Reconsidering Professionalism: Women, Space and Art in England, 1880-1914 Maria Patricia Quirk Bachelor of Arts (Hons 1A)

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Queensland in 2015 School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry

1 Abstract

The expansion of women’s participation in the fine and illustrative arts occurred concurrently to the professionalisation of those fields, but women’s relationship with artistic professionalism was fragile and ill defined. Their pathways towards “becoming” professional did not universally conform to the criteria and benchmarks that had come to represent the professional artist ideal. The fact that professional women artists were primarily middle-class in origin further complicated their relationship with traditional understandings of female labour; the working experiences of middle-class, female workers were difficult for their contemporaries to categorise and remain elusive today. This thesis examines what happened when middle-class women artists used their education and talent for the purposes of earning a living, rather than for pleasure and refinement. It defines what qualifications, attributes and achievements women needed to possess in order to separate themselves from the ubiquitous cultural stereotype of female amateurism, and be recognised by their peers and the broader public as professionals—that is, serious practitioners who dedicated their working lives to the production of art.

The framework of professionalism is thus utilised for the purposes of assessing which of its standards and markers women had to possess in order to practice and be perceived as viable working artists. This is achieved by evaluating the usefulness and necessity of key professional mechanisms and spaces to women artists’ professional legitimacy: art schools, artistic societies, studio spaces, art dealerships, commercial galleries and publishing houses. I argue that the widespread association between women and amateurism meant that women artists, regardless of their talent, education or family connections, could not describe themselves as professionals without proving their legitimacy and value via the most objective means possible—the market. The external markers and symbols of professionalism developed by (male) artists throughout the nineteenth century were thus relevant to women to the extent that they supported that end. This is both a social and an economic history of the working conditions of middle-class artists in England, that interrogates how women “became” professionals in the years between 1880 and 1914.

2 Declaration by author

This thesis is composed of my original work, and contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference has been made in the text. I have clearly stated the contribution by others to jointly-authored works that I have included in my thesis.

I have clearly stated the contribution of others to my thesis as a whole, including statistical assistance, survey design, data analysis, significant technical procedures, professional editorial advice, and any other original research work used or reported in my thesis. The content of my thesis is the result of work I have carried out since the commencement of my research higher degree candidature and does not include a substantial part of work that has been submitted to qualify for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution. I have clearly stated which parts of my thesis, if any, have been submitted to qualify for another award.

I acknowledge that an electronic copy of my thesis must be lodged with the University Library and, subject to the policy and procedures of The University of Queensland, the thesis be made available for research and study in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968 unless a period of embargo has been approved by the Dean of the Graduate School.

I acknowledge that copyright of all material contained in my thesis resides with the copyright holder(s) of that material. Where appropriate I have obtained copyright permission from the copyright holder to reproduce material in this thesis.

3 Publications during candidature

“An Art School of Their Own: Women’s Ateliers in England, 1880-1920”, Woman’s Art Journal 34, no.2 (2013): 39-44

Publications included in this thesis

No publications included.

4 Contributions by others to the thesis

No contributions by others.

Statement of parts of the thesis submitted to qualify for the award of another degree

None

5 Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been produced without the help and support of my supervision team, post-graduate colleagues, friends and family. I would firstly like to thank my principal supervisor, Dr Geoff Ginn, who has been a mentor to me since I was an undergraduate student. Geoff’s relentless optimism, insightful academic guidance, and encouragement have been hugely valuable to me over the past three and a half years. I also thank my associate supervisors. Dr Sarah Pinto has provided generous, judicious and warm-hearted academic and professional advice and has made herself constantly available to me despite the geographical distance between us. Associate Professor Morris Low graciously took on my supervision with enthusiasm and conscientiousness, and I am grateful for his careful and exacting feedback on my work. I extend a special thanks to Sandra Hogan for her generosity in proofreading this thesis.

I am grateful to the professional and administrative staff at the University of Queensland’s School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry for their help throughout my candidature. I was fortunate to receive financial support from the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry to undertake research in the United Kingdom, and I extend a special thanks to the UQ Graduate School for awarding me the International Travel Award to support further research trips. I am grateful for the assistance of staff at the Victoria and Albert’s National Art Library and Archive of Art and Design, the Tate Archive, the Glasgow School of Art, the Craft Study Centre, Women’s Art Library and University of Brighton. I also thank the staff at the UQ Social Sciences and Humanities Library for their assistance in acquiring and obtaining sources for this thesis.

I was lucky to undertake this project alongside many like-minded post-graduate students with whom I enjoyed camaraderie, thoughtful discussion and mutual understanding. I am grateful for sharing this experience with Romain Fathi, Samuel Finch, Samantha Bedgood, Anna Temby and Lachlan Fleetwood. I want to extend a special thanks to Micheline Astley-Boden, who has been a constant source of encouragement and support over the past four years and an invaluable sounding board for ideas.

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I am immensely grateful to my friends and family for their love and support over the course of this project. Candice Chan and Bridget Mellifont have been steadfast in their friendship and I greatly appreciate their unwavering encouragement and offers of support. Kathleen Brophy, Holly Woodcroft, Alex McLaren, Jason Anderson, Jack Hallahan, Hulton King and Loretta and Sephora Johnston have provided much needed distraction and cheer.

This thesis would not have been completed without the moral and financial support of my family. I thank my sisters, Susie Gore and Roslynn Quirk, for their perpetual interest in my well-being and happiness. My parents, Michael and Patricia Quirk, have been unwavering in their support of this project and myself. Their home has been a haven and their love a bulwark against all the challenges this project has presented and for that I am immeasurably grateful. Lastly, my deepest gratitude and appreciation is extended to Daniel Troy, my partner and champion, whose unconditional support, enthusiasm, patience, and relentless belief in my abilities have sustained me throughout the course of my candidature.

This thesis is dedicated to my parents. “Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living, the other helps you make a life.” Sandra Carey.

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Keywords art history, women’s history, professionalism, art market, nineteenth century, England, studios, book illustration

Australian and New Zealand Standard Research Classifications (ANZSRC)

ANZSRC code: 210305, British History, 70% ANZSRC code: 190102, Art History, 30%

Fields of Research (FoR) Classification FoR code: 2103, Historical Studies, 80% FoR code:1901, Art Theory and Criticism, 20%

8 TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 10

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ARTISTS AND THE LIMITS OF THE PROFESSIONAL IDEAL .. 11

CHAPTER ONE: SUPPLYING THE PLACE OF AN OF INVENTIVE GIFT: THE LIMITATIONS AND RECOMPENSES OF ART EDUCATION FOR WOMEN ...... 36

CHAPTER TWO: STUDIO LIFE FOR THE LADY ARTIST: THE FUNCTION AND MEANING OF STUDIO SPACE FOR WOMEN’S PROFESSIONAL ARTISTIC IDENTITIES...... 72

CHAPTER THREE: MEMBERS OF THE CLUB: WOMEN, PROFESSIONAL ART SOCIETIES AND THE LEGITIMISATION OF ARTISTIC PRACTICE ...... 112

CHAPTER FOUR: “FINDING A MARKET FOR HER WARES”: WOMEN PAINTERS AND THE BUSINESS OF ART ...... 149

CHAPTER FIVE: “A GOOD AND STEADY INCOME MAY BE MADE”: MAKING A LIVING THROUGH COMMERCIAL ILLUSTRATION ...... 198

CONCLUSION ...... 230

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 245

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List of Figures

Figure 1 Life-Class at the Female School of Art, Illustrated London News, June 20, 1868...... 46 Figure 2: Life Drawing at the Slade School of Art, Illustrated London News, 26 February, 1881...... 52 Figure 3: Life drawing of a seated model by Evelyn De Morgan (nee Pickering), 1875. © De Morgan Foundation...... 57 Figure 4: The Sea Maidens by Evelyn De Morgan, 1886. © De Morgan Foundation. The model for all figures was Jane Hales...... 57 Figure 5: Heatherley’s Art School by Nellie Joshua, 1902. © Liss Llewellyn Fine Art...... 64 Figure 6: On A Fine Day by Elizabeth Forbes, 1903. © City of London Corporation 90 Figure 7: The Lawn Tennis Season by Mary Hayllar, 1881. © Southampton City Art Gallery ...... 93 Figure 8: Louise Jopling in her Kensington Studio. Windsor Magazine, 1906...... 98 Figure 9: Kate Greenaway’s studio home at 39 Frognal, Hamptead. Photo © Steve Cadman ...... 102 Figure 10: Kate Greenaway’s tea room, pictured in M.H. Spielmann and G.H. Layard’s 1905 biography Kate Greenaway...... 102 Figure 11: The Royal Academy Conversazione, 1891 by G. Grenville Manton. © National Portrait Gallery ...... 118 Figure 12: The Roll Call by Elizabeth Butler, 1874. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015 ...... 122 Figure 13: Advertisement for The Modern Gallery, The Years’ Art (London: J.S. Virtue, 1898)...... 166 Figure 14: A Cottage with Sunflowers at Peaslake by Helen Allingham, c. early 1900s...... 169 Figure 15: A Moment of Idleness by Maude Goodman, 1894...... 173 Figure 16: Sir Nathan Mayer de Rothschild by Louise Jopling, 1878. © National Trust...... 188 Figure 17: A Apple Pie by Kate Greenaway, published by W&J Mackay in 1886. .. 208

10 Introduction: Women Artists and the Limits of the Professional Ideal

It is not enough to be able to draw and paint well; [women] must also know the more difficult art of combining sound business faculty with artistic expression. I once overheard two artists discussing a fellow-painter who had ‘arrived,’ and the remark that ‘he is a good artist, but a better man of business’ probably explained about nine- tenths of his success. “The Women’s Work Bureau: Some Openings for the Artistic”1

In 1902, the painter Louise Jopling reflected on the benefits of remunerative work for women’s happiness and independence. “The most ideal condition…for an artist, is to have to use his or her capacity as a means of livelihood,” Jopling asserted. “She who is born in purple and fine linen has a dangerous rival in the student who knows her chance of obtaining food and raiment depends entirely upon the outcome of the work of her own hands.”2

Throughout her own long, fluctuating and peripatetic career, which extended from the late 1860s to the 1920s, Jopling showcased these values of hard work, independence and ambition to an increasingly professional and commercial art world, in which women were still largely regarded as a distinct and inferior category. Reliant on her own income to support her family, Jopling took an active interest in promoting her own professionalism, and in exploring the meaning and practicalities of artistic professionalism for women more generally. The contradictions and inconsistencies of professionalism as applied to women were modelled in her own career, which saw avid social and professional networking, flirtations with bohemianism and market- focused pragmatism conflict with institutional and educational limitations, commercial reticence and the burdens of female respectability.

Jopling’s exploration of what it meant to be a professional, female artist occurred at a time of radical change for both the English art market and the role of women in the public sphere. New developments in popular modes of displaying, promoting and selling pictures revolutionised the business side of artists’ careers from the middle

1 “The Women’s Work Bureau,” Quiver 47, no. 8 (1912): 809. 2 Louise Jopling, “On the Education of the Artistic Faculty,” in Education and the Professions, ed. Janet E. Hogarth (London: Chapman and Hall, 1903), 118.

11 decades of the nineteenth century onwards. Although art dealers and commercial galleries had operated in England since the seventeenth century, by the 1880s they had gained a central place in the nation’s increasingly cosmopolitan and outward looking art world, and played a crucial role in the way artists gained exposure and sales.3 These and other organisational developments within the art world responded to an expansion and diversification of the art-buying public that began in the middle decades of the century. This phenomenon disrupted both the patronage-based model of selling art and the hierarchies of materials and subjects that had traditionally regulated market value.4 As artists and sellers increasingly courted middle-class audiences and customers, new niches and segments within the market were created that responded to the tastes of this consumer group, while also attempting to create and foster new demands in an increasingly crowded picture market.5

An important aspect of changing market conditions was the increased number of both men and women pursuing art as a full-time, remunerative profession. As institutional barriers to education and organisations declined and cultural attitudes towards women’s employment gradually relaxed, fine and illustrative art were increasingly taken up by women seeking remunerative and creative work to support themselves or their dependents. Although most art schools, galleries and societies conditionally accepted their presence by the 1880s, women continued to occupy a nebulous, ambivalent position within the art world, and the qualifiers of “woman”, “lady”, “amateur” and “feminine” complicated their categorisation and embrace of the label “professional”.

Thus although the expansion of women’s participation in the fine and illustrative arts occurred concurrently to a dynamic professionalising impulse within those fields, women’s relationship with artistic professionalism remained slippery, tenuous and ill-

3 See Anne Helmreich, “Traversing Objects: The London Art Market at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present, eds, Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplede (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 136-141; Patricia De Montfort, “The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition,” in Marketing Art in the British Isles, 147-159. 4 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle-class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 230-244. 5 Julie F. Codell, “From Culture to Cultural Capital: Victorian Artists, John Ruskin and the Political Economy of Art,” in The Political Economy of Art: Making the Nation of Culture, ed. Julie F. Codell (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2008), 27-33.

12 defined.6 Their pathways towards becoming professional and their experiences with the structures of the English art market did not universally conform to the criteria and benchmarks that had come to represent the professional artist ideal. The fact that professional women artists were primarily middle-class in origin further complicated their relationship with traditional understandings of female labour; the working experiences of middle-class, female workers were difficult for their contemporaries to categorise and remain elusive today.

Economically motivated, middle-class women workers are the focus of this thesis. These women’s social and economic backgrounds meant that, as Janice Helland explains, they “could be educated as artists, but were probably not expected to participate fully in the market economy” of art.7 The ubiquity of female amateur artists in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who learned to draw and paint proficiently for the purposes of accomplishment, had familiarised the English public to the notion of women making art.8 It was expected, even encouraged, for women to receive some kind of art education, and it was not unusual for talented students and “dabblers”—as women artists were often termed—to exhibit work publicly at local and national exhibitions.9 The pervasiveness and visibility of women in art schools and in popular culture resulted in the figure of the woman artist becoming commonplace by the last decades of the nineteenth century, but these women were largely defined by their “economic status as dependents.”10

This meant that women making art were not regarded as unusual or untoward, but it also perpetuated the view that all women artists were amateurs. This thesis examines what happened when women of this background challenged that assumption by using their education and talent for the purposes of earning a living, rather than for pleasure

6 Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski, “Introduction: Artistry and Industry – the Process of Female Professionalisation,” in Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, eds. Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 3. 7 Janice Helland, The Studios of Frances and Margaret Macdonald (Manchester: Manchester University press, 1996), 53. 8 Frances Borzello, A World of Our Own: Women As Artists (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 82- 83, 126. 9 Gordon Fyfe, Art, Power and Modernity: English Art Institutions, 1750-1950 (London: A&C Black, 2001), 85. 10 Ibid., 90.

13 and refinement. It seeks to define what qualifications, attributes and achievements women needed to possess in order to separate themselves from the ubiquitous cultural stereotype of female amateurism, and be recognised by their peers and the broader public as professionals—that is, serious practitioners who dedicated their working lives to the production of art. This is both a social and an economic history of the working conditions of middle-class, working artists in England, that interrogates how women “became” professionals in the years between 1880 and 1914.

Literature Review

Forty-five years ago Linda Nochlin asked a question that has reverberated throughout feminist art history until the present day, “Why have there been no great female artists?”11 Four decades into the project of women artists’ reclamation, and after many shifts in focus and methodology, it is worth questioning whether it remains useful to study women artists as a separate and distinct category, an approach that, some might argue, serves to reinforce rather than diminish women’s cultural and academic marginalisation. As early as 1977, the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe labelled the study of women artists a “silly topic.” “Write about women. Or write about artists. I don’t see how they’re connected,” she claimed.12 The problem with this approach, however, is that the professional activities and experiences of women artists remain under-represented in histories of nineteenth-century art. The scarcity of archival material and sources pertaining to the business side of women artists’ practice, in particular, has meant that women are marginalised in the growing field of scholarship on the history of the art market and collecting.

As a result, there is an inadequate understanding of how a significant portion of the artist population in England made money at this time, and insufficient recognition of the radical action of the women who engaged with the increasingly commercial and professional socio-economics of the art world. Recognising that women artists’ negotiation of the professional ideal occurred in parallel with the professionalisation

11 Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” Art News 69 (1971): 22-39. 12 Quoted in Roxana Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life (Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1989), 509.

14 of the English art world more broadly, this study reveals how women distinguished themselves as professionals by charting their relationships with the educational, commercial and social-based criteria for professional legitimacy that consolidated throughout this period. In doing so, it will test the usefulness and relevance of professionalism as a methodological lens for the study of women’s art history.

Linda Nochlin’s intervention into the traditional, masculinist canon of art history forms part of the broad and diverse range of literature that has emerged on the subject of women and art in the past forty years. The study of women’s involvement in fine art was one of the many new areas of scholarship that emerged as part of second wave feminism in the 1970s, which ignited and legitimised academic interest in women’s history and experiences. Feminist art history was one of the earliest sub-branches of women’s history, and the theoretical questions and approaches Nochlin proposed were highly influential amongst the first historians to take a serious and critical interest in women artists.

These approaches focused on the historical recovery of forgotten female artists and the identification of common female imagery, which differentiated women’s work from that of male artists. This “hidden from history” methodology characterised the study of female artists throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Eleanor Tufts’s Our Hidden History: Five Centuries of Female Artists (1974), Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherlands’s Women Artists: 1550-1950 (1976) and Elsa Honig Fine’s Women and Art (1978) uncovered the biographies and oeuvres of individual women artists, and employed art criticism to champion the achievements of female art.13

Studies focusing on women’s art within the English historical context emerged in the 1980s. Charlotte Yeldham’s 1984 monograph Women Artists in Nineteenth Century France and England provided a unilateral study of female artistic activity, including chapters on education, exhibitions, professional organisations and subject matter, as

13 Elsa Honig Fine, Women and Art: A History of Women Painters and Sculptors from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (London: Allanheld & Schram/Prior, 1978); Linda Nochlin and Ann Sutherland Harris, Women Artists: 1550-1950 (New York: Knopf, 1976); Eleanor Tufts, Our Hidden History: Five Centuries of Female Artists (New York: Paddington Press, 1974).

15 well as individual artist biographies.14 Yeldham sought to explain the lack of significant nineteenth-century female artists through a detailed examination of the conditions and limitations women faced throughout their training and professional careers. Like the texts that came before it, Women Artists was devoted predominantly to the presentation of newly uncovered research and information on the lives of women artists, and lacked a strong analytical framework or critical focus. Along with the biographies of particular female artists published in the same period, the work of Yeldham and other early historians of women’s art privileged a personality driven approach, which constructed recognisable narratives for a few “big names” within the discipline. This method complemented traditional approaches to art history, which have drawn criticism in more recent times for focusing too much attention on the “cult of the artist.”15Although the “hidden from history” framework was integral to the development of women’s art history as a field of scholarship, providing new information on the lives of countless forgotten female artists, the drive to uncover women who could stand alongside canonised male artists naturally led to work that tokenised a few “heroines” while continuing to obscure the majority.

Two monographs published in the early 1990s recognised the challenges in considering women artists as a unitary category. Deborah Cherry’s Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (1993) looked at the material conditions of women artists, and the social and economic changes that structured their artistic practices and identities.16 Cherry argued that femininity was not fixed, but shaped by “shifting processes and discursive practices”, and drew attention to the diversity of experiences between her various case studies. The text looked beyond the influence of patriarchy as the social force affecting women’s lives to consider the other conditions and variants which shaped women’s lives and artistic experiences, and was part of an emerging wave of scholarship that considered “women” as a fractured and unstable

14 Charlotte Yeldham, Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France and England (London: Garland Publishing, 1984). 15 See Emma Barker, Nick Webb and Kim Woods, “The Idea of the Artist,” in The Changing Status of the Artist, eds. Emma Barker, Nick Webb and Kim Woods (London: Yale University Press in association with The Open University, 1999), 10-12; Griselda Pollock, “The Missing Future: Moma and Modern Women,” in Modern Women: Women Artists at the Museum of Modern Art, eds. Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwatz (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010), 36-38; Antonia Losano, The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature (Columbus, Ohio University Press, 2008), 20. 16 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993).

16 category. In this way Cherry was building on the approach to women artists articulated ten years prior in Griselda Pollock and Rozsika Parker’s Old Mistresses. In that text, Pollock and Parker resisted presenting the story of women and art as one of exclusion and prejudice, and judged according to the the norms and criteria of “male history.” Their focus was on each woman’s unique relationship with art practice, and not merely on their interactions with the “institutions of art.”17

The heterogeneity of nineteenth-century female artists was also stressed in Women in the Victorian Art World edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr.18 This volume of essays questioned the usefulness of the “separate spheres” ideology in making sense of the professional and artistic lives of women in the period. Like Cherry, many of the authors in the collection claim that these gendered codes were often highly prescriptive and less restrictive than had been assumed. Essays such as Dodd’s Art Education for Women in the 1860s: A Decade of Debate emphasised instead the diversity of motivations and ambitions held by women artists in the mid-to-late- nineteenth century.

These two texts formed part of a methodological shift that took place within the discipline throughout the 1990s, which saw an increased focus on specific elements of the artistic experience and a decrease in generalised, personality driven monographs. Women’s relationship with art educational institutions and exhibition spaces became a popular area of study, as scholars sought to uncover the role women played in the production of culture. Enid Zimmerman and Laurel Lampela used journals such as Art Education and Studies in Art Education to publish microcosmic works on women’s educational trajectory in the late Victorian period.19 They argue that women artists

17 Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), xix. 18 Clarissa Campbell Orr, ed., Women in the Victorian Art World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 19 Laurel Lampela, “Women’s Art Education Institutions in Nineteenth Century England,” Art Education 46, no. 1 (1993): 64-67; Enid Zimmerman, “Art Education for Women in England from 1890-1910 as Reflected in the Victorian Periodical Press and Current Feminist Histories of Art Education,” Studies in Art Education 32, no. 2 (1991): 105-16. Also see Adele Patrick, “Boy Trouble: Some Problems Resulting from Gendered Representation of Glasgow’s Culture in the Education of Women Artists and Designers,” Journal of Art and Design Education 16, no. 1 (1997): 7-16; Pen Dalton, The Gendering of Art Education: Modernism, Identity and Critical Feminism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001); Graeme Chalmers, Women in the Nineteenth Century Art World: Schools of Art and Design for Women in London and Philadelphia (London: Greenwood Press, 1998).

17 benefited greatly from the introduction of independent art schools, modelled on the French atelier system, in the second half the nineteenth century. Lara Perry’s History’s Beauties: Women and the National Portrait Gallery (2006), meanwhile, examines the National Portrait Gallery’s attitude towards women artists, and the role women played within the institution as administrators, patrons and viewers.20 Perry’s book mirrors a recent trend in the history of women’s involvement in the arts, which looks at the ways women were engaged in artistic culture beyond their roles as producers to highlight their involvement in the history of public culture and patronage in the nineteenth century.

Although many of these studies address the meaning of professionalism for women artists to some extent, Patricia Zakreski and Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi focus attention explicitly on this aspect in their edited collection Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century. This collection seeks to explain how “debates about female creativity and professionalisation were defined by the changing relationship between artistry and industry,” and considers the permeable and complicated boundaries between amateur and professional practice and remunerative work.21 In her previous book Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848-1890, Zakreski examined four types of artistic work that middle-class women were involved in— painting, writing, acting and sewing—to argue that the separate spheres paradigm, and the amateur/professional divide, were more flexible than is sometimes supposed. Zakreski illustrates how women artists self-fashioned their professional identities to present art, femininity and domesticity as compatible, although her focus is primarily on the working lives of female writers.22 This work fits with a recent development in scholarship on gender and culture in the nineteenth century that looks at the intersection of gender roles and creative labour, in which the study of literature has received more attention than the fine arts.23 Although they focus on the North American context rather than the English, Laura Prieto’s At Home in the Studio and Kirstin Swinth’s Painting Professionals along with Janice Helland’s Professional

20 Lara Perry, Histories Beauties: Women and the National Portrait Gallery (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 21 Hadjiafxendi and Zakreski, “Introduction: Artistry and Industry,” 2. 22 Patricia Zakreski, Representing Female Artistic Labour: 1848-1890 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 23 Martin A. Danahay, “The Work of Gender in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 43, no. 1 (2010): v.

18 Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Scotland fit into this category by emphasising the working lives and conditions of women artists.24

Swinth and Prieto’s studies reveal how women artists fit into America’s art world at a time when fine art was becoming increasingly professionalised, structured and market focused, developments that mirrored what was occurring in England. Prieto details how women’s experiences with professionalism were different to men’s, who fit more easily within art’s prescribed professional requirements. She posits that women advanced a separate but parallel path to professionalism; this “professional separatism” embraced feminine differenceness while still cultivating the benefits of professional status.25 Prieto suggests that gender identity remained important to women’s artistic practice, as women internalised or accepted feminine expectations and conventions, and she questions Swinth’s assertion that female art students pursued a gender-neutral professional identity, although Swinth too concludes that professionalisation was a “deeply gendered process.”26 Swinth argues that although women were regarded as a threat to professionalism, they recognised the importance of conforming to professional norms to differentiate their practice from that of female amateurs. Women were attracted to professionalism because of its promise of “gender neutrality, objective criteria for advancement and regularised training program.”27 Swinth also shows how the backlash against women artists and the perceived characteristics of their art fuelled the masculinist discourse of art and genius present in American artistic culture in the 1890s, and which helped inform the rhetoric of modernism. Although the concept of art professionalism is at the centre of both of these texts, and both authors reflect on how understandings of professionalism

24 Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalisation of Women Artists in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Janice Helland, Professional Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Commitment, Friendship and Pleasure (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). 25 Prieto writes, the “…gender ideology could also enable women to develop their own route to professionalisation.” It was not the only strategy women used, but the “ability to connect the occupation with ideas about “woman’s nature” proved crucial to overcoming obstacles to women’s participation, or conversely to creating alternative “feminine” paths toward the same end…Gender conventions might thus lead unintentionally to radical consequences as women claimed an increasing number of genres and subjects to be appropriately feminine.” Prieto, At Home in the Studio, 8. 26 Prieto, At Home in the Studio, 245 n1; Swinth, Painting Professionals, 7. 27 Swinth, Painting Professionals, 14.

19 affected, limited or benefitted women, neither questions the usefulness of professionalism as a theoretical framework.

This is not the case in a recent volume on North American women artists, Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970.28 This study continues the feminist project of revising the definitions, values and parameters of art history that have resulted in the marginalisation of women’s artistic activities from traditional canons and histories of art—in this case, the concept of art professionalism itself. Rather than simply broadening conceptions of professionalism to include women, editor Kristina Huneault advocates a rethinking of professionalism as the intellectual framework most suited to women’s art history, in part because professionalism itself is linked to processes of marginalisation. The essays that make up the collection consider the consequences of looking at art history through the lens of professionalism; they reflect on the social factors that informed artists’ ability to achieve professional status, the strategies women used to practice art in an environment dominated by male authority, and the groups of artists who have been shut out of the professional art world altogether, because their work did not conform to typical definitions of professional art. “The un-theorised acceptance of an evaluative division between amateur and professional forecloses opportunities to understand some of the most significant aspects of women’s art production,” Huneault argues.29

There is merit in questioning the academic value of professionalism as a tool for organising art history. As Annmarie Adams and Peta Tancred note, the very idea of professionalism is “so profoundly masculinist” that scholars may “enter into male priorities by using this term.”30 In their history of women in the architectural profession, Adams and Tancred conclude that professionalism has some usefulness and importance for understanding women’s experiences in the field, but determine to accord “considerable thought to the potential significance (or insignificance) of the

28 Kristina Huneault and Janice Anderson, eds. Rethinking Professionalism: Women and Art in Canada, 1850-1970 (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2012). 29 Huneault, “Professional as Critical Concept and Historical Process for Women and Art in Canada” in Rethinking Professionalism, 8. 30 Annmarie Adams and Peta Tancred, Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 122.

