at least’ indicates some reservations by Leslie’s father about his art, it also indicates that painting ‘a pretty face’ was almost a assurance of being able to sell one’s work and make money, a direct indication of how commodifiable images of women were. The importance of a product that appeals to the largest market is again affirmed by one who was respected by the Hayllar sisters.

While George Dunlop Leslie may have influenced the style of Mary Hayllar, he would also have had an effect on the sisters’ choice of subject matter.10 The Lady’s Pictorial corroborates this idea in a comment confirming that Jessica Hayllar did visit the Leslies sometimes in search of subjects: Miss Jessica Hayllar has also found many charming subjects for the brush in the house of her father’s neighbour, Mr G. D. Leslie, R.A.11

Perhaps a final testament to the fact that it was a well selling product rather than so called great art that interested both Hayllar and Leslie is the fact that they each painted a picture of little children up to their elbows in soap suds, which were used by soap companies. Leslie’s This is the Way We Wash Our Clothes was taken up by the Lever

9 Wilfred Meynell, p. 233. 10 For details, see Chapter 3. 11 Lady’s Pictorial, 28 December 1889, p. 945. 165

Brothers to advertise Sunlight Soap in 1887.12 Pears Soap used James Hayllar’s Soap Suds for an advertisement in 1887.13 A note on the website of the Lady Lever Art Gallery, under an image of Hayllar’s Centre of Attraction (1891), a painting of a well-dressed woman and child gleaming in white, surrounded by admirers from the lower classes, suggests that ‘Leverhulme14 may also have bought this painting, from the 1891 Royal Academy, to use as a soap advertisement.’15 Certainly Lever Brothers gifted it to the Lady Lever Art Gallery in March 1983.16 This would therefore suggest that Hayllar may have had more than one painting used in advertisements.

The influence of the national art journals on the sisters occurred possibly because, as provincials, it would have been their most constant and prolonged exposure to the art world. James Hayllar would have travelled regularly from Wallingford to London, a train journey of about two hours, to maintain his connection with the Royal Society of British Artists and with other contacts within the metropolitan art world, including possibly a London agent.17 Since he and one or more of his daughters regularly submitted works for the R.A. Summer Exhibitions he may have delivered the works himself and because their paintings were often selected, he possibly went to

12 It is now in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, in Liverpool. 13 Edward Morris, ‘Advertising and the Acquisition of Contemporary Art’, Journal of the History of Collections 44, No. 2 (1992), 195-200 (pp.196-197) 14 Victorian businessman and detergent entrepreneur, William Hesketh Lever (1851-1925) built the international firm of Lever Brothers. He marketed and manufactured Sunlight Soap which only a decade after its launch was being sold in 134 countries. He was created Baron Leverhulme on 21 June 1917, and Viscount Leverhulme on 27 November 1922, the ‘hulme’ section of the title being in honour of his wife, Elizabeth Hulme. Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lever_1st_Viscount_Leverhulme (Accessed 28 September 2011). 15 Available at: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ladylever/collections/thecentreofattraction.asp (Accessed 25 July 2011). 16 The inventory sheet, a photocopy of which was kindly sent to me by the Lady Lever Art Gallery, notes the inventory number of The Centre of Attention by James Hayllar as 3416. It records that this oil-on-canvas painting was presented to the gallery by Lever Brothers in March 1983, and that it was exhibit number 681 at the Royal Academy in 1891. 17 Dewey and Beasley, p. 28, comment that the railway arrived in Wallingford in 1840 and note that ‘a full arduous day’ by road to London is thereby reduced to ‘only a couple of hours’ by train. 166

see them hung. Perhaps all the exhibiting artists in the family went to Varnishing Day, when all ‘hung’ artists were permitted to go and ‘touch up’ their paintings before the show was opened. It is difficult to know, however, if a Hayllar family visit to the R.A. ever occurred, because, as noted in Chapter 3, there is no mention in sources from the time that the Hayllar sisters attended London exhibitions.

As professional artists, the Hayllars would certainly have subscribed to journals that included reviews of their work, placing their names alongside those of the celebrated artists of their time. These would have included the Art Journal, a monthly magazine that produced not only essays on all aspects of fine arts in Britain and Europe, but also supported these with black-and-white etchings and engravings, the Artist and Journal of Home Culture (simply the Artist after 1890 ), a series of monthly journals that included other arts, such as music, drama and architecture, and the Athenaeum Journal of Literature, Science, the Fine Arts & Drama, a weekly magazine covering matters related to literature, science, geography, fine arts, music and drama. The Hayllars would have subscribed to these publications, as each reviewed the R.A.’s Summer Exhibition that over the period of the 1880s and 1890s always included one or more of the Hayllars’ paintings. The journals also reviewed other shows that regularly displayed the Hayllars’ works such as the R.S.A. exhibitions and those held in the Dudley Gallery.18

Many contemporary items associated with the home were confirmed as worthy of being represented in artworks because of the attention and acclamation given to them in essays and illustrations in the art journals. The journals were no doubt also catering to the needs of merchants to sell and the desire of the market to purchase these objects which would be proof of the good taste which symbolised

18 See details in the many examples of reviews and comments included throughout this work and particularly below in Chapter 6 which examines the contemporary reception of the Hayllars’ paintings. 167

gentility. Predisposed by their mentors and forces in society to make a profit, and with their subject matter sanctioned as art by the journals, the Hayllar sisters created desirable commodities for a bourgeois market.

Domestic space and its representations featured regularly in the art journals, and as we have seen, it is a focus of the Hayllar sisters. Even if, in the foreground of the sisters’ paintings there were people celebrating events such as a wedding or a christening, the rooms they occupied were regularly painted with great care and often with more skill than the people and events. The critic in the 1888 Athenaeum review of the R. A.s’ Summer Exhibition referred to Jessica Hayllar’s painting Return from Confirmation (1888) (RA 822) (Fig. 75). It shows members of the family walking from the garden through French windows into a room where an old lady, possibly a grandmother, sits waiting to receive the girl in her white dress who had just returned from being confirmed: Miss J. Hayllar in “Return from Confirmation” (822), though her figures are poor and tame, has depicted an interior which is brilliantly and purely lighted, and much furniture and small details are most exquisitely finished, from the tea-equipage and carpet pattern in perspective to the chinz covers of the chairs.19

The art periodicals frequently included articles about elegant, artistic domestic interiors and their accessories, without any suggestion that this area was exclusively for women. On the contrary it was men such as Tiffany, William Morris and James McNeill Whistler who were credited with some of the outstanding examples of domestic design discussed in the journals. It was also men who owned the spaces illustrated and discussed in the art journals.

19 Athenaeum, ‘Royal Academy (Third Notice)’, 9 June 1888, p. 733. 168

The Art Journal regularly included single items and even series of articles on great homes, or the homes of artists and the decorative and home arts which appeared in these houses. While the commodification of such home decoration and household objects may have been integral to the journals’ purpose, the articles and illustrations were not presented as ‘house and garden’ features, but as discussion of serious, respectable art. The Art Journal had quarto-sized pages so that illustrations of half a page or a page were large and the detailed sketches and etchings were impressive.

Some illustrations accompanying articles on rooms in houses invite comparison with the Hayllars’ paintings of Castle Priory. The second of two articles published in the Art Journal in 1881,20 both concerned with dining-rooms, included a large drawing of the corner of a dining room where the floor, the two walls and the ceiling meet. The illustration includes an ornately carved door, wainscoting, the edge of a fireplace, a display cabinet and even elaborately patterned wallpaper, tiled floor and carpet (Fig. 76).21 It suggests many of the rooms painted by the Hayllar sisters, principally Jessica, not in the particular patterns and styles of decoration, but in the perspective, the precise reflection of the space and the attention to detail. Three years later the same journal published an article on American Decorative Arts, accompanied by an image of a room decorated by Tiffany,22 arranged very much like a Hayllar painting, although again the decorative detail itself was unlike anything in the Hayllar paintings. And in 1885 the Art Journal published a sketch of a view of the Garrick Club from the Library (Fig. 77), which frames the room in the distance with a very ornate doorway.23 The attention to the detailed

20 G.T. Robertson, ‘Dining-Room Tables’, pp. 181-4, and ‘The Dining Room Wall’, pp. 201-4, in the series ‘Our Household Furniture; Its Past History and Its Present Development’, Art Journal (1881). 21 G.T. Robertson, Illustration, ‘Dining-room Woodwork, Messrs. Howard and Sons’ in ‘The Dining Room Wall’, Art Journal (1881), 201-4 (p. 204). 22 Mary Gay Humphreys, ‘The Progress of American Decorative Art’, Art Journal (1884), 25-8 (p. 27). 23 Illustration, ‘Garrick Club from the Library’ in ‘London Clubland’, Art Journal, (1885), p. 341. 169

wall panels and the view of a room through a door is suggestive of the views from one room to another produced mainly by Jessica Hayllar, but also by Edith. In 1890, in a series on painters’ studios, an essay entitled ‘The Studio of Edward Unger’ (Fig. 78) included an illustration of a studio, seen through a door, in which the decoration and furnishing of the room take up most of the canvas, and one small figure sits at the desk, presumably to illustrate the proportions of the room and suggest the pleasure of occupying it.24

During the course of 1891 the Art Journal published a series of articles entitled ‘A Modern Country Home’, which were illustrated with detailed images of rooms occupied by people, whose main function seemed to be to illustrate the charm and functionality of the space.25 The view through an entrance to a room with a resident figure, very small in relation to the surrounding space, suggests paintings by Jessica Hayllar. Two of her paintings, both known as Sunflowers (1884) (Fig. 79) and (Fig. 80), have a vase of sunflowers in the foreground, but look past the flowers to a further room, and even beyond that, to where one shows an open door and the other a large window with sunlight streaming in. In the first a woman sits and looks out the open door and in the second a woman sits by the window and reads a letter. The figures of the women are small in comparison to the space, and like the illustration in the article, ‘The Studio of Edward Unger’, referred to above, the paintings celebrate the details of the domestic space - tables, pictures on the wall and wood panelling – with the figures serving to suggest the contentment promoted by such a space. The Morning Lesson (1893) (Fig. 81) is another of Jessica Hayllar’s pictures in which, in spite of the title, she allocated much more canvas space to the rooms, the first room with its flowers and paintings and the hallway stretching away from it. Depicting such interiors had the imprimatur of the art journals.

24 C. Lewis Hind, Illustration, ‘The Studio of Edward Unger’ in ‘II – Painters’ Studios’, Art Journal, 2 February (1890), 40-5 (p. 45). 25 T. Raffles Davison, ‘A Modern Country Home’, Art Journal (1891), pp. 329-35, 353-7. 170

An 1892 article in the Art Journal titled ‘A Connoisseur and His Surroundings – Mr James Orrock RI, at 48 Bedford Square’ included pictures (Fig. 82) as well as descriptions of Orrock’s rooms.26 The title reflects the assumption that an expert’s ‘surroundings’ were to be seen as an extension of his art collection, thus confirming the potential for domestic space to be art.27 The 1892 Art Journal series devoted to the ‘Private Art Collections of London’ included lists of the art works of the late Mr Frederick Leyland of Prince’s Gate.28 Descriptions of the collections included illustrations of the rooms in his house such as ‘The Peacock Room’, decorated by James McNeill Whistler.29 The decoration included tables and chairs and an elaborate silver wall. In 1893, ‘A Kensington Interior’ showed a picture of a staircase and also a corner of a second drawing room decorated by William Morris, which featured richly patterned carpet, chairs, piano and curtain.30 In the 1893 Art Journal there was a copy of ‘The Fireside Student’ (Fig. 83), a picture by the American painter, F.D. Millet. The accompanying comments said that Millet was consistently a painter of interiors. His neat and accomplished execution has continually manifested itself in the niceties of light and composition within doors, and in the present instance it is displayed in a thousand well- considered details. Books in every attitude … ; an old floor, old walls, wood dark with time – all these give a far fuller and more crowded arrangement than we are accustomed to in this lovely simple work. 31 If the Hayllar sisters had read this article, as it is likely they would have, the comments praising a painting of an interior and ‘the niceties

26 ‘A Connoisseur and His Surroundings– Mr James Orrock RI, at 48 Bedford Square’, Art Journal (1892), 12-7 (p. 13). 27 Another article, Humphry Ward, ‘Bardini’s at Florence’, Art Journal (1893), pp. 10-5, also assumes that the surroundings were included in the ‘art’. It includes images of a staircase, tapestries and sculptures. 28 Lionel Robinson, ‘The Leyland Collection’, Art Journal (1892), 134-8 (p. 135). 29 Ibid. 30 Lewis F. Day, ‘A Kensington Interior’, Art Journal (1893), 139-44 (p. 139). 31 ‘The Fireside Student’, Art Journal (1893), p. 27. 171

of light and composition within doors’ must have been gratifying and would have again endorsed the subject matter of their own work.

Not simply household spaces in general, but also particular pieces of furniture such as sideboards, cupboards, ornately carved and decorated chairs and highly wrought and polished tables were included in many of the Hayllar sisters’ paintings. An extreme example of this is All Absorbing (1898) (Fig. 84), by Jessica Hayllar, in which fully half the painting is filled by a tall, very elaborately carved and decorated display cupboard. Just beyond the extreme right of the painting is a light source that illuminates the highly polished wood and the little pillars that support the shelves. The only version of this picture available is a photocopy of a tiny photograph in one of the family albums. It is a poor copy, but on the top shelf of the cabinet can be discerned an elegant china tea set, with plates, a sugar bowl and cups, all reproduced in detail. Every door, every carved decoration gleams and on the top of the sideboard stands an oriental shaped pot with a pointed lid. On the left side of the painting, beyond the cabinet, is a mother sitting in a window nook, bending forward as she gazes down on the baby lying on her lap. These two, whom one might assume are the chief focus of the painting, fill about a quarter of the canvas because around them is space, an expanse of ceiling, windows, lace curtains, carpet and floor. The title might seem to refer to the mother and the baby, but it is clear from the space occupied on the canvas and the detailed reproduction of it, that the artist was as absorbed by the furniture and decorations as by the relationship depicted.

Throughout the 1880s and early 1890s the Art Journal featured ‘furniture as art’. The 1883 series, ‘Jones Bequest to the South Kensington Museums’, which included illustrations of furniture such as an ornate mahogany commode, desks, vases, an armoire, a cupboard, and vases and clocks, points to the assumption that such objects bequeathed to a museum and listed publically are valuable and 172

significant.32 The 1884 series on the ‘Cabinet-Maker’s Art’ included four pages of pictures of cabinets, with a discussion that included the following comment: The change which is taking place in the art of design as applied to domestic furniture is a hopeful one. The reign of mean meagreness which has for some time ruled over us appears to be coming to a close.33 Such comments would have validated artists such as the Hayllars, who could see themselves moving away from ‘mean meagreness’, a phrase suggesting an attitude of skimpiness that enforced minimal standards and possibly deficiency in design and materials. The same phrase confirms that the interior of homes was no longer simply utilitarian, but rather that domesticity was being elaborated and commodified. The Hayllars participated in this process whether they intended to, or not. Their intention was to produce a saleable product, and they were influenced by the journals’ confirmation of what was art and what was desirable. The detailed discussion, interest and illustration of furniture continued in the Art Journal through the 1880s and into the 1890s.34

Other features of the Hayllar sisters’ work, aspects of decorative design, such as fabric, napery, wallpaper and china, also appeared regularly in the journals. The Art Journal’s 1883 series, entitled ‘The Year’s Advance in Art Manufactures’, included an article on ‘Textiles, Lace, Tapestry, Stuffs’ and another on ‘Household Decoration’, which included detailed sketches of wall papers.35 The 1886 Art Journal included a series, on ‘Home Arts’, with items on such subjects as Wood Carving, Repoussé or Sheet Metal Work, Modelling in Clay

32 Gilbert R. Redgrave, ‘The Jones Bequest to South Kensington Museum’, Art Journal (1883), pp. 124-8,197-200, 233-6, 401-4. 33 G.T. Robertson, ‘Domestic Furniture’, in the series ‘The Cabinet Maker’s Art’, Art Journal (1884), 373-6 (p.373). 34 See William T. Arnold, ‘The Manchester Jubilee Exhibition’, pp. 249-252; ‘The Manchester Jubilee Exhibition’, pp. 281-2; ‘Furniture in the Manchester Exhibition’, 381, Art Journal (1887). 35 Alan S. Cole, ‘Textiles, Lace, Tapestry, Stuffs’, Art Journal (1883), pp.149-52; G.T. Robinson, ‘Household Decoration – Wall Papers’, Art Journal (1883), pp.353- 6. 173

and Mosaic Setting.36 1887 was Queen Victoria’s Jubilee Year, and to celebrate the glories of her reign the Art Journal published essays on achievements in many areas of the arts. The series on ‘Victorian Progress in Applied Design’ included, besides descriptions of furniture, a piece on Edward Byrne Jones’s stained glass and another on William Morris silk designs.37 There were also essays on the sculpture and architecture created in Victoria’s reign, all of which were regarded as having equal importance. The 1891 Art Journal included a piece on silks and satins, with pictures of the fabric patterns.38 There was a series on ‘The Progress in the Industrial Arts’, with individual essays, each by a different author, on such topics as Chintzes and Cretonnes, Table Decorations, Damask, Napery and Needlework, Velvets, Velveteens and Plushes, always accompanied by large close-up images of the fabric designs.39 In 1892, as parts of a series on ‘The Furnishing and Decorating of the House’, the journal published articles by Aymer Valance, on ‘Ceilings and Floors’, ‘Wall, Windows and Stairs’, ‘The Fire Place’, ‘Furniture’, ‘Knives, Forks and Spoons’, and ‘Window Blinds, Lightings and Accessories.’40 There can be little doubt that these articles, with their lists of domestic goods and associated images, would also have served to educate readers as consumers.

In 1886, the Art Journal included a series of essays on features of interior design and decoration in the work of major artists, such as one

36 Charles G. Leland, ‘Wood Carving’, Art Journal (1886), pp. 41-5; ‘Cuir-Bouilli, or Stamped Leather’, pp. 73-7; ‘Stencilling’, pp. 105-8; ‘Repoussé or Sheet Metal Work’, pp. 181-4; ‘Modelling in Clay’, pp. 230-3; ‘Mosaic Setting’, pp. 309-69, ‘How to Design’, pp. 365-9. 37 Lewis F. Day, ‘Victorian Progress in Applied Design’, Art Journal (1887), 7, pp. 185-202. 38 Lucie H. Armstrong, ‘Silks and Satins’, Art Journal (1891), pp. 19-24. 39 Lucie H. Armstrong, ‘Silks and Satins’, Art Journal (1891), pp. 19-24; C.Lewis Hind ‘Lace’, pp. 87-92; Lucie H. Armstrong, ‘Chintzes and Cretonnes’, pp. 108-13; Rosa Crandon Gill, ‘Table Decoration of To-day’, pp.141-6; Rosa Crandon Gill, ‘Damask and Napery and Needlework’, pp. 177-82; Aymer Vallance ‘Velvets, Velveteen, and Plushes’, pp. 230-6. 40 Aymer Vallance, ‘Ceilings and Floors’, Art Journal (1892), pp. 23-7; ‘Walls, Windows and Stairs’, pp. 44-92; ‘The Fire Place’, pp. 80-5; ‘Furniture’, pp. 112-8; ‘Carpets and Curtains’, pp. 306-11; ‘Window Blinds, Lightings and Accessories’, pp. 372-8. 174

based on an engraving by J.D. Cooper of a close-up of a section of the Hampton Court room in Hans Holbein’s Henry VIII and his Family.41 To look beyond the main subject in works by artists such as Holbein and focus on the background highlights a contemporary fascination with, and reverence for, decorative design, which the Hayllars reflected in their own work. The art world echoed society’s absorption with the pleasures of domestic spaces and objects, and in representing these in the journals it both applauded them and helped to create and mould the consumerist appetite invested in household accoutrements.

The interior architect, Catherine Karusseit, confirms the process of drawing the domestic realm into consumerism, because beautiful and tasteful household objects testified to wealth and respectability.42 She quotes Thorstein Veblen, economist and sociologist, who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century: The superior gratification derived from the use and contemplation of costly and supposedly beautiful products is, commonly, in great measure a gratification of our sense of costliness masquerading under the name of beauty.’43 She also refers to the ideas of Umberto Eco, who accedes, over and above utility, every object became a commodity, and even the aesthetic enjoyment of the beautiful object was transformed into a display of its commercial value.44

41 G.T. Robinson, ‘Suggestions in Decoration Design from the works of Great Painters’, Art Journal (1886), p. 9. The article refers to the picture, Henry VIII and his Family, held in the Queen's Audience Chamber at Hampton Court Palace. This is probably the painting listed in the Royal Collection as The Family of Henry VIII (British School, c.1545). Other articles dealt with the ‘Tapestries at Hampton Court’ (1886), 49-53; with work by Steenwyk the Elder (1886), pp. 109-12; and by John van Eyck (1886), pp. 358-61. 42 Catherine Karusseit, ‘Victorian Domestic Interiors as Subliminal Space', SAJAH, 22:3 (2007), 168-82 (p. 172). 43 Quoted in T. Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 85. quoted in ‘Victorian Domestic Interiors as Subliminal Space', p.172. 44 Umberto Eco, On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea, trans. by A. McEwen (London: Seeker & Warburg, 2004), p. 363. quoted in ‘Victorian Domestic Interiors as Subliminal Space', p.172. 175

Respectability, an amalgamation of moral, religious, economic and cultural systems, was organised around practices and manifestations which enveloped every aspect of an individual's life. In particular, the adornment of their homes by the Victorian middle class symbolised their gentility. Through decoration a family was regarded as expressing its proper understanding of life and beauty, and this understanding was considered a moral quality. The Hayllar sisters’ iconography of domestic spaces and objects and the tastefulness and by extension moral significance of that subject matter was confirmed by the art journals, so the sisters too participated in the propagation of these beliefs and the profits to be made for them.

The Hayllars regularly depicted children learning from their mother, or interacting with older people.45 They painted children playing with one another, patting kittens, looking at birds, or sitting alone and reading or just being thoughtful. They were siblings in a large family and they painted children, at first their younger brothers 46 and later when Mary married and had children herself, they were often the subjects of Hayllar paintings.47 Once again the Art Journal can be seen to be legitimising these subjects as in its 1882 series discussing and illustrating images of children in art. The first article noted: ‘Hardly a happier subject or a pleasanter task could be found.’48

45 Paintings of a child learning at or on the mother’s knee: by Jessica Hayllar, Rosy Slumbers (1886), Drawing in the Round (1889), Autumn Sunlight (1891), Teaching (1895), The Morning Lesson (1893), Kittens (1901), All Absorbing (date unknown) and by Edith Hayllar, More Hindrance Than Help (1893); Kiss and Make Well (date unknown), Making a Man of Him (date unknown). 46 Edith Hayllar’s Jack Ashore (1887) (Fig. 85 )showed a small boy in a summer house near the river dressed in a little sailor’s outfit, and peering at two seated adults through binoculars as though he were at sea. Behind him, at the entrance to the summer house is a large, very fine model ship, and beyond it the river. Jessica Hayllar’s His Heart’ Desire (date unknown) has a boy obviously restricted in a house and yet he is standing by a window gazing dreamily, longingly at a model ship. These could have been brothers or nephews. They certainly show affection for and an understanding of small boys. 47 See for example: Jessica Hayllar, A Perfect Angel (1898) (R.A. 683) (Fig.86 ), Jessica Hayllar, Kittens (1901)(Fig. 87) 48 Hungerford Pollen, J., ‘Childhood and Art’’, Art Journal (1882), 81-4 (p. 81). 176

It has been discussed earlier that the Hayllars produced many images including or suggesting the game of tennis and they would have known from their reading that were not the only artists to do so. A review in the 1883 Art Journal of ‘An Exhibition of the Society of Painters’ commented that Mr. Ruskin would not like the 160 etchings except for one, ‘The Lawn-Tennis Champion’ by Otto Leyden which was described as ‘charmingly treated’.49 The 1886 Artist and Journal of Home Culture had notes on the R.A. Summer Exhibition and in the section discussing oil paintings was a reference to J. Lowry’s Tennis Match: This is indeed one of the few paintings worth remembering ... The figures of the players move and live, the spectators are facts, not mere abstractions. The flicker of light and shade cast by the trees that surround the lawn shifts and changes as the branches sway in the breeze. Everywhere is the vivacity of movement and the sparkle of variety.50

The Hayllar family’s attachment to the Anglican Church is seen in a series of four works by Jessica associated with church sacraments.51 A Coming Event (1886) (Fig. 11)52 and Fresh from the Altar (1890) (Fig. 88) are connected to marriage, Fresh from the Font (1887) (Fig. 89) shows the newly christened baby being admired at home after the service and The Return from Confirmation (1888) (Fig. 75) described above, also depicts the churchgoers arriving home. These four canvases present important stages in a woman’s life and they reveal much about Jessica Hayllar’s ambitions as a painter.

While topics related to church sacraments did not need the inspiration of the journals, it could be found there nonetheless. In a May 1883

49 ‘Exhibitions and Art Notes’, Art Journal (1883), 165-7 (p. 166). 50 ‘Oil Paintings at the Royal Academy’, Artist and Journal of Home Culture, 7:1 (1886), 194-7 (p. 195). 51 Wilder, p. 95. 52 For discussion of this work, see below in Chapter 7. 177

issue of the Athenaeum, for example, reference is made to Mr H Woods’ painting Preparations for the First Communion, which reflects the lives of Italian fishermen.53 In the Art Journal of 1886 Jules Breton’s Les Communicants (1884), was presented in a section on French art.54 A line of little girls dressed in white stand outside some cottages, with the church on a hill behind them.