20 term.”31 This is a useful approach to the problem of studying women artists’ experiences in relation to a concept tied to its gendered history and implications. In this thesis, I interrogate the value of professionalism as a framework for understanding women’s artistic practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but, instead of broadening the discussion of women’s production of art to include amateur practice, women patrons, art critics and muses32, I question whether traditional understandings and criteria of professionalism and professional development are sufficient to explain the route women followed to achieve economic stability in the fine and illustrative arts.

Research Justification and Methodology

This approach is relevant because scholars have largely overlooked how women responded to the commercial and social developments that shaped the English art world in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and how these new formulations and standards for artistic professionalism affected women’s pathway to earning a living. Building on the work of Zakreski and Helland, my aim is to examine women artists as working women, and to reveal how women who needed or wanted to earn money from art negotiated a field of labour that was increasingly regulated by professional structures. This approach fuses the study of women’s creative labour with the growing field of inquiry dedicated to the history of the art market and collecting. The framework of professionalism is therefore utilised for the purposes of assessing which of its standards and markers women had to possess in order to practice and be perceived as viable working artists. This will be achieved by evaluating the usefulness and necessity of key professional mechanisms and spaces to

31 Ibid., 123. 32 For example, Rosemary O’Day’s response to historians who “sought to place women artists in the context of male ‘professional art’” is to look at the activities of amateur women artists practicing in the 17th and 18th centuries. “Women and Art,” Huntington Library Quarterly 71, no.2 (2008): 325. The impetus to refocus attention on women who did not necessarily paint for public display is highly reasonable, particularly in the face of the dismissive attitude of some art historians to these practitioners. Kristina Huneault argues that looking at women artists through the conventional paradigms of art professionalism can devalue women amateurs, and those who pursued alternative or non-traditional art forms. “Professional as Critical Concept and Historical Process for Women and Art in Canada” in Rethinking Professionalism, 8.

21 women artists’ professional legitimacy: art schools, artistic societies, studio spaces, art dealerships, commercial galleries and publishing houses.

In the 1950s, the American artist Ad Reinhardt claimed that professional artists were simply those who relied on art as a way to make their living. When he consulted his colleagues in the New York School of painters on their interpretations of artistic professionalism, this straightforward, economically derived definition was questioned. James Brooks and Willem de Kooning claimed that professionalism had to be conferred by someone else, both economically, through the legitimising sale of art, and symbolically. “You must be a professional to someone else—not to yourself,” claimed de Kooning. For Barnett Newman, professional simply meant “serious.”33

The debates of the New York school encapsulate some of the major ideas and theories of art professionalism proffered today. Notable among these theories, particularly for scholars interested in European art history, is the “credentialist” formula, which postulates that it was the introduction of the academy system of art training in the United Kingdom that initiated the professionalisation of fine art. This model draws on one of the key principles of professionalism theory, the notion that the process of professionalisation in any industry is dependent on the “formalisation of knowledge.”34 The foundation of schools and universities that imparted specialised, standardised information via an institutional setting was key, it is argued, to professionals’ claim to expert status. This expertise then contributed to the ability of professionals to differentiate themselves from the general population, increasing both their social utility and the market value of their skills.

Some have argued that artists embraced the credentialist approach to professionalism in the nineteenth century because the vocation initially lacked the strict training prerequisites and legitimising requirements of other professions.35 As there were no specific degrees or licences to qualify someone as an artist, the distinction between

33 Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 189. 34 Jeremy Tanner, ed. Sociology of Art: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), 109. 35 Matthew Hargraves, ‘Candidates for Fame’: The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1780-1791 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 28.

22 professionals and amateurs could be difficult to discern. Artists employed the structures of traditional professional culture along with invented, art-specific mechanisms as a means of occupational gate keeping; fulfilling these standards dissociated artists’ from “mainstream social life” and from amateur artistic practice, and this separateness came to be seen “as an essential quality of any true artist,” according to Alison Bain.36

Specialised education, along with the existence of organisations to bestow and protect professional membership, occupational hierarchies based on skills and rewards, and the autonomy of workers to decide on their own fees form the principle criteria modern sociologists have developed to separate professions from other occupational groups.37 Although the “credentialist” theory of art professionalism conforms largely to these criteria, questions remain over the extent to which art can or should be regarded alongside traditional professions and, as a result, art is not included in most general historical and sociological studies of professionalism. As Julie Codell demonstrates, artists only began the process of professionalising at the end of the eighteenth century, and the conditions of their work kept them from participating in and conforming to standard professional ideals.38 Artists’ professional practices diverged from those of the “learned professions,” upon whose principles and behaviour traditional Victorian understandings of professionalism were based. Because fine art as an industry introduced professionalising mechanisms and structures relatively late, and achieved academic recognition as a legitimate professional pursuit even later, debates over the use of the term “professional” to refer to artists existed within the occupation itself throughout the nineteenth century. Artistic professionalism was and remains a changeable and nebulous concept that is highly dependent on social, contextual and individual specificities.

While the professionalism practised by male artists diverged from that of the learned professions, women’s artistic labour was again viewed as anomalous to that of male

36 Roger Coleman, The Art of Work: An Epitaph to Skill (London: Pluto Press, 1988), 78; Alison Bain, “Constructing an Artistic Identity”, Work, Employment and Society 19, no.1 (2005): 28. 37 Linda H. Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 3. 38 Julie Codell, “Artists’ Professional Societies: Production, Consumption and Aesthetics,” in Towards a Modern Art World, ed. Brian Allen (London: Yale University Press, 1995).

23 artists, because of their complicated relationship with commercialism and the association between female artistry and amateurism. The tension between earning a living through commercialisation and maintaining independence from market forces was evident in most nineteenth-century conceptions of professionalism. Professional workers sought to differentiate their work from the mercantile-focused trades by detaching their vocations and motivations from the pursuit of profit, a practice linked to class-based theories of masculine behaviour. As gentlemen, professional men were expected to think “more of duty than of profit” and earn their reputations through “tact and expert knowledge rather than by…financial success.”39 In an industry dedicated to subjective self-expression, the conflict between commerce and professional integrity was strongly felt by both artists ensconced in the academic tradition and by progressives, who pursued the “modernist embrace of market failure as a source of artistic legitimacy.”40

Women seeking professional status within the art world were particularly subject to the anxieties and suspicions generated by the tension between art and commerce and this was problematic for their pursuit of professionalism; because of the widely recognised association between femininity and amateurism, I argue it was even more important for women to legitimatise their artistic practice through participating in the art marketplace than it was for men. As Deborah Cherry explains, “as a category of value amateur is mobilised against women’s art to secure masculine definitions of the artist and the professional.” The association of femininity with amateurism positioned women as “the very antithesis of the professional artist.”41

Securing objective validation through the sale of art was thus of vital importance to women, both practically and performatively, to disrupt suggestions of amateurism and demonstrate their claim to professional status. However, because of their gender, women artists were more vulnerable to the criticism surrounding the commercialisation of art, which weakened their already tenuous claims to artistic

39 Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1900), 52. 40 Daniel Hack, “Literary Paupers and Professional Authors: The Guild of Literature and Art,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1599-1900 39, no. 4 (1999): 694. 41 Cherry, Painting Women, 9.

24 legitimacy. Even more than male artists, women had to occupy a “paradoxical position inside and outside the market,”42 balancing accusations of amateurism with market-derived legitimacy, all while maintaining the feminine decorum expected of women participating in the public sphere.

Most theories of artistic professionalism coalesce around a few central tenets: the comprehensive academy or art school education centred on life study; the studio workspace and the culture it facilitated; membership to artistic societies; and interactions with the art market and the actors who operated it, namely art dealers, auction houses, printers and commercial galleries. These educational, spatial and economic conditions support the two goals of professionalism outlined by Magali Larson in her foundational study of the sociology of the professions: monopolies on both “expertise in the market” and “status in a system of stratification.”43

This thesis addresses these criteria as a series of spaces which, according to traditional, masculinist definitions of professionalism, artists had to gain access to in order to be seen as art professionals. The relevance of each of these spaces to women’s ability to support themselves through artistic practice will be tested by examining the interactions between social power and gender that occurred within them, and evaluating how each space materially benefited and validated women’s professionalism. Women’s artistic professionalism has traditionally been associated with the gaining of qualificatory attributes—such as admittance to the Royal Academy schools and its summer exhibitions. However, I argue that women artists’ professionalism was largely judged and defined by their commercial ambitions and willingness and ability to sell, and not primarily by qualifications and affiliations of this nature. The widespread association between women and amateurism meant that women artists, regardless of their talent, education or family connections, could not describe themselves as professionals without proving their legitimacy and value via the most objective means possible—the market. The external markers and symbols of

42 Jennifer Ruth, Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2006), 22. 43 Margali Larson, The Rise of the Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), xvii.

25 professionalism developed by (male) artists throughout the nineteenth century were thus relevant to women to the extent that they supported that end.

Spatial inquiry thus informs the structure as well as the methodology of this thesis, as each of its five chapters are devoted to interrogating women’s interactions with a specific set of spaces associated with professional art practice. The educational developments, studio arrangements, professional memberships and business strategies of a series of case studies are charted throughout each chapter, and indicate how women artists’ spatial interactions influenced their professional practice and identities.

The notion that space is not merely a passive holder of people and actions has become an accepted idea in recent times. Spatial organisation and confinement was one of the most obvious ways women’s lives were structured and proscribed in the nineteenth century. Since the 1970s, historians of middle-class women have divided space into separate masculine and feminine spheres. The separate sphere didactic has been widely adopted as an organising tool for writing, and as a way to understand Victorian ideologies and understandings of gender.44 This approach, which regards space as inherently gendered, has attracted criticism in recent times for its over-simplified dichotomy. Amanda Vickery argues that the metaphor “fails to capture the texture of female subordination and the complex interplay of emotion and power in family life”.45 Linda K. Kerber points to the highly ambiguous nature of the concept, which, in her opinion, is the reason for its widespread appeal.46 However the idea of separate spheres has proved remarkably resilient to academic debates and critiques. It continues to be seen as a significant, if not the most significant, factor in organising and determining middle-class women’s lives and experiences in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and remains the dominant framework for understanding

44 See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle- Class, 1880-1950 (London: Routledge 2002); Martha Vicinus, ed., Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972); D. Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge 1981); Robert Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres (New York: Longman, 1998). 45 Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” Historical Journal 36, no.2 (1993): 402. 46 Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,” Journal of American History 75, no.1 (1988): 30.

26 space in this context. As Vickery points out, the key terms of “separate spheres”— “privacy” and “domestic”—have become so accepted and ubiquitous that they have bled into other disciplines, including women’s art history. Writing in The Culture of Capital: Art, Power, and the Nineteenth-Century Middle-class, Janet Wolff accepts unilaterally the principles of separate spheres, using the paradigm to understand not just femininity, but the century as whole, including the operation of the art world.47 The ideology also informs the work of influential women’s art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Lynda Nead.48

The use of space as a critical framework for looking at women and art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries continues to be preoccupied with the separate spheres duality. However, historians such as Lynne Walker have recently demonstrated how space can be used for the study of women artist in other ways, informed by social and cultural geography. Rather than meaning being embedded or inscribed in a physical space such as a home or studio, Walker argues that meaning is reproduced through the use and experience of that space. “Spatial definitions and divisions, although culturally sanctioned, were not immutable but amenable to intervention of living agents,” she notes.49 Walker demonstrates that women artists employed spaces defined as personal and domestic to support and foster their identities as professional, publicly visible artistic women.50 Walker’s argument that women’s spatial presence “engendered dissonance between ideology and lived experience,” informs the approach that is employed here.51

47 Janet Wolff, “The Culture of Separate Spheres: The Role of Culture in Nineteenth-Century Public and Private Life,” in The Culture of Capital: Art, Power, and the Nineteenth-Century Middle-class, eds. Janet Wolff and John Seed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 48 See Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society 4th ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007); Deborah Cherry, “Picturing the Private Sphere,” Feminist Art News 5 (1982): 8-11; Elizabeth Darling, and Lesley Whitworth, eds., Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870-1950 (Aldershot: Ashagte, 2007); Lynda Nead, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1988); Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (London: The Women’s Press, 1984); Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988). 49 Lynne Walker, “Women Patron-Builders in Britain: Identity, Difference and Memory in Spatial and Material Culture”, in Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 123. 50 Ibid., 124. 51Lynne Walker, “Vistas of Pleasure: Women Consumers of Urban Space in the West End of London 1850-1900,” in Cracks in the Pavements: Gender/Fashion/Architecture, ed. Lynne Walker (London: Sorella Press, 1992), 6.

27 Space will be used to, firstly, look at the physical places women relied upon to achieve professional artistic careers, and, secondly to examine the interactions between social power and gender within these spaces. Here I implement Michel de Certeau’s definition of space as a “practised place.”52 Central to this understanding is both the practical uses and purposes of a place itself, and the meaning that is created through the social interactions that exist within that place. By using space in this way, the practical ramifications of women’s relationships with different public and artistic spaces, and the ways in which their professional lives were shaped by their access to these places will be illuminated. Women occupied many different positions in the hierarchies of these social and artistic spaces, positions that were determined not only by gender, but also by class, age, education and social and familial connections. The tensions and inconsistencies between women’s experiences and relationships with space challenges the relevance and usefulness of the separate sphere paradigm, and invites a more practical and nuanced examination of women’s spatial interactions.

The first chapter of this study interrogates the influence of women’s growing access to educational spaces to their viability as working artists. Here the notion that art schools were the locus for women’s professional identities, and that formal art education was necessary for women to achieve critical and commercial success, is challenged. It is shown that pursuing educational qualifications was an attractive prospect for women; specialised training was seen as a key criterion for professionalism in the period, and so the attainment of that training held the promise of objective and meritocratic judgment. However, while career advice manuals and columns urged aspiring women artists to pursue art training from respected sources, in practice the attainment of equal educational access and conditions for women— achieved in the last years of the nineteenth century—did little to alter long-held opinions about women’s “natural” creative attributes and abilities or protect them from accusations of amateurism.

On an individual level, the source of a woman’s education was not a major determinant in her eventual commercial and critical success, and the attainment of

52 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press), 117.

28 formal education from a recognised or respected institution did not act alone to legitimate or validate women’s artistic pursuits. While some kind of art education was undoubtedly important to the development of women artists’ careers, the most useful kind of training in terms of immediate employment prospects, the chapter argues, was not obtained from the Royal Academy Schools or the Slade School, but from specialised or apprentice-based programs focused on press illustration, miniature painting or engraving, where practical application and industry involvement was privileged.

Chapter Two examines women artists’ access to working spaces, at a time when studios were at the centre of artistic culture. At its most fundamental level, a studio was a functional physical space that contained the material artifacts and conditions needed to produce art. Studios’ ancillary purposes—as showrooms, meeting places and entertainment spaces—were viewed by the art literate public and by artists themselves as almost as important as their practical productive uses. It is shown that studio space dedicated to their own artistic pursuits supported women’s internal self- identification as artistic professionals. A marker of seriousness, professionalism and industry, it was a space that produced and fostered women’s occupational identities, endowing credibility and validity in an industry marked by its ambiguous professional boundaries.

The third chapter reveals women’s interactions with the professional societies that conferred and monitored professional status throughout the art world. It demonstrates that traditional professional societies such as the Royal Academy continued to hold value for many women as a marker of establishment acceptance long after their relevance in the art world had been challenged by new exhibiting groups. It shows that the gradual liberalisation of professional art societies’ policies towards women’s general participation did not extend to women’s involvement in the management of those societies, a position that reflected a deeply rooted reluctance to allow women to judge male artist’s work from a position of authority. Societies were for many women the most important link to the business side of art and their greatest chance for socially acceptable self-promotion. Their interactions with professional societies did not bring them visibility and legitimacy in the art world that was equal to that of men, but expanding organisational opportunities and their links to art commerce did enable

29 more women to operate as artistic professionals than ever before, and access the artistic infrastructure necessary to be taken seriously as individual participants in Britain’s art eco-system.

The last two chapters examine spaces of art-commerce, and reveal the places, people and mechanisms women needed to interact with in order to find a market for their wares. For women to sell enough art to make a living they had to participate in these complex and interlocking structures and spaces and in turn, have their worth, prestige and professional status legitimised by the actors and mechanisms that operated within the art marketplace. It is argued that women were engaged with new developments in the increasingly professionalised and cosmopolitan retail market for art; many built reputations and earned a livelihood by selling art through the commercial market system and benefited from its business-like approach to art and artists. However sexual difference remained a disadvantage for women artists attempting to sell art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in part because of the public and mercantile nature of the physical spaces the art market inhabited.

Chapter Four explores women’s relationship with art dealers, commercial galleries, and art patrons. It argues that, for women painters, engaging with the art market and art consumers was the threshold for professional status; more than any other facet of their artistic practice, selling art legitimised women artists’ worth. On a practical level, selling art was necessary for women to earn a living from their artistic practice. Engaging with the art market and patronage subjected women’s work to objective validation and declared its purpose to be more than domestic accomplishment, and this shift from the subjective to the objective was crucial to their art being taken seriously.

Chapter Five focuses specifically on the women who made a living through commercial and press illustration by examining their interactions with spaces of publishing and advertising. I argue that women benefited hugely from the development of these fields, which were a major feature of England’s popular visual culture from the 1860s onwards. In these occupations, the “natural” characteristics that were seen as inhibiting women’s creativity and success in fine art helped rather than hindered their attainment of consistent artistic work. Engaging in the specialised, consumer-focused work that characterised illustration, and accessing the spaces and

30 people that provided this work, including publishers, stationery firms, editors and agents, provided women with a better chance of earning a stable living through artistic practice than perhaps any other avenue to artistic professionalism. Women’s activities as illustrators for illustrated newspapers and magazines, and for book publishers is examined, followed by a discussion of their employment as commercial illustrators, where they produced artistic ephemera for stationery and publishing forms and for advertising firms and brands. The opportunities presented by the advent of Christmas and greeting cards, calendars and postcards are revealed and the practical working conditions of women working as in-house artists and freelancers are illuminated to demonstrate the viability and appeal of this path to artistic professionalism.

Taken together, these five chapters mount an argument as to what women artists had to do to be recognised as professionals at the end of the nineteenth century. The fact that amateur women artists did not seek monetary reward for their work was what made their artistic practice acceptable and compatible with the ideals of Victorian femininity.53 As long as her artistic education and exhibiting were for the purposes of personal pleasure, her ambitions modest and her pecuniary gain only “pin-money,” then a woman’s artistic enterprise was not threatening to or compatible with men’s cultural and commercial monopoly on art. But, while not earning money had naturalised women’s presence in the world of art, it was also the factor that ensured they were not regarded as serious professionals, who were willing and able make art the central focus of their lives.

I argue that holding a qualification from a respected art school, or even exhibiting with an artistic society, were not sufficient to distinguish a woman as a professional, because amateur artists could and did engage in these activities regularly and visibly by the end of the nineteenth century. It was only through demonstrating commercial ambition and selling their work, either through the art market or through publication, that women could separate their intentions and practice from that of amateur artists. The other attributes and qualifications commonly associated with professionalism— education, studio space, and organisational membership—were helpful to women in

53 Susan Butlin, “A New Matrix of the Arts: A History of the Professionalisation of Canadian Women Artists, 1880-1914,” (PhD thesis: Carlton University, 2008), 74.

31 their own right, but their major contribution to her perceived and lived professionalism were in the ways that they supported her commercial viability. Women who achieved the greatest professional recognition and legitimacy were thus those who were able to achieve visible commercial success and validation while at the same time maintaining a public identity that was compatible with late Victorian strictures of middle-class female behavior.

The dates that frame this discussion differ from many other studies of women and art that focus on the same era, but they were chosen to reflect a period when women artists’ relationship with professionalism was at a decisive point.54 By 1880 many of the battles women artists had waged for access to art training and exhibitions had been won. Women could access serious art training at the nation’s premiere institutions, and were benefitting from a proliferation of small, private art schools that offered women a more wide-ranging and flexible education than they had ever enjoyed before. Women were also accepted participants at major exhibitions, and had the option to join single-sex art societies founded to promote and further women artists’ careers. However, despite these advancements, middle-class women were still regarded as unnatural occupiers of the artistic sphere and were viewed as anomalous to the traditional ideal of the professional artist. Despite access to training and increased exhibition opportunities, their relationship with professionalism remained tenuous and uneasy, and this thesis explores the tensions inherent in that relationship. The period between 1880 and 1914 was also a significant one for England’s art market, which saw a decisive shift away from the patronage model of selling art and the introduction of new modes of marketing and consuming art. As remuneration is at the heart of the definition of female professionalism presented here, it is necessary to chart women’s negotiations with professionalism alongside the shifts and changes that took place within the art market and art commerce throughout this time.

54 A number of significant monographs have focussed on the period 1850-1900, or on the decades between the two world wars. See Karen Brown, Women’s Contributions to Visual Culture, 1918-1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008); Anthea Callen, Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement, 1870-1914 (London: Astragal Books, 1979); Kat Deepwell, Women Artists Between the Wars: ‘A Fair Field and No Favour’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); David Peters Corbett and Lara Perry, eds. English Art 1860-1914: Modern Art and Identity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). An exception is Jude Burkhauser’s Glasgow Girls: Women in Art and Design 1880-1920 (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1993).

32 This study focuses on the social and economic conditions of women artists’ careers, and is not an art-historical survey of the items individual women produced or the art movements they participated in. Accordingly, I do not include a catalogue raisonné for the artists discussed or offer analysis pertaining to their aesthetic contribution to the period’s visual culture, although illustrations are provided where relevant. Nor is this thesis intended to contribute to the theoretical development of feminist art history. My engagement with women as a category for study owes much to Linda Alcoff’s critique of two major approaches to feminist theory, cultural feminism and post- structuralist feminism, which remains valuable and relevant twenty-five years after its first publication. Cultural feminists, Alcoff argues, attempt to correct patriarchal characterisations of women by constructing a counter, female-focused culture by which to re-appraise and re-define women’s activities and characteristics. Cultural feminists do not challenge the process of defining women in essentialist terms; they only challenge the role of men in that defining.55 Post structuralist feminist thinkers meanwhile, “reject the possibility of defining women as such at all.”56 By deconstructing the concept of woman, this group argue that all attempts to define or characterise women, feminist included, are misguided, as they fail to challenge the discourse of power and the cultural mechanisms that shape human subjectivity and “perpetuate sexism.”57

Highlighting the shortcomings of both of these approaches—summarised as representing the two extremes of essentialism and nominalism—and drawing on the work of Teresa de Lauretis and Denise Reily, Alcoff posits a third approach that positions the subject as “nonessentialised and emergent from a historical experience,”58 thereby safeguarding against the impulse to make universal and non- revisable conclusions about women and “the feminine” that are separate from her external, historical position. Alcoff’s “positional definition” of the concept of woman highlights the external context and situation of a person and shows how her identity and position is defined “relative to a constantly shifting context” and the objective

55 Linda Alcoff, “Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs, 13, no.3 (1988): 407. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid., 415. 58 Ibid., 433.

33 economic conditions, cultural and political institutions and ideologies of her surrounds.59 Women are not solely and passively defined by these external elements, but they provide a location from which women can interpret and construct their own values and characteristics. Alcoff’s conclusion that “being a ‘woman’ is to take up a position within a moving historical context and to be able to choose what we make of this position and how we alter this context,”60 is a usefully non-essentialist means of understanding the women artists discussed in this thesis. Their working experiences were shaped by the social and economic conditions and circumstances of the period, but the ways in which they responded to and changed that context were individual and specific.

The challenge of understanding these specificities is made more difficult by the current state of the archive relating to women artists’ professional interactions. As Jacques Derrida stated, history is shaped by “archivisation”—the process by which certain items and memories are preserved for posterity and others are not. This process is influenced by social, political and gendered forces and reflects the values of a particular place and time. It is important to recognise the contingent nature of archival research, because, as Derrida claims, archives produce as much as they record history.61 To quote Foucault, archives determine the “law of what can be said”.62 This is particularly pertinent in the study of women, whose activities, experiences and opinions have not traditionally been regarded as worthy of preservation in national and cultural repositories.

Most of the artists I study are not part of England’s conventional artistic canon and the records available to researchers reflect this status. The direction of the thesis is thus determined by the primary material that is available, and by recognising and interpreting the gaps that exist in that material and what those silences mean. Personal archives, where available, are combined with artists’ own writings in the form of memoirs, autobiographies, published interviews, self-authored articles and letters to

59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 435. 61 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16. 62 Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1972), 129.

34 gain insight into individual experience. Some of these materials are inherently performative, dedicated to the task of self-fashioning the writer’s public persona, but this mode of writing captures how women wanted to be perceived, and the means by which they projected and constructed their professional identities.

The biographies and career paths of these individual artists are not considered in isolation, but in relation to the social and artistic context from which they emerged, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s maxim that each artists’ “individual trajectory must be understood as a particular way of traversing the social space.”63 Women’s interest and art periodicals are relied upon to reflect contemporary debates on the nature of artistic professionalism, developments in the business of art and attitudes towards women’s participation in art education and business. Newly developed online databases and projects aid in charting women’s interactions with the commercial art market.

Linda Peterson approached her study of female authorship in the nineteenth century as a process of “becoming,” positioning the women under discussion as inhabiting a “state of always being in process, of always seeking yet never quite achieving secure professional status.”64 In this thesis, I posit that the processes by which women fine and illustrative artists “became” professionals did not always conform to the criteria and standards for professional practice that had crystallised during the last half of the nineteenth century, and which continue to be used to define professionalism today. However, this did not prevent them from achieving what was, I argue, the most important threshold for both publicly acknowledged and internally self-identified professional status: recognition of the objective and communal value of their work through commercial validation. This study of the economics and material conditions of women artists’ careers begins at the space where their own negotiation of professionalism began: the art school.

63 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Invention of the Artist’s Life,” Yale French Studies, 73 (1987): 87n6 64 Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters, 9.

35 Chapter One: Supplying the Place of an of Inventive Gift: The Limitations and Recompenses of Art Education for Women

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the number of art schools catering to women in England increased significantly and rapidly. “There are schools of art without end,” marvelled Girl’s Own Paper in 1892.1 When Tessa Mackenzie attempted to produce a catalogue of London art schools for publication in the mid 1890s, she found the volume difficult to compile because of the new developments that were occurring within the world of art education.2 One reason for the swell in art schools during this period was the increasing demand for training from female students, who were seeking to gain the skills needed to earn a living through artistic practice, or to occupy their time in a productive and educative way that was in line with societal expectation of appropriate feminine behaviour. As this demand was met with the foundation of new schools by both male and female art teachers, the ease with which women could access art training, and the choice and variety of schools that were available to them increased. By the 1880s it had never been easier for women to begin their education in fine or illustrative art or to access professional- grade training in their chosen artistic field.

Hypothetically, the expansion of educational opportunities for aspiring women artists would have made it easier for women to achieve professional status in the art industries, and to be recognised as legitimate actors within the art market. Education and training is a key pillar in traditional understandings and definitions of professionalism, for both art and other occupations. Jeremy Tanner posits that the “formalisation of knowledge” was what set the skills and expertise of professional artists apart from that of the general, art literate public, and this differentiation of knowledge was the basis of their claim to the “special prestige” that professionalism bestowed.3 Art historians have attributed the professionalisation of art itself in large part to changes in art education through the development of the academy system of

1 “Answers to Correspondents: Art,” The Girl's Own Paper, December 3, 1892, 160. 2 Tessa Mackenzie, Art Schools of London (London: Chapman and Hall, 1895), v. 3 Jeremy Tanner, ed., Sociology of Art: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2003), 9.