Pictures of weddings, however, did not simply show respect for the Anglican Church, they celebrated marriage, that institution which initiated the family, one of the cornerstones of Victorian society. Marriage was the goal of the young Victorian woman, because it offered her financial security and because as a married woman she would occupy her proper place as the ‘angel’ of the home. Courtship ‘often cloying and clichéd, glutted the Keepsake annuals and the art market, as was the case to a lesser extent with scenes of bridal preparations and weddings’.55 The Health of the Bride, by Stanhope Forbes ARA, depicting guests around a wedding table gazing at the married couple in their bridal finery, is reproduced in the Art Journal of 1893. The reproduction is included in an essay about the Henry Tate Collection, thus confirming the importance of the painting. 56

While Hayllar, always one to paint what was fashionable and saleable, produced a number of courtship paintings, his daughters produced very few works on the subject.57 Through the Looking Glass (1882) (Fig. 90), by Jessica Hayllar, includes a courting couple. They are in

53 ‘The Royal Academy (Third Notice)’, Athenaeum, No 2900, 26 May 1883, 673-5 (p. 673). 54 Lionel G. Robinson, ‘French Art’, Art Journal (1886), p. 65. 55 Susan P. Casteras, Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987), p. 101. 56 Walter Armstrong, ‘The Henry Tate Collection V’, Art Journal (1893), 297 – 301(p. 299). 57 Such as All the World Over (1882) (RBA1882, no. 512), which included all the conventions of the subject, taking place in a secluded corner under some trees, a man separated from the woman by a low gate, but leaning over it to take her hand, while the lady gazed shyly at her lap, and Entangled (1892), in which the pun refers to a more legitimate courtship taking place in a well-lit window-seat inside a house. The man is sitting in the window-seat holding his hands out so that the pretty young woman can wrap the tapestry thread around them and so presumably untangle it. 178

the next room, reflected in a mirror, which also reflects the doorway into the room and a painting on the opposite wall. The play with reflection, of presenting objects such as statues from different sides and oblique angles, of seeing most of the room only through reflections in the mirror suggests the allusions and lack of direct speaking inherent in courtship at the time. Jessica Hayllar uses the rooms she depicts to subtly comment on aspects of the lives of those who inhabit them. Edith Hayllar’s A Summer Shower, described at the beginning of this chapter, also includes courtship as one of its subjects.

The institution of marriage is only addressed in a few Hayllar paintings. Hayllar painted a bride in a carriage surrounded by billowing white fabric, a close up of a woman in a veil, and two or three village weddings without props and trappings. There are no known paintings of brides or weddings by Edith and Mary, and only one by Kate, dated 1898, of a bride by herself kneeling at a small altar, in a secluded room. I saw a small black-and-white photograph of this work in a family album. Jessica produced the two already mentioned. Her pictures, as always, were located in the privacy of the family home not in the church.58

Jessica Hayllar’s Fresh from the Altar is one of the works to which Cherry refers in her assertion that the Hayllars were influenced by New Imperialism, the pursuit of overseas territorial acquisitions accompanied by a prevailing belief in the superiority of the British nation and the empire. The picture shows a bride after the wedding, arriving home for the reception and being greeted by family and friends. Behind her hangs an etching of Queen Victoria’s Coronation. Cherry writes that in this painting ‘Christian ritual, bourgeois social customs and nationalism were intricately woven together.’ She says

58 Jessica Hayllar’s wedding paintings, A Coming Event (1886) and Fresh from the Altar (1890), are two of her most frequently reproduced paintings, possibly because marriage continues to be a topic of abiding interest. 179

that the picture reflects nationalist, even imperialist sentiments particularly in relation to the rituals practised at weddings; the white or cream bridal garments, and the accessories such as the lace veil, orange blossoms and wedding breakfast: As much a part of the renewed imperialism of the period as the invented traditions of monarchy, this lavish celebration of marriage coincided with and depended on global relations of colonial production and consumption, and the meanings of feminine purity invested in these rituals were part of the re-articulations of race and racial purity in imperialist discourses.59 According to Cherry all the props and rituals emphasised the white woman’s purity in contrast to the colonised black woman, and the riches on display were founded on the exploitation of the colonies exercised by the British Empire.

The engraving of Queen Victoria’s coronation ceremony hanging on the wall of the room in Fresh from the Altar confirms Cherry’s view that this work reflects imperialist sentiments. This engraving of a work by George Leslie’s father, C.R. Leslie, entitled Queen Victoria Receiving the Sacrament at her Coronation, Westminster Abbey, June 28th 1838, may have been included partially to please their neighbour and to benefit from their association with such an important person, again reflecting the influence from that quarter, but it does connect this ceremony to an important national event and reflects pride and acceptance of all that is represented by Victoria, Queen and Empress.

Cherry only refers to the white wedding and associated rituals as one example of the impact of New Imperialism. Her extended argument was that the Hayllars, in their repeated representations of the contained world of women, reinforced the imposed patriarchal social order, which was threatened by changes in society, such as women’s

59 Painting Women, p.139. 180

status in relation to education, work and property ownership. Patriarchal definitions of the superior, virtuous white women derived authority by contrasting them - explicitly or implicitly - with their opposite, the inferior, unsophisticated, even degraded black women.60 In their devotion to Queen and country and in their apparent pride in the far reaching supremacy, wealth and racial superiority generated by the extent and power of the British Empire, the Hayllars reflected the views of the majority of British citizens of their day. While I argue elsewhere that the sisters, in their personal lives and in the subject matter of certain works, extended the boundaries of hegemonic femininity, nonetheless it is possible that due to their class and race positioning, their images caused them to be in some measure complicit in reinforcing powerful, oppressive conditions in the Empire.

Imperialist sentiments were also evidenced in the many journal articles focused on art and products imported from the far flung regions of the British Empire, and in relation to China and Japan, areas of British influence. The multiplicity of articles celebrated the contemporary interest, enjoyment and commodification of the orient, particularly as used in home decoration. This interest was exhibited by the Hayllars in their own home. Certainly Jessica and Kate Hayllar included oriental items in their paintings.

‘Oriental’ applied to anything - object, pattern, painting, architectural feature - that came from those geographical regions described by the British as the Middle or Far East. Travellers in North Africa and the Middle East produced scenes of narrow streets, of harems and of tiled baths, and Britain’s occupation of India saw the appropriation of

60 Cherry supports her argument with reference to an article by Rosemary Hennessey and Rajeswari Mohan explaining that these authors ‘characterise the ways in which discourses of alterity were rearticulated to contain a crisis in the patriarchal arrangements of femininity, sexuality and the family’. Rosemary Hennesey and Rajeswari Mohan, ‘The Construction of Women in Three Popular Texts of Empire: Towards a Critique of Materialist Feminism’, Textual Practice, 3 (1989), 323-39. in Painting Women, p. 139. 181

Indian decorative motifs at home.61 Chinoiserie was a late eighteenth- century enthusiasm in Britain for Chinese style ornamentation in the decoration of furniture, textiles, ceramics, articles and designs, while Japonisme came to Britain in 1858 when the first lacquer-work and ceramic jars from Japan arrived on board the ‘Calcutta’.62 The art journals were full of articles and illustrations of Japanese art, sometimes with the suggestion that many people could not tell the good work from the bad.63 The title of a comprehensive series in the 1888 Art Journal, ‘Notes on Japan and Its Wares’, not only comments on the art, but also hints at the idea that the writers were helping educate the British market about eastern ‘wares’, the merchandise that they could purchase.64 By 1892 there was an article in the Artist stating that the Japanese Society had 113 members, including many well-known artists such as Sir Frederick Leighton. It also referred to a collection of kimonos that had been donated to the British Museum.65 The extent of the British Empire and British influence was celebrated in these collections. Locally manufactured copies of oriental objects filled middle-class homes. Oriental objects were enjoyed for their exotic beauty, and treasures from imperial conquests, or copies of them, displayed Britain’s wealth, power and glory in museums and homes throughout Britain, serving as a reminder of the extent of British influence in the far-flung regions of the world.

Jessica and Kate Hayllar, in touch with this fashion, reading about it in the journals, and presumably aware of its profitability as it were, included exotic eastern objects such as oriental vases and pots, screens

61 Evidence of this could be seen everywhere, including the 1888 special edition of the Art Journal, which carried articles and images (p. 16) on the Exhibition Hall which reflected the domes, spires and decorated arches of Indian architecture. 62 M.A.T., ‘Japanese Decorative Art’, Art Journal, (1879), 83-84 (p. 83). 63 See, for example, Anon, ‘Some Japanese Painters’, Art Journal (1884), pp. 5-7; Louis Fagan, ‘Japanese Arts’, Art Journal (1886), pp. 377-80; Marcus B. Huish , ‘Notes on Japan and Its Art Works’, Art Journal (1888), pp. 5-9. This article by Huish begins by referring to yet another series of articles in 1878 which was ‘in this Journal’ on Art and Art industries of Japan. 64 Marcus B. Huish, ‘Notes on Japan and Its Wares’, Art Journal (1888), pp. 5-9, pp. 40-4, pp.116-9, pp.153-7, pp.176-80, pp. 208-12, pp. 239-44, pp. 298-304, pp. 328- 35, pp. 373-8. 65 ‘The Japanese Society’, Artist (1892), p. 75. 182

and fabrics in their painting. One particular folding screen, with four panels, a dark lacquered boarder, and cream and gold panels with lightly sketched trees, grasses, flights of small birds and cranes, was often used by Jessica Hayllar. Siegfried Wichman, historian and art curator, has described how screens were used in contemporary bourgeois homes: The décor of the 1880s incorporated a large measure of illusionism. Screens of all kinds were used plentifully within rooms to create a series of spaces leading into each other, each formed by carefully positioned props and cleverly placed furniture, with green plants dominating everywhere. In a house, rather than in a museum, screens were used to improvise smaller, more private rooms, and for concealment – as a preparation for what was waiting to be admired next.66

Jessica did use the Japanese screen to serve some of these purposes: to create smaller, more intimate spaces by concealing what she did not want in focus, or to emphasise a subject by providing it with a background or frame. Finishing Touches (1887) (Fig. 62) is a portrait of her sister Edith working on a canvas in a large space, which includes at least three rooms. So that Edith can be the focus in this maze of rooms, and work in a more intimate space of her own, she is placed in front of the pale screen in the first room becoming consequently the most conspicuous subject even though quite small in proportion to the space. In When First They Met (1892) (Fig. 91), a little girl in stylish clothes stands in the middle of the room between two sitting ladies. The room has dark wall paper and dark furniture, and there are doors leading away into other rooms and paintings hanging on the walls. However, behind the little visitor is the pale screen framing her and eliminating any sense of clutter.

66 Siegfried Wichman, Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art since 1858 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), p. 100. 183

There are also many paintings in which the screen creates the total background of the image. A Lady Making Posies from Primroses (1888) (Fig. 92), also named The Button Hole, depicts a young woman sitting at a table occupied in arranging yellow flowers into posies. Drawing in the Round (1889) (Fig. 93) shows a woman holding a child on her lap. She is tracing the child’s spread fingers onto a piece of paper. In Choosing a Spray (1889) (Fig. 57), a woman is dressed to go out to an evening of entertainment selects some flowers from a vase containing blooming azaleas. Sweet Scented Roses (1895) (Fig. 94) is a full-length picture of a woman in a long dress of velvet and lace. She is holding out a bowl of roses to a little girl who is leaning forward to smell them. In all these paintings the pale screen forming the background frames the characters in the foreground. In her 1889 painting, Sunflowers and Hollyhocks (1889) (Fig. 2), Kate Hayllar used the same cream and gold screen as a frame and background to a still life of dark furniture, vases, flowers and embroidered fabrics.

Jessica Hayllar used the screen to create a more intimate space for the figures in her pictures and she also utilized the images on the screen as part of the design, and possibly even to exploit the symbolism of the images. At least one other screen depicting oriental motifs of feathery bamboo and pointy mountains appears in her paintings, but it is worth considering what is depicted on the one screen used most often and included in all the paintings discussed above. The images on the folding screen were undoubtedly used by Jessica Hayllar as part of the design in some of her paintings. The diagonal lines of small birds soaring upwards on the top half of the screen often contributes to the overall design of the images. In Drawing in the Round and The Button Hole the diagonals of birds depicted on the screen behind the subjects form the only real detail in the background, which is otherwise just the pale screen. Cranes on the other hand are not always obvious in the paintings unless the bottom of the screen is visible, then often a crane, sometimes two, is seen, such as occurs in Finishing Touches and Sweet Scented Roses. Considering the number of articles written about 184

the art imported from Japan, it is likely that Jessica Hayllar understood the symbolism of the bird. In Japan cranes were a symbol of long life and, because the birds are sociable and congregate in public places, they signify happiness. Also because Japanese peasants valued the vigilance of the cranes which watched over their poultry and fish, cranes were honoured for their courage and alertness.67 Symbols of such blessings and virtues as long life, warmth and friendliness, and preparedness and pluck are just what the family and home oriented paintings of Jessica Hayllar needed to reinforce the meaning and marketability of her product.

Besides the use of the screen, orientalism is reflected in Kate and Jessica’s paintings by the inclusion of other oriental objects such as fabrics, and even more often pots and vases. Kate’s Eastern Presents (1886) (Fig. 95) includes blue cloisonné vases, peacock feathers and damask roses all grouped around a golden Indian Vase, and A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever (1890) (Fig. 13) foregrounds a tall Chinese pot. Kate, however, only painted for a few years until she took up nursing, and it was Jessica, the most prolific of the sisters, who regularly included oriental objects in her work.

Like Kate, Jessica produced a work named Eastern Presents (1885) (Fig. 96), but while Kate’s painting with the same name is a still-life arrangement (Fig. 95), Jessica’s is an image representing a scene two rooms deep. The first room has a Persian carpet, and standing on it are two oriental pots, one of porcelain, the other made of brass with high curling handles. A table on the right is covered by an exotic collection of different sized pots and vases, and near it against the wall is a chair holding a lacquered tray and another small pot. Two steps, framed by ceiling to floor curtains luxuriantly decorated with large flowers, lead to the next room. There two women, one standing and one sitting in front of the Japanese screen, are holding great swathes of fabric between them, both feeling it with that familiar gesture of women

67 Ibid. 185

closely examining the quality of cloth. At their feet is more fabric in piles.68

It is evident that the Hayllar sisters were familiar with the medium of photography; certainly they used it to record their work. Since the first box cameras enabling the amateur photographer to take pictures and then return the roll of film to Kodak for development were sold by Kodak from 1888, it is interesting to speculate on how the sisters took the photographs which exist in the family albums of paintings done as early as 1881 and 1882.69 Possibly their father, or indeed one of the sisters had mastered earlier more complex photography that required chemical development as well, or perhaps the earlier works were photographed later, after the 1888 distribution of Kodak’s box camera. This, however, suggests that the works were kept for six or seven years, when evidence of sales of their works in 1881, discussed in Chapter 2, suggests that the sisters’ paintings sold quite promptly after exhibition. Perhaps they had a professional photographer take the photographs, although that would suggest significant expense and the pictures appear to be simple box camera style photographs. Whatever the case, the Hayllar sisters were acquainted with photography and used it throughout their painting careers.

Documenting their work, however, was not the only role that photography played in their picture production. Its use seems to have influenced their style, which is not surprising considering their long acquaintance with the medium. According to Abigail Large, while there is no documentary evidence to show that the Hayllar sisters used photography to assist their painting process, their work does show remarkable resemblances to photographic images:

68 This image suggests that the ‘East’ is a treasure trove of riches, even though everything described is based on a small black-and-white photograph of the work from one of the family albums. The whereabouts of the original is unknown, and the richness and variations in its colours can only be imagined. 69 Scharf points out that in the 1880s the occurrence of the Kodak camera and the great popularisation of photography made this decade the watershed for the use of cameras. Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1968), p. xv. 186

They include sharp focus detail, flattened picture space, a detailed, naturalistic style recording its subjects with exactness and precision. Figures, forms – tables, chairs, screens, draped curtains – are often cut off by the edge of the picture frame, adding to a sense of spontaneity, as if a ‘fragment’ of a wider view has been momentarily frozen on canvas. These features indicate an awareness of photography and its visual effects.70

There were originally mixed responses to photography and its relationship to art. Antiquarians and connoisseurs welcomed its ability to make accurate copies, while the nineteenth-century public, who expected a ‘good’ painting to imitate nature closely and express a moral message, thought photographic reproductions could express these essentials quite effectively. Art critics and educators, however, were ambivalent, arguing that mechanical reproduction precluded the use of the imaginative faculty.71 Nonetheless, articles defending the use of photography as an aid to artists began to appear in the journals.72 According to an unsigned article on field photography in the Artist and Journal of Home Culture in 1887: [t]he attitude assumed by artists towards photography has materially changed during the past twenty years. The brush has ceased to sneer at the camera, and the camera, anxious to assert its growing importance, has so advanced in usefulness by the introduction of dry plates, and the instantaneous process that as a handmaid to the artist it is acknowledged to be valuable, if not indispensable. The portrait painter, it is whispered, makes constant use of it to catch fleeting expressions on his sitter’s face, and the landscape artist carries a camera with him on his sketching expeditions into the country. But to no one of the

70 ‘The Hayllar Sisters’, p. 15. 71 Wolfgang M. Freitag, ‘Early Uses of Photography in the History of Art’, Art Journal, Vol.39, No.2 (Winter, 1979-1980), pp.117-23. 72 See, for example, A. Berens, ‘Knapsack Photography’, Art Journal (1885), 193-7. 187

profession is it so absolutely necessary as to the animal painter. A horse in full gallop, a bird on the wing, or groups of wild creatures at the zoo, have never before been so brought home to our admiration or knowledge as by the aid of instantaneous photography.73 Not just the portrait painter - and the Hayllars did paint portraits - but any artist could benefit from the use of photography.74 While the Hayllar sisters rarely capture movement in their work, it is likely that they used photography to capture likenesses in their sitters, or vistas of rooms, or still-lifes with the particular arrangements of objects and light they wanted.

Besides legitimising much of the sisters’ subject matter, the art journals would have provided them with a broad education in both classical and contemporary art. Many black-and-white images of classical works appeared in the journals throughout the 1880s. For example, there was a plethora of material on the theme of the Madonna and Child,75 particularly works by Raphael,76 no doubt due in part to the fact that 1883 was the fourth centenary of his birth.77 As mentioned in Chapter 3, both Kate and Jessica produced a still-life which focused on Raphael’s Madonna della Sedia. A wide variety of contemporary art could be seen in black-and-white reproductions in the Art Journal. In the 1890 edition for example thirteen pages were

73 ‘Photographic Notes: Field Photography’, Artist and Journal of Home Culture (1887), p. 202. 74 Scharf explains that, by using photographs, portrait painters could eliminate hours of sittings. Lawrence and Reynolds, he claims, sometimes needed up to 50 sittings when painting portraits. Art and Photography, p. 26. 75 ‘Madonna and Child from a Painting by Gabriel Max’, Art Journal, October (1887), p. 329, including large pictures and notes on Madonna and Child paintings by Gabriel Max; Alice Meynell, ‘The Nativity in Art’, Art Journal (1890), pp. 353- 60, including a series of classic Madonna images; Claude Phillips, ‘The Staedal Art Institute at Frankfurt-on-the-Main’, Art Journal (1891), pp. 39-45, including images of the Virgin and Child, by artists such as Carpaccio and Roger van der Weyden. 76 ‘The Exhibition of Old Masters at the RA’, Art Journal (1881), pp. 65-9, a review including an etching of a Madonna and Child by Raphael, one of the items in the exhibition; ‘The Veiled Lady of Raphael’, Art Journal (1882), p. 2, an article on Raphael’s painting, including a woodcut of the work; Henry Wallis, ‘Early Madonnas by Raphael’, Art Journal (1885), pp. 4-8, pp. 53-7, pp. 111-4, pp. 325-7, pp. 364-8. 77 The Fourth Century of Raphael’, Athenaeum, 7 April 1883, p. 451. 188

devoted to black and white drawings of works in the annual R.A. show. The editors commented: In view of the interest taken by the public in the pictures that at this time of year fill the various galleries, we have made a special effort to give our readers early productions of a selection of the principal work.78 Even if the Hayllar sisters did not visit the Academy that year they would surely have seen these drawings. In addition they would also have benefitted from the detailed descriptions that regularly appeared in the exhibition reviews of the work at such venues.79

The Hayllar sisters’ iconography was formed by various factors which I have argued included that in the first instance they were exposed to the ideas of their father and neighbour, G.D. Leslie. In wider socio- cultural terms the sisters, I would suggest, drew inspiration from prevailing attitudes and fashions including contemporary domestic design, New Imperialism, orientalism and photography. All the latter, as we have seen, were widely covered in the art journals, and by implication were legitimised as subjects for art.

======

Castle Priory Wallingford 1885

Sunday 29 June 1885

78 ‘The Summer Exhibitions’, Art Journal (1890), 146- 160 79 Henry Wallis, ‘The National Gallery – Recent Acquisitions’, Art Journal (1883), p. 1-4. This was the first in a series of articles on acquisitions by the National Gallery. It included a picture of the ‘Head of a Young Man’, from the Venetian School, including woodcut work by Montegna and Georgione. The series continued on pages 41-3, 177-8 and 370-2. Claude Phillips, ‘The Summer Exhibitions at Home and Abroad’, Art Journal (1890), ‘The Summer Exhibitions’, pp. 146-60, ‘The Royal Academy, The Grosvenor, and the New Gallery’, pp. 161-74, ‘The Royal Academy, The Grosvenor, and the New Gallery (concluded): The Paris Salons’, pp. 216-22, ‘The Paris Salons (concluded)’, pp. 240-4. 189

Kate hardly noticed the threatening grey sky. She swung the bag of art equipment onto her shoulder and strode down St Leonard’s Road towards Thames Street and home feeling very satisfied with her morning. The children’s illustrations of stories from the Bible were wonderful. She almost preferred encouraging children to produce their simple images than painting herself. Then she dismissed all thoughts of painting, took a deep breath of cool air, and quickened her steps. It was exhilarating striding along the lane from St Leonard’s Church to Castle Priory by herself. No one to slow her down, or scold her for not walking in a more ladylike manner, or telling her to be careful of cobbles, or horses and carts, or indeed anything. Suddenly Kate changed her pace to a saunter. No need to get back so quickly. In five minutes, in spite of her dawdling she was walking up the driveway towards the house. As she passed through the front door she drew in her breath. The blue imari vase standing on the gleaming side table in the entrance was spilling over with purple and pink hollyhocks. Although she knew she must prepare for lunch Kate could not hurry past. She stood transfixed, gazing at that mass of colour, then she moved closer to properly see the details. Inspecting the purple hollyhocks she noted the white stigma surrounded by the stamens, their invisible filaments topped with tiny white anther dots. The petals had gold at the centre merging along tiny star shaped veins into purple and then to the mauve at the fluted edge of each petal. Each pink hollyhock had a dark pink heart, which gradually faded to the palest pastel pink on the edge of the flower Kate stood, enthralled by the mass of blossom framed by the green stems and leaves, their glowing colours contrasting to the shiny blue pot. What if she placed those two azure cloisonné pots on either side of ... ‘Oh, there you are!’ Kate jumped as Jessica looked through the front door. 190

‘Mama was worrying about whether you were home. It’s about to pour ...’ ‘Sorry,’ Kate smiled at her sister. ‘Where is she? In the kitchen? I’ll just ...’ ‘No, get ready for lunch. I’ll tell her.’ As Kate darted off, Jessica called after her. ‘I saw you looking at those flowers. Maybe ...’ But Kate refused to listen. She did not want to paint for the rest of her life, sitting still, peering at a tiny canvas, sometimes through a magnifying glass. It took so long to complete one small painting, and then what did you have? One small painting! It was so much more satisfying working with the children at Sunday school, helping them to draw, or teaching them a hymn, or hearing about their lives. At lunch Kate told her family about the children. Her tone was enthusiastic. ‘They always surprise me. Today I read the miracle of loaves and fishes and one of the children drew a loaf of bread so real that it looked ready to slice! I think I will take some water colours next week and see if he can add a little colour to the picture.’ Her mother interrupted her. ‘I don’t know that your father would want you distributing costly art equipment to the children of Wallingford. You are teaching Sunday school, not art. Next week you must read your students another bible story.’ Kate looked at her father who nodded in agreement, although he smiled at her. ‘George was telling me, that Lydia was telling him how the minister praised your work in the Sunday school.’ Kate did not like talking about herself. She changed the subject. ‘Speaking of the Leslies, Papa, are we joining them for tennis?’ She thought an afternoon of tennis sounded most agreeable. ‘Kate! No!’ She heard indignation and humour in her mother’s tone. ‘There will be rain. Any minute! I was worrying about you getting home without being soaked. Anyway we’re all going to the Leslie’s for tea.’ 191

Kate groaned to herself. They would be sitting and talking for hours! And about art! There was pleasure in making something beautiful, but it was exhausting talking about it all the time. ‘Mr Leslie has been to London and he and your father wish to discuss the Summer Exhibition. I thought you’d be interested. You have something in the exhibition yourself.’ Kate sometimes thought her mother could read her mind. She knew Kate did not enjoy the constant art talk and she was trying to placate her. ‘We won’t go over until four o’clock, so you will have time for yourself before that.’ Of course Jessica and Edith would use the period between lunch and tea to work on their painting, but Kate had no inclination to do so. It was not raining, it might not rain! She might be able to convince Mary to have a quick game of lawn tennis after lunch. At four o’clock, all dreams of tennis gone, Kate huddled with her parents and sisters under umbrellas to keep off the heavy rain as they hurried next door over ground that was soggy and squelchy underfoot. Mrs Leslie was kindly looking out for them and flung the door open before they had reached it. ‘Come in, come in! So wet!’ As Kate wiped her feet, took all the umbrellas and gave them a shake, then took off her own soaked coat, she heard her father organising what she knew would be the only topic of conversation for the rest of the afternoon. ‘Where’s George? I am most interested to hear what he has to say about the exhibition.’ Soon there they all were, just as Kate had predicted, sitting by a large fire with Mrs. Leslie organising cups of tea and the conversation turning to art. Kate sipped her tea and tried to listen. ‘So George,’ began James Hayllar, ‘I read that they liked your Language of Flowers.80 What was it they wrote in The Athenaeum? “Two fair damsels in a white chamber”? That was set in this room wasn’t it?’

80 G.D. Leslie, The Language of Flowers (RA 141) Collection of the Manchester City Art Gallery. 192

As her father looked around at the white panelled walls with satisfaction Kate wondered how he could remember the reviews so exactly. ‘Your girls helped me.’ Mr Leslie reminded him. ‘They modelled for me, took their positions on that green settee, wore the black and white dresses and the hats, even helped me pick and arrange the basket of flowers, didn’t you, girls?’81 ‘And we enjoyed doing,’ responded Jessica. ‘Didn’t we, Edith?’ As Edith nodded Kate felt relief that her sisters were being so well behaved. It took responsibility way from her. Mr Leslie was smiling benevolently, Kate noticed. Like Papa, he enjoyed all the courtesies and compliments. Kate leaned back in her chair. She had heard it all before. As she sat there gazing around her, she noticed Mr Leslie’s Pot Pourri hanging on the wall. With the two women by the window making the scent out of rose petals and the blue and white imari pots it was a pretty image. Maybe she could ... She stopped herself. Surely she could think of something other than work! ‘And I looked for your work, James,’ Leslie said returning to the subject of the exhibition, ‘and your daughters’. All hung advantageously! And, young Mary, your picture of the children helping the old gardener is delightful.’ Kate sat up. Mary’s turn! Soon it would be hers and her parents would expect her to say something sensible. Mary spoke well. ‘Father and I worked together in the garden that day. Didn’t we Father? You painted The Thorn. I painted the girls and the gardener, pushing wheel barrows full of flowers, and you painted one of them standing on a barrow being helped by the gardener.’ Kate waited for the comment on her own work. It must come next.

81 Wilder, p. 19, has suggested that Jessica and Edith Hayllar were the models for this painting. 193

‘Jessica, your painting of those oriental treasures looked sumptuous and very fashionable.82 And Edith,’ George Leslie nodded at each girl as he discussed their work, ‘your gentleman enjoying a social evening in the study was rather an unusual subject for a young woman83, but I must say that I for one don’t mind it.’ Kate saw Edith smile, but a little uncertainly, unsure whether her work was being criticised by Mr Leslie or not. She saw a shade of displeasure cross her father’s face. He and Edith had disagreed about the subject of that picture, and he had encouraged her to include a neat uniformed female servant, so that the scene was indisputably one in a respectable home. She saw her mother catch her father’s expression and intervene. ‘George, you are so kind to notice our work, but now tell us about the other works.’ Kate relaxed again. Her work seemed to have avoided comment. She knew that Mr Leslie only needed to be asked. The Academy was his world: discussing it his passion. Kate heard descriptions of the artworks, the atmosphere at the Academy and snatches of conversations he had overheard. When he paused to sip a sherry, her father questioned him again. ‘So George, well over two thousand works this year. Three new exhibition rooms! The biggest Summer Exhibition the Academy has had! Are they letting the standards drop, do you think?’ Father was interested in nothing but the exhibition. ‘I thought the water colour collection was a little uninspiring, although,’ and here Leslie smiled at Kate, ‘there were some lovely little images that everyone appreciated.’ Kate sat up, alert, ready to respond appropriately. ‘Ah, The old brocaded gown.’84 James Hayllar looked gratified. ‘Yes, we were pleased with that weren’t we Kate? Beautiful gown, sewing box. Charming subject!’

82 Jessica Hayllar, Eastern Presents (Fig. 95). 83 Edith Hayllar, Seniores Priores (Fig. 54). 84 Kate Hayllar, The Old Brocaded Gown (Fig. 98). 194

Kate smiled at her father and his friend. ‘Oh ... thank you. Um... It was a gown of Mother’s ...’ No more seemed to be expected, so she relaxed. It was kind of everyone to praise her painting, but she just wished she was playing tennis, or having a brisk walk around Wallingford. She looked restlessly around the room, and saw the Leslie’s daughter, twelve year old Alice, sitting shyly on the edge of a chair, pleased to be there with the adults, but also rather bored by the conversation. Kate smiled at her. ‘Are you interested in painting, Alice?’ Alice jumped at the attention, but answered politely. ‘Well, I am quite interested.’ ‘You have lessons with your father, don’t you? Do you enjoy that?’ ‘Peter likes it more than me,’ said Alice referring to her little brother, the seven year old who as a result of having polio used a crutch permanently. ‘He’s only seven but Papa thinks he will do very well in painting.’ Kate liked the young Leslies. Alice was delightful and Peter a good little boy who loved his pictures. Kate felt that time spent with the young Leslies might be more interesting than listening to this never ending conversation. ‘Let’s go and find him,’ she said. ‘Maybe we can look at some of his work,’ or, she added to herself, maybe we can have a game of cards. Kate saw Mrs Leslie’s grateful smile as she rose to follow the eager Alice. As she left the room she heard her father refer to the exhibition reviews and she heard Mr Leslie’s response. ‘Ah hah! The reviews! I think The Athenaeum will have some Hayllar reviews in the next edition.’ The following morning Kate swung the bag holding the family mail around her head. She loved the walk to the Post Office to collect the mail, and applied every day for permission to fetch it. She then had to persuade one of her older sisters to come with her. This morning Jessica had agreed to come, but she was too ladylike, 195

walking sedately, constantly telling Kate to stop striding and walk more elegantly. ‘Kate, be careful! All the mail will fall out and the ground is so wet and muddy.’ ‘I always do this and it never falls ...’ Kate stood at the junction of St Peters and Thames Streets, waiting for her sister and whirling the mail bag around her head. When the leather strap collapsed, the mail cascaded out of the bag onto the road. ‘Oh!’ Kate felt guilty as she grabbed items of mail off the gravel. She was grateful to Jessica who was also picking them up, wiping them and not scolding. ‘They will be fine,’ Jessica said kindly. ‘Oh, here’s The Athenaeum. Some of our work might be reviewed. I wonder if we might ...’ ‘Sit on this little wall. Here you open it.’ Kate suddenly felt eager to hear what the reviews might say. Jessica, normally so scrupulous did not even mention her father. She unwrapped the art magazine and flicked through the pages. ‘Here it is, look! “The Royal Academy (6th and Concluding Notice)”.’ Kate watched Jessica eagerly running her finger down the columns. ‘Here’s something. It mentions two paintings and then Father’s. “ ‘The Iona’ of Mr McWirter, ‘Found’ by Mr Herkomen – Canvases measuring 8 inches by 10 would be quite big enough for either of these pretentious examples. – A specimen of fine taste and better art is the brilliant, broad and effective, though slight and sketchy ‘Shillingford Bridge’ by Mr. J Hayllar, who should also adopt a canvas commensurate to the value of his studies.’’’ ‘What exactly does that mean?’ asked Kate. ‘Well, it’s a bit ambiguous, but mainly it’s praising the work, saying it’s “better” than the other two mentioned.’ ‘“Slight and sketchy” does not sound very good though, does it? And is it suggesting that the work should have been smaller?’ Kate was fascinated by the idea of someone criticising father’s work. 196

‘Yes, but Father is never offended by criticism,’ said Jessica. She read on. ‘Here it agrees with what Mister Leslie said yesterday about the water colour section. Oh! Listen Kate! “The water colour drawings are generally speaking, unworthy of the splendid accommodation provided by the Academicians, who were anxious to satisfy complaints of former years.” Then it says ... “noteworthy examples” are ... Ha! Just listen to this! “Solid, rich, bright and good is Miss Hayllar’s ‘Old Brocaded Gown’ (1178).” Kate that is wonderful praise and not a bit ambiguous!’ Kate grabbed the paper, found the place, read the words again. ‘“Noteworthy examples ... Solid, rich, bright and good is Miss Hayllar’s ‘Old Brocaded Gown.’” She sat there feeling the sun caressing her shoulders, no longer bored by the topic of painting. A London critic had liked her work. She turned to her sister. ‘Let’s hurry home. I want to show everyone.’ Jessica laughed. ‘And maybe after we’ve apologised to Father for opening his magazine, we might do a little painting. What do you think?’ ‘I think that is an excellent idea,’ said Kate pulling her sister to her feet. ‘Let’s go.’ ====== 197

6. Reception

Reviewing the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition of 1884, the Athenaeum’s art critic made special mention of Jessica Hayllar’s The Last to Leave (1884) (Fig. 56): Among the most careful and brilliant pieces of genre in the Academy is Miss J. Hayllar’s ‘The Last to Leave’ (611). It is a delicate, faithful delineation of cold morning light in a white room, and there is spirit and quiet humour about the group of a tardy guest taking leave of his weary hostess and her daughter. The effect would have been more agreeable if rosy and golden light had been depicted. – Herr Schloesser’s “Book Worm” (612) has nearly as much humour as Miss Hayllar’s work, but it is not nearly so original.”1

The only available version of this picture is a small black-and-white photograph, but even this reveals a sense of spacious airy rooms. The viewer looks across a Persian rug and past great vases of flowers standing on the floor, through high wide arches, to three figures standing in a roomy vestibule. Beyond these figures are tall glass windows letting in pale early morning light. An older and a younger woman, presumably mother and daughter, both in formal gowns, farewell a tall gentleman in a dark evening suit bending punctiliously over the older woman’s hand. The humour is in the juxtaposition of the evening dresses and the pale morning light, reinforced by the title The Last to Leave, and also in the ridiculous performance of courtesy by this guest who, with a great lack of courtesy, has stayed all night! The review also comments on the originality of the subject. Perhaps because it is a situation presented from a woman’s point of view,

1 ‘The Royal Academy (Fourth and Concluding Notice)’, Athenaeum, 21 June 1884, 797-800 (p. 797). 198

offering a woman’s understanding of that particular social situation - the exhausting good manners and hospitality which one had to extend even to a tiresome guest who stayed on long after the others had left. The painting has all the accoutrements of respectability; a prosperous, tastefully decorated home, signs of an elegant entertainment attended by well-to-do guests and a courteous hostess and her dutiful daughter farewelling their guest on behalf of the family. It is praised in comparison to all the genre pieces in the Summer Exhibition by men and women because compared to all of them it is innovative and entertaining. That commendation indicates that Jessica Hayllar’s work was appreciated by her contemporaries. Also, beyond all these trappings offering signs of respectability, the painting I would suggest, contests the simplistic idea that looking after home matters promotes only joy and satisfaction; it demonstrates the potential burdens and irritations of hospitality, rather than simply its pleasures.

This chapter, following previous consideration of factors which moulded the Hayllar sisters’ art, such as education, home life and influences on their work, examines the critical reception of their work locally, regionally and nationally. In their exhibition record and in reviews of their work in the national journals is evidence that their work at least did circulate in the public sphere, indicating that they were not as contained within or restricted to the private sphere as it might appear. The sisters actively bridged, even challenged the divide to some extent in their work as artists.

The Hayllar sisters displayed and sold their work in their local Wallingford district, in regional galleries in Birmingham and Manchester, and in London, in such organisations as the Royal Society of British Artists, the Dudley Gallery, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours and, most importantly, the Royal Academy of Arts in London. In their local district the family of artists appear to have been well received. Hayllar’s annual studio showed the works the family were submitting to the selection pool for the Summer 199

Exhibition at the R.A. and these were reviewed in the local press. We can see this, for example, in 1888, in the following short notice in the Wallingford Times: SHOW DAY AT MR. HAYLLAR’S STUDIO – On Tuesday, Mr Hayllar, with his customary kindness, invited the residents of Wallingford to his studio, to view the pictures which he and his talented family have painted for this year’s exhibitions at the Royal Academy.2 The article first mentions Hayllar’s work and then that of his children: three mezzotint engravings, as well as Jessica’s The Return from Confirmation (1888) (RA 822) (Fig. 75), Edith’s The First of October (1888) (RA 885) (Fig. 42), and Kate’s Finished and Framed (1888) (RA 1179) (Fig. 73). Jessica’s The Return from Confirmation, shows a child returning home after her confirmation: ‘It is a bright, pleasing work, and attracted general admiration.’ Edith’s The First of October portrays the outdoor world of three sportsmen who return to a hunting lodge situated in the woods, after a day’s shooting. They eat an al fresco lunch, with their catch on the ground beside them: ‘The manner in which every detail is painted is marvellous, and the picture is a most successful one.’ Kate, in her still life Finished and Framed, presents a picture within a picture. A lavishly framed canvas of a sailing boat on a rough sea breaking against high cliffs is leaning on a table adorned with a vase of flowers. In the foreground is a paintbrush and palette covered in daubs of paint. The original sea scene, The Cliffs, Bawdsey, Suffolk (RA 1857), was by her father. The review comments that the work was ‘pretty and highly-finished.’3

Another local paper, the Berks and Oxon Advertiser, received with enthusiasm and commendation another such collection of family works in 1891: THE CASTLE PRIORY PICTURES – The pictures painted by Mr Hayllar and his talented daughters for the

2 Wallingford Times, 31 March 1888. 3 Ibid. 200

forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy were on view at the Castle Priory studio on Tuesday and a great many residents of the town and neighbourhood were favoured with the privilege of inspection of them. The pictures were more in number than usual, and all of them were of surpassing excellence.4 Two works by Jessica, A Committee of Taste (1891) (RA 928) (Fig. 99 and Autumn Sunlight (1891) (RA 1073) (Fig. 1), were on display, two by Edith, Sister Arts (1891) (Fig. 63) and Nuts and Wine (1891) (RA 801) (Fig. 100), and one by Kate, Pot Pourri (1891) (RA 1320) (Fig. 97), was also mentioned. Jessica’s A Committee of Taste shows three stylish women inspecting swatches of embroidered fabric. The local critic wrote: ‘The material is most gracefully held, and looks so like reality that it is almost impossible to believe it otherwise’ and also that it was ‘remarkable in the minuteness of detail.’5 Jessica’s other painting, Autumn Sunlight,6 depicting a woman painting, was praised by the critic as ‘attractive and refined’ and as producing an effect that was ‘quite unique’ and ‘very original as well as very beautiful.’ While Edith’s Sister Arts, depicting two sisters, one playing the guitar and one painting, was not selected by the R.A., the local reviewer found no fault with the work describing it as ‘a very captivating picture indeed.’ Edith’s Nuts and Wine, a small still-life, on the other hand, was selected for the Academy. It was ‘a very perfect, pretty picture,’ the critic wrote, ‘and will doubtless soon be secured.’ Kate’s Pot Pourri again demonstrates her inclination to include another painting in her work, this time a work with the same name, Pot Pourri, by their neighbour G.D. Leslie. Including a work by a well- known academician was a strategic move as it added prestige to her work. His painting is of two women in elaborate regency dress preparing and smelling pot pourri by an open window. Kate’s picture includes a copy of Leslie’s image hanging behind a table covered in

4 Berks and Oxon Advertiser, 20 March 1891. 5 Ibid. 6 For discussion of this work, see Chapter 4 above. 201

camellias. On the table and around it on the carpeted floor are oriental pots and swathes of rich fabric. The critic found that the original was ‘exquisitely reproduced’ and that the flowers surrounding it ‘are of all colours and varieties, and each individual flower is so perfect, that a florist would at once name the species every one of them was intended to represent.’ The article was full of superlatives: ‘marvellous piece of work’, ‘perfect’, ‘elaborate detail.’7

The inclusion of the Hayllar sisters’ works in exhibitions in large regional galleries attests to their having reached quite a high level of acceptance in the provincial art world in the final decades of the century.8 Jessica Hayllar showed in the Manchester City Art Galleries and in the Walker Art Gallery for the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions. Edith Hayllar also exhibited at Manchester and Liverpool. The article in the Lady’s Pictorial of December 1889, cited often before, was illustrated by a reproduction of Edith Hayllar’s Feeding the Swans (1889) (Fig. 19), with the comment that it was ‘now on view in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.’ Jessica and Edith also exhibited at the Royal Society of Arts, in Birmingham.9

Mary exhibited in Manchester and in Liverpool,10 but Kate who had a smaller output is only known to have showed her work in Wallingford and London. An article, ‘A Family of Artists’, in the Berks and Oxon Advertiser, suggests that that was because her work sold so rapidly: The work of Miss Kate Hayllar is not quite so well known to the public as that of her two sisters, for her pictures in many instances have passed into the hands of private purchasers, without having been seen at all in any of the

7 Berks and Oxon Advertiser, 20 March 1891. 8 According to exhibition information in Wilder, p. 75, Jessica Hayllar exhibited in the Manchester City Art Galleries in 1882, 1883 and 1885, and in the Walker Art Gallery for the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions in 1882-1885, 1890, 1895 and 1898. Edith Hayllar exhibited in Liverpool in 1883, 1884, 1888 and 1889, and in Manchester in 1890. 9 Large, Appendix 1: Exhibition Records, pp. 32-6. 10Mary exhibited in Manchester in 1882, 1883 and 1885, and in Liverpool in 1882 and 1883. See Wilder, p. 75. 202

London or provincial exhibitions. Her first exhibited work was, however, shown on the walls of the Royal Society for British Artists in 1883, whence it was purchased by Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales.11 This impressive fact that the Princess of Wales, later to become Queen Alexandra, purchased Kate’s painting is, naturally enough, regularly mentioned when her work is discussed,12 and while it is not clear which work was so distinguished, it appears likely that it was a work whose subject is unknown, named Tommy’s Orange.13

Showing and selling paintings in the provinces while some indication of success, could not compare to being an artist whose work was accepted in the London galleries. As noted, the Hayllar sisters’ work appeared in the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, the Dudley Gallery and at the Royal Academy of Arts. In many cases they were some of only a few women included in the exhibitions.

The Society of British Artists, founded in 1823 to provide display and sales opportunities for artists, received the prefix ‘Royal’ in 1887, when James Whistler was president. Its Summer Exhibition was not particularly prestigious, but it increased in size from its foundation, and was easily accessed by women. In 1850, for example, 46 women exhibited with the Society and by 1879 this number had grown to 82.14 The R.S.A. was the first London exhibition Jessica, Edith and Kate entered before having their work hung at the R.A. the following

11 Berks and Oxon Advertiser, 31 January 1890. 12 Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part 2’, p. 7. and Wilder, The Hayllar and Leslie Families, p.65. 13 Anthony Wilder claims that The Old Brocaded Gown was the work selected by royalty; however, that was the painting exhibited in 1885 at the R.A.. The painting mentioned in the newspaper quoted above as having been shown in 1883 at the Royal Society for British Artists is listed in Abigail Large’s Exhibition Records as Tommy’s Orange (image unknown). Large, Appendix 1: Exhibition Records, pp. 32- 6.The information written in 1890 and based on an interview with the Hayllar sisters is more likely to be correct. 14 Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Victorian Women Artists (London: Women’s Press, 1987), p. 113. 203

year. Only Mary was first hung in both institutions in the same year, 1880. Jessica first exhibited with the society in 1879 and then almost every year until 1889. Edith Hayllar exhibited in 1881, and then every year until 1889. Mary exhibited with the organisation from 1880 to 1885. In 1881 the Artist and Journal of Home Culture commented on the Society of British Artists: The character of these exhibitions steadily improves; and the present collection is the best we have seen, especially in regard to the watercolours.15

A few pages later ‘Art Sales’ were mentioned, including Jessica Hayllar’s painting More Ornamental than Useful, which was sold for fifteen guineas.16

The Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, originally known as the New Water Colour Society, was founded in 1831, and acquired its new name in 1863. Referred to by the Hayllars as ‘the Institute’ in the article about them in the Lady’s Pictorial,17 it was set up to challenge the R.A.s rejection of the medium of watercolours as suitable for serious art. The older society discriminated against women and the Institute maintained that same attitude. The New Water Colour Society included nine women exhibitors in 1850, and although eighteen women exhibitors were included in 1863, the numbers decreased again after that to six women exhibitors in 1879.18 In spite of this attitude, Jessica Hayllar exhibited there from 1883 to 1887, Edith Hayllar in 1883 and 1884, and Kate in 1883.

The Dudley Gallery also hung work by the Hayllar sisters. Established in 1865 to provide an opportunity for artists who were not members of existing watercolour societies and consequently did not have opportunities to exhibit their work, it at first had no regular

15 ‘Society of British Artists’, Artist and Journal of Home Culture, 1 January 1881, 6-7 (p. 6). 16 Image and whereabouts unknown. 17 Lady’s Pictorial, 28 December 1889, pp. 944-5. 18 Nunn, p. 113. 204

membership and a committee selected the paintings to be exhibited. However, in 1883 it became the Dudley Gallery Art Society with about a 150 members and a limited number of pictures received from non-members. The Gallery held a watercolour exhibition in the spring, and it also held an annual exhibition of cabinet pictures in oil and works in black and white.19 Edith and Jessica Hayllar exhibited at the Dudley, Jessica from 1881 to 1885 and in 1887, and Edith in 1882.20 An 1881 article on the exhibition at the Dudley Gallery in the Artist and Journal of Home Culture, provided a list of review quotes from other art magazines giving an overview of its reception: ‘Contains no very ‘exciting’ works of Art …’ (Daily News); ‘The general average is fairly high’ (Standard). 21 There are references to Jessica Hayllar’s work: ‘Two neat and firm views of rooms, called A Day’s Sport and The Rival Bats’22 (Athenaeum) and ‘Singularly clever designs by Miss Hayllar, remarkable for colour, rendering of texture, and mastery of perspective,’ (Daily News). G.D. Leslie’s Apple Dumplings, a painting of a kitchen maid sitting on a bench peeling an apple and looking directly at the viewer, was said to be ‘mannered to the core’ (Daily News), and his Cherry Pie23 was referred to as ‘much less acceptable’ (Athenaeum). ‘The girl in Apple Dumplings is too dainty and too wooden; the girl in Cherry Pie a little too conscious that she is playing at simplicity,’ (Standard).

In addition to the London galleries cited above the Hayllar sisters exhibited at the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, and Arthur Tooth and Sons Gallery.24 The Society of Female Artists founded in 1857 might appear to be a venue the Hayllar sisters could have used for their

19 Clara Erskine Clement and Laurence Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897), adapted on The Victorian Web. Available at http://www.victorianweb.org/art/institutions1.html (Accessed 18 May 2011). 20 Large, Appendix 1: Exhibition Records, pp. 32-6. 21 ‘Society of British Artists’, Artist and Journal of Home Culture, 1 January 1881, 6-7 (p. 6). The following quotations are all taken from this source. 22 The two works by Jessica Hayllar mentioned here are unknown and not included in the lists of her works. They suggest that other paintings by the sisters currently in private hands are yet to come to light. 23 An unknown image. 24 Large, Appendix 1: Exhibition Records, pp. 32-6. 205

work. 25 According to Pamela Gerrish Nunn, who discusses the society in some detail, its ‘establishment can be seen as a reflection of the growing numbers of women anxious to show their work but dissatisfied with the conditions of exhibition which prevailed (which discriminated against them) and as a move to extend women’s working (and therefore) earning possibilities.’26 There is, however, no record of the Hayllar sisters ever showing their works with the Society of Female Artists. Perhaps this can be explained by the fact that their works, as previously noted, was already appearing in a range of prestigious venues.

It goes without saying that the sisters’ most significant achievement is their extensive record of being selected not only to be hung in the R.A. but more importantly of being hung on the line, on a level with the eye of the spectator. The number of visitors attending the R.A.s Summer Exhibition, after its establishment in 1769, was considerable. In the first few years an average of 19,000 people visited; in the 1780s the number rose to more than 25,000, and by 1820 an average of 69,000 visitors attended, providing a lucrative market for the art works.27

Women were excluded from membership of the R.A.. There were two founding female members of the Academy, Mary Moser, a flower painter, daughter of George G. Moser, first Keeper of the Academy, and Angelica Kauffman, an internationally renowned artist at the time the R. A. was established; however, these two women did not, and

25 The Society of Female Artists was founded in London in 1855 to promote art by women. Women had great difficulty obtaining a public showing because they were not considered serious contributors. At the first exhibition in 1857, when 149 women showed 358 works, some used a pseudonym to hide their true identities for fear of social censure. The Society of Women Artists, as it is now known, continues to hold an annual open exhibition which includes about 150 works. Charles Baile De Laperriere, The Society of Women Artists Exhibitors, 1855-1996 (Calne: Hilmarton Manor Press, 1997) available at http://www.society-women-artists.org.uk/History.html (accessed 16 October 2011). 26 Nunn, p. 72. 27 Hoock, p. 64. 206

were not expected to, participate in the administration, and there were no more female members until 1936, when Laura Knight was elected.

George Dunlop Leslie, the Hayllars neighbour, was an Associate Member (1886) and Member (1874) of the R.A. and he exhibited uninterruptedly from 1857 to 1904.28 Often three of his paintings were on display and in one year four were hung. He exhibited more paintings than James Hayllar,29 although their time spent showing their work at the R.A. covered almost the same period. His membership would have earned him the prestige necessary to ensure his work was hung advantageously and probably sold at a good price. This adds significance to a comparison of the reviews mentioned above evaluating his work and that of Jessica Hayllar hung in the Dudley Gallery in the same exhibition. The fact that reviewers commented more positively on work by Jessica Hayllar confirms her recognition by the artistic community, but it also indicates that a woman’s art, no matter what its appeal or popularity, could not earn for her membership in the Royal Academy.