36 schooling in Europe. From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards, academies controlled access to what was considered “legitimate” artistic training, which, H.T. Nicely argues, was a “necessary ingredient for professional success.”4 These institutions, which included London’s Royal Academy schools, reorganised methods of art training to establish objective and measurable standards of practice; in this way they gained a monopoly on the specialised knowledge expected of professional artists. J.A. Jackson points out that it was through professionally focused, academic training that artists gained access to study from the living model, which was considered central to artists’ education and practice in the nineteenth century. Familiarity with the human body was typically seen as private, mysterious or forbidden by those outside of the field, and so possession of this knowledge formed an important part of artists’ claims to professionalism.5 As properly trained specialists, they were sanctioned to practice the normally taboo activity of observing the human figure and benefit from the technical and artistic advantages that accompanied that study in a way that amateur artists, or those studying outside legitimate educational institutions, could not.6 Theoretical and technical knowledge acquired from a formal and controlled learning environment helped artists secure expert, or “serious” status in the eyes of the public.7

Since at least the 1970s then, art historians and sociologists have positioned the art school as a foundational space for the formation of artists’ occupational identities and professional credentials.8 The expanding field of art education in the nineteenth century saw a fragmentation and specialisation of art training, a process which lessened the RA schools’ monopoly on legitimate art training but increased the expectation for artists to acquire particular qualifications in order to practise in their chosen artistic occupation. The recognised link between standardised, impartial

4 H.T. Nicely, “A Door Ajar: The Professional Position of Women Artists,” Art Education 45, no. 2 (1992): 6. 5 See also Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 29-44. 6 J.A. Jackson, “Professions and Professionalisation – Editorial Introduction”, Professions and Professionalisation, ed. John A Jackson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 7. 7 Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 190. 8 See Ibid., 189-191; Kristen Swinth posits that art schools were a “principal source of professionalisation in art.” Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 12.

37 training and professional art practice was consequently appealing to many women artists in the late nineteenth century, who agitated for equal access to all areas of art education. Professional training purported to judge individuals on their talents, in line with “empirical, rational and objective standards.”9 If women could access suitable training, and achieve success according to the criteria of that program, it followed that their qualification would be judged and respected on its merits, and the individual would be deemed to hold the necessary specialised knowledge and expertise to practise art professionally. In practice, however, the educational route to professionalism did not deliver on its objective and meritocratic promise.

The pedagogical and structural developments that occurred in the field of art education throughout the nineteenth century have been thoroughly explored by both art theorists and feminist art historians. The gendered ideologies and attitudes that informed the inequitable practices and policies of the Royal Academy schools, government schools of design and private art academies, along with the gradual expansion of opportunities for women art students at institutions like the Slade School of Art have been studied by Graeme Chalmers, Deborah Cherry, Sara Dodd and Janice Helland among others.

Chalmers and Cherry emphasise that art schools were structured around ideas of sexual difference, which changed and adapted over time to respond to developments and advances in women’s art training. Educational discrimination against women took its most obvious form in the limitations applied to women’s access to life study—a subject that is central to many accounts of nineteenth-century art education. Life and figure drawing were understood in relation to ideas of purity and decency, and the argument for a gendered ban on life class was defended as a means to protect women’s innate modesty and delicate moral sensibilities.10 Women agitated for full access to the nude model, and formed their own private classes to access the anatomical training they were excluded from, but the matter remained a “vexed issue”

9 Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (Binghamton: Vail-Ballou Press, 1987), 68. 10 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 53-56; Graeme F. Chalmers, Women in the Nineteenth-Century Art World: Schools of Art and Design for Women in London and Philadelphia (London: Greenwood Press, 1998).

38 that roused conflicting, sometimes contradictory attitudes and opinions.11 As Sara Dodd demonstrates, women’s lack of anatomical knowledge and poor training in figure composition were often remarked upon by critics and, while some recognised the limitations imposed on women’s training and blamed art schools for these technical deficiencies, others used the criticism as evidence of women’s “natural” predisposition towards unambitious and imitative subject matter.12 Paula Gillett and Pamela Nunn reveal that even after women gained access to life study at most major art schools, including the Royal Academy, the highly visible presence of female amateur art students continued to damage and challenge their claims to professionalism.13

Building on this research, which disrupts the progressive narrative of women’s inclusion within art education, this chapter argues that art schools were not a foundational space in the establishment of women artists’ professional practice and identities. My emphasis in this discussion is on the discourse concerning art education and professionalism that aired in art periodicals, women’s magazines and female- orientated advice books. Women’s advice columns and magazines, which increasingly focused on questions of women and paid employment during this period, consistently directed aspiring women artists towards particular, legitimising training institutions, and the link between superior training and professional outcomes was solidified in the pages of art periodicals, where public conversations contributing to the development of artistic professionalism took place.

In outlining the art education that was available to women during this period, I contrast the expectations and standards perpetuated in public discourse to the material and practical conditions faced by women attempting to stake a claim to professional status through education. The objective here is not to provide an exhaustive catalogue of the art education that became available to women throughout the nineteenth

11 Ellen Clayton, English Female Artists (London, Tinsley Brothers, 1876), 83. 12 Sara M. Dodd, “Art Education for Women in the 1860s: A Decade of Debate,” in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 18. 13 Paula Gillett, Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 166-172; Pamela Gerrish Nunn, “Dorothy’s Career and Other Cautionary Tales,” in Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, eds. Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 167-185.

39 century, as this has been ably achieved in previous studies. Rather, it is to diversify the discussion of women and art education beyond the traditional emphasis on the life-class debate by focusing on the professional outcomes of the various training women pursued, and the critical discourse that surrounded those options.

In looking at the various qualifications and options women pursued, none of which provided a secure route to professional success, it is argued that the gradual attainment of equal educational access did little to change long-established critical and popular opinions about women’s “natural” artistic aptitudes and the value judgements that accompanied them. Nor did it act as a bulwark against accusations of incompetence or amateurism. Education was necessary for women to achieve the proficiencies required to participate in the commercial and fine art markets, thus providing opportunities for financial and social independence, but this training came from a wide variety of sources and took a range of forms, and did not always conform to established ideas of what constituted professional training. Specialised, apprenticeship style training, for example, could assist women in their career more than a traditional Royal Academy education. Prestigious artistic credentials, regarded by some as shorthand for artistic worth and legitimacy, did not in the case of women translate into higher market value or professional respect. In other words, access to the key spaces of art education was not essential to women artists’ achieving professional recognition or commercial success, and this suggests that the traditional paradigm for understanding and defining professionalism is inadequate in explaining the means by which women made a living through artistic practice at the turn of the twentieth century.

A School Fit For Women: The Royal Female School of Art

The link between art training and women artists’ professional success was firmly set out by the critic and journalist John Cordy Jeaffreson in 1870. In the inaugural issue of Art Periodical and Industrial, one of the many art journals that aired opinion about the state of art professionalism during this period, Jeaffreson disputed the widely held view that women lacked the innate and necessary genius that was required to produce great art. Jeaffreson proposed that the problem instead lay in the limited and

40 insufficient training women had access to, linking the acquisition of specialised education to professional outcomes. The women who had achieved recognised professional success up until that point, he pointed out, had benefited from personalised and formative training within the family, which substituted and supplemented the inadequate schooling they could receive elsewhere.14 The foundation of schools to specifically cater to women students and their unique attributes was thus the factor most likely to see women enter the profession in greater numbers and with greater success than ever before was. He positioned the Female School of Art—founded in 1843 as a subsidiary of the government’s design school scheme—as the institution best suited to filling this need.

Government schools of design were the major source of art education in England from the 1850s until the early twentieth century. The “official centre and controlling power” of the training scheme was the National Art Training School at South Kensington, founded as the Government School of Design in 1838. Although plagued with conflict and controversy in its early years of operation, by the 1880s the National Art Training School and the some 150 other schools that were a part of its network had evolved into key players in English art education.15 The Royal Female School of Art (RFSA)16 was one of the eleven branch schools established in London; although women students were allowed to attend classes at the Government School of Art and the other, co-educational branch schools, the RFSA was specifically founded to provide female students of the working and artisan classes with the opportunity to train in design for the purposes of working in commercial or industrial art occupations.17

14 John Cordy Jeaffreson, “Female Artists and the Art Schools of England,” Art Pictorial and Industrial 1 (1870): 235. 15 Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labour, Empire and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 20. 16 The school underwent multiple name changes throughout its lifetime. It was founded as the Female School of Design in 1842, and renamed the Female School of Art in 1851. Upon receiving the Queen’s patronage in 1887 it was known as the Royal Female School of Art. In contemporary press reports the school was also referred to variously as the Queen’s Square School, the Bloomsbury School and the Royal School, Bloomsbury. Confusion over the school’s name persists in secondary literary, and this has led to the perpetuation of misinformation. The school was also involved in national competitions held at the South Kensington School, and this has led some authors to incorrectly place its location at the South Kensington precinct. From 1860 onwards it was located at Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury. 17 Stuart Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2004), 171-172.

41

The question of what areas of artistic work were most naturally suited to women was addressed extensively in popular and artistic journals of this period, as increased consumer demand for decorative and industrial art objects opened up new remunerative fields of artistic practice. 18 The design industries were typically positioned in this discourse as uniquely suitable for women; they occupied an ideal intermediary space between the more mentally demanding discipline of fine art and the physically demanding occupations associated with manufacturing. The art writer Lucy Baxter’s19 explanation of the artistic functions of women is typical of this reasoning. Writing in Magazine of Art in 1884 on the new artistic careers available to women, Baxter divided artistic ability into three discrete facets—genius, talent and aptitude—and suggests that the function of each of these abilities was different. Women were more likely to be endowed with talent and aptitude than genius, and so the decorative arts, which required dexterity and discipline, and found ready application within the home, were particularly appropriate.20

The Royal Female School of Art’s founding principles were aligned with this model of artistic ability. Decorative and applied art training was initially privileged over painting in order to provide students with the best opportunity of obtaining “honourable and profitable employment.”21 Graeme Chalmers suggests that it was the school’s male management committee who influenced the curriculum in this regard; they did little to challenge the association between women and the dexterous, imitative facets of decorative art and held sway over the school’s superintendent, Louisa Gann.22 He argues the school’s function was consistently presented as providing productive and remunerative skills that were in line with women’s natural domestic and feminine aptitudes. However, this discourse masked the school’s professional purpose and initiatives under a rhetorical cloak of respectable and

18 Patricia Zakreski, “Creative Industry: Design, Art Education and the Woman Professional,” in Crafting the Woman: Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century, 153. 19 Writing under the pseudonym Leader Scott 20 Leader Scott, “Women At Work: Their Functions in Art,” Magazine of Art (January 1884): 98-99. 21 This mirrors the initial principles of the Schools of Design, “The School of Design, which were established “strictly with a view to the benefit of those who desire to study commercial art with reference to its use in some industrial occupation…can be admitted.” Quoted in Chalmers, Women in the Nineteenth Century Art World, 51. 22 Ibid.

42 conventional feminine activity. This may have had the effect of garnering the school greater public support and sympathy—vital for an institution that depended on donations and patronage—but it has also resulted in the school’s seriousness and significance being underestimated. The influx of “accomplishment” students from the 1860s onwards, who attended the school in order to cultivate art as a refining pastime rather than as a means of earning a living, further distanced the school from conventional conceptions of professional training, and this is reflected in the treatment of the RFSA in contemporary sources.

Although its activities and intentions were ignored or minimised by some elements of the art press, by the last two decades of the nineteenth century the Royal Female School of Art was regarded highly by supporters of women’s professional endeavours. It was lauded for providing specialised and targeted training that responded to new developments in the commercial art world. While Chalmers suggests that Louisa Gann’s attitude towards women and art had been shaped by the patriarchal gender ideology of the mid-nineteenth century, in interviews from the 1880s and 1890s Gann speaks passionately about the school’s professional purpose and initiatives, and of the success of alumni. She asserted that the school should provide instruction in “every branch of art,” from design for manufacture to life drawing and oil painting, so that students could compete in every field with their male counterparts. When questioned about the possibility of women “ousting” men from their established positions in art, she answered, “I believe in the survival of the fittest.”23 Although the school was populated with numerous “amateur” art students, upon whose fees the school in large part relied, in terms of the courses offered the RFSA had remunerative, professional employment in mind.24

23A.E.H., “An Interview with Miss Gann, Director of the Royal Female School of Art,” The Woman's Herald, November 2, 1893, 581. 24 Henry Cole, the head the Department of Practical Art, was responsible for the decision to allow amateur students access to the RFSA in 1852. The decision was a financial one – by allowing more students into the school at increased tuition, the School could be able to run more cheaply. This development led to the school’s government funding being withdrawn in 1859, a decision that was justified with the argument that the state should not be subsidising the education of accomplishment students. Henceforth the school was reliant on patronage, donations, funding drives and school fees. See Gillett, Worlds of Art, 141-142.

43 It was one of the first schools to respond to the growing demand for press illustrators and lithographers, for example, a field of art that expanded exponentially from the 1870s. It founded a Chromo Lithographic Art Studio near its premises at Queen Square in 1883 in association with the Society for the Employment of Women. The studio ran an apprenticeship system, providing students with paid work experience and practical training over the course of three years. As it was amongst the first schools to produce trained art lithographers in England, the studio developed a wide network of business connections and employers, which enabled it to place graduates in paid positions.25 It received applications for lithographic artists from firms throughout England and Scotland and hired graduates itself to produce orders from illustrated journals, publishing houses and artists.26

In terms of providing practical, specific training in a broad range of artistic fields, and facilitating connections between students and industry, the RFSA was a useful educative space for women entering professional art practice. “We never guarantee employment to any student…but as a matter of fact every one who reaches a certain standard with us is almost certain to obtain a fair position,” claimed Gann.27 Exact figures on the percentage of students who attended the school for professional purposes, or on the career outcomes of graduates are difficult to ascertain due to the limited scope of the school’s surviving records. However discussions of the school in contemporary journals suggest that the importance of the school in the professional training of women artists in the 1880s and 1890s has been underestimated in literature on art education of the past thirty years. The Englishwoman’s Review noted in 1886 that the school “is not nearly so well known as it ought to be,” despite the fact that “year after year it does a great amount of quiet unobtrusive good by initiating women into those branches of art work by which they may earn a useful and honourable independence.”28 Articles and pamphlets dedicated to women’s employment and training consistently referenced the RFSA as the premier institution for training in

25 A.E.H., “An Interview with Miss Gann, Director of the Royal Female School of Art”, 581; “Answers to Correspondents,” Hearth and Home May 11, 1893, 823. 26 “Record of Events,” The Englishwoman's Review, July 15, 1893, 170; “Women’s Employments,” The Woman at Home 1 (1894): 78; “Royal Female School of Art,” The Woman's Signal, February 2, 1899, 75. 27 “Women’s Employments”, 78. 28 “Art III – Female School of Art,” The Englishwoman's Review, March 15, 1886, 102.

44 practical and commercial fields of art such as illustration and engraving. The “black and white” class for press illustration was noted for teaching the most up-to-date reproductive technology that would appeal to publishers of “modern magazine and books.” Increased consumer demand for other printed products such as Christmas cards, fashion drawing and valentines, regarded as “fresh work suitable for women,” was also taken into account in the training offered.29

At an exhibition of work by present and past students of the RFSA in 1893, the success of graduates in the field of illustration was particularly remarked upon: “The authorities of the school have given [illustration] attention, and…success has been attained by students.” Book illustration by Ethel Nisbet and fashion plates from leading magazines were singled out for praise. “Although it may be looked upon by some as one of the lower branches of art work, [it] is one which at the present day demands knowledge and training,” noted one critic. “These more utilitarian branches of art work, too, have the merit of being certain sources of income to those who pursue them, after a due time of steady training.”30

The Royal Female School of Art’s initial focus on decorative and industrial design, which was frequently highlighted in contemporary press reports and features, has led some scholars to minimise the institution’s role in developing the careers of illustrators and painters, particularly in the latter part of the century. Training in fine art was offered at the school from the 1850s, and study from the living model was provided in the 1860s.31 Although the waiting lists and over-crowded classrooms that were a feature of the school in the 1850s and 1860s dissipated with the emergence of

29 The Girl’s Own Paper advised its readers that they would be “well prepared” to design Christmas cards or find employment at a stationery manufacturer by attending the RFSA. “Answers to Correspondents: Painting Cards,” June 3, 1899, 575; “At the Royal Female School of Art, Queen Square, there are good teachers of fashion drawing.” “Answers to Correspondents: Designing,” The Girl’s Own Paper, September 10, 1898, 799. 30 “Passing Notes,” The Englishwoman’s Review, April 15, 1893, 125. 31 The Illustrated London News visited the school’s premises soon after the introduction of living models. Their illustration indicates a studious atmosphere in the studio, which housed a number of antique casts, examples of students’ work and ornaments. “The school is the only one devoted exclusively to female education in art, and deserves a visit from those interested in the advancement of art education amongst women.” See Figure One. “Life-Class at the Female School of Art,” Illustrated London News, June 20, 1868, 603.

45 alternative training options for women, the RFSA continued to be the foundation of many women’s artistic education in the last decades of the century.32

Figure 1: Life-Class at the Female School of Art, Illustrated London News, June 20, 1868.

Maud Earl, Florence Reason, Margaret Dicksee, Charlotte Wood, Miriam Davis and Ida Lovering, amongst many others, began their studies at the RFSA. For some it was the only art education they pursued; Wood, for example, chose to remain at the school for six years instead of pursuing additional training at the Royal Academy schools or abroad. Like many of the women who later achieved success as painters, she won numerous student scholarships and awards, which brought both monetary assistance and exposure to her work. The high number of scholarships and prizes awarded by the RFSA was one reason it remained popular with students.33 In the absence of government funding, Gann and the school’s administrators grew adept at attracting patronage and donations, and a range of accolades and bursaries were handed out

32 Charlotte Yeldham, Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France and England (London: Garland Publishing, 1984), 17. 33 The school “has the advantage of the highest patronage and possesses a considerable number of scholarships and prizes.” “Work for All: Art,” The Girl's Own Paper, December 22, 1883, 179.

46 each year at a well-publicised prize ceremony, habitually attended by high profile supporters of the school, including members of the royal family.34 Students were also eligible to compete for prizes at the yearly national competitions managed by the Department of Arts and Sciences. RFSA students regularly received a larger proportion of awards than any other schools; such was their success that RFSA students were barred from competing for the 1889-1890 Gilchrist Scholarship because of their previous dominance in the competition.35

For some prize winners, the RFSA functioned as an effective preparatory school for the Royal Academy. Transitioning from the RFSA to the RA schools was an accepted and expected route for women artists seeking a professional career in fine art—“the best, almost the only thing to do in England,” according to Florence Reason.36 Some of the most successful professional artists of the late nineteenth century followed this route, including Henrietta Rae, Elizabeth Butler, Helen Allingham and Susan Ruth Canton. The RFSA is typically marginalised in accounts of these women’s professional success; it is their acceptance and tenure at the RA schools that is highlighted as the educational experience that transformed their artistic practice from student to professional. But the role of the school in offering inclusive, professionally focused foundational training for women should not be underestimated. Nor is it the case, as some suggest, that students who completed their education at the school failed to achieve publicly recognised, professional careers in art.37 Here, the limitations of artistic reputation in art historical discourse are evident. Tracking the careers of RFSA prize winners and graduates indicates that a significant proportion made a living through artistic practice and remained active in various parts of the art world throughout the early twentieth century. The nature of the jobs and activities they pursued, however, means that the specifics of their occupations and

34 “Art Work for Women,” Art Journal (May 1872): 129; “Notes of the Month,” Myra’s Journal, August 1, 1900, 10. 35 Charles Middleton Wake, “The Royal Female School of Art and the Gilchrist Trust,” The Times, February 1, 1890, 10. 36 Florence Reason, “Work and Workers: Art as a Profession for Girls,” The Monthly Packet, May 1, 1891, 469. 37 Charlotte Yeldham, for example, claims “Surprisingly few women who subsequently emerged in public eye as artists attended this school.” Women Artists in Nineteenth Century France and England, 17.

47 achievements were not widely recorded in contemporary sources, and this means that their names are missing from accounts of women artists of this period.

The artist, illustrator and engraver Edith Harwood is an example of a RFSA graduate who strung together various jobs and activities related to art throughout the 1890s and 1900s in order to earn a livelihood. She had a successful tenure at the RFSA in the late 1880s, winning the Duchess of Westminster’s Prize, the Atkinson Award, the Queen’s Gold Medal and a silver medal in the National Art Competitions.38 Upon graduating she found work as an illustrator, and at times collaborated on projects with Charles Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft.39 She wrote articles on art history for The Woman’s Signal and the Illustrated Archaeologist, produced illuminations for Art Journal, wrote and illustrated guidebooks on Italian art and taught short courses on Italian pictures at the National Gallery.40 In 1910 she held a solo exhibition of tempera paintings inspired by early Italian masters at the Dowdeswell Gallery on New Bond Street. An enthusiastic review in The Times eludes to one reason Harwood’s reputation as an artist has failed to endure: “We fear that Miss Harwood has fallen on evil days, days of realism and proso,” the critic noted, “but had she worked 40 years ago, with Rossetti and the young Burne-Jones she would have made an impression.”41

There are numerous other examples of RFSA graduates like Harwood, whose practical education in the fine arts and applied illustration facilitated a stable, if not profitable, career in art that responded to new demands in the art world, such as illustration and art teaching. Demand for trained art educators to work in government schools of design and private art ateliers increased in the second half of the nineteenth century as art education expanded. Art teacher training was a focus of the South

38 “The Royal Female School of Art,” The Morning Post, December 22, 1887, 3; “Royal Female School of Art,” The Standard, January 30, 1890, 3; “Royal Female School of Art, Daily News, October 28 1889, np. 39 “Fine Art Gossip,” The Athenaeum, October 11, 1902, 493; Harwood illustrated C.R. Ashbee’s The Masque of the Edwards of England (1902) and provided illuminations and decorative initials for Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Flower and the Leaf (1902) printed by Ashbee’s Essex House Press. Alan Crawfood, C.R Ashbee: Architect, Designer and Romantic Socialist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 480. 40 “Lectures,” Woman’s Signal, December 20, 1894, 395. Examples of journalistic work include: Edith Harwood, “Studies from Pictures of Women in the National Gallery,” Woman’s Signal, July 18, 1895, 44; The Reliquary and Illustrated Archaeologist 2, (1896): 33-58. R.E.D. Sketchley, “The Art of the Scribe,” Art Journal, (December 1907): 361. 41 “Art Exhibitions,” The Times, November 12, 1910, 6.

48 Kensington curriculum, where a primary objective of instruction was “to turn out masters and mistresses for the hundreds of schools of art” in its network.42 The RFSA shared this aim, and its encouragement of students to take up art teaching was “in line with contemporary attitudes to the profession” as one that was suited to women, at least in regard to female students and schools.43 Louisa Gann noted that the school regularly received requests for teachers from girls’ high schools, and students were also engaged in private art schools and founded their own classes for instruction in specific disciplines.44 The teacher certification offered by the RFSA was often listed by employers as a desirable attribute for female teachers, and graduates also placed the letters of the school after their names, indicating that it vouched for their professional credentials. But, as in other fields of artistic practice at this time, teaching was a crowded and competitive field, conditions that particularly affected women who were less likely to be employed in male dominated or co-educational environments.

Although most board schools used the South Kensington system of art teaching, in which RFSA students were trained, few women were employed at these institutions. When a journalist from the employment bureau of Hearth and Home inquired at the Department of Science and Art about the lack of female teachers in its network of schools, she was informed that teacher hiring was handled by local school committees, who officially had no barrier against engaging female teachers.45 It appears, however, that these committees were unwilling to employ female teachers to instruct male or co-educational classes. In 1872 the Art Journal reported that out of the 338 night classes provided by public art schools, five were taught by women.46 The lack of female teachers employed by the Department of Science and Art was a

42 J. Penderel Brodhurst, “Our English Schools of Art: II – South Kensington,” Atalanta (March 1888): 329. The National Art Training School at South Kensington was the first art school to offer a specific class for art teachers, which was initiated in 1841. Students trained in these classes filled the demand for instructors created by the expansion of government schools of art into provincial centres. Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 83. 43 Anthea Callen, Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement 1870-1914 (London: Astragal Books, 1979), 34. 44 “The Female School of Art,” The Times, June 19, 1874, 11; “Women’s Employments”, 78. For a discussion of female-run, private art schools of this period see Maria Quirk, “An Art School of Their Own: Women’s Ateliers in England, 1880-1920,” Woman’s Art Journal 34, no.2 (2013): 39-44 45 “Our Employment Bureau: Art as Remunerative Employment – II,” Hearth and Home, July 8, 1897, 381. 46 “Art Work for Women,” 65.

49 point of contention with the RFSA management. “The [RFSA] committee expressed regret that so few appointments of female teachers to schools so far have been made by the Science and Art Department,” reported The Times.47 Women were also unlikely to be employed at the major art schools outside of the government system; the Royal Academy schools and the Slade, for example, had almost entirely male teaching staff.

The RFSA thus did provide women with the training and certification they needed to be employed as art teachers, but the positions graduates obtained were not generally well-paid or prestigious within the art world. While students were employed as drawing mistresses at all-girls’ primary and secondary schools, these were lowly paid positions from which women had little contact with the art establishment; the paucity of teaching jobs for women meant that competition for these places was high regardless.48 According to Gann, more than thirty RFSA students founded art schools of their own although, for many of these women, teaching would have been a side occupation to supplement art sales or design commissions. These schools were usually small operations offering short courses—such as the three day program run by Edith Harwood—or training in a specific discipline such as miniatures or china painting. Remuneration for such services was low and job security precarious.

The ranks of private art teachers were overcrowded with professional, semi- professional and inexperienced aspirants, who were all competing with the myriad other sources of art education available to students in London and surrounds.49 “It is most difficult for all but the most gifted women to obtain permanent employment as teachers of drawing and painting alone,” warned one periodical.50 The RFSA itself was one of the few schools to offer women secure teaching positions in a wide variety of disciplines, and provide opportunities for women to take on authority and influence as heads of departments and administrators. Although some scholars have claimed

47 “Female School of Art, Bloomsbury,” The Times, February 7, 1884, 8. 48 Female art teachers were “starving on a pittance” according to Myra’s Journal. “The Ladies’ Gallery,” January 1, 1889, 20; “Answers to Correspondents: Art Teachership,” The Girls’ Own Paper, August 19, 1899, 750 49 E.H. Turpin, “The Present Decadence of Private Teaching,” Musical Standard, April 18, 1885, 244- 245. Turpin makes the point that teachers in the fine arts and music faced the same difficult conditions. 50 “Questions and Answers,” The Girls’ Own Paper, August 26, 1899, 766.

50 that the school’s all-female staff indicated an amateur level of teaching,51 the professionalism of the staff was noted in contemporary accounts: It has been ascertained by experience in Queen’s-square that women can teach art quite as well as men, and that young ladies can be induced to attend to their lessons…without the stimulus of that “influence of sex”, about which the approvers of male teachers for girl-learners are wont to say so many pleasant things.52

The school’s teaching of technique in both drawing and design was praised. “It is remarkable that the anatomical studies of the muscles and the skeleton...are superior to any studies of the kind done by male students”, marvelled the Penny Illustrated Magazine in the 1880s. The school “shows a standard of excellence in all branches, except architecture, sculpture and mechanical drawing, quite equal to any reached by the male students.”53

Institutions of Influence: The Slade School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools

This last source calls attention to an important aspect of the RFSA’s fine art teaching; the school was one of the first to provide women access to the living model, a point for which it is not often given credit. The fact that discussions about women’s art education in the nineteenth century are predominantly framed around their access to life study explains, to some extent, why institutions such as the Slade have been the subject of more scholarly analysis than institutions like the RFSA or female run private art schools.54 Access to the nude model was regarded as a marker of professional study during this period, and equal access to life study was the subject of agitation for many women artists throughout the nineteenth century, as they argued that the educational barrier was preventing women from pursuing the full spectrum of artistic genres and subjects. Edward Poynter RA, the first principle of the Slade

51 Charlotte Yeldham notes that the all-female staff, drawn from the school itself, suggests “amateur teaching” see Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France and England, 19. 52 Cordy Jeaffreson, “Female Artists and the Art-Schools of England,” 52. 53 “The Female School of Art,” The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, November 26, 1881, np. 54 Charlotte Yeldham, for example, argued in her foundational text on English women artists that the development of art education for women in the nineteenth century was chiefly a question of increasing opportunities for them to work from life. Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France and England, 30-39.