An article in the 1889 Art Journal stated that approximately 9 per cent of the works exhibited at the R.A. in 1887, 1888 and 1889 were by members.30 Academicians were assured of having their work hung and had the right to exhibit more than one of their works, while non- members had to submit each piece to the anonymous selection process. In 1881, at the beginning of the decade when the Hayllar sisters were exhibiting, the academicians included such celebrated names as Sir Frederick Leighton, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Poynter, George Frederick Watts, and Henry Tanworth Wells.31 There were also the Associate Members, one of whom was Alfred

28 The Royal Academy Exhibitors, pp. 42-4. 29 Hayllar exhibited for the first time in 1851 and for the last in 1898; The Royal Academy Exhibitors, pp. 42-3. 30 ‘The Royal Academy’, Art Journal (1889), 185-8 (p. 185). 31 Royal Academy Exhibition Catalogue, 1875-84 (1881 Exhibition). Not a published book – One of a set of 10 separate exhibition catalogues bound solely for their protection for the Royal Academy’s Library. 207

Waterhouse. The Associate Members were the pool of talent from which the members were elected, and since places were available only when a Member died, any vacancy was coveted and much debated in art journals and the art community until the next election. For instance in 1897 The Artist – An Illustrated Monthly Record of Arts, Crafts and Industries described the elections to the R.A. as the holy of holies, which is the chiefest [sic] of the honoured places reserved for the workers in fine arts in this country. What knighthood is to the philanthropist is the title of ARA to the worker with brush, chisel and scale.32

In her reminiscences, Louise Jopling, discussed in Chapter 3, describes an incident demonstrating what obstacles were in the way of a woman becoming a member. When Elizabeth Thompson’s Calling the Roll After an Engagement, Crimea (The Roll Call) was hung at the Academy Exhibition in 1874, it was so popular that a railing had to be erected in front of it to control the crowds. Jopling explains that such success almost allowed Elizabeth Thompson to be elected to the Academy: Elizabeth Thompson was very nearly elected a member of the R.A. after this great success, and I heard that it was chiefly the determined opposition of Sir John Gilbert, R.A. that prevented her being elected. Sir John is credited with declaring that he didn’t ‘want any women in.’33 If Thompson, the creator of such an admired painting, generally acknowledged to have presented with fidelity and skill the male preserve of war, killing and death, was refused a place in the Academy, then painters of genre, such as the Hayllar sisters surely would never have been considered.

32 Artist: An Illustrated Monthly Record of Arts, Crafts and Industries, 19 February 1897, p. 58. 33 Louise Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life1867-1887 (London: John Lane, 1925), in Pamela Gerrish Nunn, ed., Canvassing; Recollections by six Victorian Women Artists (London: Camden Press, 1986), p. 148. 208

While women could not become members of the R.A., they could nevertheless have their work selected for display in the Summer Exhibition. Each of the four Hayllar sisters earned this recognition, not once but for the whole period of their painting careers. Jessica, the eldest, was the first to have her work shown in the exhibition (1880), and she would go on to exhibit for longer than her siblings. With the exception of 1882 she had at least one painting on display every year until 1902. She had two works selected for five Summer Exhibitions, and three works selected for three. In 21 years she had 32 paintings hung in the R.A.. It is also noteworthy that even in her first year of exhibiting Jessica’s work was hung on the line: From that time [1880] to this [1889] (except in the year 1882), Miss Jessica has not once failed to exhibit at Burlington House, a fact which speaks for itself as to her unweary study and application, and her well deserved success. On every occasion her pictures have been hung on the line.34

With the exception of three years Edith exhibited at the R. A. from 1882 to 1897. She had two paintings accepted in 1887 and all in all she showed twelve works in eleven years. Mary exhibited from 1880 until 1885, five paintings in five years, and Kate from 1885 to 1898, showing twelve works in twelve years.

Focusing on some annual exhibitions clarifies the sisters’ achievements. In 1881 James, Jessica and Mary Hayllar were each represented. Mary’s The Contents of Tommy’s Pockets (1881) (RA 379) (Fig. 30) was one of only three works by women in Gallery Number V (Oil Paintings), which had 77 paintings on display. John Everett Millais R.A. had seven works on view in the same gallery. Jessica’s painting, Christmas Comes but Once a Year (1881) (RA

34 Lady’s Pictorial, 28 December 1889, p. 944. 209

435) (Fig. 20), was one of six by women artists hung in Gallery Number VI (Oil Paintings), which contained 84 paintings.

In 1882 James, Edith and Mary had paintings in the Summer Exhibition. Again there were only a few works by women displayed. Edith’s As Hungry as a Hunter (1882) (747) (Fig. 39) was in Gallery VII, which included 105 paintings of which nine were by women. Mary’s All a-blowing and a-growing (1882) (RA 1538) (Fig. 101) was in Gallery XI where 114 paintings were displayed, only nine of them by women. Two of these were by Louise Jopling, mentioned earlier. While it was an achievement to be among the very small percentage of women in these exhibitions, these figures reflect numbers of women’s work hung, and do not indicate the numbers entered. It is possible that women, not expecting a good reception, did not enter many paintings in the selection pool. The Hayllar sisters, however, with the advantage of their father’s encouragement and assistance, constantly submitted their work.

By 1888 the number of works by women included in the Summer Exhibition had increased noticeably. In that year James, Edith, Jessica and Kate were all represented by one painting each. In Gallery IX there were 222 paintings. Jessica’s The Return from Confirmation (1888) (RA 822) (Fig. 75) and Edith’s First of October (1888) (RA 885) (Fig. 42) were two of those by at least 50 women in that gallery; these changes were reflected in most galleries.

Being selected by the Hanging Committee and being displayed on line was one thing, but commentary in the national art journals was another. As will be seen, some reviews used patronising language, referring to a ‘clever young lady’, or using the adjective ‘pretty’, and sometimes the review mixed criticism with praise. Nonetheless, the sisters were discussed regularly, usually positively, and among so many works exhibited, the reviews do indicate significant recognition. 210

The 15 April 1880 Artist and Journal of Home Culture carried an article on the forthcoming R.A. Exhibition. Evaluating the entries, the author selected the few he felt sure would be included. He named four by members of the Academy, including the President, Sir Frederick Leighton, an associate member, one other artist and then, among this venerable collection of people he included James Hayllar and his daughters: ‘Mr. J. Hayllar, has sent Deputies of villagers with parish clerk as spokesman, giving to the daughter of the squire a handsome piece of silver plate as a wedding present.’ Also ‘Miss Mary and Miss Jessica Hayllar hope to be represented by careful little “still life” studies.’ The writer of the article then mentions six other members or associate members and fifteen other men, as artists who should be included. 35 Here the critic included the Hayllars in a small, very select group of proficient artists.

In 1885 Mary Hayllar’s final contribution to the Royal Academy was Helping Gardener (1885) (RA 787) (Fig. 72), now commonly referred to as The Gardener’s Assistant, which shows two little girls in pink bonnets and white pinafores helping an old gardener with wheelbarrows and azalea plants.36 In the Bristol Times, there was this enthusiastic comment: It is a charming picture, delightful for its truth to nature and its bright freshness of colour. The figures are admirably drawn and painted … The picture is a thoroughly well-considered, well finished work, which cannot fail to increase the reputation of the clever young lady who painted it.37

In 1887 James Hayllar’s The Honoured Guest (1887) (RA 491), Jessica Hayllar’s Fresh from the Font (1887) (RA 776) (Fig. 89), Edith Hayllar’s The First of September (1887) (RA 778) (Fig. 102)

35 Artist and Journal of Home Culture, 15 April 1880, 98-101 (p. 98). 36 For more details, see above Chapter 5. 37 Bristol Times, May 1886, quoted in Wilder, p. 39. 211

and Jack Ashore (1887) (RA799) (Fig. 85), and Kate’s The Eleventh of August (1887) (RA 1057) (Fig. 74), were all hung in the R.A. exhibition. The Athenaeum reviewed the entries over a number of editions. It goes without saying that not all canvases received a comment as there were over a thousand in the exhibition; however, Jessica and Kate had their work noted, and Jessica’s Fresh from the Font, showing a family gathered around the baby on the return home after the christening, received a mention in the May edition of The Athenaeum. It is compared to the first work mentioned here: So, despite their heaviness and some excess of paint, [there] are numerous and well designed figures crowding the picture. [This is a reference to a work by Mr W. Logsdail, St Paul’s and Ludgate Hill (RA 846)] – Harder, more brilliant, polished and finished, but much less artistic and subtly balanced in all its parts, is Miss J. Hayllar’s vividly illuminated interior with figures of women attending a baby, called Fresh from the Font (776). The picture is flat, but clear and charmingly drawn.38 The Fifth Notice, in the June 18 edition, included short but unqualified praise of Kate’s watercolour: Miss K. Hayllar’s Eleventh of August (1057), a gun case, a cabinet, and a print after Landseer, suggests “sport” and is extremely bright, precise and firm.39

Two years later, the 1889 Summer Exhibition included work by James Hayllar, his daughters, Jessica and Kate, and his son, Algernon.40 Jessica had two pictures Choosing A Spray (1889) (RA 975) (Fig. 57) and Some of the Choir (1889) (RA 1109) (Fig. 103), while Kate’s entry was Sunflowers and Hollyhocks (1889) (RA 1315) (Fig. 2). Jessica’s Choosing a Spray, an image of a young woman pinning a spray of flowers on her lapel, was installed in Gallery IX which

38 ‘The Royal Academy (Third Notice)’, Athenaeum, 28 May1887, 708-10 (p. 709). 39 ‘The Royal Academy (Fifth Notice)’, Athenaeum, 18 June 1887, 805-6 (p. 806). 40 Algernon with Patty after Mr G.D. Leslie (1786) and Wintry Wind after E. Ellis (1809). 212

included over two hundred paintings. The critic for the Art Journal commended five or six pictures in the gallery, and mentioned a few others as noteworthy, including Jessica’s work.41 In the Water Colour Room Kate was similarly singled out as her work was among sixteen commendations in a room hung with over three hundred paintings. The critic referred to the sixteen saying: ‘the following appear to elbow out their fellows.’ Among those mentioned were Sunflowers and Hollyhocks (1315) Kate Hayllar’s vase of flowers,42 and Algernon Hayllar’s work.43

The Athenaeum, a weekly magazine and therefore with more space, was able to review the 1889 Summer Exhibition in more detail over many weekly editions and with reference to more artists. It praised Kate’s and Jessica’s work: ‘“The Sunflowers and Hollyhocks” (1315) by Miss K. Hayllar is exquisitely finished with solidity, firmness and brightness.’44 Both Jessica’s works were commended in the Fourth Notice: ‘We like “Choosing a Spray” (975) by Miss J. Hayllar because it is neat, pretty, soft and bright.’ Then a few paragraphs later was a comment on her other painting. While praising the work, the reviewer also points to weaknesses and implies limitations in the sisters’ education: “Some of the Choir” by Miss J. Hayllar, is noticeable for genuine and spontaneous expression. The attitude of the little peasant girls standing somewhat uneasily in a row are capital, while the young lady behind the teacher is rather sweet and refined. It is brilliantly – very solidly painted, with a wonderfully crisp and firm touch. The pattern of the carpet would please Van Eyck, who nevertheless, would advise Miss Hayllar how, without forfeiting the least splendour or purity, she could bring

41 ‘The Royal Academy’, Art Journal (1889), 245-6 (p. 245). 42 For details, see the opening of Chapter 1 above. 43 ‘The Royal Academy’, Art Journal (1889), 245-6 (p. 246). 44 ‘The Royal Academy (Fifth and Concluding Notice)’, Athenaeum, 22 June 1889, 297-8 (p. 798). 213

into compact groups the shadows, lights and colours of her picture so as to produce an artistic coloration and a massive chiaroscuro of higher quality than these. 45`

In the following year, 1890, complimentary notices were received for Kate’s entry to the Academy’s show. One item in Public Opinion was picked up by the Wallingford Times. The entry, A Thing of Beauty is a Joy for Ever (1890) (RA 1190) (Fig. 13), discussed previously in Chapter 4, was the canvas that included a black and white reproduction of Raphael's Madonna della Sedia, surrounded by flowers, fine furniture and rich fabric: One of the best talked about pictures [my italics] in the present exhibition is Miss Kate Hayllar’s “A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever” (1,190). As a tour de force it is remarkable; the painting of the furniture, china, flowers, prints on the walls, is achieved with consummate delicacy; it is so harmonious in colour, and so remarkable as a piece of workmanship that one is tempted to think it owes its existence to some clever process rather than to manipulative skill. Artifice can scarcely go further than this.46 ======

London 1889 Bloomsbury London 26 May 1889

Dear Mama, Papa and all my loving family,

45 ‘The Royal Academy (Fourth Notice), Athenaeum, 8 June 1889, 733-5 (p. 733). 46 Wallingford Times, 13 June 1990. 214

I am writing to you all even though only yesterday morning I said goodbye to Papa before he caught the train home to Wallingford. Nonetheless, I did promise my mother and sisters that I would send my impressions of the Summer Exhibition, and since I am staying with our friends in Mecklenburg Square for the whole week, I am writing a letter to add my voice to Papa’s comments on the exhibition, in case you think his is the only version Visiting the Academy with Papa was a most stimulating and pleasurable experience and the hour and a half spent strolling to the Royal Academy increased my enjoyment of the day. The Mecklenburg Square Gardens at the start of our walk were arrayed in their best summer clothes, an ensemble of matching and contrasting green garments, which presented us with a work of art before we even reached the Academy. It was early enough for the shopkeepers in Lamb’s Passage to be still overly enthusiastic in their attempts to sell their wares, and Father encouraged them dreadfully by taking an interest in everything they showed him, particularly books. I said the walk to the Academy took one and a half hours, but it could have taken less than an hour if we had simply walked from our front door to our destination without so many distractions! Papa diverted our route slightly to visit Soho Square, which while fashionable and respectable in the seventeenth century, degenerated in the early nineteenth century. It is now becoming respectable again, however, and father and I added to that of course! We walked through busy city streets, crowded with horses and carts and work men calling out to one another in loud, expressive language. Papa was regretting taking me along that route, but while such an area might be one for respectable city dwellers to avoid, to a person from the country it all seemed very vigorous and colourful. At Piccadilly Circus we brushed ourselves down, straightened our shoulders and our hats, and walked sedately down Piccadilly. We sauntered into the entrance to Burlington House, across an elegant, spacious courtyard and up the stairs to the Academy. All pretence at sedateness had then to be abandoned as there were crowds 215

of people pouring in to the exhibition, as well as artists themselves rushing to and fro, greeting one another and calling out comments and congratulations. I thought primly that they were a very hurly burly crowd until my father spied our dear neighbour, Mister Leslie. And then indeed Papa became one of that hurly burly crowd and started calling out, ‘George, I say George!’ Yes you did Papa! Mister Leslie greeted us warmly and insisted that we come with him to meet his good friend, Lord Leighton, the President of the Academy, who happened to be standing in the foyer. I know Father felt embarrassed as we had not yet viewed Lord Leighton’s works and so could make no comments, but Lord Leighton was very gracious. He remembered the Hayllar name because when the Hanging Committee had made their selection they found that there were four Hayllars. He asked if we were in the same family, and then congratulated Papa for having such talented children. Well as you can imagine Papa and I were almost bursting with pride. I was unable to speak I was so overwhelmed, but Papa upheld the respectability of the family name by making intelligent comments about the size of the exhibition, authoritatively quoting statistics such as the 189 works by members and the 2007 works by non-members. He congratulated the President on the generous reception given to works by non-members and this comment pleased the President greatly. ‘Indeed Mr. Hayllar, what you say reflects the very truth of the matter. Unjust complaints are made every year claiming that we academicians use the Summer Exhibition simply as a platform from which to publicise our own work. Nothing could be further from the truth! While the number of exhibiting members has increased from 177 last year, to 189 this year, the non-member exhibitors, including your own talented family, has increased much more. From 1,900 last year to, 2,007 this year, over a hundred more! Very generous indeed!’ I hope you are all impressed that I am quoting these numbers exactly. Unlike Papa I have not remembered them, but found them in one of the journals. 216

Mr Leslie then attempted to introduce me to the President, mentioning that two of my works had been accepted. ‘Now what are their names, Jessica? Perhaps the President will remember them.’ ‘Choosing a spray and Some of the choir,’ I answered eagerly, thinking that false modesty was out of place given the opportunity to draw the attention of the President to my work. Too late, however! Lord Leighton was already smiling at more important people he could see over our shoulder. ‘Very nice! Very nice!’ he said without even pretending to listen to what I was saying. ‘Enjoy the exhibition.’ And he was gone. Mr Leslie apologised charmingly for the President’s behaviour, explaining that he had a responsibility to share his time with everyone. Papa later confirmed this and told me that I must not be critical of such a great and yet gracious man. However, I still feel that Lord Leighton could benefit from lessons in good manners, especially when communicating with an artist of such potential, or at least with such enthusiasm as myself! Enough of that! Let me tell you about the exhibition. Of course our first act was to find Lord Leighton’s work, as Papa felt he must be able to make some comment if we encountered the President again. In the first gallery we spied two Leighton works: Sybil, the prophetess in luscious purples, golds and yellows, and Invocation, with a priestess, arms aloft, attired in much lighter, more diaphanous clothes. Father stood before them for a moment, thinking I am sure of what he would say to Lord Leighton. Finally he said, ‘Beautiful, and I think ... well placed. An elevated introduction to the exhibition?’ ‘Perfect,’ was my reply, approving the wording of his response; however, I also referred to the paintings, which were very fine. Among the many interesting paintings we passed as we approached the president’s most important work was Mr Leslie’s Berkshire Mill Stream. Papa had seen it in Wallingford and spoken of 217

it highly as being full of warmth. It was a delightful picture as his always are, although possibly there was too much red and green. We came then to Lord Leighton’s great work this year, Greek Girls Playing at Ball. There was a crowd in front of the painting, praising it, enthusing about the noble, classic landscape, the animation of the young women, the proportions of their limbs and the fine reproduction of their garments. Papa looked at it for some time; again I am sure pondering appropriate comments for the president, or indeed Mr Leslie. I enjoyed the painting, but I did voice some doubts. ‘From my own experience of playing sport, Papa, I cannot tell how the young woman nearest to us keeps those loose garments in such a modest arrangement in a game necessitating such a free use of the arms!’ Papa glanced around to be sure no one had heard me, then he smiled. ‘Perhaps those young women should not be seen as the same category of person as modest English girls. Think of them as Greek goddesses or some such, with divine abilities to keep their clothes modestly arranged.’ Then he shook his head at me. ‘Exercise your critical faculties Jessica, but perhaps with less vocalising.’ Do you recall hearing about Elizabeth Thompson whose work, Roll Call, painted in the 70s excited so much attention? I remember reading about it! A serious historical subject: exhausted Grenadier Guards standing in the snow after a battle in the Crimean War, waiting for the roll call, obviously knowing that many soldiers would be missing. Well I was excited to see another example of Thompson’s work in the exhibition. At the Front shows a troop of French cavalry leaving a Breton town for the 1870 war. It includes details such as a mother grieving over her departing son and a hardened squadron leader. The horses were very well done. Papa, who does not approve of Elizabeth Thompson and her unfeminine subject matter, instantly pointed out that the execution of the work was weak and the draughtsmanship basic. ‘More importantly,’ he said, ‘I don’t think it appropriate for a woman to glorify war in that manner. Can Elizabeth Thompson not choose some tasteful subject, more fitting for her and 218

her audience than these unsuitable images of war and suffering? Only her marriage to a soldier saves her from universal criticism.’ Of course I defended a fellow lady artist. ‘Elizabeth Thompson is trying to show the pathos of war. Look at that tragic old woman hopelessly farewelling her son. I find the subject quite touching. And Miss Thompson could be regarded as objecting to the tragedy of war. Surely that is an appropriate theme for a woman.’ ‘For one finding fault with war, she has certainly used the subject to her advantage over the years. Furthermore, there is no excuse for poorly executed work. Let us move on to other more salutary images.’ Papa, I hope I have represented our points of view reliably. I have repeated this conversation because I know that Edith will be interested. She is attracted to the possibility of drawing on a wider scope of subjects and it’s interesting to consider the work of a woman who has moved beyond the decorous subjects suitable for women artists and yet been so successful. To discuss other important paintings in the exhibition, Sun and Moon flowers by Mister G.D. Leslie, with those two pretty girls sitting at the window and the sunshiny world outside, looked charming and we heard many observers comment favourably on it. Mr. J. Hayllar’s Picture Gallery at the Hall, with the elegant and serious little girl showing visitors the pictures in the hall, looked very attractive and many visitors stopped to inspect it. I heard comments such as ‘pretty’ and ‘clever’ used to describe it. Papa and I could wait no longer! We moved to the other family works to note how they were received, and to gloat a little on their inclusion in such an eminent collection. In the Water-Colour Room Kate’s Sunflowers and Hollyhocks stood out as bright and exquisitely finished amongst a cluster of what I judged rather mediocre works. Kate’s painting is small, but it was on the line and its beautiful vases and richly coloured flowers caused many members of the public to stop and admire it. I crept up close to listen and I heard many murmurs of approbation. It did look superb, Kate! 219

In the Black and White Room Algernon’s two prints Patty, the copy of Mr. G. D. Leslie’s pretty girl, and Wintry Wind, the E. Ellis landscape, both looked distinctive. Algernon shows real talent, doesn’t he Papa? And such a useful skill, especially with illustrated magazines being so popular! I am trying to modestly mention my work last and I did lead Papa to see everyone else’s work first. However, finally Papa said, ‘Jessica we must now examine how your paintings appear hung on the Academy walls.’ And then there they were. Choosing a spray looked pretty and I felt very proud of it. Some of the choir, the one I was most pleased with, presented well, with its little choristers and the music room. I don’t mean to sound immodest, but I am sure that Papa brought me to London just to learn what I learnt at the Academy yesterday. The fact is that seeing my paintings hanging in that important exhibition, with such painters as Lord Leighton, John Everett Millais, and Elizabeth Thompson helped me to think of my work more seriously, and to understand the privilege of hanging there. I have been sitting here in my room writing to you all, but now I must go downstairs and join our friends. I hope I have written enough to interest Mama and Grace, excite Edith, congratulate Kate and pacify Papa. I look forward to seeing you all at the end of the week, and thank you dear Mama and Papa for allowing me to come to London to see the Summer Exhibition and for allowing me to stay a little longer and enjoy it all even more. Your loving daughter and sister Jessica ===== 220

Conclusion

Jessica Hayllar’s four-painting series relating to the sacraments of the Anglican Church, discussed in Chapter 5, depicts transitional moments in a woman’s life. 1 While three of these images illustrate the gatherings of family and friends after a christening, a confirmation and a wedding, the first of the series, A Coming Event (1886) (Fig. 11) shows a moment before the approaching nuptial. Its focus is a wedding dress draped over a chair, with the corridor of retreating rooms that Jessica Hayllar reproduced many times in the background. It is an ambiguous image, not easily classified as depicting the contemporary veneration of marriage, described by the historian, Jane Lewis: ‘Marriage and motherhood were Victorian woman’s ‘natural’ destiny and it was considered a tragedy of they were not achieved.’2 This work, on the contrary, could be interpreted as a reflection on, even a questioning of this traditional life choice for women.

Liana Piehler includes paintings by both Jessica and Edith Hayllar in her discussion of the representation of space in the works of Victorian women writers and artists, in which she claims that spatial composition was a means of developing the female figure or character. ‘Spatial palpability’, she writes, ‘goes beyond mere convention for the artist; it infuses the work with vitality. As that energy, that life-giving force, it gives rise to meaning, creating another layer of symbolism for artist and viewer.’3 Piehler cites Gaston Bachelard and Virginia Woolf on living space and why it is important.4 Bachelard writes:

1Discussed in Chapter 5, they are A Coming Event (1886), Fresh from the Font (1887), The Return from Confirmation (1888) and Fresh from the Altar (1890) 2 Jane Lewis, ‘Introduction: Reconstructing Women’s Experience of Home and Family’, in Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1850- 1940, ed. by Jane Lewis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986),1-23, (p.3). 3 ‘Spatial Dynamics and Female Development in Victorian Art and Novels’, p. 1. 4 Michael Pollan, ‘Homes & Gardens: Inner Space’, Guardian, 14 June 1997. Available at http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/homes-gardens-inner-space/ (Accessed 25 January 2011). 221

If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.5 Woolf claims that there is a connection between space and creativity, particularly for the writer, because carving out and preserving a private space allows the female writer to pursue and capture her thoughts.6 Both Bachelard and Woolf claim that occupying a protected, private place empowers an individual to develop a richer life of the mind. Piehler takes up this idea in her study of space as represented in literature and art. Further, referring to Michael Pollan’s note that ‘a room of one’s own’ is a modern ‘invention’ due to the emerging notions of the self as individual and to modern, privatized arrangements of interior living spaces, Piehler suggests that for the idea of private space to be so strongly expressed by Virginia Woolf in the early twentieth century, it may have been surfacing during the Victorian period.7 Piehler proceeds to consider the representation of space in paintings by male and female Victorian artists such as Edward Burne-Jones, Elizabeth Siddall, Maria Spartalli Stillman, Lord Frederick Leighton, Augustus Egg and Jessica and Edith Hayllar. Piehler’s description of Jessica Hayllar’s A Coming Event (Fig. 11) as ‘One of the most sensitive and dramatic uses of space to portray and respond to Victorian women’s ... lives,’ invites quoting at some length. She argues that the picture illustrates a woman’s transition into married life... The foreground focuses on the symbols of her wedding – the dress, veil, shoes, flowers, etc... Beyond this room in a long passageway sits the bride possibly speaking to her fiancé ... Beyond her stands an unidentifiable figure at the end of the hall, possibly signifying her past life and

5 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), p.6. 6 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Inc, 1929) 7 ‘Spatial Dynamics and Female Development in Victorian Art and Novels’, pp. 1- 2. 222

family. Hayllar’s depiction seems very astute, for it is a transformation to go from single to married woman, an exchange of one identity to another. Hayllar expresses this change through her spatial composition, the depth of the long hallway, and the largeness of the looming wedding accoutrements in contrast to the small figures… It is the space itself – the rooms, the long passageway, the thresholds, the high ceilings – that command the viewer’s attention, implying a focus on the journey and the identity of the woman who occupies these spaces. All the openings to the outside world ... are located on the far left side of the paintings, flanking, but not obstructing the direct pathway. For the Victorian viewer, this painting may have had a direct meaning and implication – the transfer of identity from single woman to wife... For the current viewer, that same allusion to transitions and passages through life – that same relation to space and openness Hayllar’s rooms and expanses also provide – may allow for more autonomous female role in her own life’s passage. The window openings cast light on that transition and provide alternative passages – existing as sideline possibilities.8 Piehler assumes the objects and people symbolise the stages in a woman’s life journey from the single person in the distance, to the couple in the middle ground presumably preparing for life together, to the marriage ceremony in the foreground. The space with its thresholds, straight pathway and depth is more dominant than the figures, and would have symbolised for Victorian women the transition from single to married life. This reading still suggests a woman following the traditional pathway; nonetheless Piehler does see possibilities for other interpretations. For example she also proposes that the painting could be meaningful to modern women with

8 ‘Spatial Dynamics and Female Development in Victorian Art and Novels’, p. 17. 223

its offering of alternatives to the straight path, in multiple ones suggested by the tall windows on the left.

While Piehler sees the concept of alternative paths occurring to modern women, rather than to their Victorian counterpart, the image is replete with windows leading to the outdoors, and entrances and exits leading to other places, leading me to propose that even for the Hayllars’ contemporaries the work would surely have suggested possibilities of a life beyond the domestic corridor depicted. On the other hand, however, if only light is seen streaming through the windows and nothing else, perhaps it suggests a yearning for something not seen, or known, that might never be experienced.

A Coming Event was discussed in Christies’ 2003 catalogue The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures & Works of Art, where quite a different interpretation of the image was provided: In each room a stage on the marital journey is represented. In the first are the accoutrements of the coming event, with gown, slippers and flowers, described in wonderful detail. In the second a man and woman converse while in the third, a widow, in black, is glimpsed.9 This reading of A Coming Event assumes that the life stages move from the wedding that is about to occur in the present, symbolised by the wedding dress and accessories, to married life as shown in the man and woman, to widowhood represented by the figure of the woman in the distance. Christopher Wood develops a reading that reflects the stages of a woman’s life from marriage in the foreground to widowed old age in the narrow, dark background,10 in contrast to Piehler, a twenty-first-century female theorist, whose analysis above sees the

9 Christies: The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures & Works of Art, Sale 6747, 19 February 2003, London. Available at: http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4051945 (Accessed 25 January 2011). 10 A note in the Christies’ 2003 catalogue The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures & Works of Art thanking Christopher Wood for his input clarifies that the discussion of the painting is mainly from his point of view, as a scholar in Victorian art. 224

woman moving from the background to the foreground and presumably on from there, in a reading full of assumptions about opportunities and escapes from rigid pathways.

Susan Casteras in Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art also comments on Jessica Hayllar’s A Coming Event. She writes that while the Victorian cult of the bride and her attendants is reaffirmed in countless paintings, in 1886 A Coming Event offered something very different. Again the argument should be quoted at length: Although no contemporary critics seem to have commented on it, A Coming Event was an unprecedented and iconoclastic image of courtship or nuptial subjects, which were usually rather saccharine close-ups of demure ladies in their bridal finery or being prepared for their for their toilette. In Hayllar’s haunting picture, the foreground still-life elements of the wedding paraphernalia- - the lustrous gown, the flowers, the fan, and the empty slippers – all attest to the coming event. Yet unlike standard representations of the bride and her trappings, this painting focuses on the separate life of the lovely things themselves, which function as ghostly prefiguring of the new identity and life which the woman would soon embrace... the empty satin slippers remind viewers of the ancient Anglo-Saxon practice of transferring ‘ownership’ or custody of the woman from the father to her husband, by the handing over a woman’s shoe, a custom evoked by tying old shoes to the back of cars.11 For Casteras, Jessica Hayllar is not glorifying the cult of brides and weddings, but on the contrary, questioning, even challenging it. She indicates that the painting is unusual enough to have drawn comment in its own time about the questions it seems to be raising. She suggests that the poignancy of the still-life arrangement draws attention to the

11 Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art, p. 101. 225

traditional accoutrements of a wedding, and encourages a consideration of the future that they symbolise. For example, one such consideration might be that while the accoutrements are lovely enough, they are by themselves, unworn, and the future they symbolise is therefore not confirmed with any certainty.

My first impression of A Coming Event focused on the fact that the satiny, white wedding dress filling half the right foreground is draped over chair, not on the bride. Why isn’t the bride wearing the dress? Diagonally opposite the dress, in the next room is the figure of a seated woman, very small in proportion to the dress and apparently looking directly at it. Is she dreaming of the occasion when she will be wearing it? Is she looking forward to wearing it? Is she regretting the future? Could she be considering not proceeding with the marriage? The distant, small female figure is surrounded by shadows, with dark spaces between rooms before and behind her and long dark curtains at her back. This shadowy space in the background and those empty wedding objects in the foreground, glowing and rich in the light and surrounded by flowers, give the painting a sense of a meditation, a reflection on the meaning of the ceremony and its rituals. My immediate impression was that the woman was questioning the marriage. A closer examination reveals that she is actually looking at a man whose dark figure is almost lost as he stands against the curtains. He is only discernible by flecks of sunlight falling on the back of his head and shoulders, and his presence, so shrouded in shadow, does not change my interpretation. Piehler and Casteras both suggest that space here also suggests time, a movement from girlhood to womanhood, from the single to the married state. I see the hint of doubt, even reluctance: the image questions the married future and suggests ways out of that space. This canvas was painted a year after the marriage of Mary Hayllar, the artist’s sister; perhaps Jessica Hayllar is reflecting a sense of emptiness, of the inevitable losses brought about by these life changing transitions. 226

The gaze, that much discussed element in visual culture, can be considered in relation to the Hayllar sisters’ work. Laura Mulvey’s much-cited essay on film theory argues that erotic voyeurism takes place on several levels when an audience watches a film.12 Mulvey suggests that the ‘determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure which is styled accordingly’, so that it is the male gaze that organises the representation of women. Since the 1970s the concept of the gaze, that look which ‘concerns pleasure and knowledge’ and ‘generally places both of these in the service of issues of power, manipulation and desire’, has guided the examination of historical conventions for the painting of women, developed by mainly male artists for the consumption of a male audience.13 The female nude, a dominant theme in art in the last two centuries, is the most obvious example of how in paintings women’s bodies have been objectified through male desire. Less obvious than a female nude but still subject to the gaze are those women in paintings who, although fully dressed, even modestly dressed, are nonetheless represented as looking at the viewer with an inviting expression, or else are in a sexually vulnerable situation in which the viewer is positioned to be complicit in making them vulnerable, or in which the viewer could be titillated by their vulnerability.

There is a dilemma for a female artist who can imagine herself in the woman’s position as the object of the gaze, because she is also in the position of artist imagining the viewer, the subject of that gaze.14 This dilemma existed for artists such as the Hayllar sisters, whether or not they identified and articulated it clearly themselves. What strategies

12 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema’, in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp.14-26. 13 Margaret Olin, ‘Gaze’, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. by R. Nelson and R. Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 209, quoted by Gill Perry, ‘Introduction’, in Gender and Art, ed., by Gill Perry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 27. 14 The dilemma is articulated by Mary Kelly, ‘Chapter 12. Desiring Images/Imaging Desire’, in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader ed. by Amelia Jones (London, New York: Routledge, 2003), 72-5, (pp. 72-3). 227

did women who were artists use to negotiate this contradiction? How did they arrange for their representation to deflect the objectification of the gaze and reclaim for women power over their own images, designing them instead as suitable for an audience of middle-class viewers including women? Women artists approached the dilemma in many ways, and in concluding this dissertation I will speculate about the Hayllars’ representation of females, not in order to decide whether they deliberately and consciously produced work that did or did not accommodate the mastering gaze, but rather to examine how their aspirations for their work, like that of many other women artists, wishing to produce images for ‘respectable’ audiences, deflected the male voyeurism implicit in the gaze.

The two male artists who influenced the Hayllar sisters presented different approaches to depicting women. As I have already shown, while their neighbour, Leslie, a more widely recognized artist than James Hayllar, had produced works on a wide range of themes, he gradually came to focus more and more on images of appealing young women. Some of his genre paintings were similar to the Hayllars’, for example a woman reading to a child, or women and children in a garden; however, he often represented women as conventionally pretty and sometimes coy, rather than convincingly real. In Apple Dumplings an appealing young kitchen assistant sits on the table, rather than at it, looking directly at the viewer with the hint of a smile. She is peeling one apple while the peel slides down her skirt and onto the floor. Her interest is more about engaging, or soliciting the viewer than cooking apple dumplings. The work suggests her availability. In The Walled Garden, Leslie presents a girl with walls and trellises behind her. There is a gate, but it is closed. The girl is beautiful but her expression is anxious, even trapped. One hand grips her skirt and the other is clasped against her chest in a gesture of self- consciousness, or self-defence. Her expression hints at her belief that the viewer is about to hurt her. In the Wizard’s Garden, Leslie has again trapped a vulnerable young woman in a closed garden. She is in 228

the foreground in a red dress, which hints at her sexual availability, and the garden is surrounded by a high hedge. The only doorway is in the hedge behind her and it is blocked by a man in a dark cloak and wide black hat who is entering the garden. The wide-eyed and apprehensive girl looks at the viewer; the sinister figure meanwhile, frighteningly referred to in the title as the wizard, with all the connotations of gendered enchantment and control, is approaching. Here the representation is organised so that the viewer is complicit with the wizard.

Such work by Leslie would clearly not have provided the Hayllar sisters with strategies to deflect the objectification of the gaze; however, they may have been aided by their father, both in his example and by the strict guidance he gave them in relation to suitable iconography. James Hayllar selected locations which best reveal the relationship he wished to depict: relationships between people, such a small girl with the old gardener, in The Thorn (1884) and As the Twig is Bent so is the Tree Inclined (date unknown), or a little girl with her grandfather, as in Grandfather’s Little Nurse (date unknown); and relationships between classes, such as a well-to-do mother and baby sitting on a bench surrounded by the admiring villagers, in The Centre of Attraction (1891), or a young girl from an affluent family visiting the respectable poor, in Mabel’s Pensioners (1884), or showing humble villagers around the manor house picture gallery in The Picture Gallery at the Hall (1872). Within his large oeuvre Hayllar did paint a close-up of a young woman looking boldly at the viewer, but he was explicit in his purpose and named it The Coquette (1863). The image includes her head and shoulders, but the shoulders are covered with an all enveloping fur coat which reaches high up her throat. There is no seductive body, only big, bold eyes. In another canvas, At the Theatre (date unknown), he depicted the opposite: three beautifully dressed young women all gazing with interest across the auditorium, one with the use of binoculars. Unaware of the viewer, they are actively looking themselves, challenging the idea of female 229

passivity and restraint. Hayllar tended to sentimentalise his subjects, often depicting the eyes too big, or presenting clichéd images such as the young girl attending her sick grandfather, but he was usually not presenting passive subjects for a male spectator in his paintings. His choice of iconography and how it influenced his artist daughters has been discussed before; here however, I am arguing that he presented women who were in safe spaces occupied by members of their family and with all characters in the work preoccupied with one another and so, it seems to me, repelling a voyeuristic gaze.

The Hayllar sisters produced work that appealed to the market desire for attractive images of women and children in an elegant bourgeois home; this has been discussed throughout this dissertation and commercial viability has been proposed as a likely cause for their choice of subject matter. Such representations of women could be criticised for reinforcing that patriarchal regime which so limited the lives of women, but on another level it could be claimed that these representations did not pander to the male gaze, but were rather offered for the enjoyment of middle-class families, for the appreciation of men and women, living for themselves and their families.

I am suggesting that the Hayllars, in their domestic images, use various devices to present traditional subjects and space in ways that prohibit them from functioning as a site for the appropriating male gaze. In this respect, it could be said that the sisters follow their father’s example, but that they go further and depict women in control of their own lives. In their work the figure of the woman or girl is usually located in a domestic space, but she is depicted as using it as a locus of relationships or in pursuit of her own interests, ones that address women’s concerns. These are sometimes traditional activities, but often they are individual and unrelated to household duties, indicating their disregard of the dominant regime. Besides the particular use of the domestic space represented, the Hayllars’ 230

depiction of the women subjects themselves, in their particular appearance and in their air of unselfconscious self possession and preoccupation, function not so much to accommodate the male gaze, but to attract an audience of respectable, affluent families like those represented, an audience that included women.

As we have seen, Jessica Hayllar painted genre scenes, women with children, or women interacting with other women - scenes supporting prevailing beliefs in relation to women’s roles. However, other paintings of hers showing women occupied with interests of their own threw into question these ideologies. Examples of Jessica Hayllar’s paintings of women caring for children, The Dancing Lesson (1893) (Fig. 104), Sweet Scented Roses (1895) (Fig. 90) and Encore (1894) (Fig. 105), are located in domestic spaces, but the relationship between the woman and child is established by their concentration on the shared activity.

Dancing, of course, has the potential to attract the gaze, but in The Dancing Lesson the three females, an older girl playing the piano, and a woman and little girl practising dancing, are totally preoccupied by their engagement with one another and the movement. The face of the accompanist on the far right is immersed in the music. The dancing teacher, her dark hair pinned up, is in the centre of the picture in a long modest dress of dark material, and emphasising that her interest is in her little pupil and that she is uninterested, even unconscious of a viewer, her back is to the audience. The viewer sees only her profile silhouetted against a dark curtain in the background. Even though the woman is dancing, with her arms lifted to hold up her skirts, springing up on one foot and kicking out the pointed toe on her other foot, she is absorbed in her lesson with the child. The child is facing the woman and the viewer. Her head is held slightly to one side and she is holding up and swishing the skirts of her white dress, while her dark stockinged legs emphasise her skipping movement. Her body is swaying slightly to one side; however, she looks down slightly with an 231

expression indicating her concentration on the movement, with no awareness of an audience.

This work could be understood as supporting the argument of historians Deborah Cherry and Abigail Large that a mother is teaching a child a female accomplishment presumably to help her to take her traditional place in society. Large describes how it depicts a young girl rehearsing with her mother, behind them another daughter playing the piano. Dancing skills were one element of complex social codes and conventions of dress, deportment and modes of appropriate behaviour, signs, like the ‘accomplishment’ of playing a musical instrument, of respectable bourgeois femininity.15 I would, by contrast, argue that this is a female-centred painting of three females enjoying one another’s company, focused wholly on one another and their mutual activity of dancing, totally at ease and unselfconscious in a private room in their home, and with the woman who is dancing turned away from the audience so that her actions are ‘modest’ and the view quite ‘proper’.

In Sweet Scented Roses the woman is holding out a bowl of roses and the child, with her hands behind her back, leans forward anticipating delight, her whole being directed towards smelling the roses. Both are beautiful; the woman with long hair pulled back and pinned up, the child with long curls falling down her back. While the woman’s face is attractive, she is looking away from the viewer and down at the child. Their mutual absorption and pleasure in the roses precludes any awareness of an audience.

Encore presents a young girl, nine or ten years old, standing looking at her audience, her violin in one hand and her bow in the other, having just completed a performance. This painting is interesting in relation

15 ‘The Hayllar Sisters’, p. 24. 232

to the gaze, because both the woman and the child are performing for an audience. Their formal clothing and their attention to their task suggest awareness of an audience; however, in this captured moment neither is thinking about the spectators. The little violinist is not looking at her audience; she seems hardly aware of them, as she stands with lowered eyes apparently considering which piece she will perform next. The woman at the piano has her hand on a page of music, but she is intently watching the young girl, waiting for her encore selection. In this moment the two performers are more interested in their work than their audience. Even though the image presupposes an audience, it assumes a sympathetic audience of equals such as the members of the family who might be imagined watching, or the potential purchasers of the work.

Relationships between women in Jessica Hayllar’s works are located in domestic spaces. This can be seen in both Eastern Presents (1885) (Fig. 96) and A Committee of Taste (1891) (Fig. 99), as in both the women sit together and examine lengths of fabric. They are in their home, involved in a domestic activity and they are interested in one another’s opinions. Jessica Hayllar also depicts women alone making posies or sprays, and the women are absorbed in their task.16 They are not swooning in a sensual daze, or gazing soulfully into the distance, or at the viewer, typical attitudes of women with flowers in many works by male artists.17 In the Hayllars’ works the women’s preoccupation and self-possession deflect the male gaze, but instead attract recognition and enjoyment from spectators and buyers, male or female, who would see the work as desirable for a family home.

16 Jessica Hayllar’s: The Button Hole (1888) (Fig. 92); Choosing a Spray (date unknown) (Fig. 57); The Finishing Touch (1892) (Fig. 58). 17 John William Godward, RBA, (British 1861-1922) is an example of an artist who painted beautiful young woman, often wearing or gazing at flowers. Sometimes loose clothing slipped off one shoulder, as in Violets, sweet violets, sometimes voluptuous woman surrounded by flowers gazed at the viewer dreamily making eye contact, as in Flabellifera and Ionian dancer. 233

Three of Jessica Hayllar’s canvases offer studies of women alone. They tend to undermine the conventional standards for women’s behaviour in that the women are using their time pursuing their own interests and in each of these images the woman’s absorption in her activity and the sense that she is at ease and secure in the domestic space, deflects the appropriative male gaze. These works are Sunflowers (1884) (Fig. 80) (Dudley Gallery, 1884), Sunflowers (date unknown and a different painting) (Fig. 79) and A Symphony (date unknown) (Fig. 106). There is a vase of sunflowers on a table in the nearest room in two of these images, and a large brass pot with an azalea plant on it in the third. A woman occupies the room beyond the house plants, in the next room, or even two rooms away. In the 1884 Sunflowers, the woman leans against a sideboard in a window recess to read her letter in the daylight. In the second Sunflowers there is an open doorway to the outdoors, with sunlight flooding through it. Sitting in the sunlight looking intently out the door is a woman patting a dog near her knee. In A Symphony the potted azalea is on a large polished table. A shawl has been carelessly tossed on the table and next to it is a book. These are signs of time already spent alone and also signs that the space is wholly available for the woman’s use. A woman sits on a chair in the next room playing a violin, while beyond her an archway leads to a room with a large window looking out to the garden. She has no sheet music. There is no sense of dutiful practice, but rather someone playing for her own pleasure. Each of these works shows glimpses of attractive airy rooms, with the still life features in the foreground and the various shafts of light and shade produced by the light filtering in from the far window or door. There are framed paintings on the walls, panelled doors and shutters, but in each the woman, preoccupied by her own interests, gives a focus to the painting. The women seem in control of themselves, the spacious, stylish place they inhabit, and the time they are using for their own interests. Such self possession, comfort and concentration presents women as independent people, with power over themselves who need give no thought to the mastering gaze. 234

In Jessica Hayllar’s Autumn Sunlight and Finishing Touches, both works already discussed in detail, a young woman is shown absorbed in the task of professional painting. In both paintings the woman’s facial expression and body language are those of a person concentrating on her task, unaware of any observer. Each is in a spacious room which gives views of other rooms, but the space she occupies is hers in that she uses all of it for her activity, looking across it at the objects she is portraying.

The particular appearance of the women in these works is important. They have dark hair, not floating luxuriously around the shoulders, but neatly pinned up. Their garments are not low cut, but up to the neck and with sleeves past the elbow. Also the women are not presented as vulnerable, powerless and easily manipulated, but rather as competent, mature women, beautiful but in control of themselves and their lives.

Edith Hayllar’s depictions of women, like those of her sister, Jessica, were also arranged for audiences of people like themselves. They too depicted women in their own space, and sometimes occupied only by their own individual interests. In Sister Arts (Fig. 63), a picture already discussed, two women individually pursue their interests in painting and music. In A Cosy Chat (Fig. 51) two women sit in a greenhouse, surrounded by plants and with the glass windows behind them. They are facing each other, looking and listening to each other. Each holds a cup of tea and one has a hand raised in a conversational gesture. The greenhouse, leafy and welcoming, is a place where the two can have a private and absorbing chat. Edith Hayllar has produced other images with only one female in a greenhouse, or conservatory. In Tea in the Conservatory (1897) a woman stretches back in her chair totally absorbed in the book she is reading, and in Afternoon Tea (Fig. 48) a woman in a green house is sitting on a step, looking down at and patting a companionable dog lying near her. A laden tea table is nearby. In A Cosy Corner (Fig. 108) a young girl is in a safe, 235

attractive place reading a book. There is a strong suggestion here that reading, rather than dutiful housework is a very satisfactory, even pleasing activity. In these works by Edith Hayllar the woman’s space and her time appear to be her own to be used as she wishes.

I would argue that the ‘looking’ invited by the Hayllars’ works is that of an audience/viewer who takes pleasure in this iconography of family and meaningful, agreeable activity, particularly for women, and often an activity that is for themselves, not their family. This work conjures up a middle-class observer who will recognise, enjoy and possibly purchase such a work.

Further to the argument made throughout my dissertation that the Hayllar sisters represented a modern outlook is the fact discussed above that they each painted canvasses which depicted a woman occupying a room of her own, a space of peace and safety, which consequently liberated her to concentrate on an activity of her own choosing. As discussed at the beginning of this chapter, in response to Pollan’s theory that ‘a room of one’s own’ is a modern ‘invention’, Piehler suggests that Virginia Woolf may have advocated such private space because the concept was already emerging at the end of the nineteenth century.18 Certainly Jessica and Edith Hayllar’s paintings described above (completed in the 1880s and 1890s), depicting women playing a musical instrument, reading, painting or thinking in a space occupied only by themselves, could be seen to support Piehler’s argument, and therefore provides evidence that the Hayllar sisters, as modern women, appreciated creative time alone in a room of their own.

In 1980, Michael Fried, the now celebrated art critic and historian, published a book on the writings of the art critic Denis Diderot, which discussed paintings hung in the Paris Salons in 1750s and 1760s, in

18 ‘Spatial Dynamics and Female Development in Victorian Art and Novels’, pp. 1- 2. 236

which he defined the relationship between a painting and its beholder in terms of ‘absorption’ and/or ‘theatricality’. Fried has subsequently elaborated on these notions in a number of important books, including his more recent The Face of Painting in the 1960s19. Pointing out similar features between Fried’s terms and my definitions of images which ‘repel’ and those which ‘invite’ the gaze clarifies and adds weight to the distinction I am making here. ‘Absorption’ indicates that the figures are engrossed in the situation depicted, creating the illusion that the viewers are not there, thus allowing the spectator to become more convinced by and consequently more engaged in the world of the painting. To achieve this desired state in which ‘the beholder be stopped and held precisely there’20 the picture, according to Fried, needed to be a persuasive representation of the complex absorption of a figure or a group of figures in various actions, activities and states of mind – a dramatic illusion if ever there was one – that the painter was able to establish the fiction of the aloneness of these figures, and by implication of the painting as a whole, relative to the beholder. 21 Fried goes on to suggest that changes occurred in the art over some years, and that Diderot’s descriptions reflect the change: Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the emphasis both in criticism and in painting itself shifts from the representation of absorption to the representation of heroic or grandly pathetic action and expression.22 This alternate state is one in which viewers feel inclined to become engaged in these more emotional, theatrical images, imagining that they can speak with, or engage with the figures in the picture. Fried maintains that this different relationship between the painting and the

19 Michael Fried, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) 20 Absorption and Theatricality, p. 108. 21 Absorption and Theatricality, p. 108-9 22 Absorption and Theatricality, p. 70. 237

beholder leads to a situation in which the viewer can no longer believe in the reality of the situation being witnessed. Fried explains: in Diderot’s writings on painting and drama the object- beholder relationship as such, the very condition of spectatordom, stands indicted as theatrical, a medium of dislocation and estrangement rather than of absorption, sympathy, self- transcendence; and the success of both arts [painting and drama], in fact their continued functioning as major expressions of the human spirit, are held to depend upon whether or not painter and dramatist are able to undo that state of affairs, to de-theatricalize beholding and so make it once again a mode of access to truth and conviction.23

Fried’s ‘absorption’ can be related to that aspect of the Hayllars’ work which, in the characters’ engagement with activities of their own, emphasises that lack of awareness of a spectator which I maintain serves to dismiss the gaze. Further, his understanding of the term ‘theatrical’ parallels my description of works that attract the gaze in that they invite the participation of the viewer as a voyeur, looking from a position of power, exploitation and desire.24

I make a claim for the Hayllar sisters’ paintings by extrapolating from benefits that may be derived from Fried’s ‘absorption’. The sisters may have been guided by the intention to produce desirable commodities, and perhaps because of what their market required, or

23 Absorption and Theatricality, p. 104 24 An extension of this latter resemblance occurs in Fried’s discussion of ‘theatricality’ when he quotes and analyses Diderot’s words in relation to particular paintings, revealing that in a ‘theatrical’ work an explicitly sexual message may be projected to the spectator. In Une Jeune Fille qui pleure son oiseau mort by Jean Baptiste Greuze, (Salon of 1765), the beholder feels an inclination to comfort a young woman who has lost her virginity, and in Greuze’s Une Jeune Fille qui envoie un baiser par la fenetre, appuyee sur des fleurs, qu’elle brise (Salon of 1769), the beholder is presented with a young woman in a state of excitement, her clothes in disarray, as she looks feverishly past the beholder, presumably at her lover. Both project a sexual message to involve the reader. Absorption and Theatricality, pp. 57-9, pp. 60-1. 238

because of their own upbringing and beliefs, and probably because of both, a majority of the images they produced were of women and children absorbed in an elegant, attractive world, pursuing enjoyable or dutiful activities, and interacting with the other characters who inhabited that world. Beyond any connection with profit, however, these images of characters involved in their own lives can still cause ‘the beholder [to] be stopped and held precisely there’ (Fried), to be attracted and then enthralled by the work. ====== Castle Priory Wallingford August 1892