51 School of Art, was one member of the educational establishment who recognised that women were barred “from the same complete study of the model that is open to male students” which, he believed, was essential to the production of high class work in any genre. Upon its founding in 1870, the Slade thus offered co-educational classes for the study of the half draped model and a single sex class for the female nude.55 With this development, Art Journal claimed that women had achieved open and equal access to the art profession; “it thus rests with themselves to prove how far their power matches their aspirations.”56

Figure 2: Life Drawing at the Slade School of Art, Illustrated London News, 26 February 1881.

Throughout the 1880s and 1890s other art schools matched the Slade’s policy on women’s life study. The Royal Academy schools, considered the institution most resistant to pedagogical change, was the last major art school to grant its female students access to the nude model in 1903. It could be assumed that this development marked a turning point in women’s relationship with artistic professionalism. As the Art Journal intimated, access to life study was the last major educational barrier to women’s practice of the fine arts, and its achievement meant that they would have the training and knowledge to both compete and be judged on equal terms with their male counterparts. The nude model also held important symbolic power in the late

55 Edward Poynter, Ten Lectures in Art (London: Chapman and Hall, 1879), 111. 56 “Art Work for Women,” Art Journal (May 1872): 130.

52 nineteenth century art world. Physical access to the model in life class and in artists’ studios was a “staple part of the definition of masculinity and artistic identity,” according to Lynda Nead. Visual culture representing (male) artists at work in educational settings often highlighted the relationship between the artist creator and the model subject as a sign of the artists’ authority, creativity and professionalism.57 In its aesthetic form, representations of the nude were classified as the most prestigious form of academic art and were an important emblem in the developing aesthetic language of modernism.58 Controlling who had access to models was thus an “instrument in the exercise of power” that reinforced male artistic authority while marginalising and devaluing the work of those who did not conform to this professional artistic ideal.59 It follows that women’s entry into life class should have endowed them this same artistic authority and creative autonomy, as they gained access to the subjects and symbols that characterised high art. In reality, however, the introduction of life study for women in art schools did little to alter or shift established attitudes towards women’s “natural” artistic abilities and aptitudes, or change their contested relationship with high culture. The persistence of these ideological positions, and their resistance to change, is a sign of how embedded such attitudes were amongst England’s artistic community.

The commercial and critical response to women artists who trained from the life model and pursued figure painting as a career illustrates the conflicting attitudes and opinions women faced on the issue of life study. Evelyn De Morgan was amongst the first female students to enter the Slade when she began her studies in 1873 at the age of sixteen. There she had access to a half draped model, and her student sketchbooks indicate an interest and proficiency in drawing both the male and female figure. Her talents in this field were recognised and rewarded at the Slade; she received a prize for life drawing and the prestigious Slade Scholarship in 1874.60 She also studied in

57 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London: Taylor and Francis, 2002), 49; Hana Leaper, “Objects of Art: The Dualities of the Artist’s and the Model’s Bodies in Laura Knight’s 1913 “Self-Portrait”, Bodies of Work: Women and the Arts Journal 2 (2009): np. 58 Cherry, Painting Women, 54. 59 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988), 65. 60 “From our London Correspondent,” Manchester Guardian, June 25, 1874, 5; “Men in Pants: Evelyn De Morgan’s Male Life Drawings from the Slade School Onwards,” The De Morgan Foundation, 2014, http://www.demorgan.org.uk/meninpantsexhibition

53 Rome from 1875 to 1877, and was fortunate to have a suitable and willing model close to hand—her maid Jane Hales—and a supportive, artistically minded husband. She was well placed, then, in terms of education and working conditions, to focus on figure drawing throughout her career. For De Morgan, working from living models and depicting classical and literary stories was a means of asserting her professional ambition, as these were subjects and compositions considered both intellectually and technically challenging. For the most part, however, contemporary critics failed to notice her unique interpretations of mythological images or the subtle symbolic meanings she invested in her figures. Instead, it was her “imprudently ambitious” choice to portray the draped and undraped human figure in classical guises that was the focus of critical attention into the early twentieth century.61

De Morgan trained at one of the most prestigious and progressive art schools in London, and her skills in life drawing were validated through the receipt of non- gendered prizes, but her aptitude in depicting the human figure, as well as her inventive and creative capacities were continuously questioned in reviews of her work. The Athenaeum claimed that the nude figures in De Morgan’s The Spear of Ithuriel, painted after the artist had gained decades of experience with the human form, were ill painted, and the “worst portion” of the painting. In general, the criticism of De Morgan’s nude figures was not that they were immoral or unfeminine, although that aspect of women artists’ engagement with life study certainly drew criticism from some as debates over the morality of the nude in art, particularly in regard to women, continued into the early years of twentieth century. The Sentinel maintained the position that for “modest girls” being subjected to life study in art school was “extremely painful”: If drawing from the nude by large classes of youths and girls is held to be necessary for the attainment of a high level in art, we say, without hesitation, let us be content with a degree of skill which does not involve the deterioration…of one of the most precious gifts with which the creator has endowed our race.62

61 “The New Gallery,” The Athenaeum, 28 April, 1900, 534. This review labels De Morgan’s The Spear of Ithuriel “a pseudo Burne-Jones.” 62 “Study of the Nude in Art,” The Sentinel 12, no.3 (1890): 25-26.

54 By the time of The Sentinel’s writing in the 1890s, however, it was fairly widely accepted in artistic circles that studying from the nude was an essential part of an artist’s education, even for girls. “To question the propriety of painting from the nude in a company of artists would be to invite derision,” noted The Westminster Review.63 Commentators from within the art world who denounced women artists’ use of models from this period onwards were relatively rare, although vocal critics of the practice, such as the artist John Horsley RA, did sporadically spark public debate over the issue.64

Criticism of De Morgan’s paintings did not generally centre on the immorality of her nude studies, but on the fact that the subjects and materials she chose to work with were overly ambitious and beyond her capabilities Even when the technical aspects of her pictures were praised as correct or life-like, the composition, expression, subject or sentiment was labeled as uninspired or derivative. “As a study of the nude the work is meritorious,” noted E.W. Godwin of Cadmus and Harmonia (1877), “[but] as a picture it is very nearly being horrible.”65 Other works were described as feeble, lank or inept—words that pointed to a lack of the virility, authority and creativity in De Morgan’s work, masculine traits that that were often used to praise paintings of this nature. The most common critique of De Morgan’s work was that it imitated the style and subjects of male Pre-Raphaelite artists of the period, particularly that of Edward Burne-Jones, despite the fact that De Morgan was not well acquainted with the Pre- Raphaelite style and was primarily influenced by Botticelli and other members of the early Italian school.66 To some critics, however, De Morgan’s work was a clear imitation of Burne-Jones’s oeuvre in both subject and style. The Athenaeum labeled Cadmus and Harmonia “plagiarism of the most distinct and obvious kind” claiming, “If Mr. Burne-Jones had not turned to the doings of the Venetian romance painters…it is certain that Miss Pickering would not have painted this tall, naked

63 John River, “On Painting From the Nude,” The Westminster Review 174, no.5 (1910): 568-576. 64 John Callcott Horsley, “Models,” The Times, October 19, 1885: 13. For an in-depth analysis of Horsley’s role in these debates, and on the tension surrounding the issue more broadly see Smith, The Victorian Nude, 227-232. 65 E.W. Godwin, “The Dudley Gallery,” British Architect 8, no.22 (1877), 264. 66 According to Walter Sparrow, De Morgan only became familiar with Rossetti’s art after visiting a retrospective exhibition staged after his death, and did not see Millais’s early Pre-Raphaelite work until 1886. “The Art of Mrs. William De Morgan, Studio 19 (1900): 220.

55 damsel,” which was “without the energy in which genuine art abounds.”67 These comments were ignorant of the fact that the picture was painted during De Morgan’s time in Italy, where she was inspired not by Burne-Jones, but by the early Italian and renaissance masters she studied in Rome.68 De Morgan’s The Sea Maidens, meanwhile, was described by The Graphic as “very successfully imitate[ing] the peculiar manner of Mr. Burne-Jones.”69 The picture “ would never have been painted but for Mr. Burne-Jones’s Mermaid in last summer’s Academy,” asserted another critic.70

These remarks support Pamela Nunn’s assessment of the determination of some critics to see sexual difference in the work of women artists, even when their work was indistinguishable from that of male artists.71 Commercially De Morgan fared fairly well; the market value of her work increased throughout her career and the fact that she painted large, figure heavy canvasses probably meant that she was able to charge higher prices than if she produced flower paintings or still life. In 1901 Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery purchased one of her largest paintings, Life and Thought have Gone Away, for the advertised price of £600 which, while not in the same realm as the sales made by some of her male contemporaries, was a respectable price for a professional, late nineteenth-century artist to receive.72 In terms of critical acceptance, however, De Morgan’s work confounded commentators and her Slade school training and proficiency in life drawing did little to alter attitudes towards her perceived over-ambition and lack of originality.

67 “Winter Exhibition of Cabinet Pictures in Oil: Dudley Gallery,” The Athenaeum, December 1, 1877, 704-705. 68 Elise Lawton Smith, “The Art of Evelyn De Morgan,” Woman’s Art Journal 18 no.2 (1997/1998): 4. 69 “Fine Arts,” The Graphic, December 4, 1886, np. 70 “Painters in Oil Colour,” The Era, December 11, 1886, np. 71 Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Problem Pictures: Women and Men in Victorian Painting (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), 150. 72 Catherine Gordon, ed., Evelyn De Morgan: Oil Paintings (London: De Morgan Foundation, 1996), 24.

56

Figure 3: Life drawing of a seated model by Evelyn De Morgan (nee Pickering), 1875. © De Morgan Foundation.

Figure 4: The Sea Maidens by Evelyn De Morgan, 1886. © De Morgan Foundation. The model for all figures was Jane Hales.

In cases such as De Morgan and many others, access to life study and comprehensive art education was used as further evidence of women’s natural artistic inferiority. Some commentators reasoned that women failed to benefit from access to life study,

57 because no women artists who had received this education had reached the top ranks of the profession. “The experiment has been tried, girls in vast numbers have studied art under the same conditions as men…and practically nothing has come from it,” claimed the Saturday Review in 1899.73 The thorough, technical education women could now receive would make little difference to their output, because women still lacked the innate creativity and inventive power to create great art.

Reviewing the work of female figure painters Annie Swynnerton and Marianne Stokes in 1900, the Athenaeum issued a similar sentiment. The life-size nude depicted in Stokes’s Eve “mark[s] how far modern ladies who paint have departed from the ways of their mothers, without attaining power to do justice to nature,” the critic claimed. In the case of both ladies it is remarkable that the practice of painting nude figures from the life, especially when the scale of nature is adopted, has not had the effect (which should be its justification as well as its aim) of regulating, elevating and chastening the style and taste of those who devote themselves to it.74

This critical rhetoric demonstrates the deeply embedded ideology of sexual difference that underpinned attitudes towards women artists and their work, which was justified in the language of biological determinism. Women were innately incapable of the creativity and genius needed to produce great art, and thus advanced art education was fruitless. The idea that education could “supply the place of a kind of inventive gift” was an illusion.75 The dominance of this discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrates the limitations of art education for women pursuing professional careers in fine art. An art school education could endow women with the technical skills and training they required to gain proficiency in their chosen field, but it did not validate their creative capacity or legitimise their professional practice in public, critical discourse. What’s more, the most significant challenge to women’s ability to pursue art professionally—the demands and obligations attached to family and marriage—awaited most women only after they left their art school. A thorough and distinguished tenure at an art school meant little if women did not

73 D.S.M., “Women Artists,” Saturday Review 87 (1899): 138. 74 “The New Gallery,” The Athenaeum, 6 May, 1899, 568-569. 75 D.S.M., “Women Artists,” 139.

58 progress into an environment and space that was conducive to her artistic practice. Here, the case of the Slade’s “brilliant generation” of female students, who attended the school during the 1890s, is instructive.

The artist Augustus John, a student at the Slade during this period, noted that this “great epoch of the Slade” was characterised by the brilliance of its female students. “Male students cut a poor figure; in fact they can hardly be said to have existed. In talent, as well as in looks, the girls were supreme.”76 In their later careers, however, these students achieved limited artistic success critically or commercially. Ida Nettleship married John soon after graduating the Slade, and later died in childbirth. Edna Waugh, regarded during her time at the Slade as one of the school’s greatest draughtsmen, was removed from the art world after her marriage to the lawyer William Clarke-Hall, who, although initially encouraging of Edna’s work, preferred that she devote herself to family life. As Jessica Christian notes, the examples of Waugh, Nettleship and their friend Gwen Salmond, who were each recognised as precocious talents at the Slade, “could scarcely have provided more extreme examples of the potential pitfalls” of marriage for women artists at the Slade.77 Of the “outstanding” class of women who attended the Slade in the mid 1890s, only Augustus’s sister Gwen, who remained unmarried and resided in Paris for most of her working life, achieved lasting recognition as a painter, in large part because of the patronage of the American art collector John Quinn, who was encouraged by her brother to support and invest in Gwen’s work. Augustus John identified the “burdens of domesticity” as the reason these women’s talent “came to naught.” The school’s drawing master Henry Tonks remarked on the same phenomenon in the 1930s: “after the twenties their [women’s] good work seems to stop. Possibly their powers have not really diminished, but marriage, children or some other interest has interfered.”78 But, as Hilary Taylor points out, the limited careers of the Slade generation points to the myriad of challenges that faced women artists after they completed their art education, of which the demands of marriage and family were only one. “So great was the unspoken difference between the opportunities and expectations of women

76 Augustus John, “Lady Smith [nee Gwendolen Salmond],” The Times, February 1, 1958, 8. 77 Jessica Christian, Wyn George: Artist and Traveller (Dorset: Dovecote Press, 2013), 80. 78 Sybil Vincent, “In the Studio of Professor Henry Tonks,” Studio 112, (1937): 86.

59 and men, even at the Slade, that it would seem that under no circumstances could these women have practised as artists in a way comparable to their male colleagues,” she argues.79

Even at a relatively progressive institution like the Slade, male and female students received different treatment. Women worked in separate life rooms and were not allowed to speak or interact with the sitting model, conditions that discouraged students to release themselves from social and artistic inhibitions. Although they were eligible for Slade prizes and scholarships, female students were rarely awarded top honours in the most prestigious competitions for oils and life drawing, and they were far less likely than male students to have work accepted by the New English Art Club, an art society largely managed by Slade graduates and teaching staff. Tonks’ comment that women “make far better pupils than men because they do what they are told, while men are inclined to doubt their teacher,” indicates that female students were encouraged to maintain a docile and submissive “feminine temperament” rather than test their creativity, ideas or expression in the classroom.80 Ideas about men and women’s natural artistic abilities and aptitudes remained present. Wyn George, a contemporary of John, Nettleship and Waugh at the Slade in the mid 1890s, recorded a conversation with a female Slade tutor that illuminates and reinforces the gender difference embedded in the school’s culture: Man stands on his ground and woman on hers—a woman cannot compete with a man on his ground. She must find her own line in art. Of course this is difficult because we have no great women painters to go by. Man is a greater creative and imaginative force than woman, but we have more inventiveness and more refinement, grace and beauty in drawing.

Interestingly, George found this conversation professionally encouraging, and called it a “lovely lesson” in her diary.81 Her reaction suggests that in an educational atmosphere that was still dominated by male authority, despite the fact that two thirds of students were female, it may have been helpful to envisage a route to professionalism that did not position women in direct competition with men. This is what Laura Prieto has labelled as women’s attempt to feminise artistic

79 Hilary Taylor, “If a Young Painter be not Fierce and Arrogant God…Help Him’: Some Women Students at the Slade, c. 1895-9”, Art History 9, no. 2 (1986): 234. 80 Vincent, “In the Studio of Professor Henry Tonks,” 86. 81 Quoted in Christian, Wyn George, 56.

60 professionalism. She argues that connecting art with ideas about women’s unique nature was “crucial to overcoming obstacles to women’s participation.”82 George’s recollections indicate that, in some cases, this process began in the educational context; as women continued to be categorised and judged according to their sex, recognising and embracing those boundaries was one way to accommodate ideas of difference into a separate but parallel path to professionalism.

One reason for the continued prevalence of ideas of gender difference in art schools was the presence of “female accomplishment” students. The large number of women “dilettantes” enrolled in England’s major art schools encouraged a presumption of amateurism on the part of educators that damaged the reputation and advancement of would-be professionals.83 The multitude of “female accomplishment” students bolstered the art school sector economically; their fees provided livelihoods for the men and women who ran private art schools and worked as tutors, and helped support large, independently funded institutions such as the Royal Female School of Art.

Despite this, the gatekeepers of the education establishment derided their presence. The changes to the Royal Academy schools’ admission processes in 1890 were, in part, motivated by a desire to limit the number of women students who were perceived to be amateurish. The reforms decreased the number of stippled drawings applicants had to submit and added a requirement for drawings from the life, including a life-sized head and arm. “The first advantage [of the reforms] will be the exclusion of the ordinary run of the lady students, as only the best of them will be equal to the new and more painter-like test,” enthused one commentator.84 Women who passed the new admission test would be allowed access to a partially draped female figure, in an attempt to improve the standards of female students.

Although these reforms were justified as a means of improving student standards and adapting to educational developments, it is probable that they were partly a response

82 Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalisation of Women Artists in America (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2001), 8. 83 See Nunn, “Dorothy’s Career and Other Cautionary Tales,” In Crafting the Women Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century, 167-86. 84 “Art in March: Reform of the RA Schools,” Magazine of Art (January1890): 21.

61 to the high success rate of female students under the previous system, which some in the art world found disconcerting.85 The Magazine of Art ascribed women’s success in the RA schools to the fact that the application process was suited to their mimetic and dexterous artistic temperament. Stippling rewarded artists who were patient and technical rather than creative or vigorous, and so the result was work, “which was especially well adapted to female genius, carried in a large majority of women, while of those students whose later successes did credit to their Academy training, by far the greater proportion were the men.”86 The changes to the rules would result, it was hoped, in the admittance of a smaller number of female students, which would be in proportion with their subsequent success rate as artists.87

Among women artists and supporters of female professionalism, the changes to the RA schools’ admission processes were welcomed. The inclusion of life drawing in the schools’ application prompted new preparatory schools to open, which broadened female students’ access to models. Harold Copping and Percy Short, for example, founded a drawing studio on Great Ormond Street to provide training in life study to women preparing for RA admission. The advice-focused women’s magazine Myra’s Journal called the development “a distinct boon to earnest lady art students.”88 By the second year of the new protocols women applicants were performing as strongly as they had under the previous system; more than half of the successful candidates in 1891 were women.89 These results could have been interpreted as proof of the proficiency of women applicants, regardless of their professional or amateur intentions, but the achievement did not dispel criticism of female hobbyists and their

85 Magazine of Art, who were at the forefront of the campaign to change admission rules, specially pointed to the success of female students as the reason the entry requirements had to change. “It surely behoves the Academy, whose province it is to do its utmost to aid the advance of art by imparting proper instruction and not to act as the amiable cicerone of the china painter and the amateur professional to so alter its rules as to remedy the present anomalous state of affairs.” “Woman, and her Chance as an Artist,” Magazine of Art (January1888): 25-26. 86 “The New Rules at the Royal Academy Schools,” Magazine of Art (January 1890): 41-42. 87 Ibid. 88 “Notes on News,” Myra's Journal, March 1, 1890, 35. Myra’s Journal was founded in 1875 by editor Martha Browne, who had previously worked at The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and The Young Englishwoman. The journal provided advice and commentary of topics of fashion, beauty and careers to a broad, predominantly middle-class audience. See Margaret Beetham and Kay Boardman, Victorian Women’s Magazines: An Anthology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 10-14; Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds. Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent: Academia Press, 2009), 436. 89 “English News,” The Woman's Herald, January 24, 1891, 217.

62 damaging influence on the educational environment. Paula Gillett explains that the disparaging views aired in the art press and periodicals towards the presence of women hobbyists in art schools offset the advantages wrought to women by the expansion of educational opportunities and access to life study. 90

This frustrated women aspiring to professional standards as much as it did male commentators. Artists who struggled to be taken seriously as potential professionals throughout their schooling, including Louise Jopling, Henrietta Rae and Laura Knight, wrote disparagingly of the influence female hobbyists had on general attitudes towards women students, whose commitment and seriousness were not taken for granted by teachers. Rae complained that these women lacked perseverance, and only painted “prettily and correctly”—no doubt because they were encouraged to do so—which reflected badly on women artists as a whole. She was determined not to be categorised as a “woman artist” because the label connoted diffidence and idleness.91 It was only women who were obliged to study art in order to earn an income who, Rae argued, had the necessary “seriousness.”92 Rae’s biographer suggested that women who achieved success in art did so in spite of their male-controlled art education rather than because of it, flourishing instead through “sheer force of will and talent.”93

The fact that female amateurs could access professional grade art training, including life study, diluted the seriousness of art schools’ professional purpose for women and the specialised knowledge of the human body artists could claim to hold. As a result, admittance to art school and the knowledge of the figure acquired within could not be held up by professional women painters as a marker of their professional credentials or separate them from the highly visible amateur multitude. Although many women who later achieved success as artists continued to attend the Royal Academy schools,

90 Gillett, Worlds of Art, 172. 91 Rae criticised women dabblers for not understanding the labour and drudgery that was involved in producing art. “Girls as a rule…think too much of their social pleasure to be able to study art seriously. They think they can learn to paint good pictures at the same time they are going in for balls and parties. It is quite a mistake. I don’t think women will ever submit to the drudgery of daily work that success in art at one time or other requires. I know numerous instances of female students pursuing a course of social pleasures while they are supposed to be qualifying for an art career.” “Lady R.A.’s,” The Pall Mall Gazette, August 16, 1888, np 92 Ibid. 93 Arthur Fish, Henrietta Rae (London: Casell and Company, 1905), 10.

63 the Slade and other respected art schools and benefited from the technical education and social connections they provided, these educational qualifications themselves did not serve to legitimise their later artistic practice.

Figure 5: Heatherley’s Art School by Nellie Joshua, 1902. © Liss Llewellyn Fine Art.

It is significant that many women who forged respected careers in fine art did not follow the conventional, “professionalising” educational route of attending the RA schools or the Slade, but instead relied on private tuition, lessons from family members or overseas study to cobble together artistic training. Louise Jopling received her first art lessons as a married woman at Charles Chaplin’s atelier in Paris, where she benefited from personalised tuition in an atmosphere that was supportive of female talent. She later attended classes at Leigh’s School of Art (later Heatherley’s Art School) to improve her knowledge of life drawing.94

94 Leigh’s School of Art, formally Dickinson’s Academy, was the first school to admit women on equal terms with men. It was founded by students expelled from the Government School of Design over a dispute concerning the use of the nude model, and the school’s staff believed firmly in the primacy of

64 Edith and Jessica Hayllar, meanwhile, were taught to draw by their father, the genre artist James Hayllar, in a purpose built studio at the family’s home, Castle Priory. Their education took the form of a long apprenticeship, during which their father supplied equipment, studio space and supplies as well as technical instruction and mentorship. As all four of the Hayllar sisters were expected to contribute to the family’s income through art, James Hayllar provided a comprehensive education that provided his daughters with proficiency in painting, watercolours and modeling. James’s style of training was highly practical and calculated according to the market conditions and preferences of the day. He encouraged his daughters to paint in a realist style and focus on the domestic, narrative subjects that he also specialised in, because they were “suitable for exhibition and readily found purchasers.”95 He “never let anything pass that was not quite correct in form or relation to its surroundings,” noted Jessica Hayllar, “this intensive means of training the eye enabled the pupil to dispense with months of time spent in waste and paper and paint, and begin to do things worth exhibiting.”96

The practical, commercially orientated training the Hayllar sisters received did not include life study, and the family largely relied on each other to act as models, but this does not appear to have hindered their artistic practice. Their paintings, which recorded the gentle rituals of middle-class female domesticity, were praised for their highly finished realist style and attention to light and perspective. And while not considered technically or intellectually challenging, domestic images such as the Hayllars produced had a broad popular appeal in late Victorian England.

The Benefits of Specialised Art Education

Florence Reason asserted that large art schools best served female students, because they tended to employ high quality teachers and provide scholarship and funding opportunities.97 However for women like the Hayllars, who wanted or needed to figure drawing in art education. It was a popular RA prep school amongst women. After James Leigh’s death the school was directed by T.J. Heatherley. 95 Jessica Hayllar Unpublished Memoir Manuscript, quoted in Mary Gabrielle Hayllar, “Framing the Hayllar Sisters: A Multi-Genre Biography of Four English Victorian Painters” (PhD thesis: University of New South Wales, 2012), 98. 96 Ibid. 97 Florence Reason, “Work and Workers: Art as a Profession for Girls,” The Monthly Packet, May 1,1891, 469.

65 practice in a specific, market-orientated artistic medium or style, such as portrait painting, illustration or fan painting, it was often small, specialised schools or apprenticeship-style studentships that provided the best professional training and experience. And, as the number of aspiring painters continued to increase in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the quantity of exhibiting groups and galleries competing for the public’s attention and patronage ballooned, young artists of both genders were increasingly encouraged to pursue education in practical and specialised categories of art. It was only when a girl had particular “training for the branch of art which she intends to devote herself” that she had “good prospects of doing well,” according to the women’s broadsheet Hearth and Home. 98 Most female-orientated advice columns and career manuals addressing the artistic professions advised girls to acquire one or two years of general art training at an institution like the RFSA or the National Art Training School before seeking out additional instruction in a discipline suited to their skills.99

The number of specialty art schools and apprenticeship programs catering to young women increased significantly in the last decades of the nineteenth century as a response, in part, to new consumer demands and developments in various fields of design. Schools and studios were founded to train students in art forms such as press and fashion illustration, which became increasingly in demand from the 1870s onwards as printing technologies improved. Like the pioneering Chromolithographic Studio at the Royal Female School of Art, which was run in cooperation with the Society for the Employment of Women, these speciality art schools tended to focus on practical training in remunerative disciplines. Illustrated newspapers, advertising and fashion catalogues created significant demand for technically trained illustrators and engravers, and the practice was regularly recommended to women seeking to support themselves through art. The Girl’s Own Paper, for example, advised readers who required an income “not to go in for painting,” and instead to pursue training in fashion or magazine illustration.100 Although fashion illustration, in particular, was generally considered an unambitious and imitative field of art, specialist training and

98 “Our Employment Bureau: Art as a Remunerative Employment,” Hearth and Home, June 24, 1897, 301. 99 “After having gone through a general training a girl should set herself to consider to which branch of art she must devote herself for remunerative purposes.” Ibid. 100 “Answers to Correspondents,” The Girl's Own Paper, October 22, 1898, 63.

66 knowledge of current modes and techniques was still demanded of applicants, and the “expense of lessons” was recommended.101 “You are quite wrong in imagining that your general knowledge of drawing, however good, is sufficient,” chided one advice columnist addressing press illustration. Along with the “certain style” demanded of illustrators, familiarity with methods of reproduction was often required of artists working in magazines and newspapers.102 Training in these methods was offered at small studio schools such as Robert Santer’s School of Art on High Street Kensington, the Rossetti Studio in Chelsea and Henry Blackburn’s studio on Victoria Street.103 Blackburn, the editor of Pictorial World and owner of London Society magazine, championed the entry of women into the illustration profession and set up his school to provide professional training in pen and ink drawing through a short course of instruction. After “one or two months instruction [ladies] should be able to draw sufficiently well to turn their knowledge to account,” noted Hearth and Home, and, because of Blackburn’s own reputation in the industry, editors sought his pupils out for employment and commissions.104

The demand for illustrations for magazines and pictorial newspapers also opened up opportunities for women in wood cutting and engraving. While many other methods of producing and reproducing illustrations existed by the 1890s, engraving and cutting remained popular techniques, and were employed by magazines such as Good Words and Cassell’s.105 The City and Guilds of London Institute saw the demand for wood engravers as an opportunity for women’s employment, and devised a program to train art students in the discipline. They opened a studio in conjunction with the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women in 1879 under the direction of Mr C. Roberts for pupils who had obtained at least a second grade certificate from the South Kensington Science and Art Department. The school ran an apprenticeship-style program, with students receiving practical tuition and experience over the course of four or five years. After their first year of training, students were allowed to commercialise their work, and could earn up to £1 a week throughout their tenure.