‘Life drawing, James! Not for painting naked bodies, but for learning how the body works. How it’s put together!’ ‘Yes, yes! But there are other ways for women to learn ...’ As Jessica poured the tea she listened to this familiar argument between her father and their neighbour, George Leslie. These two had over the years debated every aspect of art and art education. Her father’s opinions never varied, but sometimes Mr Leslie changed his position, or tried to put another point of view. ‘The idea that woman should gather around a naked model ...’ Jessica handing her father his cup of tea, saw him pause, searching for words to express his outrage. ‘... the impropriety of it! And all for some so called benefit to their work!’ Jessica had read letters by women in the art journals expressing their need to attend life classes. She sometimes thought, with a twinge of disloyalty, that life classes might give her more confidence in depicting figures, that possibly her standing figures looked a little stiff, or too still. They were certainly not ready to break into movement. Sometimes she included figures small in proportion to the size of her canvas, so that the rooms, the furnishings, the light, all 239

features which she loved and with which she felt confident, filled the greater part of her work. She liked to include a figure, though. The space was nothing if no-one was enjoying it. George Leslie tried again. ‘Well the truth is I have not welcomed women in the Academy schools ... but Francis Cary, our dear teacher, supported women having the same opportunities as men...’ ‘A great man! And he encouraged me to give my daughters the best art education. We differed only on the question of life classes. The thing is, George...’ Jessica gave each man a slice of pound cake, knowing what her father would say next. ‘...my daughters study plaster castes, copies of classical paintings and one another. They do observe life, the life they see around them. And they constantly paint one another.’ He put the cup down and spread his arms wide in that gesture Jessica recognised as one he used to emphasise the importance of his argument. ‘Then they practised until they could reproduce convincing images of the figures around them. They have produced paintings which contain acceptable, realistic images without any art classes except mine.’ As though his point was unassailable he stopped speaking and looked at his friend, daring him to disagree. When Jessica had served them both and left the room, she heard Mr Leslie started to speak again. ‘Your daughters do wonderful work, James. I have always said so and I mean it; ... however....’ Jessica held her breath. However? She paused for a minute and bent down to tie her shoe lace more firmly. She could imagine George Leslie sitting there, maybe checking to see that she was gone, pausing in his speech, searching for the right words. She had never heard this opinion before. However? ‘... like many women, indeed, many artists, perhaps like most of us, including you and me, James ... your daughters paint motionless figures. There is no sense of movement, and ...’ 240

Mr Leslie paused and Jessica, aware that their neighbour had never been so blunt before, was shocked but also exhilarated. Surely, she though, such things need to be said. Mr Leslie, possibly deciding that it was too late to retreat, proceeded, ‘... and those unmoving figures have a certain flatness about them. Perhaps I say too much. They do produce charming, proper and importantly, very successful work.’ Jessica could feel her father’s silence. She could imagine him sitting there, gazing at his friend, thinking about how to answer such a serious statement. She felt instantly that their neighbour was right, but guessed that her father would never admit it. Mr Leslie continued, trying to make his comments more palatable. ‘You don’t need me to commend your teaching. Your girls’ work is regularly selected for the Summer Exhibition. Indeed,’ here he chuckled, ‘they often receive better reviews than me. We are, of course, reluctant to have the Academy Schools overrun with women, but we’re beginning to notice that those who’ve attended life classes do show a better understanding of the body, how its put together, how it works.’ Jessica stopped fiddling with her shoe lace, stood up and walked towards the kitchen. She felt stimulated by what she had overheard. She wanted to create work that suggested movement. Then she laughed. She knew it could not involve life drawing classes. Early the following afternoon she sat in the living room gazing at her canvas. It included many favourite features, aspects of her work that she executed well and that always sold well. It was a view from one room to another, a procession of connecting rooms each with windows letting in the sunshine. It included favourite props, the screen, the tall Chinese porcelain stand, the white azalea plant and a gleaming, high backed, decorated chair. In the next room was a woman sitting on a chair reading to a little girl standing by her lap. Jessica had seen Mary just so with her arm resting affectionately around her daughter’s shoulders and she had loved the tenderness in the image. She had posed them in this place that she painted so often, 241

made sketches, taken photographs, and now the painting was coming along nicely. Even so, while the cosy pair in the next room having their morning lesson and the beautiful spaces and things in Castle Priory melded into a canvas that offered a peaceful, private moment for the mother and child, Jessica now realised the stillness of the whole. She felt the challenge of Mr Leslie’s words and wanted to try something different, more demanding, a work that showed movement. She sat for a while looking at The Morning Lesson,25 but could not settle to making the finishing touches. Her thoughts were wandering. Finally she decided to visit the studio where Edith and Kate were working. Kate took so long to complete one of her tiny works that she would find a position in the studio where the light was right, created her still life arrangement and then worked slowly and painstakingly for months reproducing it, sometimes even using a magnifying glass. This meant that she was always easy to find. Edith would be with her today, working on that picture showing two of Mary’s children playing. Jessica knew that like her, Edith had done sketches, taken photos and every now and then when Mary visited, re-posed the children and studied them again. The children had objected to this by wriggling and complaining, ‘Are you finished yet, Aunty Edith?’ Jessica walking towards the studio door remembered Edith saying that on their last visit the children had said this before she had even once placed them properly. Kate was not in the studio, but Edith was there. ‘Gone for a walk,’ Edith commented. ‘Said her eyes needed a rest and her body needed to move before it turned to stone! She gets so restless!’ Jessica sat on Kate’s chair and peered at the tiny canvas. It featured a page from a drawing folio with sketches of pretty children’s faces drawn from the front and the side. With the addition of some feathery wings the whole looked like a cluster of little angels. In her

25 Jessica Hayllar, The Morning Lesson (Fig. 81). 242

picture Kate had placed the open page of the sketch book against a small table. On the table above it was the statue of a rearing horse, and on either side of the table were two fine-looking, ornate chairs. ‘Little Angels?’ asked Jessica. ‘A Gem from the Folio,’26 answered Edith. Jessica thought about how she and her sisters each had her own favourite themes and features. Kate liked to surround a picture, either classical, or less well known, with beautiful things, a screen, fine furniture, fabrics and flowers, and then paint them into a small, richly coloured jewel of an image. After examining Kate’s picture, she rose to look at Edith’s painting. Only then did she remember that she had come to inspect her sisters’ work in relation to movement. Well there was no movement in Kate’s work of course. Kate had never considered including it. She only thought of still life. Edith’s painting was enchanting. Like all their work at the moment it was inspired by Mary’s children. ‘Well, we wouldn’t have a subject between us without those children,’ commented Jessica. ‘Maybe they should get a commission. ... What do you think?’ ‘I think Mother pays them enough in baked delicacies, without them getting any further rewards.’ ‘I mean about my work?’ laughed Edith. ‘What do you think about the painting?’ Jessica studied the picture of a boy, still un-breeched, standing on a chair in his skirts. He was leaning on the back of the chair gazing at his sister who sat on the front of the chair holding up the letter B. The B was back-to-front for the viewer, because the little girl was holding it so her brother could read it. ‘B is for Brother,’27 said Edith. ‘Already the good little Mother!’ said Jessica. ‘That should please our customers!’

26 Kate Hayllar, A Gem from the Folio (Fig. 108). 27 Edith Hayllar, B is for Brother, (Fig, 101). 243

‘She may be a great artist too! Who knows?’ Edith protested. ‘It’s just a picture, not her fate! Sometimes I would love to paint the children outdoors jumping into the water in their bathers, or playing cricket, but Father doesn’t think it’s what people want.’ When Edith paused, Jessica knew she was trying to restrain herself, express herself moderately. ‘Well that’s not exactly what he said. His point was that we have matched our experience to our talents, and that the resulting work always finds a market because of that! Anyway, I simply cannot discuss this topic again!” Edith moved both hands as though to push the vexed topic away. ‘What do you think about the picture?’ Jessica studied the image of the two children. The boy was standing still, but for all his skirts, he looked very boyish with his solid stance, his sturdy limbs, his short hair and squarish face. He was watching his sister attentively. The little girl was lower than the boy, sitting on one side of the same chair, but she was turning around holding up the B and smiling at her brother. Her little body was hidden by a loose dress covered by a loose pinafore, but the legs coming out from under the skirt looked authentic, and the arm holding up the B was perfectly formed and placed. There was a sense of movement in this painting, of the little girl having just turned around to show her brother the B! ‘Maybe close observation is enough,’ she mused. ‘Enough for what?’ Jessica told Edith about the conversation she had overheard; admitting that she could see Mr Leslie’s point. ‘Oh Jessica, of course you can, because he’s right.’ Edith pointed at her work. ‘So you think this looks real, suggests movement?’ ‘Yes. She is not swinging around as we watch, but she appears to have just turned around.’ Edith sat there for a minute, as though thinking about something. ‘I had trouble with that.’ Jessica watched as her sister traced her finger from the neck of the image of the little girl, along an imaginary body line to the knee. 244

‘Mary helped me by slipping off the dress, so I could see exactly where the legs would be when the body was turned.’ Jessica gazed at Edith in amazement. Edith nodded. ‘Careful observation is essential, but it helps greatly to know how the body works under the clothes. Mr Leslie was right,’ she paused for a minute, then continued almost in a reassuring tone, ‘but Father is more or less right too. Studying, sketching, looking at the result, copying, trying again until it is correct. That method has stood us in good stead.’ ‘I want to try something with much more movement than I have attempted before,’ said Jessica. ‘Maybe the children playing tennis?’ Edith shook her head. ‘Trying to play tennis you mean! They can hardly hold the rackets. And anyway that would be outside, in the garden. You are not practised at landscape, but your work inside the house is always right.’ ‘But I want to show movement,’ said Jessica. ‘And people exercise out of doors.” Jessica saw Edith’s thoughtful expression and then saw her satisfied smile. ‘Tomorrow when Mary comes for the children’s dancing lesson. The children are only little, but you know how they love it! There should be plenty of movement there!’ ‘A dancing lesson! Too hard to start with!’ Jessica thinking of all those flying limbs, felt alarmed. ‘Just come and watch. Think about it. Do a few sketches. See what happens.’ That evening at dinner Jessica introduced the idea to her father. ‘Papa, I plan to start a picture of a dancing lesson tomorrow.’ ‘A dancing lesson!’ Jessica was surprised at her father’s shocked tones. ‘I think we know the dangers in such a subject. Surely Jessica ...’ ‘Dangers! In drawing the children dancing?’ ‘Papa she is just going to try some sketches of Mary’s children during their lesson tomorrow,’ protested Edith. Jessica, bewildered, was grateful for her sister’s support. 245

‘Oh, the children.’ Jessica saw her father relax. ‘Well do a few sketches and let me see them.’ The next day the dancing lesson was in full swing by the time Jessica had completed her other tasks. She hurried to the studio, grabbed a sketch book and ran to the music room. She placed a chair where she should have a good view of the dancers and watched Mary’s wonderful energetic movement, springing and kicking and pointing her toes, and the children’s rather funny attempts to copy her. The oldest girl, however, moved with rhythm and grace reflecting her mother’s movements. As Jessica settled down, she sighed. Dancing seemed such a difficult movement to suggest. Still, Edith was right, it couldn’t hurt to try. During the lemonade break as Jessica sat back and studied her drawings, she suddenly understood her father’s objections. The teacher in her enthusiasm revealed kicking legs, pointed toes, even ruffling petticoats. Jessica walked over to Edith at the piano and showed her the sketches. She was grateful for Edith’s comments. ‘Well they are full of movement! You have certainly done well there.’ However, she understood Jessica’s problem, ‘but those legs and petticoats!’ ‘I know, but it’s ridiculous. Surely a mother teaching her daughter to dance is a suitable subject for ...’ Then as Jessica, now standing near the piano, watched Mary start the lesson again she saw the solution. ‘Another angle! That’ll do it. Look! See what I mean! Not from the front! Mary from the back, the child from the front! Quite modest in her black stockings and neat little steps. Looking at them from another viewpoint gives quite a different picture.’ In the evening after tea, she showed her father her sketches, but only those she had made after the lemonade break. Her father examined the sketches, turning the pages of the sketch book, flicking back to certain images, seemingly looking for problems. Jessica began to feel impatient. 246

Finally he delivered his opinion. ‘They have potential Jessica. And this one...,’ he held up a sketch of Mary seen almost from the back, with only a toe pointing out from under a long dark skirt, and of a little girl executing an energetic dance step.28 ‘This is charming and modest and yet there is a wonderful impression of motion here.’ Pleased, Jessica took back the folio and looked at the sketch as her father discussed it. ‘You know, that sketch just proves something I was saying to George yesterday. Life drawing lessons are not essential. Close observation! Practice! They can achieve almost anything.’ Jessica nodded, but knew that she would ask Mary for a little more help with the drawing of her figures, just as Edith had done, and she felt relieved that her father had not seen the first set of dancing sketches she had made yesterday.

======

28 The Dancing Lesson (Fig. 104). 247

Afterword

Some biographical details relating to the lives of the Hayllar sisters after the Castle Priory Period are provided here.

In 1900 when Beatrice Kate Hayllar (1864-1956) was 35 years old and still unmarried, she left home and took up nursing. This may have been because she felt a need to acquire some independence, or as the youngest daughter growing up in a more liberal, relaxed atmosphere both in her family and society, it was easier for a woman to choose a career outside the home. The 1911 census reveals her working in the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford as a hospital nurse. She apparently worked as a nurse during WWI. A label on the back of her painting Still Life with Strawberries (1884), obviously added later, says ‘that she made a valuable contribution nursing during the First World War.’1 She worked in nursing for many years. Anthony Wilder encountered people in Wallingford who remembered her as a nurse.2 There was a period when she lived an itinerant existence apparently residing in the homes of her patients. Later she stayed in Torquay in the winter and at the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Association Home at Wallingford Castle in the summer.3 However, she also wintered in Bournemouth, because there are letters to her niece ‘Peggy’, from The Cliffeside Hotel, East Cliff, Bournemouth, written while wintering there. These letters to ‘Peggy’, the family’s name for Jessica Margaret, Edith’s oldest daughter, indicate that Kate and her sisters’ children stayed in touch, sharing family details, including information on the children’s progress, even when Kate was the only Hayllar sister still living.4 Although she ceased painting professionally she produced miniatures of her grandnieces and grand nephews in the 1920s.

1 Wilder, The Hayllar and Leslie Families, p. 66. 2 Anthony Wilder, Interview with author conducted on 23 March 2002 at Wallingford, Oxfordshire. 3 Wilder, The Hayllar and Leslie Families, p. 67. 4 Copies of these letters sent by Neil McKay are in the author’s possession. 248

Alexandra Mary Hayllar (1863-1950) stopped painting at the age of 23 when she married Henry Wells in 1885. He was a man with mercantile and administrative connections in Wallingford, which secured for Mary a comfortable and prestigious position in life. Except for some family portraits, she never painted again. Anthony Wilder spoke to one of Mary Hayllar’s descendants, a granddaughter who lived in Wallingford. The granddaughter stated that when Mary was asked in later years about her painting she said: ‘Anyone who is well taught can paint’.5 These words might suggest that Mary did not see herself as especially talented, but instead attributed her success to her father’s painstaking program of art education. Perhaps her belief in herself as a well taught artist, rather than a naturally gifted one, made it easy to give up painting after her marriage. Perhaps her husband did not approve, or did not think it was necessary for her to paint. The 1901 Census records Mary and her husband, Henry Wells, in their Sotwell Hill House, in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell. Although Jessica, who was staying with them, was still painting and exhibiting and had, in the 1881 census been listed as a ‘painter of domestic life’, Henry Wells did not mention her profession as a painter on the census forms. This could indicate anything from a lack of interest to disapproval of such a profession for a woman.

The census also recorded that Mary and Henry Wells had five of their six children in their home at the time, with nine domestic staff, four women in the house, three gardeners, an odd-job man and a groom. Anthony Wilder spoke to Mrs Ada Lay in 2002, when she was 101. She had been the cook for the Wells in the 1920s. She said that when she worked for the Wells family there had been many Hayllar art works on the walls, but no painting was done.6 This was confirmed by Mary’s granddaughter who said that Mary would not even draw for her young grandchildren. Immersed in home and family, and for a

5 Wilder, Interview. 23 March 2002. 6 Wilder, Interview. 23 March 2002. 249

period of time wife of the mayor, she had a busy life and seems to have never considered art again. In 1932 her husband died in a car accident and she returned to Wallingford to live7.

Edith Parvin Hayllar (1860 - 1948) painted until she married in 1897. Her husband Bruce Mackay had been Rector of St Leonard’s Church in Wallingford since 1893. The 1901 census indicates that they were living in the Rectory in Wallingford and their family included a three year old daughter and a one year old son. They lived well enough to have a cook and a housemaid. In 1902 when Bruce MacKay accepted a living at the Vicarage in Sutton Courtenay, a small village about 10 miles North West of Wallingford, a note in the Berks and Oxon Advertiser described Mackay as being a preacher of ‘earnestness and robustness of style’ and observed that the Mackays ‘will be much missed in Wallingford, and especially in the parish in which their work was centred’.8 Interestingly the paper announced the value of the Sutton Courtenay living, £290 with residence, which supports Branca’s statement of £300 being an average annual middle class income. The Mackays had two more children. Edith Hayllar’s husband may not have objected to her painting, but as the wife of a clergyman she would have been busy looking after her family and supporting her husband’s work. Except for a few paintings of members of her family, she did not paint again. Christopher Wood writes that he spoke to one of Edith’s granddaughters who claimed that she did not know until after the death of her grandmother that she had ever been a painter.9

Jessica Ellen Hayllar (1858 - 1940) never married. In 1899 the productive life of the Hayllar family at Castle Priory came to an end. Mary and Edith had married and Kate had become a nurse. When James Hayllar gave up painting and moved with his wife, Ellen, to

7 Wilder, The Hayllar and Leslie Families, p.63. 8 Berks and Oxon Advertiser 3rd Jan 1902. 9 Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar. Part 2’, p.6. 250

Bournemouth, Jessica moved with them. She continued painting and contributing work to the Royal Academy. The 1901 census gives the Hayllars’ address as Redholme, Cambridge Rd, Bournemouth. James Hayllar, who described himself as a retired painter, was 72 and his wife Ellen was 75. They had two servants. Ellen Hayllar died not long after this date and Jessica stayed in Bournemouth with her father. Around this time she had an accident, being struck by a carriage and was crippled. She was in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. By 1904, however, she was again exhibiting at the Royal Academy and she continued to do so until 1915.10 In this later section of her career she painted mainly flowers. Possibly she missed the domestic interiors in the elegant, spacious home that was Castle Priory, or perhaps, being in a wheelchair, flowers were the most accessible subject, and paintings of them still popular commodities. James Hayllar died in 1920 and then Jessica lived with her sister Edith Mackay in Surrey. In 1931, when she made her will, she was living in Surrey, and when she added the codicil in 1937 she was still there. Anthony Wilder was told by one of Mary’s granddaughters that she has seen Jessica in Surrey in 1929 and she was still painting, especially flowers.11 It is possible that she was still painting works that could be sold to contribute to her support.

10 Wood, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar. Part 2’, p.5. 11 Hayllar and Leslie Families, p. 50. 251

BIBLIOGRAPHY

(1) Archive material

‘Hayllar MS’, c1920s-30s, pp. 1-12. Held in the Hayllar family archive, this short biography of James Hayllar contains useful material on the art education of his daughters.

(2) Monographs and Scholarly Journals

Ambrosius, Lloyd E., ed, Writing Biography (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2004)

Anderson, Linda, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001)

Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon, 1958)

Baile de Laperriere, Charles, The Society of Women Artists Exhibitors, 1855-1996 (Calne: Hilmarton Manor Press, 1997). Available at: http://www.society-women-artists.org.uk/History.html (Accessed 16 October 2011)

Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. by Vincent B. Leitch (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001), pp. 1466-70

Banks, J.A., Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning among the Victorian Middle Classes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954)

Batchelor, John, ed., The Art of Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995)

Benstock, Shari, Textualizing the Feminine, On the Limits of Genre (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991)

Blake, Robert, ‘The Art of Biography, in The Troubled Face of Biography ed. by Eric Homberger and John Charmley (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 75-112

Booth, Alison, ‘Biographical Criticism and the “Great” Woman of Letters’, in Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography Criticism, ed. by William H Epstein (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991), pp. 185-107

Borzello, Francis, A World of Our Own: Women as Artists (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000) 252

Brosh, ‘Renate, Imagendering II: Gender and Visualisation’, Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies,13 (2006) Available: http://www.genderforum.org/issues/imagendering-ii/looking-at- women-looking/ (Accessed: 30-9-2011), p. 2

Branca, Patricia, Silent Sisterhood Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home (London: Croom Helm, 1975)

Brewster, Anne, ‘Aboriginal Life Writing and Globalisation: Doris Pilkington’s Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence’, Australian Humanities Review. Available at: http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-March- 2002/brewster.html (Accessed 9 June 2006)

Brewster, Anne, ‘Remembering Whiteness: Reading Indigenous Life Narrative’, borderlands e-journal, 4:1 (2005). Available at: http://www.borderlands.net.au (Accessed 9 June 2006)

Briggs, Asa, Victorian Things (London: Batsford, 1988)

Brosh, Renate, ‘Imagendering it: Gender and Visualisation’, Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies, 13 (2006). Available at: http://www.genderforum.org/issues/imagendering-ii/looking-at- women-looking/ (Accessed 30 September 2011)

Casteras, Susan P., Images of Victorian Womanhood in English Art (London: Associated University Presses, 1987)

Casteras, Susan P. and Linda H. Peterson, A Struggle for Fame; Victorian Women Artists and Authors (New Haven: Yale Centre for British Art, (1994)

Chadwick, Whitney, Women, Art and Society (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992)

Chantrey, Francis, ‘Extract from “The Will of Sir Francis Chantrey”’, in Dugald Suthland MacColl, The Administration of the Chantrey Bequest. Articles Reprinted from the Saturday Review, with Additional Matter, Including the Text of Chantrey’s Will and a List of Purchases, p. 70. Available at: Ebook and Texts Archive > University of Toronto - Robarts Library (Accessed 1 August 2011)

Cherry, Deborah, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850-1900 (London: Routledge, 2000)

Cherry, Deborah, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993) 253

Clement, Clara Erskine and Laurence Hutton, Artists of the Nineteenth Century and Their Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897). Available at: http://www.victorianweb.org/art/institutions1.html (Accessed 18 May 2011)

Coleman, Patrick, Jayne Lewis and Jill Kowalik, eds., Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Conway, Jill Ker, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1998)

Cosslett, Tess, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield, eds, Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods (London: Routledge, 2000)

Damousi Joy, ‘Feminist Biography’, in Tracing Past Lives, The Writing of Historical Biography, ed. by Richard Broome (Carlton: History Institute, Victoria, 1995), pp. 33-42

Davies, Carole Boyce, ‘Collaboration and the Ordering Imperative in Life Story Production’, in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, ed. by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1992), pp. 3-19

Dewey, Judy & Stuart, and David Beasley, Window on Wallingford, 1837-1914: Life in a Thames-side Market Town (Wallingford: Pie Powder Press, 1989)

Dyhouse, Carol, ‘Mothers and Daughters in the Middle-Class Home, c.1870-1914’, in Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1850-1940, ed. by Jane Lewis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 27-47

Eisenman, Stephen F., Nineteenth-Century Art: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1994)

Ellis, David, Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000)

Epstein, William H., ed., Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography Criticism (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991)

Evans, Mary, ‘Extending Autobiography, A Discussion of Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar’, in Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, ed. by Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 76-88

Felski, Rita, Gender and Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995) 254

Fried, Michael, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980)

Fried, Michael, The Face of Painting in the 1860s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Gallagher, Catherine and Thomas Laqueur, eds, The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987)

Garb, Tamar, Sisters of the Brush: Women’s Artistic Culture in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 1994)

Gaze, Delia, ed., Dictionary of Women Artists, Vol 2 (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997)

Glendinning, Victoria, ‘Lies and Silences’, in The Troubled Face of Biography, ed. by Eric Homberger and John Charmley (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 49-74

Gorham, Deborah, The Victorian Girl and The Feminine Ideal (London: Croom Helm, 1982)

Graham-Dixon, Andrew, ‘Court on Canvas, at Barber Institute, Birmingham, review’. Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/8698001/Court-on-Canvas-at- Barber-Institute-Birmingham-review.html (Accessed: 2 January 2012)

Gray, Anne and Ann Galbally, The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires (Melbourne: National Gallery of Australia, 2004)

Hackforth-Jones, Jocelyn and Mary Roberts, eds, Edges of Empire: Orientalism and Visual Culture (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2005)

Hall, Catherine, White, Male and Middle-Class (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992)

Hall, Stuart, ‘The Question of Cultural Identity’, in Modernity and Its Futures, ed. by Stuart Hall, David Held and Tony McGrew (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 273-316

Hardman, J.S., Wallingford: A History of an English Market Town (Wallingford: J.S. Hardman, 1994) 255

Helsinger, Elizabeth K., Robin Lauterback Sheets and William Veeder, The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837-1883 / Volume 2 Social issues (New York: Garland, 1983)

Hennessey, Rosemary and Rajeswari Mohan, ‘The Construction of Women in Three Popular Texts of Empire: Towards a Critique of materialist Feminism’, Textual Practice, 3 (1989), 323-39

Holmes, Richard, ‘Biography: Inventing the Truth’, in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. by John Batchelor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 15-25

Homberger, Eric and John Charmley, eds, The Troubled Face of Biography (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988)

Hoock, Holger, The Kings Artists, The Royal Academy of Art and the Politics of British Culture, 1760-1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003)

Hutch, Richard A., The Meaning of Lives (London: Cassell, 1997) Jackson, A. Huth, A Victorian Childhood (London: Methuen, 1932)

James, M., Alice Ottley, First Headmistress of the Worcester High School for Girls, 1883-1912 (London: Longman, 1914)

Karusseit, Catherine, ‘Victorian Domestic Interiors as Subliminal Space', SAJAH, 22:3 (2007), 168-82

Karusseit, Catherine, ‘Victorian Respectability and Gendered Domestic Space’, Image & Text, 13 (2007), 38-53

Kelly, Mary, ‘Chapter 12. Desiring Images/Imaging Desire’, in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader ed. by Amelia Jones (London, New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 72-5

Conway, Jill Ker, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York: Knopf, 1998)

Kerr, Heather and Amanda Nettelback, eds, the space between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism (Nedlands, WA: UWA Press, 1998)

Knight, Vivien, Victorian Pictures: Guildhall Art Gallery (London: Guildhall Art Gallery, 1999)

Kosambi, Meera, ‘A Prismatic Presence: The Multiple Iconisation of Dr Anandibai Joshee and the Politics of Life Writing’, Australian Feminist Studies, 16 (2001), 157-73 256

Krauss, Rosalind E., Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977)

Lalumia, Matthew, ‘Lady Elizabeth Thompson Butler in the 1870s’, Woman's Art Journal, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring - Summer, 1983), pp. 9- 14. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1358095 (Accessed 07/05/2012)

Leckie, Shirley A., ‘Biography Matters: Why Historians Need Well- Crafted Biographies More Than Ever’, in Writing Biography, ed. by Lloyd E. Ambrosius (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 1-26

Lewis, Jane. ‘Introduction: Reconstructing Women’s Experience of Home and Family’, in Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1850-1940, ed. by Jane Lewis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 1-23

Lewis, Jane, Women in England, 1870-1950: Sexual Visions and Social Change (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1984)

Lewis, Reina, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996)

Loeb, Lori Anne, Consuming Angels; Advertising and Victorian Women (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)

Marsh, Jan and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998)

Mathews, Brian, Louisa (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1987)

Meyers, Jeffrey, ed., The Craft of Literary Biography (New York: Schocken, 1985)

Modjeska, Drusilla, Poppy (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1990)

Modjeska, Drusilla, Stravinsky’s Lunch (Sydney: Picador, 1999)

Morris, Edward, ‘Advertising and the Acquisition of Contemporary Art’, Journal of the History of Collections 44:2 (1992), 195-200

Morris, Edward, Victorian and Edwardian Paintings in the Lady Lever Art Gallery (London: MSO, 1994)

Mulvey, Laura, ‘Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema’, in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp.14-26 257

Nadel, Ira Bruce, Biography Fiction, Fact and Form (London: Macmillan Press, 1984)

Neuschel, Kristen B., ‘Creating A New Past: Women and European History’, in Women and a New Academy Gender and Cultural Contexts, ed. by Jean F. O’Barr (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), pp. 9-19

Niall, Brenda, ‘Georgiana McCrae: A Private Life’, in Tracing Past Lives: The Writing of Historical Biography, ed. by Richard Broome (Carlton: History Institute, Victoria, 1995), pp. 43-53

Nochlin, Linda, Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848-1900: Sources and Documents (New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1966)

Nochlin, Linda, Representing Women: Interplay Theory Arts History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999)

Nochlin, Linda, Women, Art and Power and Other Essays (London: Harper and Row, 1988)

Nord, Deborah Epstein, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995)

Nunn, Pamela Gerrish, ed., Canvassing; Recollections by Six Victorian Women Artists (London: Camden Press, 1986)

Nunn, Pamela Gerrish, Problem Pictures: Women and Men in Victorian Paintings (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995)

Nunn, Pamela Gerrish, Victorian Women Artists (London: Women’s Press, 1987)

O’Brien, Sharon, ‘Feminist Theory and Literary Biography’, in Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography Criticism, ed. by William H. Epstein (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991), pp. 123-33

Olin, Margaret, ‘Gaze’, Critical Terms for Art History, ed. by R. Nelson and R. Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). pp. 208-19

Orr, Clarissa Campbell, ed., Women in the Victorian Art World (New York: Manchester University Press, 1995)

Painter, Nell Irwin, Sojourner Truth (New York: Norton, 1996)

Painter, Nell Irwin, ‘Ut Pictura Poesis, or The Sisterhood of the Verbal Arts’, in Writing Biography, ed. by Lloyd E. Ambrosius (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), pp. 103-31 258

Parker, Rozika and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981)

Perkin, Joan, Victorian Women (London: John Murray, 1993)

Perry, Gill, Gender and Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999)

Peterson, M. Jeanne, Family, Love and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen (Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 1989)

Piehler, Liana F., Spatial Dynamics and Female Development in Victorian Art and Novels: Creating a Woman’s Space, Studies in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, V20 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2003)

Poe, K.L., ‘Gammel, Irene, ‘The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery’, Biography, 28:4 (Fall 2005), 690-3

Pollock, Griselda, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988)

Randall, Rona, The Model Wife Nineteenth-Century Style (London: Herbert Press, 1989)

Rhodes, Kimberly, Ophelia and Victorian Visual Culture: Representing Body Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1988)

Riddell, Charlotte, A Struggle For Fame (London: Richard Bentley, 1883)

Ross, Valerie, ‘Too Close to Home: Repressing Biography, Instituting Authority’, in Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography Criticism, ed. by William H. Epstein (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991), pp. 135-65

Ruskin, John, ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’, in Sesame and Lillies , Unto this Last and The Political Economy of Art (London, Paris, New York, Toronto & Melbourne: Cassell and Company Ltd., 1907), pp. 61-95

Sanders, Valerie, The Private Lives of Victorian Women: Autobiography in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989)

Scharf, Aaron, Art and Photography (London: Allen Lane, 1968) 259

Shefer, Elaine, ‘Woman's Mission’, Woman's Art Journal,7:1 (Spring-Summer 1986), 8-12 Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1358230 . (Accessed 21/9/2011)

Skidelsky, Robert, ‘Only Connect: Biography and Truth’, in The Troubled Face of Biography, ed. by Eric Homberger and John Charmley (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 1-16

Slatkin, Wendy, The Voices of Women Artists (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993)

Smith, Sidonie, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)

Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson, ‘Introduction: De/Colonization and the Politics of Discourse in Women’s Autobiographical Practices’, in De/Colonization and the Politics of Discourse in Women’s Autobiographical Practices, ed. by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. xii-xxxi

Smith, Sidonie, Selectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)

Spokes P.S., ‘Some Notes on the Domestic Architecture of Wallingford, Berkshire’, Berkshire Archaeological Journal, 50 (1947). Available at: http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en- 249334-castle-priory-college-wallingford (Accessed 10 September 2011)

Spurling, Hilary, ‘Neither Morbid nor Ordinary’, in The Troubled Face of Biography, ed. by Eric Homberger and John Charmley (New York: St Martin’s, 1988), pp. 113-22

Stanley, Liz, The auto/biographical I (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992)

Stanley, Liz, ‘From “Self-made Women” to “Women’s Made-selves” Audit Selves, Simulation and Surveillance in the Rise of Public Women’, in Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, ed. by Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 40-60

Steedman, Carolyn, ‘Enforced Narratives Stories of Another Self’, in Feminism and Autobiography, Texts, Theories, Methods, ed. by Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 25-39 260

Stewart, Brian and Mervyn Cutten, Chichester Artists (Canterbury: Bladon Press, 1987)

Swindells, Julia, Victorian Writing and Working Women: The Other Side of Silence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985)

Summers, David, ‘Meaning in the Visual Arts as a Humanistic Discipline’, in Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside, A Centennial Commemoration of Edwin Panofsky (1892-1968), ed. by Irving Lavin (New Jersey: Institute for Advanced Study, 1993), pp. 10-24

Taylor, Tom, ed., Autobiographical Recollections of Charles Robert Leslie EP (Wakefield: Wakefield Publishing, 1978)

Thwaite, Ann. ‘Writing Lives’, in The Troubled Face of Biography, ed. by Eric Homberger and John Charmley (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1988), pp. 17-32

Usherwood, Paul, ‘Elizabeth Thompson Butler: A Case of Tokenism’, Woman’s Art Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Autumn, 1990 - Winter, 1991), pp. 14-18. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3690693 (Accessed 07/05/2012)

Wagner-Martin, Linda, Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994)

Walker, Cheryl, ‘Persona Criticism and the Death of the Author’, in Contesting the Subject: Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biography Criticism, ed. by William H. Epstein (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1991), pp. 109-21

W., M., ‘Lady Artists, Nos. 30 to 32, the Misses Hayllar’, Lady’s Pictorial, 28 December 1889, pp. 944-5

Weeks, Jeffrey: Sex, Politics & Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London: Longman, 1981)

Weiland, Steven, ‘Biography, Rhetoric and Intellectual Careers: Writing the Life of Hannah Arendt’, Biography 22:3 (Summer 1990), 370-98

Wichman, Siegfried, Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Western Art since 1858 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981)

Wilder, Anthony, Victorian Artists of Wallingford: A Tale of Two Dynasties, The Hayllar and Leslie Families (Wallingford: Pie Powder Press, 2006) 261

Wood, Christopher, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part I: James Hayllar’, Connoisseur (April 1974), 166-73

Wood, Christopher, ‘The Artistic Family Hayllar, Part 2: Jessica, Edith, Mary and Kate’, Connoisseur (May 1974), 2-9

Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Inc, 1929)

Yeldham, Charlotte, Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France and England; Their Art Education, Exhibition Opportunities and Membership of Exhibiting Societies and Academies, with an Assessment of the Subject Matter of their Work and Summary Biographies (New York: Garland, 1984)

(3) Thesis

Large, Abigail C., ‘The Hayllar Sisters’ (unpublished BA (Joint Hons) thesis, Visual Art Department, The University of Wales Aberystwyth, 1996)

(4) Newspapers and periodicals

(a) Longer, signed articles

Armstrong, Lucie H., ‘Silks and Satins’, Art Journal (1891), 19-24

Armstrong, Lucie H., ‘Chintzes and Cretonnes’, Art Journal (1891), 108-13

Arnold, William T., ‘The Manchester Exhibition’, Art Journal (1887), 249-52

Arnold, William T., ‘The Manchester Jubilee Exhibition’, Art Journal (1887), 281-2

Arnold, William T., ‘Furniture in the Manchester Exhibition’, Art Journal (1887), 381

Berens, A., ‘Knapsack Photography’, Art Journal (1885), 193-7

Davison, T. Raffles, ‘A Modern Country Home’, Art Journal (1891), 329-35, 353-7

Cole, Alan S., ‘Textiles, Lace, Tapestry, Stuffs’, Art Journal (1883), 149-52

Crandon Gill, Rosa , ‘Table Decoration of To-day’, Art Journal (1891), 141-6 262

Crandon Gill, Rosa ‘Damask and Napery and Needlework’, Art Journal (1891), 177-82

Day, Lewis F., ‘Victorian Progress in Applied Design’, Art Journal (1887), 185-202

Day, Lewis F., ‘A Kensington Interior’, Art Journal (1893), 139-44

Freitag, Wolfgang M., ‘Early Uses of Photography in the History of Art’, Art Journal, Vol.39, No.2 (Winter, 1979-1980), pp.117-23

Hind, C. Lewis, ‘Painters’ Studios’, Art Journal (1890), 11-6, 40-5, 135-9

Hind, C. Lewis, ‘Lace’, Art Journal (1891), 87-92

Huish, Marcus B., ‘Notes on Japan and Its Art Works’, Art Journal (1888), 5-9

Huish, Marcus B., ‘Notes on Japan and Its Wares’, Art Journal (1888), 5-9, 40-4, 116-9, 153-7, 176-80, 208-12, 239-44, 298-304, 328-35, 373-8

Humphreys, Mary Gay, ‘The Progress of American Decorative Art’, Art Journal (1884), 25-8

Hungerford Pollen, J., ‘Childhood and Art’’, Art Journal (1882), 81- 84

Leland, Charles G., ‘Wood Carving’, Art Journal (1886), 41-5; ‘Cuir- Bouilli, or Stamped Leather’, 73-7; ‘Stencilling’, 105-8; ‘Repoussé or Sheet Metal Work’, 181-4; ‘Modelling in Clay’, 230-3; ‘Mosaic Setting’, pp. 309-69, ‘How to Design’, 365-9

Meynell, Alice, ‘The Nativity in Art’, Art Journal (1890), 353-60

Meynell, Wilfred ‘Our Living Artists – George Dunlop Leslie, R.A.’, Magazine of Art Illustrated, (1879-1880), 232-4

Phillips, Claude, ‘The Summer Exhibitions’, Art Journal (1890), 146- 60; ‘The Royal Academy, The Grosvenor, and the New Gallery’, (1890), 161-74; ‘The Royal Academy, The Grosvenor, and the New Gallery (concluded). The Paris Salons’, 216-22; ‘The Paris Salons (concluded)’, 240-4

Phillips, Claude, ‘The Staedal Art Institute at Frankfurt-on-the-Main’, Art Journal (1891), 39-45 263

Redgrave, Gilbert R. ‘The Jones Bequest to South Kensington Museum’, Art Journal (1883), 124-88, 197-200, 23-6, 401-4

Robertson, G.T., ‘Dining-Room Tables’, Art Journal, (1881), 181-4; ‘The Dining-Room Wall’, (1881), 201-4

Robertson, G.T., ‘Domestic Furniture’, Art Journal (1884), 373-6

Robinson, G.T., ‘Household Decoration – Wall Papers’, Art Journal (1883), 353-6

Robinson, G.T., ‘Suggestions in Decoration Design from the Works of Great Painters’, Art Journal (1886), 9-11

Robinson, Lionel G., ‘French Art’, Art Journal (1886), 65-8

Robinson, Lionel, ‘The Leyland Collection’, Art Journal (1892), 134- 8

T., M.A., ‘Japanese Decorative Art’, Art Journal, (1879), 83-84

Vallance, Aymer, ‘Velvets, Velveteen, and Plushes’, Art Journal (1891), 230-6

Vallance, Aymer, ‘Ceilings and Floors’, Art Journal (1892), 23-7; ‘Walls, Windows and Stairs’ (1892), 44-92; ‘The Fire Place’ (1892), 80-5; ‘Furniture’ (1892), 112-8; ‘Carpets and Curtains’ (1892), 306- 11; ‘Window Blinds, Lightings and Accessories’ (1892), 372-8

Wallis, Henry, ‘The National Gallery – Recent Acquisitions’, Art Journal (1883), 1-4, 41-3, 177-8 and 370-2

Wallis, Henry, ‘The Early Madonnas of Raphael’, Art Journal (1885), 14-8, 53-7, 111-4, 325-7, 364-8

Pollan, Michel, ‘Homes & Gardens: Inner Space’, Guardian, 14 June 1997. Available at: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/homes-gardens-inner-space/ (Accessed 28 May 2012)

(b) Unsigned articles and reviews

The Athenaeum (1883-91)

The Artist, an Illustrated Monthly Record of Arts, Crafts and Industries (1892-97)

Artist and Journal of Home Culture (1880-87)

Art Journal (1863-93) 264

Berks and Oxon Advertiser (1890-99)

Lady’s Pictorial (1889)

New York Observer (2003)

Wallingford Times (1888-90)

(5) Miscellaneous (catalogues, interviews, scrapbooks, websites etc.)

Camus, Marianne, ‘EXHIBITION REVIEW: Pre-Raphaelites and Other Masters’, Art on the line, 2004/1 (3). Available at http://www.waspress.co.uk/journals/artontheline/journal_20041/revie ws/index.html (Accessed 20 January 2012)

Christie’s London, Fine Victorian Pictures, Friday 1 November 1985 (London: Christie, Mansion & Woods, 1985)

Christie’s: The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures & Works of Art, Sale 6747, 19 February 2003, London. Available at http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=405 1945 (Accessed 25 January 2011)

Hayllar, James, A Family Group, painted in 1864 and since 1964 in the National Gallery of Canada. Available at http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=6616 (Accessed 11 July 2011)

Johnson, Ray kindly gave me copies of Hayllar pictures and papers and a videotape which showed a brief visual tour of Castle Priory, with an interesting commentary about the Hayllar family.

Lady Lever Art Gallery – A photocopy of the Inventory Sheet kindly sent to me by the Lady Lever Art Gallery notes the Inventory Number of The Centre of Attention by James Hayllar as 3416. It records that this oil on canvas painting was presented to the gallery by Lever Brothers in March 1983. It also records that it was exhibit number 681 at the Royal Academy in 1891.

Large, Abigail kindly gave me a copy of her thesis, letters she had received in relation to her research and her colour slides of the Hayllar sisters’ paintings that were in the The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art.

THE FORBES COLLECTION OF VICTORIAN PICTURES AND WORKS OF ART. Available at http://www.christies.com/special_sites/forbes_feb03/pressinfo.asp (Accessed 20 January 2012) 265

Wilder, Anthony, Interview with author conducted on 23 March 2002 at Wallingford, Oxfordshire. Part of the interview included giving lecture and showing the slides originally presented in Wallingford Town Hall on 8 March 2002.

Wilder, Anthony kindly gave me a collection of photocopies of newspaper cuttings about the Hayllars from the 1880s and 1890s. The cuttings were of the articles only and included no page numbers. These included: Other photocopies: Hand written family trees Pages from a Catalogue of sales of James Hayllar’s works in 1899.

Royal Academy of Arts – On my visit to this institution the librarian kindly photocopied Academy Records related to the Hayllars. The Royal Academy Exhibitors pp 40-43 (Includes a record of paintings by the Hayllars, dates hung at R.A. and their numbers in the Summer Exhibitions.

Royal Academy Exhibition Catalogue, 1875-84 (1881 Exhibition). Not a published book – One of a set of 10 separate exhibition catalogues bound solely for their protection for the Royal Academy’s Library Email responses with detailed answers to my questions, giving information re guidelines for acquiring a collection, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lever,_1st_Viscount_Leverhul me, Accessed 28-9-2011 http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ladylever/collections/thecentreo fattraction.asp, Accessed (25/7/2) Framing the Hayllar Sisters A Multi-genre Biography of Four English Victorian Painters Illustrations Book

Mary Gabrielle Hayllar

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

University of New South Wales School of Arts and the Media Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

August 2012 Figures Index

Figure1 Jessica Hayllar, Autumn Sunlight

Figure 2 Kate Hayllar, Sunflowers and Hollyhocks

Figure 3 Mary Hayllar, The Lawn Tennis Season

Figure 4 Jessica Hayllar, No 3 Rhododendrons

Figure 5 Jessica Hayllar, The Lemonade Drink

Figure 6 Jessica Hayllar, Thomas Frederick Wells Esquire (1837 – 1907)

Figure 7 Edith Hayllar, James Hayllar

Figure 8 Jessica Hayllar, There Came to My Window a Robin

Figure 9 Edith Hayllar, James Hayllar (1896)

Figure 10 Edith Hayllar, Ellen Phoebe Hayllar

Figure 11 Jessica Hayllar, A Coming Event

Figure 12 Edith Hayllar, A Summer Shower

Figure 13 Kate Hayllar, A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever

Figure 14 Mary Hayllar, For a Good Boy

Figure 15 Page from family photograph album: Wedding presents, The contents of

Tommy’s pockets, All a-blowing and a-growing

Figure 16 Page from family photograph album: Poppies among the corn, The rendezvous, Out of bounds

Figure 17 Page from family photograph album: The old brocaded gown, The eleventh of August, The corner of the mantleshelf, Sunflowers

Figure 18 Page from family photograph album: The Age of Innocence

Figure 19 Edith Hayllar, Feeding the Swans

Figure 20 Jessica Hayllar, Christmas Comes but Once a Year

Figure 21 James Hayllar, A Family Group Figure 22 Jessica Hayllar, Going to My Uncle’s

Figure 23 Jessica Hayllar, Cottage Fare

Figure 24 Jessica Hayllar, The Hallway

Figure 25 Mary Hayllar, Poppies Among the Corn

Figure 26 Mary Hayllar, A River Bank

Figure 27 Jessica Hayllar, Lilies of the Field, (Madonna Lilies)

Figure 28 Kate Hayllar, The Age of Innocence

Figure 29 Kate Hayllar, Roba di Roma

Figure 30 Mary Hayllar, The Contents of Tommy’s Pockets

Figure 31 Jessica Hayllar, Teaching

Figure 32 Jessica Hayllar, Wallace’s Exit

Figure 33 Hayllar, Jessica, An Early Cooper

Figure 34 Mary Hayllar, Little Flora’s Wreath (RA 1659)

Figure 35 Mary Hayllar, Little Flora

Figure 36 Mary Hayllar, Christmas Eve

Figure 37 Edith Hayllar, Meal Time

Figure 38 Edith Hayllar, A Quiet Pipe

Figure 39 Edith Hayllar, As Hungry as a Hunter

Figure 40 Jessica Hayllar, Duck and Green Peas

Figure 41 Mary Hayllar, The Rendezvous

Figure 42 Edith Hayllar, The First of October

Figure 43 Edith Hayllar, The Sportsmen’s Luncheon

Figure 44 Mary Hayllar, Out of Bounds

Figure 45 Edith Hayllar A Punting Party

Figure 46 Edith Hayllar, ‘e went that way, Sir Figure 47 Edith Hayllar, Kind Enquires

Figure 48 Edith Hayllar, Afternoon Tea

Figure 49 Edith Hayllar, Intruders Made Welcome

Figure 50 Edith Hayllar, Caught

Figure 51 Edith Hayllar, A Cosy Chat

Figure 52 Jessica Hayllar, Tea or Coffee

Figure 53 Edith Hayllar, The Single Married, The Married Happy

Figure 54 Edith Hayllar, Seniores Priores

Figure 55 Jessica Hayllar, Best of Friends Must Part

Figure 56 Jessica Hayllar, The Last to Leave

Figure 57 Jessica Hayllar, Choosing A Spray

Figure 58 Jessica Hayllar, The Finishing Touch

Figure 59 Mary Hayllar, The Tennis Party

Figure 60 Jessica Hayllar, Sunshine

Figure 61 Edith Hayllar, Hand Parcels

Figure 62 Jessica Hayllar, Finishing Touches

Figure 63 Edith Hayllar, Sister Arts

Figure 64 Hayllar, Edith, Farmhouse Butter and Eggs

Figure 65 Jessica Hayllar, House Cleaning

Figure 66 Edith Hayllar, A Present from the Farm

Figure 67 Mary Hayllar, Wedding Presents

Figure 68 Hayllar, Edith, Blackberry Tart

Figure 69 Hayllar, James, Perplexed

Figure 70 Hayllar, Edith, Christmas Dinner at the Rectory

Figure 71 James Hayllar, The Thorn Figure 72 Mary Hayllar, Helping Gardener

Figure 73 Kate Hayllar, Finished and Framed

Figure 74 Kate Hayllar, The Eleventh of August

Figure 75 Jessica Hayllar, Return from Confirmation

Figure 76 Dining-room Woodwork, Messrs. Howard and Sons, Art Journal,

(1881), p 204

Figure 77 View from the Library, Garrick Club, Art Journal, (1885), p. 341.

Figure 78 The Studio of Edward Unger, Art Journal, (1890), p. 45.

Figure 79 Jessica Hayllar, Sunflowers

Figure 80 Jessica Hayllar, Sunflowers

Figure 81 Jessica Hayllar, The Morning Lesson

Figure 82 “A Connoisseur and His Surroundings – Mr James Orrock RI, at

48 Bedford Square”, Art Journal, (1892), p. 13.

Figure 83 F.R Millet, the Fireside Student, Art Journal, (1893), p. 27.