101 “Passing Notes,” The Englishwoman's Review, April 15, 1893, 125; “Miscellanea,” Myra's Journal, May 1, 1891, 29. 102 What to do with our Daughters,” Myra's Journal, May 1, 1894, 23. 103 “Employments for Gentlewomen,” Myra's Journal, November 1, 1898, 40. 104 “Drawing for the Press: A Chat with Mr Henry Blackburn,” Hearth and Home, May 18, 1893, 18. 105 Henry Blackburn, The Art of Illustration (London: WH Allen & Co, 1896), 183.

67 The Society for the Employment of Women also helped Roberts establish a secondary workroom for advanced students adjoining his own studio at Londsale Chambers, and there students were hired to assist on publication commissions and orders.106 Other classes for wood engraving were taught at the Lambeth School of Art and at Mr Paterson’s studio on Whitefrairs Street.107

Other speciality art schools recommended to women art students focused on china painting, pottery decoration and glass painting. Apart from the Lambeth School of Art, where students’ proximity to the Doulton Pottery Studios encouraged many to train in pottery, Howell and James Art Pottery Gallery on Regent Street was popular with young female students, who paid £3 3s for a course of ten lessons. Pupils were eligible to exhibit and sell work at the annual exhibition held at the gallery, which became “quite an institution” on account of regular royal patronage.108 The classes and exhibition provided “many ladies of limited means with a pleasant and lucrative employment,” according to one commentator.109 Jessie Scott Smith, Charlotte Spiers and Linne Watt were among the china painters trained at Howell and James who went on to professional careers in the art industries. Watt’s idealised images of the English countryside drew comparisons to Helen Allingham, and her pictures were considered “perhaps the most novel and satisfactory product of the taste for paintings on china in England,” according to the Magazine of Art.110

Howell and James’s class, exhibitions and sales helped reposition china painting as a feminine profession suited to women’s hands and capabilities. The craft had previously been conceptualised as a male occupation, associated with commercial factories and manufacture but, in the later part of the century, painting on china came to be seen as an “ideal solution” to the increasingly visible social problem of women’s

106 “Work for All: Art”, 179; “Minor Topics: Wood Engraving by Ladies,” Art Journal (February 1890): 62. 107 Mercy Grogon, How A Woman May Earn a Living (London: Cassell and Co, 1883), 56. 108 “The Fifth Annual Exhibition of Paintings on China,” Magazine of Art, (January 1880): 392. 109 It is perhaps an overstatement to claim that china painting was a lucrative career for all women involved, although sales from the Howell and James annual exhibitions did reach over £2000. “Art Notes: Painting on China,” The Examiner, June 5, 1880, 691; “Work for All,” 179. 110 Cosmo Monkhouse, “The ‘Royal Academy’ of China Painting,” Magazine of Art (January 1884): 249.

68 employment.111 By 1879, china painting was considered “a profitable resource for those whose circumstances necessitate their making some contribution to the household expenses.”112 Like fashion illustration and copying, china painting was not regarded as intellectually or artistically rigorous, and this encouraged the perception that it was “naturally” suited to women’s capabilities. The Magazine of Art, for example, labelled it a “harmless and charming” pursuit that nevertheless “opened out a congenial career to hundreds of women.”113

Anderson notes that women’s participation in china painting as a legitimate form of professional artistic practice was also justified by the advent of the House Beautiful movement, which helped popularise china collecting and display. Women were encouraged through painting kits and craft manuals to create porcelain decorations for their own homes, and undertaking china painting professionally for the purposes of decorating domestic interiors was a regarded as a natural progression.114 Specialised training helped differentiate the efforts of aspiring professionals from that of amateurs, and endowed them with the technical training necessary to find employment at pottery firms such as Doulton and Co.

Conclusion

Contemporary articles on women’s employment and career advice columns provide anecdotal evidence that specialised art education provided students with the best chance of finding steady work; young women were repeatedly advised to pursue practical or commercial forms of art such as illustration, china painting or engraving instead of oil or watercolour painting. The tone of this advice is highly prescriptive, and likely reflected, in some cases, gendered ideas about men and women’s natural artistic capabilities and impulses rather than evidence-based conclusions about

111 Anne Anderson, “The China Painter: Amateur Celebrities and Professional Stars at Howell and James’s ‘Royal Academy of China Painting,” in Crafting the Woman Profession in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, eds. Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Farnham, Ashgate, 2013), 125. 112 Campbell Hancock, The Amateur Pottery and Glass Painter (London: Chapman and Hall Co, 1879), 6. 113 Monkhouse, “The ‘Royal Academy’ of China Painting,” 246. 114 Manuals and “do it yourself” painting and decoration kits of this kind contributed to a backlash against female artistic amateurism, as articles appeared criticising women’s poor technical skills and taste, and their over-enthusiasm for “painting everything.” Discourse of this kind sometimes also impacted popular perceptions of professional female artists, who were often grouped together with their enthusiast counterparts as being untrained and unskilled.

69 women’s chances at employment. However, this ideology of sexual difference was not uncommon in the art world, and likely informed the hiring and buying practices of commercial art firms, editors and consumers. Pursuing training in the forms of art in which women were expected to excel was a practical strategy for students looking to earn a living from art. Schools and apprenticeship programs that offered training in lithography, engraving and illustration enabled women to practice forms of art considered suited to their natural abilities, while also providing the specialised qualifications necessary to bulwark them against claims of amateurism. These schools also tended to have links with industry or in-built employment opportunities, which helped facilitate the transition between training and work.

The advantages of professional education were less straightforward in the field of fine art. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, women artists and their defenders maintained that women were disadvantaged commercially and critically in the realm of fine art because of the challenges they faced in accessing comprehensive training. The Royal Academy schools and the Slade School were positioned as loci of professionalism; they were spaces where the practical knowledge artists needed was acquired, skills were honed and where professional identities were forged. Women artists saw the professionalising potential of education; even if they could not combat claims that they lacked intrinsic artistic genius, education could at least provide measurable skills and objective qualifications that they could leverage in their favour.115

In many cases however, the achievement of educational bona fides did little to change or dispel gendered attitudes towards women’s artistic capabilities and aptitudes, even after women were granted equal access to life study and the nude model at art schools. Women continued to be discriminated against on the basis of their sex in critical discourse and under-valued in the commercial arena. Although the RA and the Slade remained popular with female students into the early twentieth century, those who did succeed in making a living through fine art came from a variety of educational backgrounds. Private art schools and ateliers, family members and foreign art schools continued to be important sources of art education for women, and artists

115 Swinth, Painting Professionals, 13.

70 who derived their education in these ways were not significantly disadvantaged in the pursuit of a professional career, so long as their training was of good quality and comprehensive. Education was undoubtedly important to the development of women artists’ careers, but was not the lynchpin of their professional identity or success. Attending the RA, the Slade or any other source of education traditionally viewed as elite or prestigious did not guarantee that women would be taken seriously as art professionals, or that they would have the skills and connections to successfully negotiate the commercial and critical sides of the art business. There were many other factors and influences that affected women’s chances at professional success more than their education; it was their access to spaces of production, exhibition and commerce after they left art school that decisively shaped the trajectory of women’s artistic practice and their claim to the title “professional artist”.

71 Chapter Two: Studio Life for the Lady Artist: The Function and Meaning of Studio Space for Women’s Professional Artistic Identities.

In 1931, Eileen Mayo, artist and model to Laura Knight and Dod Proctor, read Virginia Woolf’s newly published essay A Room of One’s Own. In it, Woolf posits that women’s ability to pursue creative professions and attain intellectual freedom depended on their material circumstances. “From the beginning of time,” she argues, women have lacked independent sources of income and privacy, the two conditions necessary to achieve creative inspiration, originality and genius. What women needed was an independent and secure income and a space of their own to devote solely to their craft; “five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate” Woolf argued, “a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself.”1 The essay’s sentiments resonated with Mayo. Her own aspiration to paint professionally was realised only when she attained a private, quiet space that was dedicated to her own interests and possessions. “Years ago, I had no idea of succeeding as a painter,” Mayo wrote, “but given the inspiration and the quiet of my own room, I painted my first picture. The great writers and painters of this age are unanimous in agreeing that they owe their most inspired works to being alone. From my own experience I know it to be true.”2

Mayo’s treatise on the value of space and privacy reflected a long tradition of women artists negotiating the spatial and material parameters of their domestic, marital and economic circumstances in order to achieve the professional artistic ideal: an independent studio devoted to the production, display and promotion of their art. This ideal was a particularly potent social force in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, a time when studios were at the centre of artistic culture. Their ancillary purposes—as showrooms, meeting places and entertainment spaces—were viewed by the art literate public and by artists themselves as almost as important as their practical productive use. For women, haunted by the spectre of “Sunday painter” amateurism, studio access was even more important in establishing their professional credentials to the wider artistic community. Just as importantly, studio space dedicated to their own

1 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas (London: Chatto and Windus, 1984), 99. 2 Eileen E. Mayo, “Privacy is Essential: Miss E Mayo on the Art of Living,” Birmingham Daily Mail February 12, 1931. Personal Papers of Eileen Mayo, Tate Archive, TGA 916/174.

72 artistic pursuits supported women’s self-identification as artistic professionals. It was there where her artistic subjectivities were formed and her sense of personal artistic worth was validated through the creation of creatively fulfilling and recognised work. At its most fundamental level, a studio was a functional physical space that contained the material artefacts and conditions needed to produce art—light, space to pose models and props, easels, paints and brushes. The building blocks of an artistic career were contained in this one productive space. For illustrators, studios fulfilled both a design and manufacturing purpose, housing the equipment and materials needed for the production process. Traditionally, the notion of creative and artistic genius had been gendered as male. The studio, the space that fostered that creative output, was similarly viewed as a place of male artistic activity and ambition that was crucial in the pursuit of artistic activity. Possession of a studio went some way to situate women in this culturally recognised artistic tradition. A marker of seriousness, professionalism and industry, it was a space that produced and fostered women’s occupational identities, endowing credibility and validity in an industry marked by its ambiguous professional boundaries.

The cultural significance of the artists’ studio in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the associated popularity of bespoke studio-houses among the artistic elite are matters of interest for art and architectural historians of this period. Giles Walkley, Charlotte Gere and Caroline Dakers have recognised the social and aesthetic importance of studios to the working lives of painters, at a time when artists had attained a newfound status and prominence in English popular culture and society.3 Gere and Walkley used the locations and design style of studios to develop a geography of artistic London, mapping the overlapping social circles of artists, collectors and patrons and unpacking the modes of display and self-presentation that studio homes facilitated.

3 Caroline Dakers, The Holland Park Circle: Artists and Victorian Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Charlotte Gere, Artistic Circles: Design and Decoration in the Aesthetic Movement (London: V&A Publishing, 2010); Giles Walkley, Artists' Houses in London 1764-1914 (London: Scholar Press, 1994). See also Lara Garner, “Palace of Art: Victorian Studio-Houses in the Museum Context” (PhD thesis, Baylor University, 2012), 5.

73 Women’s involvement with this studio culture is touched on by Dakers, and the meaning of women’s interactions with studios and workplaces is explored more fully by Lynne Walker, who argued that women artists, patrons and architects often co- opted personal, domestic spaces for artistic purposes, which fostered their identities as “professional, artistic women.” In these new social spaces “new subjectivities and identities were defined and signalled.”4 Louise Campbell too has shown that women associated with the Aesthetic movement used studio homes to “devise for themselves distinctive artistic and personal identities.”5 The recent spatial turn in gender studies, meanwhile, and the associated interest in the material circumstances of women’s lives, has shed new light on the significance of women’s spatial interactions in the formation of her social, artistic and professional identities.6 However, the link between access to adequate and independent workspace and the practical, commercial and professional outcomes of women artists’ careers remains under-explored, despite Deborah Cherry’s assertion that “spatial provision undoubtedly affected the categories of art in which women worked.”7

Looking at the working lives and identities of contemporary artists in Canada, Alison Bain has emphasised the necessity of studio space to the professional recognition women artists sought and received from their peers, as well as to their internal sense of artistic credibility.8 Building on Gloria Garfunkel’s contention that women tend to “only experience themselves as artists when actually ‘doing’ art,”9 Bain argues that

4 Lynne Walker, “Women Patron-Builders in Britain: Identity, Difference and Memory in Spatial and Material Culture” in Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland (Aldershot: Ashgate: 2006), 124, 134. 5 Louise Campbell, “Questions of Identity: Women, Architecture and the Aesthetic Movement” in Women’s Places: Architecture and Design 1860-1960, eds. Brenda Martin and Penny Sparke (London: Routledge, 2003), 1. 6 See Kathryne Beebe and Angela Davis, eds., Space, Place and Gendered Identities: Feminist History and the Spatial Turn (London: Routledge, 2015); Henrietta Moore, Space, Text and Gender (London: Guilford, 1996). For women, space and visual culture see for example Elizabeth Darling and Lesley Whitworth, eds., Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870-1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Temma Balducci and Heather Belnap Jensen, eds., Women, Femininity and Public Space in European Visual Culture, 1789-1914 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 7 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993), 38. One notable exception is Susan Butlin, whose PhD thesis on Canadian women artists included a detailed survey of women’s studio provisions. “A New Matrix of the Arts: A History of the Professionalisation of Canadian Women Artists, 1880-1914” (PhD Thesis, Carleton University, 2008). 8 Alison Bain, “Female Artistic Identity in Place: The Studio,” Social and Cultural Geography 5, no 2 (2004): 171-193 9 Gloria Garfunkel, “The Improvised Self: Sex Differences in Artistic Identity” (PhD Thesis: Harvard University, 1984), i.

74 studios have an essential role in building and maintaining women’s artistic identities as well as materially facilitating the practice of her profession. In this chapter, I apply Bain’s hypothesis to women artists and illustrators attempting to earn a living through art at the turn of twentieth century. Although studio space has not conventionally been regarded as a key criterion for professional artist status in comparison to educational qualifications and organisational membership, I argue that access to stable and private studio space was crucial to women’s pursuit of professional artistic practice in three ways, which align approximately with Henri Lefebvre’s categorisation of social space. According to Lefebvre, the material and conceptual social production of space occurs through three interrelated processes: “‘spatial practice’ (material or functional space), ‘representations of space’ (space as codified language), and ‘representational space’ (the lived everyday experience of space).”10

Women’s spatial interactions with their studios, and the meaning produced by those interactions, correspond with Lefebvre’s categories. Studios were fundamentally functional spaces, and access to well-equipped studios provided women with the material conditions and practical provisions they needed to pursue their choice of style and genre, thus allowing them to be commercially competitive. At their most basic level, studios were necessary as a place for women to produce the art they needed to sell in order to be recognised as professional artists. The cultural discourse and representational meaning surrounding the possession of a studio, meanwhile, served to validate women’s own artistic identities and sense of occupational legitimacy. Lastly, the daily rituals and social interactions involved in the everyday performance of studio life produced and provided an external, visible marker of women’s seriousness and longevity to the artistic community, from whom women were seeking professional recognition, and to the art-buying public. At a time when artists’ workspaces and the social exchanges they produced were fetishised in English popular culture, access to studios made women visible, and facilitated the economic interactions necessary to legitimise their professionalism.

10 Lefebvre quoted in Jane Rendell, “Gender, Space: Introduction”, in Gender, Space, Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, ed. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner and Iain Borden (London: Routledge, 2000), 103.

75

Studio Politics within the Family

Where a woman’s studio was located, and with whom she shared it, was significant. Possession of a studio was an external marker of professionalism within the artistic community but, for many women, decisions over the type of studio they could access and its locality were influenced or determined by family members, particularly fathers, husbands or sisters who were also involved in artistic production. Although the involvement of parents and spouses in a woman’s artistic career was commonly the catalyst for their pursuit and success in the profession, the power dynamics these exchanges and relationships engendered also led to challenges that were specific to the female artistic experience, particularly when it came to the provision of studio space.

Home studios, or those shared with husbands or parents, risked making a woman’s professionalism invisible, particularly when the barrier between studio space and domestic space was blended and permeable. The acquisition and maintenance of a studio signalled financial and social self-sufficiency, and a willingness to sacrifice for the sake of artistic independence. Buying or renting a studio on their own account demonstrated than an artist had the capacity to support themselves through art, and had received validation of their talents through the art market. The use of home or family studios could thus undermine that commitment to craft in the eyes of the wider art community.

Historians and gender theorists have examined what occurs when divisions of public and private space are tested in the home environment.11 The gendered binary of public and private spheres as a lens through which to understand nineteenth-century spatial dynamics has been challenged and scrutinised, returned to and reinforced. The home and family studio is of particular relevance to these discussions because it represents a

11 See Kirsten Ringelberg, Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Painting: Work Place/Domestic Space (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); Walker, “Women Patron-Builders in Britain: Identity, Difference and Memory in Spatial and Material Culture”; Lynne Walker, “Vistas of Pleasure: Women Consumers of Urban Space in the West End of London 1855-1900”, in Women In the Victorian Art World ed. Carissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 70- 88.

76 space where public and private functions intersect, and where women could produce new and distinct identities and subjectivities. Home studios take Haar and Reed’s assertion that women’s identities were embedded within the “normative structure of the home” and challenge the definition of what “home” is in terms of the values, conventions, activities and social relations that are inscribed within its walls.12 But while the location of women’s studios, and the spatial, gender and power ramifications of that location, are meaningful, so too is examining the familial arrangements that supported, withheld and provided studios, and the relationships that played out within their walls, and that is what will be done here.

The power hierarchies that formed within home and family studios were complex and variable, reflecting the diversity of experiences encountered by women artists. For some, studios located in the home of a father or husband, or shared with a spouse or relative, remained patriarchal spaces, dominated by the personality of the male artist, whose reputation and commercial success typically exceeded that of his female counterpart. Even when they too identified as professional artists, the women of these studios were often marginalised within these spaces, operating in their physical and psychic periphery. This dynamic, particularly when shared by husband and wife, raised questions of ownership and attribution of female artistic property, both legally and creatively, an issue that was of particular significance before the reform of English divorce laws in the 1850s and the passing of the Married Women’s Property Acts in the late nineteenth century. However, the division of labour and power hierarchies that existed within artistic marriages and families were not always conventionally gendered and, when family members accepted and supported a woman’s desire to work professionally, or relied on her artistic income, spouses and parents could assist a woman’s access to studio space. There were instances too when the home/family studio was a refuge from external social expectations and pressures, particularly for unmarried women, who often chose to reside in the family home even when other opportunities existed. Home studios offered women a space to practice art which was untarnished by questions of propriety, and which provided many of the

12 S. Haar and C. Reed, “Coming Home: A Postscript on Postmodernisn,” in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. C. Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 272.

77 artistic provisions and accoutrements they required, including, perhaps most importantly, an array of accessible models in the form of family members and household staff. Even if domestic responsibilities or expectations sometimes inhibited their work, many women in the early, or even later stages of their professional practice found working within the family home an economic imperative, and the material support of family welcome.

When artist Sylvia Gosse was presented with the work of a young, promising female artist, the first question she asked was “Is she married?” continuing “What a waste of a good talent like this, to go and get married. It does me wild!” Gosse believed that the best way for a woman artist to be successful was for her to be completely unencumbered; she decided early in her career to live alone and never marry.13 She wanted to work independently, and have the autonomy and the time to devote her life to painting. For practical or ideological reasons, marriage ended or circumscribed the artistic careers of many women artists in the late nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Sylvia’s own mother, Ellen Epps, had found her artistic pursuits marginalised after her marriage to the critic Edward Gosse. Ellen, who had trained at the studio of Ford Madox Brown and was acquainted with the Pre-Raphaelite circle, had been wary of marriage. She wanted to pursue art seriously, and it was only when Gosse promised that she “could paint everyday” that she accepted his proposal.14 While Epps did continue to paint while pregnant with Sylvia, and exhibited landscapes sporadically throughout the 1880s, her earlier aspirations as a painter were not realised, despite the fact that she married an enlightened and sympathetic husband and was involved in an artistic, intellectual milieu.

The artist Louisa Starr observed, “When a [married] woman has a profession, it means in most case that she has two professions.”15 For a woman artist, marriage meant sacrificing two factors essential for artistic practice: autonomy and time. Decisions over where she lived and how she spent her day were influenced or

13 Kathleen Fisher, Conversations with Sylvia: Sylvia Goss, Painter 1881 – 1968, ed. Eileen Vera Smith (London: Charles Skilton, 1975). 74. 14 Ibid., 12. 15 Louisa Starr, “The Spirit of Purity in Art,” in Transactions of the International Council of Women, ed. Ishbel M Gordon (London: T Fischer Unwin, 1900), 86.

78 determined by her husband and children. Marital responsibilities and the running of a household served as constant interruptions to attempts of artistic work. “In marrying, Lucy had not contemplated giving up her profession as a painter for by that time she regarded it as a profession,”16 wrote William Rossetti of his wife Lucy Madox Brown, who had trained with Epps in her father’s studio.17 After our marriage she tried more than once to set resolutely to work again but the cares of a growing family, delicate health and a thousand constant interruptions…always impeded her and very much to her disappointment and vexation she did not succeed in producing any more work adapted for exhibition.18

One of the primary reasons women found it difficult to practice art professionally after marriage was access to studio space. Married women were most likely to set up studios within their homes. Renting an independent workspace elsewhere solely for the purpose of practising art was expensive and inconvenient when running a home and family, even before considering the fact that married women were unable to purchase property or enter into rental contracts until 1882. Propriety and social convention were also concerns. As a result, most married women worked either from a designated room in her marital home converted to fit the purposes of a studio or, if space or economy compelled her, from a general room in the house shared with another domestic purpose, most commonly the drawing or morning room. This latter workspace in particular was under constant threat of encroachment from domestic duties. In this locality, the mental and physical barrier between studio space and domestic space was fragile; there were no doors or locks to separate the artist from members of her family and household, or to guard her from disruptions. “Like most women, Mrs. Alma Tadema works with interruptions,” noted Alice Meynell in her profile of the artist, nonchalantly glossing over the impact of these disturbances on Laura Alma Tadema’s work.19

Many women artists successfully pursued professional artistic careers from within such domestic workspaces. Louisa Starr and Louise Jopling used their drawing rooms

16 William Rossetti, Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti (New York: Charles Scribner, 1906), 2:433. 17 Angela Thirlwell, William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis (New Haven: University Press, 2003), 147. 18 Rossetti, Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti, 2:433. 19 Alice Meynell, “Laura Alma-Tadema” Art Journal (November 1883): 347.

79 as studios early in their careers, although Starr’s daughter Estella Canziani recorded her mother’s joy at later acquiring her dream studio home in Kensington Palace Gardens in 1886.20 In both locations Starr’s artistic work was privileged over domestic responsibilities, and Estella was taught never to interrupt her mother’s work. “I also grew up to realise that my mother was a very busy professional women, always occupied by her portraits, that work of any kind must not be interrupted, except out of necessity.”21 However for women whose families were less accommodating of their professional ambitious, home-based workspaces could undermine their artistic independence, ownership and legitimacy. As Patricia Zakreski notes, working from a domestic setting like the drawing room placed the art women produced “under the control of the male head of household,” a condition under which it was difficult for female creativity to thrive.22 Furthermore, without the external, material markers of a traditional studio to situate them in an obvious cultural tradition, women had to work harder to validate their artistic identity to themselves, and to be acknowledged by others as artistic professionals. For this arrangement to succeed, the artist’s family and spouse had not only to support and endorse her artistic ambitions, but also respect the mental and physical parameters of her workspace.

For some women, the shift to a marital home had immediate and tangible effects on the type of art they could produce and, it follows, their commercial ambitions and viability. Mary Fraser Tytler, for example, gave up painting after her marriages to the much older and more established artist G.F. Watts. Mary trained in fine art and sculpture at the National Art Training School and at the Slade in the 1870s. She had ambitions to become a portrait painter and, by the mid 1880s, was dividing her time between two studios, one in the house she shared with her mother in Bloomfield Place, Pimlico and the other at her family’s home in Sanquhar, Scotland.23 Photographs of the latter show a space of cosy artistic industry; the walls are covered with paintings and drawings in various states of completion, and more canvasses are propped against the wall. Two large easels display works in progress, while a nearby

20 Estella Canziani, Round about Three Palace Green (London: Methuen, 1939), 184. 21 Ibid., 40. 22 Patricia Zakreski, Representing Female Artistic Labour: 1848-1890 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 75, 83. 23 Mary McMahon, The Making of Mary Seton Watts (Guildford: Watts Gallery, 2013), 27-29.

80 table is cluttered with flowers, paints and canisters crammed tight with brushes. At the Pimlico studio Mary arranged for local children to pose as models.24

Although she came from a generation and social class that discouraged female professionalism in any industry, Mary had both the training and the studios of a professional artist. As a single woman, she had access to two designated spaces where she could produce art uninterrupted, and, importantly, these rooms contained the external markers of serious artistic industry—visiting models, an array of materials and accoutrements and room to set up large canvasses and display work for visitors and patrons. As Alison Bain notes, the possession of such a studio was a meaningful display of commitment and prioritisation of artistic practice.25

Becoming a wife, particularly to an artist of the fame and status of G.F. Watts, put at risk Mary’s access to such independent studio space, and the self-directed, uninterrupted art practice that it provided. Watts initially acted as a mentor to Mary, a role he assumed for many young artists, and she admired both the man and his work. The pair visited each other’s studios and Watts advised Mary on her art as his student. “These opportunities were to me priceless,” she recalled.26 Following their marriage in 1886, Mary moved to Little Holland House, the studio home Watts had commissioned as a semi-public “palace of art” at the centre of Kensington’s artistic community.27 It was a daunting change for Mary, and although she revered Watts, she worried that acting as his aide and companion would halt her own artistic development. In a letter written just before their wedding, Watts responded to her concerns: Whether or not you will ever come to help me with my work…[and] whether or not you will be able to go on with your painting in the life that may be yours I am extremely regretful to think you are losing any chance of improvement.28

24 Mary Seton Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life (London: Macmillan, 1912), 2:49. 25 Alison Bain, “Constructing an Artistic Identity,” Work, Employment and Society 19, no.1 (2005): 32. 26 Watts, George Frederic Watts, 2:53 27 Strand Magazine noted in 1893 that Kensington “has for some years past been completely converted into a colony of eminent artists and sculptors…and R.A.’s in particular…It is altogether the ideal spot for an artist.” Harry How, “Illustrated Interviews. XXV – Mr Luke Fildes, R.A.,” Strand Magazine, 6 (1893): 110. 28 Letter from George Frederic Watts to Mary Seton Watts, 23 July 1886. George Frederic Watts Papers, Watts Gallery Archive, GFW/2/17.

81

To allay her fears, Watts ordered that one of his studios, the iron house, be altered for her use, and these renovations took place in the months before their marriage.29 Here Mary worked on gesso panels to decorate a new reading nook that Watts had built in the house, but her time in the studio was frequently interrupted by Watts giving or seeking advice, offering suggestions and asking for her help elsewhere in the house. Women artists and commentators largely accepted such disruptions as a feature of married life. However in her diary Mary expressed frustration at her new studio arrangement. “Instead of my work, I focus on him. It will take me a little while yet to get over being under the shadow of his great work.”30 This knowledge that her art would always stand “under the shadow” of her husband’s likely contributed to Mary giving up painting after her marriage. Her art production from this point onwards took the form of decorative art, a field in which she would not be compared to Watts, or seen as competing with him for sales, and which she could use to personalise their home.

Decorative and applied art were more flexible pursuits, able to withstand interruptions from Watts and his many visitors, and synchronise with the rigid schedule around which his day revolved.31 But although she had a studio, and access to art and design luminaries including Edward Burne-Jones and Walter Crane for advice and inspiration, Mary felt stifled by Little Holland House and her art suffered.32 The house was built to reflect Watts’s artistic identity, and as a monument to his success and social currency. In it, Mary’s artistic identity was effaced, and her nascent professionalism obscured by the myriad of spaces, visitors and rituals dedicated to the Watts industry.