Figure 84 Jessica Hayllar, All Absorbing

Figure 85 Edith Hayllar, Jack Ashore

Figure 86 Jessica Hayllar, A Perfect Angel

Figure 87 Jessica Hayllar, Kittens

Figure 88 Jessica Hayllar, Fresh from the Altar

Figure 89 Jessica Hayllar, Fresh from the Font

Figure 90 Jessica Hayllar, Through the Looking Glass

Figure 91 Jessica Hayllar, When First They Met

Figure 92 Jessica Hayllar, A Lady Making Posies from Primroses (1887) and also The Button Hole (1888)

Figure 93 Jessica Hayllar, Drawing from the Round Figure 94 Jessica Hayllar, Sweet Scented Roses

Figure 95 Kate Hayllar, Eastern Presents

Figure 96 Jessica Hayllar, Eastern Presents

Figure 97 Kate Hayllar, Pot Pourri

Figure 98 Kate Hayllar, The Old Brocaded Gown

Figure 99 Jessica Hayllar, A Committee of Taste

Figure 100 Edith Hayllar, Nuts and Wine

Figure 101 Mary Hayllar, All a-blowing and a-growing

Figure 102 Edith Hayllar, The First of September

Figure 103 Jessica Hayllar, Some of the Choir

Figure 104 Jessica Hayllar, The Dancing Lesson

Figure 105 Jessica Hayllar, Encore

Figure 106 Jessica Hayllar, A Symphony

Figure 107 Edith Hayllar, A Cosy Corner

Figure 108 Kate Hayllar, A Gem from the Folio

Figure 109 Edith Hayllar, B. Is for Brother

Illustration Citations

Figure1 Jessica Hayllar, Autumn Sunlight Available at: http://www.petticoated.com/1012/ (Accessed 19 February 2013)

Figure 2 Kate Hayllar, Sunflowers and Hollyhocks Available at: http://www.worldgallery.co.uk/art-print/Sunflowers-and-Hollyhocks- 105154.html (Accessed 19 February 2013)

Figure 3 Mary Hayllar, The Lawn Tennis Season Available at: http://www.southampton.gov.uk/s- leisure/artsheritage/sotonartgallery/search/view- artwork.asp?acc_num=241&show_page=interpretation (Accessed 19 February 2013) Courtesy of Southampton City Art Gallery

Figure 4 Jessica Hayllar, No 3 Rhododendrons Available at: http://goldenagepaintings.blogspot.com.au/2011/08/jessica-hayllar- rhododendrons.html (Accessed 19 February 2013)

Figure 5 Jessica Hayllar, The Lemonade Drink Courtesy of Wallingford Town Council, Photo by David Beasley/Stuart Dewey

Figure 6 Jessica Hayllar, Thomas Frederick Wells Esquire (1837 – 1907) Courtesy of Wallingford Town Council, Photo by David Beasley/Stuart Dewey

Figure 7 Edith Hayllar, James Hayllar Courtesy of Wallingford Town Council, Photo by David Beasley/Stuart Dewey

Figure 8 Jessica Hayllar, There Came to My Window a Robin Available at: http://goldenagepaintings.blogspot.com.au/2011/06/jessica-hayllar-there- came-to-my-window.html (Accessed 19 February 2013)

Figure 9 Edith Hayllar, James Hayllar (1896) Available at: http://clara.nmwa.org/index.php?g=entity_detail_print&entity_id=3572 (Accessed 19 February 2013)

Figure 10 Edith Hayllar, Ellen Phoebe Hayllar (1896) Available at: http://clara.nmwa.org/index.php?g=entity_detail_print&entity_id=3572 (Accessed 19 February 2013)

Figure 11 Jessica Hayllar, A Coming Event Available at: http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/lot/jessica-hayllar-a-coming-event- 4051945-details.aspx?intObjectID=4051945 (Accessed 19 February 2013)

Figure 12 Edith Hayllar, A Summer Shower Available at: http://www.fineartlib.info/gallery/p17_sectionid/26/p17_imageid/3311 (Accessed 19 February 2013)

Figure 13 Kate Hayllar, A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever Available at: http://goldenagepaintings.blogspot.com.au/2010/09/kate-hayllar-thing-of- beauty-is-joy_10.html (Accessed 19 February 2013)

Figure 14 Mary Hayllar, For a Good Boy Available at: http://www.arcadja.com/auctions/en/hayllar_mary/artist/132168/ (Accessed 19 February 2013)

Figure 15 Page from Hayllar family photograph album: Wedding presents, The contents of Tommy’s pockets, All a-blowing and a-growing. Photograph by Marygai Hayllar January 2005 Figure 16 Page from Hayllar family photograph album: Poppies among the corn, The rendezvous, Out of bounds . Photograph by Marygai Hayllar January 2005

Figure 17 Page from Hayllar family photograph album: The old brocaded gown, The eleventh of August, The corner of the mantleshelf, Sunflowers. Photograph by Marygai Hayllar January 2005

Figure 18 Page from Hayllar family photograph album: The Age of Innocence. Photograph by Marygai Hayllar January 2005

Figure 19 Edith Hayllar, Feeding the Swans Courtesy of Edith Hayllar’s family. Photo by David Beasley/Stuart Dewey

Figure 20 Jessica Hayllar, Christmas Comes but Once a Year Available: http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/16352/lot/247/ (Accessed 19 February 2013

Figure 21 James Hayllar, A Family Group Available at http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=6616 (Accessed 11 July 2011)

Figure 22 Jessica Hayllar, Going to My Uncle’s From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 23 Jessica Hayllar, Cottage Fare From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 24 Jessica Hayllar, The Hallway Available at http://www.excitingposters.com/101402.htm (Accessed 19 February 2013)

Figure 25 Mary Hayllar, Poppies Among the Corn Courtesy of Mary Hayllar’s family. Photo by David Beasley/Stuart Dewey

Figure 26 Mary Hayllar, A River Bank From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 27 Jessica Hayllar, Lilies of the Field, (Madonna Lilies) Courtesy of Edith Hayllar’s family. Photo by David Beasley/Stuart Dewey

Figure 28 Kate Hayllar, The Age of Innocence Available at: http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Kate-Hayllar/The-Age-Of-Innocence.html (Accessed 20 February 2013)

Figure 29 Kate Hayllar, Roba di Roma From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 30 Mary Hayllar, The Contents of Tommy’s Pockets From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 31 Jessica Hayllar, Teaching Available at: http://www.wikigallery.org/wiki/painting_369417/Jessica-Hayllar/Teaching (Accessed 20 February 2013)

Figure 32 Jessica Hayllar, Wallace’s Exit From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 33 Hayllar, Jessica, An Early Cooper From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 34 Mary Hayllar, Little Flora’s Wreath (RA 1659) From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute Figure 35 Mary Hayllar, Little Flora From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 36 Mary Hayllar, Christmas Eve Courtesy of Mary Hayllar’s family. Photo by David Beasley/Stuart Dewey

Figure 37 Edith Hayllar, Meal Time From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 38 Edith Hayllar, A Quiet Pipe From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 39 Edith Hayllar, As Hungry as a Hunter Available at: http://www.bridgemanart.com/asset/84716/Hayllar-Edith-1860-1948/As- Hungry-as-a-Hunter-1882-oil-on- board?search_context=%7B%22url%22%3A%22%5C%2Fsearch%5C%2Fartist%5C%2F Hayllar-Edith-1860- 1948%5C%2F1558%22%2C%22num_results%22%3A%229%22%2C%22search_type%2 2%3A%22creator_assets%22%2C%22creator_id%22%3A%221558%22%2C%22item_ind ex%22%3A1%7D (Accessed 20 February 2013)

Figure 40 Jessica Hayllar, Duck and Green Peas Available at: http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Jessica-Hayllar/Ducks-And-Green-Peas.html (Accessed 20 February 2013)

Figure 41 Mary Hayllar, The Rendezvous From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 42 Edith Hayllar, The First of October Courtesy of Edith Hayllar’s family. Photo by David Beasley/Stuart Dewey

Figure 43 Edith Hayllar, The Sportsmen’s Luncheon Available at: http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/edith-hayllar-the-sportsmans- luncheon-5197680-details.aspx (Accessed 20 February 2013)

Figure 44 Mary Hayllar, Out of Bounds From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 45 Edith Hayllar A Punting Party From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 46 Edith Hayllar, ‘e went that way, Sir From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 47 Edith Hayllar, Kind Enquires From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 48 Edith Hayllar, Afternoon Tea From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 49 Edith Hayllar, Intruders Made Welcome From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 50 Edith Hayllar, Caught From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 51 Edith Hayllar, A Cosy Chat From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute Figure 52 Jessica Hayllar, Tea or Coffee From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 53 Edith Hayllar, The Single Married, The Married Happy From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 54 Edith Hayllar, Seniores Priores From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 55 Jessica Hayllar, Best of Friends Must Part From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 56 Jessica Hayllar, The Last to Leave From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 57 Jessica Hayllar, Choosing A Spray From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 58 Jessica Hayllar, The Finishing Touch From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 59 Mary Hayllar, The Tennis Party Available at: http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Mary-Hayllar/The-Tennis-Party.html. (Accessed 19 February 2013)

Figure 60 Jessica Hayllar, Sunshine From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 61 Edith Hayllar, Hand Parcels From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 62 Jessica Hayllar, Finishing Touches From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 63 Edith Hayllar, Sister Arts From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 64 Edith Hayllar, Farmhouse Butter and Eggs Courtesy of Edith Hayllar’s family. Photo by David Beasley/Stuart Dewey

Figure 65 Jessica Hayllar, House Cleaning Available at: http://goldenagepaintings.blogspot.com.au/2009/11/jessica-hayllar.html (Accessed 20 February 2012)

Figure 66 Edith Hayllar, A Present from the Farm From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 67 Mary Hayllar, Wedding Presents Available at: http://www.arcadja.com/auctions/en/hayllar_mary/artist/132168/ (Accessed 20 February 2013

Figure 68 Edith Hayllar, Blackberry Tart From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 69 James Hayllar, Perplexed Christie’s London, Fine Victorian Pictures, Friday 1 November 1985 (London: Christie, Mansion & Woods, 1985), p. 51

Figure 70 Edith Hayllar, Christmas Dinner at the Rectory From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute Figure 71 James Hayllar, The Thorn Available at: http://www.art.com/products/p13224516-sa-i2335402/james-hayllar-the- thorn.htm (Accessed 20 February 2013)

Figure 72 Mary Hayllar, Helping Gardener Available at: http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Mary-Hayllar/Helping-Gardener.html (Accessed 20 February 2013)

Figure 73 Kate Hayllar, Finished and Framed From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 74 Kate Hayllar, The Eleventh of August From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 75 Jessica Hayllar, Return from Confirmation

Figure 76 Dining-room Woodwork, Messrs. Howard and Sons, Art Journal, (1881), p 204

Figure 77 View from the Library, Garrick Club, Art Journal, (1885), p. 341.

Figure 78 The Studio of Edward Unger, Art Journal, (1890), p. 45.

Figure 79 Jessica Hayllar, Sunflowers From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 80 Jessica Hayllar, Sunflowers From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 81 Jessica Hayllar, The Morning Lesson From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 82 “A Connoisseur and His Surroundings – Mr James Orrock RI, at 48 Bedford Square”, Art Journal, (1892), p. 13.

Figure 83 F.R Millet, the Fireside Student Art Journal, (1893), p. 27.

Figure 84 Jessica Hayllar, All Absorbing From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 85 Edith Hayllar, Jack Ashore From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 86 Jessica Hayllar, A Perfect Angel Available at: http://www.1st-art-gallery.com/Jessica-Hayllar/A-Perfect-Angel.html (Accessed 22 February 2013)

Figure 87 Jessica Hayllar, Kittens From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 88 Jessica Hayllar, Fresh from the Altar From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 89 Jessica Hayllar, Fresh from the Font From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 90 Jessica Hayllar, Through the Looking Glass From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute Figure 91 Jessica Hayllar, When First They Met From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 92 Jessica Hayllar, A Lady Making Posies from Primroses (1887) and also The Button Hole (1888) Available: http://www.bridgemanart.com/print_asset/659886 (Accessed 22 February 2013)

Figure 93 Jessica Hayllar, Drawing from the Round From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 94 Jessica Hayllar, Sweet Scented Roses From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 95 Kate Hayllar, Eastern Presents Available at: http://www.art-prints-on-demand.com/a/hayllar-kate/eastern-presents- cloisonn.html (Accessed 22 February 2013)

Figure 96 Jessica Hayllar, Eastern Presents From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 97 Kate Hayllar, Pot Pourri From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 98 Kate Hayllar, The Old Brocaded Gown From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 99 Jessica Hayllar, A Committee of Taste From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 100 Edith Hayllar, Nuts and Wine Courtesy of Edith Hayllar’s family. Photo by David Beasley/Stuart Dewey

Figure 101 Mary Hayllar, All a-blowing and a-growing Page from Hayllar family photograph album, Photograph by Marygai Hayllar January 2005

Figure 102 Edith Hayllar, The First of September From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 103 Jessica Hayllar, Some of the Choir From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 104 Jessica Hayllar, The Dancing Lesson From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 105 Jessica Hayllar, Encore From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 106 Jessica Hayllar, A Symphony From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 107 Edith Hayllar, A Cosy Corner Available at: http://www.antiquesimagearchive.com/items/557784.html (Accessed 22 February 2013)

Figure 108 Kate Hayllar, A Gem from the Folio From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 109 Edith Hayllar, B. Is for Brother From Witt Library, Courtauld Institute Figure 1

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Autumn Sunlight (RA1073) Date 1891 Medium Size 21in x14.5in / 53x37cm Other Signed and dated

Figure 2

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Kate Hayllar Title Sunflowers and Hollyhocks (RA 1315) Date 1889 Medium Watercolour Size Other Corporation of London, Guildhall Art Gallery Collection

Figure 3

Artist Mary Hayllar Title The Lawn Tennis Season (RA 641) Date 1881 Medium Oil on card Size 19.3 x 24.3 cms Other Inscribed, Southampton City Art Gallery Collection

Figure 4

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title No 3 Rhododendrons Date Date Unknown Medium Oil on Canvas Size 28 x19 cm Other Wycombe Museum Collection

Figure 5

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title The Lemonade Drink Date Date unknown Medium Oil on Canvas Size 54.5 x 22 cm Other Wallingford Town Council Collection

Figure 6

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Thomas Frederick Wells Esquire (1837 – 1907) Date 1908 Medium Oil on canvas Size 90 x 69 cm Other Wallingford Town Council Collection

Figure 7

Artist Edith Hayllar Title James Hayllar Date 1890 Medium Oil on paper Size 25.1 x 20 cm Other Wallingford Town Council Collection

Figure 8

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title There Came to My Window a Robin Date 1910 Medium Oil on canvas Size 40 x 32 cm Other Rochdale Art Gallery Collection

Figure 9

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title James Hayllar Date 1896 Medium Oil on board Size 17 5/8 x 15 5/8 ins Other Gift of Forbes Inc National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC

Figure 10

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Phoebe Ellen Hayllar Date 1896 Medium Oil on board Size 16 ½ x 14 5/8 ins Other Gift of Forbes Inc National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC

Figure 11

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title A Coming Event (RA 926) Date 1886 Medium Oil on Canvas Size 22.5 x 18.5 in. / 57.1 x 47 cm Other Inscribed lower left: Jessica Hayllar 1886 In The Forbes Collection of Victorian Pictures and Works of Art until auction of Christie's London: Thursday, February 20, 2003 Price Realised £138,650

Figure 12

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title A Summer Shower (RA 420) Date 1883 Medium Oil on canvas Size 53.3 x 43.1 cm (21 x 17 ins) Other Signed and dated ‘Edith Hayllar 1883’ (lower left) and inscribed lower left, Edith Hayllar, 1883. ‘A Summer Shower’ Miss Edith Hayllar/Castle Priory/Wallingford (on a fragmentary label on the reverse) Forbes Collection, sold by Christie’s London Thursday, February 20, 2003 (Lot 104)

Figure 13

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Kate Hayllar Title A Thing of Beauty is a Joy Forever (RA1190) Date 1890 Medium Pencil, pen and black ink and watercolour, heightened with touches of white and with gum arabic Size 13 3/8 x 9¾ in. (34 x 24.8 cm.) Other Signed and dated 'Kate Hayllar/1890' (lower right) Sold in 2003 for £50,190

Figure 14

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Mary Hayllar Title For a Good Boy (RA 641) Date 1880 Medium Oil on canvas Size 16 ¼ x 11 ½ in. (42.3 x 29.2 cm.) Other Inscribed lower left: Mary Hayllar 1880. 2003 Christies, Price Realised £26, 290

Figure 15

Artist All by Mary Hayllar Title Wedding presents, The contents of Tommy’s pockets, All a- blowing and a-growing (respectively)

Medium

Other Photograph of Hayllar family album

Figure 16

Artist All by Mary Hayllar Title Poppies among the corn, The rendezvous, Out of bounds (respectively)

Medium

Other Photograph of Hayllar family album

Figure 17

Artist All by Kate Hayllar Title The old brocaded gown, The eleventh of August, The corner of the mantleshelf, Sunflowers (respectively)

Medium

Other Photograph of Hayllar family album

Figure 18

Artist Kate Hayllar Title The Age of Innocence Date Medium

Other Photograph of Hayllar family album

Figure 19

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Feeding the Swans Date 1889 Medium Paper laid down on board Oil Painting Size 7x9 inches Other Signed Sotheby's: USA. Auction Date: 1997 Private Collection

Figure 20

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Christmas Comes but Once a Year (RA 435) Date 1881 Medium Oil on board Size 21 x 26.5cm (8 1/4 x 10 7/16in) Other Signed and inscribed on label verso, oil on board Sold for £2,400 in 2008

Figure 21

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist James Hayllar

Title A Family Group or The Artist’s Family Date 1864 Medium oil on canvas, Size 91.7 x 70.7 cm Other Inscribed National Gallery of Canada Collection

Figure 22

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Going to My Uncle’s (RA 79) Date 1880 Size 9 ¾ x 6 ¾ in. (24.8 x 17 cm) Other Written on the back: “The Goods and Chattels I have selected as those most likely to be amongst the first to be sacrificed to the Pawnbrokers”. Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 23

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Cottage Fare Date 1880 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 24

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title The Hallway Date 1882 Medium on board Size 8 ½ x 6 ½ in. (21.5 x 16.5 cm.), Other Signed and dated

Figure 25

Artist Mary Hayllar Title Poppies Among the Corn Date 1883 Medium Size Other Private Collection

Figure 26

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Mary Hayllar Title A River Bank Date Medium Size Other Witt library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 27

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Lilies of the Field Date 1905 Medium Size Other Private Collection, Courtauld Institute

Figure 28

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Kate Hayllar Title The Age of Innocence (RA 984) Date 1894 Medium Water colour on paper Size Other

Figure 29

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Kate Hayllar Title Roba di Roma (RA 1285) Date 1892 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 30

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Mary Hayllar Title The Contents of Tommy’s Pockets Date Medium 1887 Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 31

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Teaching Date 1895 Medium oil on canvas, Size 21 5/8 by 17 5/8 in., 54.9 by 44.9 cm Other Signed and dated 1895 Exhibited: San Francisco, M.H. De Young Memorial Museum, The San Francisco Collector, 1965, no 79, illustrated

Figure 32

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Wallace’s Exit Date 1882 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 33

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title An Early Cooper Date 1882 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 34

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Mary Hayllar Title Little Flora’s Wreath (RA 1884) No 1659 Date 1884 Medium Size 27 x 19in. (68.5 x 48,3 cm) Other Signed and dated 1884 Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Plate 35

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Mary Hayllar Title Little Flora Date 1884 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 36

Artist Mary Hayllar Title Christmas Eve Date Medium Size Other Private Collection

Figure 37

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Mealtime Date 1882 Medium Size Other Dudley Gallery 1882 Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 38

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title A Quiet Pipe Date Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 39

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title As Hungry as A Hunter (RA 1882) No 74 Date 1882 Medium Oil on board Size 15 x 10 ¾ (37.8 x 27.3) Other Signed and dated

Figure 40

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Duck and Green Peas Date 1882 Medium oil on Canvas Size 9 5/8 x 7 5/8 in. (24.4 x 19.3 cm.) Other signed and dated 'Jessica Hayllar 1882 and further signed and inscribed '’Ducks and green peas' Miss Jessica Hayllar Castle Priory Wallingford' (on an old label on the reverse) The painting formerly belonged to John Osborne, the playwright, and his wife Helen, who gave the picture to the present vendor.

Figure 41

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Mary Hayllar Title The Rendezvous Date 1882 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 42

Artist Edith Hayllar Title The First of October (RA 885 ) Date 1888 Medium Size 25 x 36 in (63.5 x 91.5 cm) Other Signed and dated 1888 Provenance James Hayllar, Christie’s Feb 25, 1899, lot 105 Private Collection

Plate 43

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title The Sportsman's Luncheon1891 Date Medium Oil on card Size 5 x 6 3/4 in. (12.7 x 17 cm.) Other Signed with initials 'EPH' (lower left) Christies: United Kingdom Auction Date: 2009

Figure 44

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Mary Hayllar Title Out of Bounds Date 1883 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 45

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title A Punting Party Date Date unknown Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 46

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title ‘E Went That Way, Sir Date Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 47

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Kind Enquiries Date Date unknown Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 48

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Afternoon Tea/ Five O’clock Tea (RA 132) Date 1895 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 49

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Intruders Made Welcome Date 1898 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 50

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Caught Date 1899 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 51

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title A Cosy Chat Date Unknown/probably 1890s Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 52

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Tea or Coffee Date 1882 Medium Size Other Dudley Gallery 1882 Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 53

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title The Single Married, The Married Happy Date 1887 Medium Size Misc. Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 54

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Seniores Priores (RA 889 ) Date 1855 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 55

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Best of Friends Must Part Date 1881 Medium Size Other Dudley Gallery 1881 Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 56

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title The Last to Leave RA (611) Date 1884 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 57

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Choosing a Spray (RA975) Date 1889 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 58

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is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title The Finishing Touch (RA 819) Date 1892 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 59

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Artist Mary Hayllar Title The Tennis Party Date 1880 Medium Oil on panel Size 7 x 9 ½ inches Other Signed and dated

Figure 60

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Sunshine Date 1884 Medium Size Other Dudley Gallery 1884 Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 61

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Artist Edith Hayllar Title Hand Parcels Date 1884 Medium Size Other 1885 Liverpool Walker Gallery Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 62

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Finishing Touches Date 1887 Medium Size Other Exhibited. Institute of Oil Painters 1887 The girl at the easel is said to be Edith Hayllar Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 63

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is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Sister Arts Date 1891 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 64

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Farmhouse Butter and Eggs Date Medium Size Other Private Collection

Figure 65

Due to copyright restrictions the image

is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title House Cleaning Date 1882 Medium Oil on Board Size 11 x 9 in (28 x 23ccm) Misc. Signed and dated/Jessica Hayllar 1882 (lower left) Other Sale 5879, Victorian and Traditionalist Art, 25 Feb 2009, London South Kensington, Price Realised £2, 125

Figure 66

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title A Present from the Farm Date 1881 Medium Size Misc. Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 67

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Mary Hayllar Title Wedding Presents (RBA1881) Date 1881 Medium Oil on board Size 7,8 x 9,5 in. / 19,7 x 24,2 cm Other Signed and dated 'Mary Hayllar 1881' (lower right) and inscribed verso 'Wedding Presents Miss Mary Hayllar Castle Priory Wallingford’ Sold at Bonhams New York: Tuesday, October 21, 2008 [Lot 234]

Figure 68

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Blackberry Tart Date 1885 Medium on board Size 41 x 31.5cm Other Signed and dated 1885 Possibly exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists as A Helping Hand 1886 No 423 Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 69

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist James Hayllar Title Perplexed Date 1874 Medium Canvas Size 36 x 28 in (91.5 x 71 cm) Other Signed and dated Royal Academy, 1874, No. 983 My Legal Adviser

Figure 70

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Christmas Dinner at the Rectory Date 1883 Medium Size Other 1884 The Institute Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 71

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Artist James Hayllar Title The Thorn Date 1884 Medium Size Other

Figure 72

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Mary Hayllar Title Helping Gardener (RA787) 1885 Date 1884 Medium Oil on canvas Size 56 x 79 cm (22.05" x 31.1") Other Private collection

Figure 73

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Kate Hayllar Title Finished and Framed (RA 1179) Date 1888 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 74

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Artist Kate Hayllar Title The Eleventh of August (RA1057), Date 1887 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 75

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Return from Confirmation (RA 822 ), Date 1888 Medium Size Other

Figure 76

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Artist Title Dining-room Woodwork, Messrs. Howard and Sons Date 1881 Medium Size Other Art Journal , (1881), p 204

Figure 77

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is not available.

Title View from the Library, Garrick Club Date 1885 Medium Size Other Art Journal, (1885), p. 341

Figure 78

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is not available.

Artist Title The Studio of Edward Unger Date 1885 Medium Size Other Art Journal, (1885), p 341

Figure 79

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Artist Edith Hayllar Title Sunflowers Date Date unknown Medium Size Other Witt Library

Figure 80

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Sunflowers Date 1884 Medium Size Other Dudley Gallery 1884 Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 81

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title The Morning Lesson (RA 688) Date 1893 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 82

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Title View of Dining Room

Other From “A Connoisseur and His Surroundings – Mr James Orrock RI, at 48 Bedford Square” Art Journal, (1892), p. 13.

Figure 83

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is not available.

Artist F.D. Millet Title The Fireside Student’ Date 1899 Medium Size Other Art Journal, (1893), p 27

Figure 84

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title All Absorbing (RA 546 ) Date 1898 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 85

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is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Jack Ashore (RA799) Date 1887 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Fig 86

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is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title A Perfect Angel (R.A. 683) Date 1898 Medium Size 26 ½ x 9 ½ (67.5 x 49.5) Other Signed and dated Also known as The Property of a Lady

Fig. 87

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is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Kittens (R.A.) Date 1901 Medium Size Other

Figure 88

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is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Fresh from the Altar (RA 972) Date 1890 Medium Size Other

Figure 89

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Fresh from the Font (RA 776) Date 1887 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 90

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Through the Looking Glass (RSA 608) Date Medium Size Other Exhibited at the Royal Society of British Artists (608) and sold at the time for £42, a price close to what James Hayllar’s paintings usually achieved. Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 91

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title When First They Met (RA 277) Date 1892 Medium Size Misc. Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 92

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title A Lady Making Posies from Primroses (1887) and also The Date Button Hole (1888)

Medium Size Other

Figure 93

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is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Drawing From the Round Date 1889 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 94

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Sweet Scented Roses (RA 1895) Date 1895 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 95

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is not available.

Artist Kate Hayllar Title Eastern Presents Date 1884 Medium Water colour Size 4 ¾ X 6 ½ in Other Signed and dated 1884

Figure 96

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Eastern Presents (RA 883) Date 1885 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 97

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Artist Kate Hayllar Title Pot Pourri(1891), (RA 1320), Date

Medium Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 98

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title The Old Brocaded Gown (RA 1178) Date 1885 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 99

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is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title A Committee of Taste (RA 928) Date 1891 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 100

Artist Edith Hayllar Title Nuts and Wine, (RA 801)

Date 1891 Medium Size Other Private Collection

Figure 101

Artist Mary Hayllar Title All a-blowing and a-growing (RA 1538) Date 1882 Medium Size Other From a Hayllar family album

Figure 102

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title The First of September 1887 (RA 778) Date 1886 Medium Size 18 ¼ x 25 ¼ in. (46.3 x 65.5 cm) Other Signed and dated 1886 and inscribed on a label on the reverse

Figure 103

Due to copyright restrictions the image is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Some of the Choir (RA 1109) Date 1889 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 104

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title The Dancing Lesson (RA 688) Date 1893 Medium Size Misc. Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 105

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Artist Jessica Hayllar Title Encore (RA387) Date 1894 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 106

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is not available.

Artist Jessica Hayllar Title A Symphony Date Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Plate 107

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is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title A Cosy Corner Date 1897 Medium Size 20 by 14 in. 50.8 by 35.5 cm Misc. Signed Edith Hayllar and dated 1897 (lower right) Other Sotheby's: USA Auction Date: 2009

Figure 108

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is not available.

Artist Kate Hayllar Title A Gem from the Folio (RA 1093) Date 1893 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute

Figure 109

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is not available.

Artist Edith Hayllar Title B. is for Brother (RA 476) Date 1893 Medium Size Other Witt Library, Courtauld Institute