29 Letter from George Frederic Watts to Mary Seton Seton Watts, 3 October 1886. George Frederic Watts Papers, Watts Gallery Archive, GFW/2/25. 30 Mary Seton Watts Diary, 7 September 1887. Mary Seton Watts Papers, Watts Archive, MSW/1/2. 31 The Illustrated London News noted that Watts’ believed it was his “methodical” routine that allowed him to achieve the vast quantities of work he produced throughout his lifetime. He had a “daily programme [sic], and from it not many departures are made.” D.W., “The Surrey Home of Mr G.F. Watts, RA,” Illustrated London News, July 29, 1893, 135. 32 Mark Bills, “Two Artists who are of Just the Same Mind Concerning their Ideals of Art’: George Frederic Watts (1817-1904) and Mary Seton Watts (1849-1938),” in An Artist’s Village: G.F. Watts and Mary Watts in Compton ed. Mark Bills, (London: Watts Gallery/Philip Wilson, 2011), 16.

82 In 1891, the pair began construction on Limnerslease, a new house in Compton, Surrey. Mary wanted a break from the formality and conspicuousness of their semi- public London residence, and to have a home that reflected both their artistic tastes and identities. She played a meaningful role in planning Limnerslease and in the design of its interiors, which reflected her growing interest in symbolist pattern and Celtic mythology. Mary’s designs for the house’s entrance hall and sitting room asserted her presence as an artist-in-residence, instant reminders that this house was the home of two artists, not just one. “At every turn we find signs not only of Mrs Watts’s taste but of her inventive facilities and artistic skills,” a contemporary noted.33 “Mr Watts himself, when he points the details of the design out to you, [says], “It is my wife’s work. She designed it all and she did all the actual work.”34 Like at Little Holland House, however, Limnerslease revolved around Watts’s studio, a “lofty and commodious” space that remained a shrine for journalists, patrons and art lovers.35 “Studio tourism” was at its height in the late nineteenth century, and the increased fame and wealth of artists like Watts attracted crowds of curious visitors to the homes of the artistic elite.36 While Watts’s studio was the hub of the house, Mary also ensured that she had a space of her own for the production of art. She co-opted the room opposite Watts’s studio, a high ceilinged open space initially marked as a billiards room on the house’s plans. This was her daily working space, and where she designed, made and decorated the panelling for the house’s front rooms.37

Most significantly, this was the space Mary used to lay the foundations for her move back into professional, commercial artistic practice. Before she was married, Mary taught pottery classes associated with the Home Arts and Industries Association at St Jude’s Whitechapel. HAIA was an organisation dedicated to cultural philanthropy; it organised an extensive network of art and craft classes throughout the country, with the aim of reintroducing and maintaining traditional craft skills and making use of the leisure time of the working classes. Mary was an active organiser within the HAIA

33 Julia Cartwright, The Life and Work of George Frederick Watts, R. A. (London: Art Journal Office, 1896), 30. 34 Hulda Freiderichs, “An Interview with Mr G.F Watts, R.A.,” The Young Woman (December 1895): 76. 35 D.W, “The Surrey Home of Mr G.F. Watts, RA,” 135. 36 Garner, “Palace of Art”, 12. 37 I am indebted to Desna Greenhow of the Watts Gallery Archive for providing me with this information.

83 throughout her marriage and, after settling at Limnerslease, she initiated her own pottery class for local residents, using her own studio as the classroom.38

Initially established to provide terracotta tiles for the Watts Mortuary Chapel, a building designed and built by Mary on the Limnerslease estate, the pottery classes grew into the Compton Potters Art Guild, a professional collective. With Mary at the helm, the Guild diversified its products to include tombstones, sundials and garden pots, which were sold to private clients and through department stores like Liberty’s.39 As was the case with many nineteenth-century charitable organisations, the Home Arts movement’s philanthropic ambitions made it an acceptable pursuit for middle and upper class women. Under its guise, and by using spaces within the domestic sphere, Mary was able to move her artistic pursuits back into the professional realm.

At Limnerslease, Mary Watts asserted her own artistic identity on a shared creative and social space by manipulating the domestic spaces that were available to her, bending their purpose to suit her own artistic pursuits. Although Mary fits the traditional, gendered artist/designer power hierarchy, and was circumscribed by the responsibilities of marriage, she negotiated the spatial and power dynamics of her marital life to find a means of art professionalism that did not compromise her role as wife and companion.

The experiences of Mary Watts illustrate that entering into an artistic marriage was no guarantee of a stable work environment amenable to professional practice. The duties that accompanied marriage to an established and prolific artist and the spatial restrictions of the marital home were what compelled her to practice decorative art, perceived as more suitable to the domestic sphere, instead of painting or illustration. Applied design was traditionally seen as a “lesser” art compared to painting, supposably requiring less training, concentration and creativity, and women like Mary may also have adopted these disciplines so as not to be seen as attempting to

38 Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life Vol 2, 284. 39 The Potters’ Art Guild, Compton, Guildford, Mrs. GF Watts’ Village Industry. Price List of Pots and Sundials. 1 May 1909. William Morris Gallery; Ffoulkes, CJ. “Notes from the Workshop” Books of Garden Ornaments (London: Liberty and Co, 1904), 22. See also Barbara Morris. “Liberty’s Pioneer Designer” in Veronica Franklin Gould, ed. Mary Seton Watts: Unsung Heroine of the Art Nouveau (England: Watts Gallery, 1998), 11-13.

84 challenge or compete with their more established partners. The practice of design was tantamount to an admittance of their inferior artistic skill, to the extent that they would not inhabit the same occupational realm.

It was relatively rare for a female fine artist to marry a male designer, but when this did occur the spatial provisions and arrangements concerning studios differed. The painter Evelyn Pickering married Edward De Morgan, a potter associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, in 1887. She had already struggled against the expectations of her parents to acquire a studio. Her mother, Anna-Maria Stanhope Spencer, studied drawing as a child and was a skilled sketch artist, but her view on art reflected both her class and generation—it was merely one of the many accomplishments a lady should possess. She discouraged the seriousness of Evelyn’s artistic ambitions, claiming once, “I want a daughter, not an artist!”40 As a teenager Evelyn practiced her art in secret, concealing her paints and canvas with a piece of cloth when she left her bedroom, and pasting paper over the gaps in the doorway to mask the smell of paint.

Although her parents later employed a drawing master for Evelyn, and allowed her to attend the Slade, she continued to chafe under the restrictions of domestic life while working from home. She resented the daily schedule of social calls and long, ceremonial meals, and the time these obligations took away from her work. “This enforced idleness is insupportable,” she wrote in her diary.41 Her parents’ home did not contain a room with suitable light for painting and she was not allowed to bring models there, even if she had been able to pay them out of her meagre pocket money. She wanted her own studio outside of the family home, a space that would allow her to devote her time solely to art.

Evelyn achieved this goal in part after the death of her father in 1877. After this time, her mother and sister spent most of the year in Yorkshire, leaving Evelyn alone at the family’s new home in Bryanston Square. Her friend, the novelist Vernon Lee, recalls visiting her there:

40 A.M.W. Stirling, William De Morgan and his Wife (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1922), 174. 41 Ibid., 176.

85 In the evening Mary and I went to Evelyn Pickering. She has a mother and sisters, but, for all one sees, appears to be all alone in a huge handsome house in Bryanston Square... She had a very fine thing in the studio. We sat on perch chairs (the things models sit on) and talked for a long time.42

Evelyn relished the independence of her life at Byranston Square. She was already achieving professional success, exhibiting work at the newly opened Grosvenor Gallery and creating contacts and networks within the artistic community. After prolonged disagreements with her parents over their expectations for her future, she appears to have convinced her family to accept her rejection of a conventional upper middle-class lifestyle. Plans for Evelyn to be presented at court, traditionally a first step towards finding a suitable husband, were abandoned on her passionate declaration; “No one shall drag me out with a halter round my neck to sell me!”43 Even when her family were in residence at Byranston Square, Evelyn carried out an independent schedule based around the rooms she had appropriated as her own studio suite: Evelyn used the middle drawing room as her studio and the yellow one in a very bare state as her sort of sitting room…Mamma and I lived in the morning room in a very uncomfortable state. Afterwards we moved into the front room which was much better…There we lived entirely, the others joined us at meals and we sat alone there in-between. I saw little of the others…One never quite knew with [Evelyn] what was coming next.44

Soon, Evelyn achieved even greater independence by moving into a set of rooms above a studio in Chelsea. She was beginning to earn income from commissions and the sale of paintings, which were hung at exhibitions at the Grosvenor, the Dudley Gallery, the Fine Art Society and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Evelyn understood the importance of selling art to her professional viability as well as to her spatial self-sufficiency, noting that “money meant freedom, and freedom meant greater power to work.”45 Her industriousness became her trademark; “she has astonishing physical endurance and power of work, starting to paint early in the morning and going on swiftly and surely throughout the day”.46 This demanding schedule was made possible by her living arrangements; she lived adjacent to a

42 Vernon Lee, Vernon Lee’s Letters (Privately Printed, 1937), 64. 43 Stirling, William De Morgan and his Wife,181. 44 Anna Maria Wilhemina Stirling, Unpublished Autobiography. The De Morgan Foundation 45 Stirling, William De Morgan and his Wife, 185. 46 May Morris quoted in Stirling, William De Morgan and his Wife, 192.

86 designated, independent studio and, by living alone, was free of the responsibilities of family, entertaining and housekeeping. Her life finally resembled the professional artistic ideal, displaying the sacrifice, commitment and independence that artistic credibility was based on. Evelyn’s studio arrangements defined her firstly not as a daughter or a woman, but foremost as an artist and in an occupation such as art, with its amorphous parameters and criteria for success and professionalism, a lifestyle grounded in this “historically established studio ideal” helped prove an artist’s validity in the eyes of the artistic community.47

Having succeeded in establishing herself as a professional art practitioner through her studio, sales and exhibitions, Evelyn had much to lose from marriage. To her family, the idea that she would wed, when “her sole romance was art” seemed “too far fetched for credence.”48 In William De Morgan, however, Evelyn believed she had found someone as devoted to art making as herself. She judged his character over many years; they met in 1883, were engaged in 1885 and married in 1887, and during this time he actively supported her artistic pursuits. They held joint exhibitions in the ballroom of Edward’s rented home on Great Marlborough Street, showing her paintings and his pottery to friends and clients over tea and refreshments. Once married, Evelyn’s working arrangements were central to the organisation of their new home, “The Vale” in Chelsea. Part of the garden was demolished to make room for a new studio, custom built for Evelyn’s use.49 Although William is recorded as having loved children,50 the pair remained childless. Whether this was a conscious choice on the part of the couple is unknown; however the arrangement doubtlessly contributed to the maintenance of Evelyn’s artistic career. While some women artists, including Henrietta Ward and Louise Jopling, succeeded in combining motherhood with professional art practice, it was recognised as a barrier to the serious pursuit of art, particularly when a family’s finances did not allow for sufficient household support. Much of Evelyn’s income from sales and commissions went to the upkeep of William’s pottery business which, though artistically acclaimed, was an

47 Bain, “Female Artistic Identity in Place: The Studio”, 190. 48 Stirling, De Morgan and his Wife, 194. 49 Ibid., 199. 50 Ibid., 75.

87 acknowledged failure economically.51 Theirs was a marriage that subverted the normative gendering of fine and applied art, as well as many of the conventional spatial and financial dynamics expected even in artistic marriages. Evelyn’s studio requirements were provided for in all of the De Morgan residences, including the Florence apartment in which they lived for part of each year, and the income these studios facilitated supported her husband’s design workshops.

Marriage to a fellow artist did not guarantee the provision of a studio, but in most cases it ensured that a woman was not isolated, physically and psychically, from artistic society. Although they worked under distinct studio conditions, and achieved different levels of professional success, Evelyn De Morgan and Mary Watts did find in married life access to vibrant artistic communities, in which they could, in some form, find a means to express their artistic impulses. Each woman’s experience negotiating studio space within an artistic marriage differed, according to her unique financial, social and artistic circumstances. The miniaturist and animal painter Gertrude Massey, for example, achieved greater commercial success than her artist husband Henry, and her busy portrait business required an inviting and functional studio space. For this reason Gertrude worked in a designated studio within the couple’s home in St John’s Wood, which befitted, as Andrew Sim notes, “her status as portrait painter to canine royalty,” and Henry worked in a converted shed in the garden.52

Some artistic marriages generated communities of their own, attracting fellow artists and designers to places that became geographical and factional hubs. Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes and Stanhope Forbes’ home formed the centre of the artists’ community at Newlyn. They took a parental interest in the activities of Newlyn

51 Elise Lawton Smith notes that the De Morgan’s marriage was “marked by financial difficulties,” which were made worse by William’s continual health problems. In 1888 Evelyn contributed £4000 to a partnership between William and the architect Halsey Ricardo. Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the Allegorical Body (London: Associated University Presses, 2002), 28. The De Morgan’s friend William Richmond noted “His capacity as a business man was probably nil, hers was only a little more than nil; but her money was his, and, with what is often called generosity, she gave it up, as all his and her friends know, to save crashes and to make one more glorious pot.” Quoted in Stirling, De Morgan and his Wife, ii. 52 Gertrude Massey, Kings, Commoners and Me (London: Blackie and Sons, 1934), 85; Andrew Sim, “Henry and Gertrude Massey: A Life Class at Heatherley’s,” Sim Fine Art, 2013, http://www.simfineart.com/pdf_bin/Massey%20Collection.pdf

88 artists, visiting their studios and organising social and recreational activities to stimulate a sense of community. “Stan and I spent the morning visiting the different Newlyn studios,” Armstrong Forbes wrote to her mother-her-law, commenting on each artist’s progress individually.53 Their school attracted more artists to the area, including Laura and Harold Knight, and Dod Shaw and Ernest Proctor, couples to whom the Forbes were a model of successful artistic marriage. Stanhope Forbes was the more famous of the pair, and the design of their Newlyn home was built to his specifications, “every detail having been carefully considered and decided upon by himself in the first place.”54 He had a nervous, highly-strung temperament, and Armstrong Forbes often assumed the role of comforter and soother, interrupting her own work to provide “the encouraging stimulus” he needed.”55 Her own painting schedule was built around these demands; at four in the afternoon, for example, she always paused to provide Stanhope his afternoon tea.56

However, although Armstrong Forbes continued to fulfil this “feminine” role of self- effacing nurturer, spatially and socially her marriage provided her with an ideal, professional working environment. When she wasn’t painting out of doors, Armstrong Forbes had her own studio in the garden, half covered by a drooping magenta fuchsia. It was plainly decorated with white-washed walls and a raftered ceiling, showing few concessions to aestheticism or luxury. The walls were thickly hung with charcoal drawings, preliminary studies for oil paintings, and the space had the atmosphere of a workroom, a place where “art is seriously and earnestly pursued.”57 In keeping with her preference to paint en plein air, Armstrong Forbes also had a portable studio from which she could take full advantage of the Newlyn landscapes. This small wooden hut offered protection from weather and wind and provided space to store equipment and paint while away from home. The hut was planted on cliffs or in meadows to suit the subject of a particular painting; for the 1903 Royal Academy picture “On a Fine Day”, the studio was moved to a field three

53 Letter from Elizabeth Forbes to Mrs. Forbes, 31 July c.1888. Tate Archive TGA 9015/4/2/2. 54 “Houses of Today: An Artist’s House at Newlyn” The World, 10 September 1907, 245. Tate Archive TGA 9115/11/4. 55 “Mrs Stanhope Forbes,” Queen, October 18, 1890, 576. Tate Archive TGA 9115/11/4. 56 Ibid. 57 “Mrs Stanhope Forbes”, 576.

89 miles from the Forbes’s home, where Armstrong Forbes could depict her five local models in the natural environment.58

Figure 6: On A Fine Day by Elizabeth Forbes, 1903. © City of London Corporation

Some scholars, including Deborah Cherry, have seen Armstrong Forbes’s painting hut as a symbol of the confinement and isolation that came with the conventions of feminine decorum. Cherry makes the point that as a “respectable married women,” Armstrong Forbes was compelled to avoid the public visibility and scrutiny that came with painting freely out of doors, and the casual transactions with strangers that would inevitably follow. She sees the portable studio as a concession to English social codes about the gendered division of public and private.59 However, as Cherry herself notes, portable studios were commonly used by en plein air painters as they moved around the countryside.60 Painting huts gave artists control over views and lighting, and protected work from rain and sunlight; Louise Jopling commented that working from

58 Gladys B Crozier, “Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes,” Art Journal (December 1904): 382-383. 59 Cherry, Painting Women, 18 60 John Everett Millais was one prominent male artist who used a portable painting hut to work outdoors independent of the weather. Louise Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 1867-1887 (London: John Lane, 1925), 159.

90 a painting hut was “delightful” for painting and sketching landscapes.61 Although in principle all Newlyn painters believed in the primacy of painting outdoors and of finishing the entirety of a work in natural conditions, those who visited Newlyn saw that artists used a series of aids to help them attain this effect.62

It is difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain whether Armstrong Forbes’s use of a painting hut was motivated by reasons other than practicality. Women were not traditional occupiers of public space. It was more difficult for a female painter to be anonymous or invisible in crowds, and to easily observe others without being made a figure of scrutiny and attention.63 However Armstrong Forbes was a well-known figure in Newlyn society, where she was recognised for her independence and industry.64 She was comfortable using villagers as models for portraits and domestic scenes and moved freely throughout the community. It seems likely that Armstrong Forbes’s painting hut was a mark of her professional emancipation, and not confinement. Her workmanlike garden studio, meanwhile, was a clear marker of her professional intent; these were the two spaces that enabled her to paint the same subjects and work under the same conditions as her male counterparts. The fact that Armstrong Forbes had two studio spaces to herself within the spatial infrastructure of an artistic marriage is, itself, a testament to the “mutual affinity”65 and respect that sustained successful artistic partnerships. Although Armstrong Forbes was often cast as a supporter to her husband’s genius, a role she appeared to enjoy, their marriage also supported two distinct professional identities and provided spatially for the maintenance of both.

Elizabeth Armstrong’s marriage to Stanhope Forbes cemented her position as a fixture in Newlyn society. Communities such as Newlyn, and social hubs like the Forbes’ home, countered the isolation both home studios and married, domestic life

61 Ibid., 160. 62 Gabriel Weisberg, Beyond Impressionism: The Naturalist Impulse (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992), 127. 63 This point is explored in length in Grisedla Pollock, Vision and Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988): 65-75. 64 These are traits that attracted and intrigued Stanhope Forbes when he first met Elizabeth: “She is one of the most energetic and industrious girls I have ever seen, and that is better than a dowry of two or three hundred a year.” Letter dated 1 June, 1886 quoted in Tom Cross, The Shining Sands: Artists in Newlyn and St Ives 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1994), 81. 65 “Mrs Stanhope Forbes”, 576.

91 could produce. “We had never led so full a social life,” remarked Laura Knight upon arriving in Newlyn.”66 The fear of being cut off from artistic society and support was one reason young female artists with sympathetic or artistically minded families remained at home, or shared studios with their sisters. The four Hayllar sisters formed their own miniature artists’ coterie at their home of Castle Priory under the guidance of their artist father James Hayllar. The sisters’ lives were dedicated to art; upon leaving school each studied painting daily from ten until four in a specially constructed studio adjacent to the house, furnished with skylights and north facing windows for optimal painting conditions.67 Every space throughout the home was used for an artistic purpose, either as a studio, sketching place or background for the domestic interiors the Hayllars’ specialised in. Amongst themselves and their extended family the sisters had a ready supply of willing models, and the house itself, and the relationships that existed within it, were a constant source of inspiration. Their paintings depict the gentle rituals of English domestic life—afternoon teas, tennis parties, picnics, parties and balls—activities that formed the rhythm of the sisters’ lives at Castle Priory. The same spaces and faces can be seen repeatedly throughout Hayllars’ work, referencing and memorialising the same shared experiences.

66 Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936), 166. 67 Jessica Hayllar’s biographical manuscript quoted in Mary Gabrielle Hayllar, “Framing the Hayllar Sisters: A Multi-genre Biography of Four English Victorian Painters” (PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 2012), 96.

92

Figure 7: The Lawn Tennis Season by Mary Hayllar, 1881. © Southampton City Art Gallery

As well as providing supportive artistic relationships, the sisters’ home also supplied the spatial and material provisions required for professional art practice—suitable rooms for painting, models, props, and a place to display art for public view. James Hayllar regularly organised “at homes” at Castle Priory, opening his studio to visitors and critics to view the latest Royal Academy offerings by himself and his daughters.68 This support precipitated exhibiting and commercial success; Edith sold work to the Walker Art Gallery and Kate’s first Royal Academy picture was bought by the Prince of Wales. The Hayllar sisters may have produced images of idyllic domestic femininity in their paintings but, in their early lives, they actively promoted their industriousness and professionalism, through participating in studio open days and exhibitions, and by giving interviews about their art education and practice. The house, and the sisters’ relationship within it, was so intertwined with the art they produced that the loss of this environment precipitated a severing of artistic activities; the sisters who left Castle Priory in adult life ceased artistic practice.69 The reasons the

68 “District News: Mr Hayllar’s Pictures,” Jackson Oxford Journal, March 29, 1890; “District News: Wallingford,” Jackson’s Oxford Journal, March 26, 1892; “Wallingford: Mr Hayllar’s Pictures,” Jackson Oxford Journal, March 25, 1893. 69 Edith Hayllar gave up painting when she married Reverend Bruce Mackay in 1900, and in the same year Kate Hayllar took up nursing and ceased artistic activity. Mary Hayllar stopped working

93 Hayllar sisters stopped painting professionally are not recorded, however it is unlikely their subsequent homes and lifestyles afforded the same opportunities for painting as their family home, a point crystallised by the fact that Jessica, who remained with her parents at Castle Priory throughout her life, was the only of the sisters to produce and exhibit art into the twentieth century.

Castle Priory was an unusual space in that it privileged female art making above domesticity; materially and spatially it encouraged and abetted artistic professionalism. It is an example of a sister studio—a studio and living space shared by sisters or female friends for the purposes of companionship and art production. Sister studios were another way family relationships influenced the provision and purpose of studios for women artists, and the communities that formed around these spaces differed from those created by artistic marriages. Sister studios were miniature artistic communities, providing camaraderie and encouragement and facilitating collaborations, the sharing of materials and models and the exchange of ideas.70 The presence of a female family member or friend went some way to counteract the social impropriety of a woman seeking property outside of the home, and this allowed sisters and friends to acquire independent workspaces away from the binds of familial responsibility, spaces that indicated the seriousness of their intentions and facilitated the production of commercially competitive and saleable art.

Performing Studio Life: The Studio as Showroom, Stage and Social Hub

Artists’ studios assumed unprecedented cultural significance in the late nineteenth century. As the wealth and social prominence of artists grew, public interest in their lifestyles, homes and habits increased exponentially. Books, newspapers articles and photographic series documented artists’ working environments, which were seen as giving insights into their creative process and intellectual and aesthetic subjectivity.71 professionally after her marriage in 1887. See Chistopher Wood, “The Artistic Family Hayllar. Part Two: Jessica, Edith, Mary and Kate,” Connoisseur (May 1974): 2-9 70 For a discussion of sister studios in the Scottish context, see Elizabeth Cumming, Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland (Edinburgh: Berlinn, 2006): 51-80. 71 These included F.G. Stephens’ influential book Artists at Home, published in 1884 with photographs by J.P. Mayall depicting well-known artists in situ in their studios. Stephens stated, “In biographical and historical interest no pictures surpass views of the interiors of artists’ studios.” Artists at Home (New York: Appleton and Co., 1884), 6. Other publications in this vein include Maurice Adams’ 1884

94 The studio transformed from a private place of work to a public site of cultural consumption. “In our epoch the painter is no longer the labouring artisan who locks himself away in his studio behind a closed door,” wrote the art critic Albert Wolff. “He has thrust his head foremost into the bustle of the world…he had his day when his studio is transformed into a salon where he receives the elite of his day.”72

The purest manifestation of the studio’s newfound status was the custom designed studio house, which was built to reflect and advertise the taste, wealth and reputation of the commissioning artist. These homes, built in the fashionable artistic areas of Kensington, Chelsea, Hampstead and elsewhere, were showrooms for the artist’s unique aesthetic sensibilities and creativity. They operated as packaging for both the artist and their work, presenting them to an attentive public as cultural icons and influencers.73 “At homes”, private views and “show Sundays” were a chance for members of the culturally curious middle-class as well as the social and artistic elite to view the interiors of London’s “palaces of art”.74 As well as impressing on visitors the prosperity, sophistication and innovation of the artist in residence, these events enabled the artist to interact and network with the upper echelons of London society, forming new relationships and connections that further entrenched them into the nation’s cultural establishment.

Grand studio houses were only within the reach of an elite group of artists, who were almost exclusively male, but the attention and press they generated encouraged other artists and designers to view their studios as a means to brand, market and promote their careers. “The studio does not make the artist quite the same way as the tailor is said to make the man,” noted Walter Goodman in The Magazine of Art: It very materially assists however, in the making of a picture, while in these fashionable times of private views and Show Sundays a well regulated studio goes far towards impressing the visitor with the proper appreciation of the

book Artists’ Homes, The Graphic’s series “Painters in the Studios” which appeared in the late 1880s and Magazine of Art’s multi-part exploration entitled “Artists Studios: As They were Then and as They Are.” 72 Albert Wolff, Le Capitale de L’art (Paris 1886), 285. 73 Devon Cox, The Street of Wonderful Possibilities: Whistler, Wilde and Sargent in Tite Street (London: Francis Lincoln, 2015), 42. 74 Dakers, The Holland Park Circle, 237-239.

95 artist’s worth, and at the same time helps to enhance the merits of its performance by showing them off at the best possible advantage.75 The studio house phenomenon and the increasing status and professionalism of artists elevated even more prosaic studio spaces into cultural artefacts, worthy of visitation and comment.76 As studios became of greater importance to cultural understandings of what an artist was, women artists increasingly sought out independent workspaces that they could personalise and use to promote their artistic careers.

Some were able to access the studio house ideal through collaboration with their artist husbands. After working from her drawing room during her first marriage, and occupying a rented studio after her divorce, Louise Jopling expressed delight at the twin, custom built studios designed by William Burgess in the garden of her second marital home. Louise Jopling and her second husband, the artist Joe Jopling, commissioned the studios to stand side by side at the back of their Chelsea residence, allowing each the independence and privacy they desired while still fostering a communal and supportive atmosphere. “It was a great delight to me when my new studio was finished,” wrote Jopling, “I was able to work in it—all alone in my glory.”77 The studio was the first designed to her specifications, and which allowed space for models, props, exhibits and social gatherings. “The architect and I used to spar occasionally about the proportions—but I always posed him by asking: “Who is going to use the Studio—you or I?” Louise recalled.78 It “was a delightful room to work.”79

Louise and Joe Jopling’s economic and artistic relationship was unlike that of many other artistic couples. Both relied solely on art for their income and, during their marriage, Louise was the primary earner. She painted primarily in oils, a medium more associated with serious, academic art than the watercolours Joe favoured, and her social and artistic reputation was the greater of the pair. The specifications of their

75 Walter Goodman, “Artists Studios: As They Were Then and as They Are – II,” Magazine of Art (June 1901): 402. 76One art commentator wrote in 1874, “Outsiders are always curious about artists and their surroundings; to them the sanctum sanctorum of the painter's house is a mysterious place…A laboratory in which ideas are melted down and boiled up and turned out on canvas by magic, the paint pot and brushes being the wizard’s apparatus. The Architect and Building News 11 (1874), 174. 77 Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 1867-1887, 135. 78 Ibid., 134-135. 79 Ibid., 155.

96 studios reflect these circumstances in its spatial and psychic parity, and it allowed Louise the space to foster the networks and social connections she needed to support her family through art. She established a place in the fashionable artistic milieu associated with the Grosvenor Gallery and cultivated friendships with the most famous artists and patrons of the day, including John Everett Millais, James Whistler, and Grosvenor Gallery owners Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay. She was savvy about the need for self-promotion to attract clients and commissions; after her divorce from her first husband, Louise sent her children to boarding school and lived in a cheap, furnished studio where she could devote her time to both producing art and developing her social and artistic connections. She attended concerts, and the theatre, gallery openings and at homes, and invited friends to her own studio for talking and dancing.80 By the time of her marriage to Joe Jopling, Louise was “one of the most popular hostesses in London.”81

Louise thus used her studios as a tool to cultivate her networks and display her art in a professional and tasteful setting, seemingly aware that studios represented “not just a particular type of structure but a definite manner of social life.”82 Her workspaces attracted the attention of journalists and photographers, and the resulting articles further promoted her professionalism, sophistication and success. One writer recalled the décor and furnishings of Louise’s Kensington studio, which she took after the death of Joe Jopling, in breathless detail, and a contemporary reader would recognise its oriental draperies, eastern carpets and Moorish screen as the height of Aesthetic fashion. The grand piano and parquet floor were “suggestive of impromptu dances” while a tea table and “luxurious chairs and couches [gave] an air of comfort.”83 In this space of work, entertainment and show, Louise applied studio home principles to create an aesthetic studio in miniature that promoted her own professional identity and legitimacy by demonstrating her knowledge of the most fashionable trends in artistic interior decoration.

80 Letter to Albert Fleming from Louise Jopling, quoted in Twenty Years of My Life, 29. 81 F.M.G., “Famous Women: Lady Artists at Home,” Ludgate Monthly (May 1893): 197. 82 Joseph Frank Lamb, “Lions in their Dens: Lord Leighton and late Victorian Studio Life” (PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1987), 6. 83 Ibid.

97

Figure 8: Louise Jopling in her Kensington Studio. Windsor Magazine, 1906.

Louise Jopling’s prominent place in London’s artistic society and her determined self- promotion—which included the publication of a detailed memoir in 1925—ensured that the status of her studios in her marital and post marital homes was known and her role in their creation recognised. It is possible that misattribution and lack of existing documentation has obscured the involvement of other women artists in the design of their own studio homes and it is difficult to ascertain what other shared studio homes may have been the product of collaborations between husband and wife teams. When women’s involvement in the building of a studio house is recorded, however, it is evident that they held a vested interest in cultivating and displaying their artistic professionalism.

Anna Lea Merritt was one of the few women to commission a studio house independently. Like Jopling, she understood the importance of the studio in public understandings of artistic professionalism and wrote candidly of the difficulties women faced in achieving that professional ideal. Following her husband’s death in 1877 Merritt required an independent studio near her former home on Cheyne Walk,

98 where she could work on portrait commissions, but she was continuously rebuffed on account of her sex. “The owners would not let any flat to any lady–only men were allowed the comfort of small dwelling rooms, a large studio and most especially a janitor cook!”84 Unable to rent an appropriate space, Merritt invested “all [she] possessed” into building 50 Tite Street, Chelsea, a two bedroom home with a spacious studio perfectly proportioned for painting portraits, which she named “Work House.” “Artists understand the necessity of space to secure atmosphere,” she wrote. In her new studio “the light and space were just what I needed and the benefit was at once evident in my work.”85 It was at Work House that Merritt participated in Frederick Hollyer’s photographic series, which captured artists in their working environments— a project which itself contributed to the increased public interest in artists and their studios. In Hollyer’s photograph Merritt appears modestly and respectably dressed, holding a large palette and brush in her hands. As Olive Maggs notes, Merritt presents herself, independent in her own, custom-designed studio, as “the acceptable face of the New Woman of her time, assertive and autonomous.”86 However, Merritt was also intensely aware of how difficult it was for women to maintain the material conditions that were expected of professional artists, and which in turn supported their saleability and boosted their market value. By the late 1880s the cost of maintaining 50 Tite Street was untenable, and Merritt gave up the house to move to the country. As she would later warn other women artists, art was an expensive and uncertain career and the “social claims” on artists could lead them to live more expensively than they could afford.87

Despite her financial insecurity Merritt was proud of the fact that she “lived by the brush” and her studio house was built as a testament to her professional ambition.88 A second woman to commission her own studio home, however, used the space to promote a different version of female artistic success. Kate Greenaway’s idealised depictions of pre-industrial childhood made her one of the most successful illustrators

84 Anna Lea Merritt, Love Locked Out: The Memoirs of Anna Lea Merritt (Boston: Museum of Fine Art, 1981), 130. 85 Ibid., 136. 86 Olive Maggs, Anna Lea Merritt's Murals: Wall Paintings in a Surrey church (Surrey: The Society for the Arts and Crafts Movement in Surrey, 2011). 87 Merritt, Love Locked Out, 167. 88 Anna Lea Merritt, “A Letter to Artists: Especially Women Artists,” McBride’s Magazine 65 (1900): 463.

99 of the late nineteenth century. In 1885, Greenaway commissioned the architect Norman Shaw to design a studio house on a £2000 block of land in the semi-rural Hampstead. She took an active role in the design of the house; as a commercially successful artist she already had access to an attractive, well proportioned studio, and wanted the new building to provide even more comfort and functionality.89 However, although Greenaway wanted a space that would materially support her professional activities, the design of the house also obscured the seriousness and commercialism of her artistic pursuits. Greenaway’s public persona was often identified with the nostalgic domesticity depicted in her illustrations. While other successful women artists, like Greenaway’s former studio mate Elizabeth Butler, were criticised for attempting to paint “like men,” Greenaway was praised for using her “feminine” artistic sensibilities to create images for children—for whom women artists were seen as having a “special vision.”90

In her studio home, Greenaway created a space that promoted this image of cosy femininity by borrowing from the style of her signature illustrations. “One can see at once where Miss Greenaway received the inspiration for her quaint gabled house,” remarked one journalist. The house reproduced her pre-industrial aesthetic in its exteriors, which were described in contemporary press in the same language used for her illustrations—simple, bewitching and picturesque.91 While other studio homes featured expansive dining rooms and galleries for the reception of guests, in the Greenaway house the tearoom was the space most frequently used for entertaining. Here, the “long windows, with their full curtains, the cosy window seats… had a familiar look to those who had studied the work of the talented artist”.92

In this room, Greenaway entertained her child models and close circle of friends. She did not open the house on “show Sundays” or host parties or private viewings, nor did she network with other artists to earn commissions and patrons. For an artist whose commercial success was built on idealised depictions of domesticity, the house was

89 M.H Spielmanm and G.H Layard, Kate Greenaway (London: Adams and Charles Black, 1905), 144; Louise Campbell, “Questions of Identity: Women, Architecture and the Aesthetic Movement”, 12. 90 “Women and Art,” Bow Bells 1 (1888): 13. 91 “Our Illustrations: Miss Kate Greenaway’s House,” British Architect 23, no. 19 (1885): 224; “Kate Greenway’s House,” Bow Bells 18 (1892), 164. 92 “Kate Greenaway’s House”, 164.

100 designed to support her art in a different way. It was a pubic embodiment of the aesthetic and lifestyle her illustrations promoted—an advertisement for her art that also cloaked her commercial success and professional routine in a veil of feminine conventionality. Louise Campbell notes that Greenaway’s studio home endowed her artistic practice with an “old fashioned charm”, rendering it “individual, feminine and domestic.”93 It displayed and promoted her signature aesthetic to the world, while also presenting her artistic practice in the guise of a lady-like, genteel pastime, encouraging her reputation as an artist who embraced her natural feminine sensibilities.

Although Greenaway used her studio home to conceal rather than promote her professionalism, the space still had a performative aspect; within its spatial parameters she defined and played out a non-threatening, feminine artistic identity. Although it did not perform in the same way as the archetypical studio houses of G.F. Watts and Sir Frederic Leighton, it was still a “key element in the creation of Greenaway’s professional and artistic identity.”94 Greenaway had the motivation and the means to construct an elaborate and bespoke workplace to support the production of her art and the maintenance of her brand. For most women artists however, the cost of maintaining even a small studio was significant. To maximise its value and utility, many tried to acquire space in an artistic area of the city where they could be close to exhibition venues, galleries and dealers and feel part of an artistic community. Even on a small scale, these spaces enabled women artists to perform the “studio life” that structured the daily routines of working artists and defined public perceptions of the artistic lifestyle.

93 Campbell, “Questions of Identity: Women, Architecture and the Aesthetic Movement”, 14. 94 Ibid.

101

Figure 9: Kate Greenaway’s studio home at 39 Frognal, Hamptead. Photo © Steve Cadman

Figure 10: Kate Greenaway’s tea room, pictured in M.H. Spielmann and G.H. Layard’s 1905 biography Kate Greenaway.

102 Women like Ethel Walker relied in part on the location of their studios and the activities and interactions that occurred within it as proof of their dedication and commitment to the craft and their belonging and status in the profession. Walker’s studio on the Chelsea embankment consisted of a double room on the first floor of a converted Victorian house. The space functioned as a bedroom and kitchen as well as a studio, and it was here that Walker worked, entertained guests and received critics and journalists. Finished canvases were stacked haphazardly five or six deep against the walls and perched upon piles of books to be on view.95 Pictures, ornaments and vases were crammed on the mantle and atop tables, contributing to an atmosphere of “glorious confusion.”96 In press accounts of her studio life Walker was positioned in the tradition of famous Chelsea bohemians Augustus John and Dante Rossetti—a figure of the “Chelsea pageant” who was keeping the “romantic aura” of the area alive. “Miss Ethel Walker is the Squire of Chelsea. When she advances along King’s Road…the painters’ suburb becomes a village again.”97 The geography of Walker’s studio and the lifestyle it facilitated positioned her firmly in an established cultural and historical narrative that was recognisable to an art literate public—the bohemian maverick. She encouraged this perception in interviews and through her interactions with the local area; she walked her dogs each morning in black satin pyjamas and regaled journalist with stories of her clashes with other artists.98

Walker settled in her Cheyne Walk studio in 1899, at a time when artistic identities like “the bohemian” started to become more accessible to women. The solitary, bohemian artist, a product of mid-nineteenth century French literature, was a recognised cultural figure in Britain. The lax sexual morality and social rebellion the concept implied was accepted, so long as it remained discreetly behind the doors of a male studio.99 However, women artists’ access to studio space in modern, urban environments enabled them to also reject the social and behavioural codes of their

95 “She Threw George Moore Down the Stairs,” The Recorder, November 19, 1949. Grace English Collection, Tate Archive Ref: TGA 716/96. 96 “An Artist at Home,” Tatler and Bystander 9 July, 1941. Grace English Collection, Tate Archive Ref: TGA 716/96. 97 “Ethel Walker: Artist,” Picture Post, January 9, 1941. Grace English Collection, Tate Archive Ref: TGA 716/96. 98 “Two Sets of Biographical notes on Ethel Walker by Grace English,” Grace English Collection, Tate Archive Ref: TGA 716/81; Austin. “She Threw George Moore Down the Stairs”. 99 Gill Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde: Modernism and Feminine Art, 1900 to the late 1920s (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 192.

103 gender. In this space women had the freedom to set their own work and social routines—they could eat and sleep when they pleased, entertain male and female guests and visit galleries and theatres on their own time. The studio was a space where women could exercise their nascent modernity, and experimented with new and more autonomous modes of living.100

The artistic histories of areas like Kensington, Chelsea and Bloomsbury situated women in an established spatial tradition. These addresses functioned as a signifier of cultural credibility and placed women in geographic dialogue with the primary infrastructure of art production and commerce. However, while urban studio life for women was, in the late nineteenth century, seen as “one of the developments of modern times” the cost of maintaining a studio in these areas was a significant challenge for many, leading The Athenaeum to remark on the number of artists working from drawing rooms, “who would prefer studios but are unable to rent them at present in London.” 101 In 1901, Anna Lea Merritt suggested that young artists budget £200 a year for studio rent, materials and models—significantly more than the £115 Emily Hobhouse estimated as the average income of a professional female artist in 1900. As artists required spaces of a particular size and orientation, Hobhouse found that nearly a third of their income needed to be devoted to rent, compared to the average female contribution of 21 percent.102 Women artists seeking independent live- in studios were thus recognised as part of a larger social problem concerning the provision of housing for respectable, working women of small and medium incomes.

Self-supporting female professionals and single women were in need of accommodation that was more private and comfortable than boarding houses, and more affordable and sociable than privately rented flats. The “ladies housing problem” was highlighted in the pages of The Englishwoman’s Review and Work and Leisure, where the desire for “wholesome and cheap lodging” where single women

100 For a discussion of how women used their studio spaces to support the women’s suffrage movement, see Tara Morton, “Changing Spaces: Art, Politics and Identity in the Home Studios of the Suffrage Atelier,” Women’s History Review 21, no 4 (2012): 623-637. 101 Darley Dale, “Lady Artists,” London Society (November1898): 490; “The New Type of Studio,” The Athenaeum, 26 September, 1919, 954. 102 Emily Hobhouse, “Women Workers: How They Live, How They Wish to Live” Nineteenth Century 47 (1900): 473.

104 “could live in comfort and safety without sacrificing privacy or independence” was deeply felt.103 One business-orientated solution to the issue that benefited women artists was put forward in 1888 with the founding of the Ladies’ Dwelling Company, a society that aimed to build purpose designed accommodation for single, professional women in the areas of London where they desired to reside— Bloomsbury, Kensington and Marylebone. The interior designer and advocate of women’s rights Agnes Garrett was at the centre of the new company and her former architectural master, J.M Byrdon, was chosen to design the second Ladies’ Residential Chambers, at Chenies Street Bloomsbury. Garrett did not design the building’s interiors, but was on the subcommittee for the residence’s domestic fittings and took responsibility for choosing furniture and refitting the building’s bathrooms and common areas over its lifespan.104

The Ladies’ Dwelling Company residences at Sloane Street, Chenies Street and York Street, Marylebone were designed with the needs of artist residents in mind. At the latter two, women were able to rent one, two or three room apartments, allowing space to store materials and accoutrements and to host students or clients. Separate studios and workrooms were also provided for those who required them.105 The common dining room dispensed with the need to cook and tenants arranged to have their rooms serviced by a staff of cleaners. These arrangements freed women artists from the burden of housekeeping and, according to one Chenies Street resident, were a significant part of the appeal of the Ladies’ Residential Chambers compared to other communal living ventures.106 The private rooms and studios provided professional women with respectable and independent spaces to devote to their work and the communal areas, which also included reading rooms, music rooms and, at York St, a bicycle room, fostered a sense of community and facilitated professional networking. Amateur theatre, musical performances and charity fundraisers were frequent

103 “A Castle in the Air,” Work and Leisure 12 no. 9 (1888): 235; “Sloane Gardens House,” Work and Leisure 11 no. 14 (1889): 285. See also H Reinherz, “The Housing of the Educated Working Woman,” The Englishwoman's Review, 15 January, 1900, 7-11. 104 Elizabeth Crawford, Enterprising Women: The Garretts and their Circle (London: Francis Boutle, 2002), 210. 105 “Editorial,” Manchester Guardian, January 23, 1889, 5. 106 Alice Zimmern, “Ladies Dwellings,” The Contemporary Review 77 (1900): 101.

105 occurrences, and these events contributed to an atmosphere of cultural and intellectual industry.107

Florence Reason, Mary Elizabeth Harding, Grace May, Ann Maitland and Mary Aberigh-Mackay pursued careers in art and art teaching from Chenies Street and York Street Chambers in the late 1890s and early 1900s.108 After working from an austere attic studio in the latter part of her RA studentship, Chenies Street provided Reason with the location and resources she needed to make a living from her art.109 She already referred to herself as a professional painter, but was pragmatic about the range of activities she had to pursue to make a living. As well as exhibiting oil and watercolour paintings and illustrating for books and magazines, she returned to her preparatory school, the Royal Female School of Art, as a teacher. Residing at Chenies Street, which was at the centre of literary and artistic London and nearby to the RFSA, publishing houses and exhibition venues, facilitated this breadth of artistic pursuits. As “women of culture” whose occupations required them to “dwell in the metropolis…without being burdened with the cares of house keeping” purpose built ladies’ residences supported women’s efforts for artistic professionalism.

Another studio arrangement available to female artists of small or medium incomes were purpose-built studio developments. These were popular with building developers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they were a way to use unusually shaped or leftover plots of land, while taking advantage of the demand for studio accommodation from the city’s growing population of artists.110 Most of these developments took the form of studio flats and included a small sleeping area, lobby or living space, scullery and bathroom. The Avenue Studios at 76 Fulham Road Chelsea, credited with being the first custom built studio building, was one of the most popular developments amongst women artists. Elizabeth Butler painted her breakthrough picture Roll Call at an Avenue Studio the year after the complex was

107 “Our London Correspondence,” Glasgow Herald, December 23, 1889; The Morning Post, January 12, 1893, 5. 108 1891 England and Wales Census and 1901 England and Wales Census; “Society of Women Artists 66th Exhibition Catalogue.” Society of Women Artists Records, Archive of Art and Design Victoria and Albert Museum, REF: AAD/1996/7/67 109 Florence Reason, “Art,” in Ladies at Work: Papers on Paid Employment for Ladies (London: A.D Innes, 1893), 49. 110 Giles Walkey, Artists’ Houses in London: 1764-1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994), 139.

106 built, and Annie Swynnerton and the famed canine painter Frances Farman also made homes there.111 Sylvia Pankhurst rented a studio at The Avenue in order to complete a paid mural commission from the Women’s Social and Political Union for an exhibition in May 1909.112 Women artists also populated the Bolton, Chester and Thurloe Studios in Kensington along with the Carlyle Studios in Chelsea. Five of the seven residents of the Edith Grove Studios in 1915 were unmarried female artists.113

Studio developments were attractive to artists of small and medium incomes because they allowed them to share in the cultural capital of a fashionable address that was prohibitively expensive in other residential forms. The spaces were far preferable to adapted drawing rooms and attics; they were designed with the needs of the artist in mind, and so were equipped with north facing windows and skylights. More luxurious and expensive accommodation featured shared entertainment spaces and caretakers, while even simple and affordable developments like 38 Cheyne Walk, designed by Charles Ashbee, incorporated double height studios and dressing rooms.114

Purpose-built studio flats and female residential developments allowed women artists of modest incomes to participate in the artistic community, and partake in the activities and behaviours expected of working, professional art practitioners. Elizabeth Butler hosted “show Sundays” and “at homes” at her Avenue studio, which she decorated to complement the pictures on display. “From one till six to-day people poured in,” she remembered. “My studio was got up quite charmingly with curtains and screens, and with wild beast skins disposed on the floor, and my arms and armour furbished up.”115 The studio’s Chelsea location allowed her to fully participate in the events that surrounded the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition as well as the social activities of London’s artistic quarter; she attended “at homes”, garden parties and

111 Elizabeth Butler, An Autobiography (London: Constable & Co, 1922), 101; “Mrs. Swynnerton,” Manchester Guardian, January, 16 1934, 11; Society of Women Artists, Exhibition Catalogue, Forty- Fifth Exhibition (1899) Society of Women Artists Records, Archive of Art and Design AAD/1996/7/46. 112 Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928 (London: Routledge, 2013). 113 Walkley, Artists' Houses in London, 239. 114 Kate Orme, “Artists’ Studios Supplementary Planning Guide,” Royal Borough of Chelsea and Kensington, http://www.rbkc.gov.uk/planningandconservation/planningpolicy/idoc.ashx?docid=83155635-4acf- 40d0-b6ac-83c9f97c295c&version=-1. 115 Butler, An Autobiography, 184.

107 private views, dined with John Millais and the critic John Ruskin, met art collectors and patrons and went to music recitals at nearby Bolton Studios.116

Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale used her studio at 11 Holland Park Road, Kensington to host viewings with writer and art critic Arthur Fish.117 Some women used the space independent studios provided to supplement their income by subletting or teaching. Louise Jopling ran her painting school from two studios at the Clareville Studios in South Kensington and, after the death of her husband, Henrietta Ward earned extra income by renting one of the two Chester Studios while working from the other.118 To afford the lease on a pair of rooms at Trafalgar Studios for herself and her husband Dora Meeson sublet space in her studio several days a week.119 While some women were “content with a north room in their own houses,” independent, affordable studio spaces allowed them to more freely “entertain their friends, [give] ‘at homes’ and afternoon teas” and pursue a “useful and pleasant” studio life.120 The fact that these spaces were designed and equipped with the needs of artists in mind and located in the artistic districts of London situated the occupants firmly within an established and recognisable professional tradition; it was only when the illustrator Florence Upton took up residence in a studio-flat at 38 Cheyne Walk that she was “ready to begin her career as a serious, professional artist,” notes her biographer.121

Conclusion

In her appraisal of the early twentieth-century artist Hilda Carline, Alicia Foster compares the “spatial marginalisation” Carline experienced throughout her working life with the way her art was marginalised critically in comparison to that of her brothers and her husband, Stanley Spencer.122 Despite being born into an artistic family, Carline struggled to access adequate studio space from the beginning of her

116 Ibid., 137, 152. 117 Letter from Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale to Arthur Fish, March 2, 1901. Arthur Fish Correspondence, Tate Archive, TGA 20076/1/39. 118 Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 307; Walkey, Artists’ Houses in London, 235. 119 Dora Meeson Coates, George Coates: His Art and His Life (London: JM Dent and Sons, 1937), 135. 120 Dale, “Lady Artists”, 490. 121 Norma S. Davis, A Lark Ascends: Florence Kate Upton, Artist and Illustrator (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1992), 68. 122 Alicia Foster, Tate Women Artists (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), 77.

108 career. As a student living in the family home at Hampstead, she set up a workspace in the hallway that separated the two studios occupied by her brothers, prompting visitors to label her the “passage artist.”123 She was, literally, working from the periphery. Independent workspace remained difficult to come by after Carline’s marriage to Spencer as she juggled domestic and artistic pressures. At the Spencers’ home in Cookham village Carline shared a room with her daughter Unity, lamenting that “all my possessions are packed into that tiny bedroom…I cannot even have my paintbox about—it has to be packed away.”124

For large parts of their working lives, women like Carline experienced difficulty accessing what was regarded as the “natural” habitat of professional artists. As well as providing important functional support to artists’ practice, studios were a vital part of artistic identity; they wrapped the artist in an appealing and recognisable “package” that was as important to buyers, patrons and critics as the content of the artists’ work.125 They were spaces that embodied the sometimes tense interplay of culture and commerce, reflecting the newfound wealth and status English artists achieved throughout the nineteenth century and the increasing commercialism and professionalism of the English art market.126

For Carline and many others, however, access to studios remained largely dependent on familial and marital relationships, which often determined the type of studio women had access to, its size and location. The provision and affordability of independent studios and workspaces, meanwhile, increased in the first decade of the twentieth century, as purpose built residences for professional women and studio developments responded to the growing demand for inexpensive, autonomous workspaces. These places fostered female artistic communities and networks, allowing women to inscribe political, feminist and bohemian meanings onto the space of their studios. For many women residing in independent studios, workspace and

123 Gilbert Spencer, Stanley Spencer (London: Gollancz, 1961), 165. 124 John Rothenstein, Stanley Spencer, the Man: Correspondence and Reminiscences (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979), 55. 125 Sarah Burns, “The Price of Beauty: Art, Commerce and the Late Nineteenth Century American Studio Interior,” in American Iconography: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature ed. David C Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 218; Mark Girouard, “The Victorian Artist at Home: The Holland Park Houses – 1.” Country Life 152, no. 3934 (1972): 1279. 126 Girouard, “The Victorian Artist at Home”, 1279.

109 living space were merged, an arrangement that led to a “new kind of domestic interior” which signalled women’s independence and professionalism, rather than their femininity, domesticity or seclusion.127 Women’s experiences with home-based or hybrid studios differed in accordance with their marital, economic and social circumstances. Working from a familial home meant that women’s artistic practice and autonomy was under constant threat from domestic responsibilities, and the location could isolate women from the social interactions and activities associated with studio life, and undermine their professional commitment and seriousness. Other women, however, benefited from access to productive home studios, purpose built studio houses and modern, live/work apartments and reinscribed the meaning attached to domestic space; for them home studios “represented their artistic freedom rather than their second-class citizenship of the world of art.”128

Although studios remained gendered spaces, allied with male artistic traditions and masculinist notions of power, commerce and representation, for many of the women discussed here the studio was a place of burgeoning female modernity—a space of creative ambition where the female artistic process was privileged. In this way, access to studio space supported women artists’ professional practice, both in terms of their internal sense of professional identity and their peer-determined reputation as serious working artists. While art school endowed women with the tools and techniques required to achieve proficiency in art, studios were where artistic production actually happened. If women artists and illustrators did not have access to a space where they could carry out their work without interruption or intervention, and access the artistic accoutrements and materials required for their chosen genre, their ability to produce work of the standard and quantity needed to earn a livelihood was stymied.

The “seemingly straightforward” 129 act of acquiring appropriate workspace for artistic production presented familial and financial challenges. The determination and sacrifices many women artists demonstrated to acquire a workspace of their own, and the willingness they showed to participate in the social rituals and interactions

127 Frances Borzello, At Home: The Domestic Interior in Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2006), 137. 128 Ibid. 129 Bain, “Female Artistic Identity in Place,” 183.

110 associated with studio life illustrate the importance of studio space to the development and maintenance of women’s artistic subjectivities, and to their material success as artists. Studios were as much commercial spaces as they were creative ones. It was there that artists produced the work they would sell through the art marketplace, and showcased their wares, and their professional personas, to buyers, patrons and critics. Defining the professional artist as Art Journal did in 1900, as one “whose ideal of professional standing is an annual income from his work and a full quota of pictures in the annual exhibitions,”130 the studio was the most important material condition of women artists’ professional practice. To have a studio was, both practically and symbolically, to be an artist. As a result, women fashioned spaces that responded to the structural, gender-based biases that remained in place into the twentieth century, and which allowed them to participate in art commerce and exhibitions as professional art practitioner.

130 James L. Caw, “The Art Works of Mrs. Traquair,” Art Journal (May 1900): 148.

111 Chapter Three: Members of the Club: Women, Professional Art Societies and the Legitimisation of Artistic Practice

In the early part of 1910, Walter Sickert wrote to his friend and fellow artist Nan Hudson regarding the new art society he had recently founded. The Camden Town Group was formed as an exhibiting platform for London artists to expose their work to potential buyers, patrons and dealers. Like other professional societies, membership bestowed on members increased access to the art marketplace, and signalled to prospective buyers and colleagues their inclusion in London’s art milieu and legitimacy within that world. To Hudson, however, Sickert noted that, “the Camden Town Group is a male club, and women are not eligible. There are lots of 2 sex clubs and several 1 sex clubs, this is one of them.”1 In 1910, such an exclusionary approach to membership was not unusual, despite the gradual liberalisation of attitudes towards women artists throughout the previous three decades. Although not technically barred from its membership, no woman had yet been elected to the Royal Academy, the traditional bastion of the English art establishment, and women remained the minority in other exhibiting groups and marginalised in the administration of professional art organisations.

Participation and involvement within the spaces of Britain’s artistic societies was important because, unlike other professionals, such as lawyers, doctors or teachers, art practitioners did not have to register to a professional association in order to enter into their respective fields. A peak institutional body did not enforce nationwide, uniform standards, nor was a licence required to practice art professionally. Grace Lees-Maffei argues that the absence of a “defined professional framework” for art benefited women; they had no legal barriers to overcome and were not subject to the rules of a central organising body, such as a marriage bar or age restriction.2 But the lack of uniform standards or set professional trajectory also made the art world more difficult

1 Letter from Walter Sickert to Nan Hudson c. Jan-May 1910. Ethel Sands Collection, Tate Archive. Ref: TGA 9125.5.77. 2 Grace Lees-Maffei, “Professionalisation as a Focus in Interior Design History,” Journal of Design History 21, no.1 (2008): 5.

112 to enter, particularly for those who did not conform to the character profile of the typical artist—that is, an urban, middle-class male. In the absence of a peak institutional organisation to grant or deny professional membership, artists and designers put in place their own structures, standards and criteria for artistic professionalism, which were enforced by gatekeepers such as art critics and writers, gallery owners, art dealers and professional societies.

These organisations, which included exhibiting societies and clubs, were particularly important in monitoring professional status throughout the art world. As Kirsten Swinth notes, the running of these associations mirrored the professional approach of other male-dominated industries.3 They established selective criteria and processes for application and membership, which bestowed professional legitimacy on those deemed qualified and suitable and shut out others to the benefits that accompanied that status. In fields such as medicine and law, professional societies had strong claims to objectivity when it came to selecting members. As Harold Perkin explains, such associations were places “in which people find their place according to trained expertise and the service they provide rather than the possession or lack of inherited wealth or acquired capital.”4 Being judged on “empirical, rational and objective standards” rather than on class, or, for that matter, gender, was part of the appeal of professionalism, and contributed to the desire of women artists to be granted membership of professional organisations.5 By the later half of the nineteenth century, however, most mainstream art societies continued to run according to opaque, subjective and non-standardised procedures, in which personality, connections and networking played an important role.6 As Maria Malatesta shows, professions in which the professionals themselves controlled membership, rather than the state or universities, were the most difficult for women to gain entry to, and these practices produced particular challenges for women artists. 7 The lack of a formal, credential-

3 Kirstien Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 68. 4 Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (New York: Routledge, 2002), 359. 5 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 234. 6 Julie F Codell, “Artists’ Professional Societies: Production, Consumption and Aesthetics” in Towards a Modern Art World, ed. Brian Allen (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 171-174. 7 Maria Malatesta, Professional Men, Professional Women: The European Professions from the Nineteenth Century until Today. Trans. Adrian Belton. (London: Sage, 2011), 130.

113 based system for application and membership meant that their exclusion could continue to be justified on a subjective, traditionalist basis.

Katy Deepwell, Pamela Gerrish Nunn and Deborah Cherry have argued that the prestige of Royal Academy membership waned at the end of the nineteenth century, as its inward looking selection and hanging practices and relevance to contemporary art were challenged by new exhibiting groups and societies.8 For women, however, membership to the oldest and most traditional art academy continued to be a relevant professional ideal because, and not in spite of, its exclusionary and gendered membership practices. The fact that women had not been given the opportunity to participate in the RA as full members and associates meant that it continued to hold value for them as a marker of establishment acceptance and professionalism, at a time when many male artists, some of them RA members and associates themselves, lost confidence in the society. The first section of this chapter will examine women’s involvement with established and male-run professional societies, and consider what access to these spaces meant to women artists, their artistic practice and professional identities.

It was not only membership of art organisations that the professional woman artist desired. Involvement in the management and organisation of societies themselves elevated art practitioners to a gate-keeping role within the profession, from which they had the power and agency to influence the culture and practices of the art world. The gradual liberalisation of professional art societies’ policies towards women did not extend to their involvement in the management of those societies, a position that reflected deeply rooted reluctance to allow women to judge male artists’ work from a position of authority. The second section of this chapter will discuss women’s role as organisers and administrators in professional organisations open to both sexes, and their attempts to create more significant and meaningful roles for themselves in single

8 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London: Routledge, 1993), 65; Katy Deepwell, Women Artists Between the Wars: A Fair Field and no Favour (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 101-103; Pamela Gerrish Nunn, “Dorothy’s Career and Other Cautionary Tales” in Crafting the Women Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, eds., Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 167-86

114 sex, female societies, which attempted to provide members with the benefits of professional association within a self-consciously gendered framework. It was as organisers, committee members, selectors and jurors that women were able to exercise real authority in the art world, and effect long-lasting changes to the culture of professional societies and their attitudes towards female artistry. Whether they were involved with male-run, “establishment” art societies, new, genre-specific groups or avant-garde art clubs, engagement with art societies materially assisted women artists’ professionalism by providing a platform for the public display, judgement and sale of their work. It was this impersonal, public scrutiny that, I argue, moved women’s artistic practice from the amateur realm of subjective satisfaction and personal exchange to the professional realm of objective, commercially-driven validation.9

The Royal Academy and “Establishment” Artistic Societies

In the 1890s, Florence Fenwick Miller began a campaign through her column in The Illustrated London News against the Royal Academy’s treatment of its female exhibitors. Fenwick Miller was a professional journalist and advocate of female suffrage, and took an active interest in the challenges of other women workers in her “Ladies’ Column”, particularly those attempting to make a living through art or other cultural enterprises. Her reviews of the Royal Academy’s summer exhibitions read as a feminist alternative to those found in mainstream news outlets such as The Times; special attention was paid to the number of women selected as exhibitors, the care with which their pictures were treated and the prestige attached to their location within the exhibition. Fenwick Miller’s articles draw attention not only to the importance of the jurors and hanging committee to the reception of a picture, but also the internal Academy politics involved in the these decisions. “Can it be true,” she wrote of the Royal Academician Laurence Alma-Tadema for example: That the artist who has lavished such care on painting women, in so noble an attitude as that of these matrons and so lovely an aspect as that of these girls, can be in practice accustomed to exert all his influence against the admission of women’s work to the Academy, and so against its prominence of place?10

9 Anne Higgonet, Berthe Morisot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 29. 10 F.M.M., “The Ladies' Column,” Illustrated London News, May 7, 1887, 516.

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Fenwick Miller saw the attitudes of Royal Academicians like Alma-Tadema and others as preventing the election of female associates and influencing the decisions of the selection jurors and hanging committee, and she railed against this “wholesale depreciation of living women artists.”11 However the motivation for her sustained critique of the RA’s practices was not to encourage women to abandon the Academy and its exhibitions, or promote the work of alternative, female-run societies, but, paradoxically, to advocate for women’s further involvement at the Royal Academy itself. As Meaghan Clarke points out, this is because Fenwick Miller, like many others, still “equated success with Royal Academy membership.”12 The titles bestowed by the RA were potent and widely recognised symbols of legitimacy and establishment acceptance; “ARA and RA are weighty letters, a hall mark as to the possession of talent,” Fenwick Miller explained.13 In addition, membership of the RA continued to confer practical benefits; before 1903 RAs and associates were entitled to exhibit eight works, a condition that allowed members to monopolise the exhibition space, and the letters were also an indicator of market value. As a critic in the Examiner commented in 1871, “Everyone knows the money value (to mention no others) of the magic letters [RA].” 14 Apart from these material advantages, the continued exclusion of women from art’s largest organisational body prolonged the association between women and amateurism by withholding from them the most official title an artist could hold. Therefore despite the RA Committee’s apparent antipathy towards female exhibitors, it was still important for women to continue their attempts at integration for the sake of their own professional success.

Fenwick Miller’s opinion of the RA as England’s foremost artistic organisation was a common one in the 1890s, despite the fact that the society had faced criticism about its management for decades. The 1863 Royal Commission into the Academy’s relationship to fine arts in Britain heard grievances about the organisation’s lack of transparency in its exhibition and election processes, along with its ambiguous

11 F.M.M., “The Ladies’ Column,” Illustrated London News, October 21, 1889, 795. 12 Meaghan Clarke, Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880-1905 (Aldershot: Ashage, 2005), 92. 13 Quoted in Clarke, Critical Voices: Women and Art Criticism in Britain, 1880-1905, 93. 14 Quoted in Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists, 65.

116 position as both a publicly supported institution and a private society that refused to answer to any higher authority and claimed a monopoly over the artistic establishment.15 The commission recommended that the Academy reconstruct its membership on a “wider and more liberal basis.” Critical and popular discourse on art continued to protest the RA’s limited membership and dispute the privileges members enjoyed at exhibitions compared to conditions for general exhibitors.16 But, even while its cultural monopoly was being challenged, the Academy largely retained the esteem of the art-literate public and continued to operate as the nation’s premier fine art organisation in the eyes of many, perhaps because a more credible challenger that could command the same authority and loyalty never emerged.17 Its exhibitions attracted more coverage from newspapers and periodicals than any other society or club in England, and were treated by critics as a guide to the current landscape of contemporary art, and a barometer of its health.18 And while it was not technically a public institution, the RA’s royal charter and state-sponsored premises at Burlington House endowed the society with an air of national responsibility and cultural legitimacy.19 As The Times remarked in 1886:

15 The Reader described the position of the Royal Academy as “peculiar. It is a self-elected aristocracy of art, having the sanction and patronage of the Sovereign, and a prescriptive right to lodgings at the expense of the nation; in return for which they provide a perfectly gratuitous education in art and though reserving to themselves certain privileges they admit the works of the profession generally to their annual exhibition.” “The Royal Academy,” February 17, 1866, 187; See also Tom Taylor, “Report of the Commissioners Appointed into the Present Position of the Royal Academy,” The Fine Arts Quarterly Review (October 1863): 275-298: Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 304-305; Helen Valentine, Art in the Age of Queen Victoria (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1999): 34-35. 16 See “A Comparison of the Salon and the Royal Academy,” Art Journal (August 1880): 247-248; D.S. MacColl, “The Royal Academy,” The Fortnightly Review 53 (1893): 881-889; A.L. Baldry, “The Royal Academy Exhibition,” Art Journal (June 1904): 161-182. Even while criticising the RA as playing the “undignified part of purveyor of the things which are most in demand”, Baldry admitted that the Academy was “accepted as the chief guardian of British art.” 17 Thomas Bayer, “Money as Muse: The Origin and Development of the Modern Art Market in Victorian England: A Process of Commodification” (PhD thesis, Tulane University, 2001), 178. 18 As Marion Spielmann commented in 1901, “You may approve the Royal Academy as the great official living Art institution of the day, or you may deride if for its dullness…but you cannot deny that it is at the centre of all the popular artistic movements of the country, and that the relatively few who repudiate its pretensions and the fewer still who have advertised in the pubic prints that they ‘have had the honour of rejection at the hands of the Royal Academy,’ accept the statement that the artistic stellar system of England revolves round the pole star of Burlington House.” “Behind the Scenes of the Royal Academy Exhibition,” The Pall Mall Magazine 24, no. 97 (1901): 99. See also Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, eds. The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 6. 19 The Royal Academy was founded by Royal Charter in 1768, at which time King George III guaranteed to underwrite the organisation’s financial losses. MaryAnne Stevens, “A Quiet Revolution: The Royal Academy 1900-1950” in The Edwardians and After: The Royal Academy 1900-1950, ed. MaryAnne Stevens (London: Royal Academy of Arts; Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1988), 15.

117 [The Royal Academy’s] presumed recognition by the State gives it, its members, and their works a dignity and market worth beside which the value of their Burlington-House lodgings is inconsiderable. All Academicians are really aware of their dependence on the public belief that their Academy is a public and not a private institution.20

Figure 11: The Royal Academy Conversazione, 1891 by G. Grenville Manton. © National Portrait Gallery

The Royal Academy’s perceived role as the nation’s artistic arbiter, along with its art schools, membership structure and exhibitions made it a “locus of professionalisation” in the nineteenth century as it sought to monopolise cultural power and arbitrate who and what was considered legitimate in the world of art.21 As the closest England had to an official, state-endorsed peak body for artists, a relationship with the RA was particularly important for women, who required external validation of their professional status to be taken seriously. However this perceived association between women and amateurism, or at the very least with sub-standard

20 The Times, 28 September, 1886, 7. 21 Gordon Fyfe, “Auditing the RA: Official Discourse and the Nineteenth Century Royal Academy,” in Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Rafael Cardoso Denis and Colin Trodd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 118.

118 artistic production, also gave the RA a reason to distance itself from female artists, and to do the least of all major professional societies to support their professional ambitions. The risk of women members tainting the RA’s reputation for artistic and cultural legitimacy was perceived as high, while the awkwardness of introducing women participants to the social and administrative sides of the Academy also caused concern. G.D Leslie recalled the unease felt by Academicians as the success of women at the RA schools and exhibitions grew more apparent: [T]he “Patres conscripti” of the society were much alarmed at the idea of a possible invasion into the very hearts of their own ranks…Members considered the difficulty of the treatment of women after they had been elected; for instance, they might choose to come to the banquet; possibly one solitary lady would come!...Would she have to be escorted in to the dinner? And if so, by whom? The president has to escort the highest personage that attends the banquet. Would the Royal personage himself escort the lady? Would ladies be eligible to serve on the Council—or to serve as Visitors? Might we not some day even have a female President?22

The movements to reform the Royal Academy did little to change these attitudes towards the position of women within the organisation or enact practical changes to aid their integration and, throughout the 1880s and 1890s, the impulse for reform amongst the broader public waned.23 Debates about the inclusion of women as associates and Academicians were often answered by pointing to women’s existing success as exhibitors.24 Paul Usherwood explains how the Royal Academy’s generous treatment of Elizabeth Butler (then Thompson) in the early 1870s, and the success of her battle painting The Roll Call, gave the institution the opportunity to project itself as an open-minded and liberal institution, without having to give any real, long lasting concessions to female exhibitors.25 While some critics called for Butler’s election as an RA associate, others, in an opinion seemingly mirrored by the RA, saw Butler’s success as proof that women could achieve success in the art world from their present position, and would not benefit from any membership concessions. Why, when women could already “sit down at their desks and easels to write books and paint good pictures” would they “hanker after a participation in the dirty drudgery which

22 G.D. Leslie, Inner Life of the Royal Academy (London: John Murray, 1914), 222-223. 23 Within the art world, however, criticism of the RA continued into the early twentieth century. 24 The membership structure of the RA at the turn of the century allowed for 40 Academicians (full members) and 30 Associates. Associates were elected by Academicians and promoted to full member status in the same way. William Stevens, “The Royal Academy,” The Leisure Hour (June 1898): 490. 25 Paul Usherwood, “Elizabeth Thompson Butler: A Case of Tokenism,” Woman’s Art Journal 11, no.2 (1990/1991): 14-18.

119 pertains to men,” questioned one journalist in an otherwise glowing review of The Roll Call.26

The reasons for women’s exclusions from RA membership were thus explained by the lack of professionalism in most women artists’ work, the social awkwardness and impropriety that would be caused by women’s inclusion in member events and activities, and the fact that those women who did achieve success as exhibitors at the RA did not require membership to further advance their position.27 The first point was used by many to justify the absence of women from the Academy’s membership—as the Academician William Powell Frith wrote in the late 1880s, “Whether we shall have female Academicians or not depends upon the ladies themselves; all the honours the Academy can bestow are open to them.”28 It was not the fault of the Academy that a woman had not yet been elected, but of women themselves in failing to produce an artist of the standard an RA associateship would demand. This point was disputed by the more progressive contingent of the critical commentariat, along with members of the Academy themselves and some outspoken women artists, although others placed their good relationship with the Academy above protesting on the part of their sex.29

This last point reflects the truth, to some extent, of the view that successful female painters did not need to be elected to the RA to reap the benefits of association with the organisation. Elizabeth Butler’s status as a serious member of the professional art community, for example, was solidified through the RA’s treatment of The Roll Call; its prestigious placement “on the line” at the summer exhibition and the Academy’s

26 G.A. Sala, “The Royal Academy,” The Daily Telegraph, May 2, 1874. 27 The questions relating to female members’ potential participation in RA banquets was answered in 1881, when the Academy revised its rules to exclude any future female Associates or Academicians from attending this event, and from serving on the Academy Council. 28 William Powell Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences (London: Richard Bentley and Sons, 1887), 491. In this passage Frith is also referring to the important role played by supporters and allies within the RA in the election of new members, and the significance of connections and networking will be discussed in a later section of the chapter. 29 Fred Miller, for example, claimed that Elizabeth Butler “ought to be of the ‘divine Forty” [Royal Academicians] and Artist magazine supported the election of Ethel Wright and other women painters to the RA. “Surely it is not for the want to merit in all cases, and were women to receive a little more recognition who knows but what such encouragement would not stimulate them to such greater efforts.” Frank Miller, “Angelica Kaufmann, Royal Academician,” The English Illustrated Magazine 175 (1898): 20; F.M. “The Work of Miss Ethel Wright,” Artist 22 May, 1898, 33-43. Norman Shaw and John Everett Millais, for example, supported both Butler’s and Louise Jopling’s election as associates. See Elizabeth Butler, An Autobiography (London: Constable, 1922), 136 and Louise Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life (London: John Lane, 1925), 151, 154.

120 feting of Butler’s achievement contributed to the picture becoming the “hit of the season.”30 In practical terms, this success resulted in Butler receiving £1200 from Dickson and Co for the picture’s copyright, a myriad of new admirers, clients and commissioners—including Queen Victoria—and a vastly increased market value.31 These factors contributed to Butler’s ability to practice as an economically viable, professional painter and participate in the art marketplace in equal competition with her male counterparts. Participating in the “market of sale and purchase” was “a principle close to her art,” as she saw it as the only way to be judged fairly and equally as a professional artist and distance herself from the spectre of female amateurism.32 Exhibiting at the RA continued to strengthen the careers of female artists as the century came to a close. Lucy Kemp-Welch experienced a similar trajectory to Butler when, early in her career, she caused a sensation at the 1897 RA summer exhibition with Colt Hunting in the New Forest, which became the second picture by a female artist to be purchased for the nation via the Chantrey Bequest Fund.33 As in the case of Butler, the broad, highly publicised platform of the summer exhibition granted Kemp-Welch almost overnight fame within the art world and beyond, and this renown helped the artist develop contacts and clients while, significantly, increasing the market value of her work.

30 The picture was so popular with the public that the RA hired policeman to protect it and the paintings near by from damage. Butler, An Autobiography, 110. 31 Butler, An Autobiography, 104-113; “Exhibition Of The Royal Academy” The Times, May 2, 1874, 12; "Miss Butler’s Roll Call,” Newcastle Courant, September 18, 1874. 32 John Oldcastle, “Our Living Artists: Elizabeth Butler nee Thompson,” The Magazine of Art (January 1879), 260. 33 “Signals from our Watch Tower,” The Woman’s Signal, May 13, 1897, 296; Rose Sketchley, “The Reign of Woman in the World of Art,” The Argosy (February 1901), 58.

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Figure 12: The Roll Call by Elizabeth Butler, 1874. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015

The year 1897 was a strong one for women at the Royal Academy. One fifth of all exhibitors were female, and apart from Kemp-Welch, Ethel Wright, Louise Jopling, Henrietta Rae and Maud Earl were favourably hung. As non-members these women were excluded from the ceremonial banquet that accompanied the exhibition and could have no role in the selection committee charged with reducing the 12 000 entries down to a barely-manageable 2000, but the rituals, events and customs that surrounded the show still provided them with valuable exposure and opportunities for networking. A “lady artist” reporting on the events leading up the exhibition’s opening noted the thrill of varnishing day, when artists saw the position of their painting for the first time, made last minute adjustments and mingled with their fellow exhibitors. At midday parties of artists broke off to dine at the surrounding restaurants, where gossip and news about the year’s art was swapped. “The picture is the same—good, bad, or indifferent—whether it has a place in the Academy catalogue or not,” she notes, “but that, Burlington House being the best “shop” it is a very good thing when our works are shown there.”34 The associated “show Sundays”, when artists displayed their Academy entries in open studios to a revolving audience of artists, critics and spectators were an important opportunity to participate in the studio culture of the period and gain greater visibility in London’s insular and interconnected art society.

34 A Woman Artist, “Varnishing day at the RA,” The Woman’s Signal, May 2, 1895, 280.

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Some women, like Henrietta Rae, were satisfied to participate in the RA in this way as exhibitors and saw little reason to advocate for greater status. “The title RA would be a purely honorary one,” Rae asserted. “The introduction of any women RAs into the inner workings of Burlington House must only cause hindrance and undesirable change.”35 Women like Rae, Butler, Kemp-Welch, Wright and many others used the RA to further their professional prospects; the summer exhibitions provided a valuable platform for exposure to London’s art society and the wider, art-buying public, and the associated events and customs presented women with the opportunity to make new connections and build networks within the art world.36 In this way, women’s exclusion from RA membership at the turn of the twentieth century did not necessarily stunt their development as professional painters; they might still use the RA to access the nation’s largest art market and build their reputations through the press and commissions the exhibition generated.37 However, others saw the withholding of membership status as unjust, even if its meaning was largely symbolic. Henrietta Ward, for example, expressed frustration at being shut out of the official art establishment. “I have long felt the injustice of withholding the honour of RA from women,” she remarked, noting in her memoir, “I don’t suppose that there is anyone living who has attending so many RA private views as I, dating from the time when it was held at the National Gallery.”38

Ward was the daughter of artists and married to a Royal Academician. She had exhibited at the RA since the age of 14, known Academicians from childhood and was friends with a succession of RA presidents including Sir Frederick Leighton and

35 Henrietta Rae, “My First Success,” Atalanta: The Victorian Magazine, January 1, 1896, 260. 36 No other exhibitions attracted the number of visitors as the summer exhibitions. In the 1880s and 1890s approximately 355 000 people visited the shows each year, and viewing numbers did not start decreasing significantly until the First World War. Sidney C. Hutchison, The History of the Royal Academy 1768-1968 (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1968), 138. 37 Although the RA did not officially take responsibility for selling the works in the summer exhibitions, the show operated as a buying venue for art consumers and dealers and a “shop window” for exhibiting artists. In 1879 for example profits from work sold totalled £20, 814. Artists could send recommended prices for their works to the Academy’s secretary, and visitors were advised in the exhibition catalogue to contact the price clerk to find out the price of a particular work. The catalogue also included artists’ addresses so that potential buyers, dealers, patrons and commissioners could contact them directly regarding payment. Unlike most other exhibiting societies, the RA did not charge a commission on works sold through its exhibitions, making it a profitable place for artists to make sales. The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1910), np. 38 Mrs. E.M. Ward, Memories of Ninety Years (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1924), 174, 279.

123 John Everett Millais. She did not want for artistic connections or networks and enjoyed a successful exhibiting and teaching career, but the absent title of ARA or RA still exerted a strong reaction. For women without the in-built connections of an artist like Ward, RA membership would have meant something even more tangible— contact with the art world’s most influential and powerful personalities and access to important networks of dealers and patrons, some of whom dealt exclusively with members of the Academy. Paradoxically however, the women in most need of the connections and benefits of RA membership had the least chance of appointment. RA elections were political events that often necessitated campaigning on the part of nominees.39 Laura Wortley explains Lucy Kemp-Welch’s unsuccessful attempts at RA elections over a period of 20 years by pointing to her unwillingness to play politics by cultivating supporters or soliciting favours. Kemp-Welch was shy and reclusive, and was more interested in devoting her time to work than building useful social networks within art society.40 “It seems increasingly probable that she contributed to her own exclusion from the RA by refusing to play political games,” Wortley notes, adding that the women who were ultimately elected to the RA in the 1920s and 30s were advantaged by the advocacy of a close circle of influential male friends and husbands.41

The fact that the RA withheld membership from women for so long made these eventual elections more meaningful than the unfashionable status of the Academy at the time would suggest. For Laura Knight, the second woman to be elected as an associate and the first to be given full Academician status, the RA remained a symbol of official recognition for her talents and achievements. She was a product of a Victorian childhood and a struggling artist mother, who had instilled in Knight the belief and ambition that she would “be elected to the Royal Academy one day.”42 At a

39 A conversation between an Academician and a journalist was recorded in The Speaker in 1892: “The last three elections, do those elections represent artistic opinion?” “Perhaps not, but there are social and commercials reasons…” G.M., “The Royal Academy,” The Speaker 5 (1892): 497. 40 Laura Wortley, Lucy Kemp-Welch 1869-1958: The Spirit of the Horse (Woodbridge: Antique Collector’s Club, 1996), 95, 135. 41 Laura Wortley. “Lucy Kemp-Welch: The Hunt for the Artist Behind the Horses,” Antique Collecting (February 1997), 13-15. However it is important to note that even the willingness to actively cultivate connections and the possession of male supporters was not a guarantee of RA election, as the failure of artists such as Louise Jopling, perhaps the female artist most known for her social connections and networking skills, to be nominated for election demonstrates. 42 Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (London: Macmillan, 1936), 1

124 time when modern and avant-garde forms of art were flourishing, Knight remained a staunch realist with a traditional approach to art, and her values regarding the RA mirrored her nineteenth-century training. As Rosie Broadly notes, “official recognition, and the financial security that would surely follow, was the only way to demonstrate that she had overcome the double disadvantage of her sex and background.”43 Knight’s friend Alfred Munnings, who later became the RA’s president, supported her throughout the election process and she was aware of the advocacy of “certain supporters” on her behalf, but remained cautious of the outcome and afterwards, surprised that prejudice and discrimination were still at play. “Even today,” Knight claimed, “a female painter is considered more or less a freak, and may either be undervalued or overpraised, and by sole virtue of her rarity and her sex be of better press value.”44 RA membership rewarded her life long pursuit of artistic professionalism and loyalty to the Academy ideal, and delivered her new and more prestigious commissions and clients, but the title could not erase long established and enduring attitudes towards the otherness of female artistry and the associated value judgements.

The election of Annie Swynnerton and Laura Knight as associates to the Royal Academy in the 1920s reflected an attempt by the organisation to introduce institutional reforms and widen its membership base. While most accounts of the RA in the period after 1900 focus on the organisation’s entrenched traditionalism and resistance to artistic changes, the Academy did slowly reform by reducing the number of works members and non members were permitted to submit, reversing a ban on the admission of engravers to the Academy and including exhibitors from diverse educational backgrounds. However, many artists continued to be dissatisfied with the RA’s dismissive treatment of mediums other than oil, its populism and inward- looking disregard of progressive art.45 “You did not speak of the Royal Academy if you pretended to be interested in modern art,” noted The Sunday Times’ art critic

43 Rose Broadley, Laura Knight: Portraits (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2013), 20. 44 Laura Knight, The Magic of the Line: The Autobiography of Laura Knight DBE (London: William Kimber, 1965), 307. 45 “For the RA and Others,” The Outlook, April 21, 1900, 368. The Outlook criticised the RA for selecting the most commercial pictures to hang on the line. “By their haphazard hanging consequent on accepting too many canvasses, their complete failure to discriminate between good pictures and bad…they have alienated a large number of the more thoughtful artists in the country.”

125 Frank Rutter for example.46 The changing nature of the art market and diversifying exhibiting practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also challenged the RA’s cultural and economic dominance amongst professional art societies.

Niche and Genre Specific Societies

In this way, art was mirroring developments in other industries and professions that had expanded and diversified as the middle-class increased in influence and buying power throughout the nineteenth century. Margali Larson explains that as the general consumer base grew in the nineteenth century, “a collective effort was needed on the part of the actual or potential sellers of services to capture and control expanded markets.” 47 New ways of generating and securing the attention and patronage of potential buyers had to be created.48 One way to diversify the existing art market to appeal to new groups of art consumers, and “open the ranks of traditional professional elites,” was to establish new professional societies that represented a specific segment of art production and responded to a niche demand of the art-buying public.49 These societies were also a reaction to the increased supply of artists in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s—a fact that was itself a result of the professionalisation of the industry and expanding educational opportunities throughout the century.50 Amongst this increased number of practicing professionals, artists had “to meet and motivate new demand” from a buying public that was expanded in numbers but reduced in individual buying power.51 New societies thus attempted to create new markets for art at the same time as they responded to existing and undersupplied demands.52

46 Frank Rutter, Art in My Time (London: Rich and Cowen, 1933), 53. 47Margali Larson, The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 10. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 “Nothing seems to check the production of painters, and in every country the swift succession of their exhibition continues, in spite of bad times, chilling criticism and all other obstacles.” “Art Exhibitions,” The Times, 27 March, 1906, 14; “Even to approximate the number of persons of both sexes who are now engaged in painting would be difficult.” “The Business Side of Art,” Art Journal (August 1888): 249. 51 Julie Codell, “From Culture to Cultural Capital: Victorian Artists, John Ruskin and the Political Economy of Art” in The Political Economy of Art: Making the Nation of Culture, ed. Julie F. Codell (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), 31. Codell explains that the “boom” in art- buying that was led by wealthy patrons and collectors in the mid nineteenth century ceased in the

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Women accounted for a significant portion of the increased artist population and, accordingly, were interested in the new art societies founded to represent their needs. D.S. MacColl supplied a list of some of these groups in his 1893 critique of the Royal Academy, in which he blames the “stupidity and neglect” of the Academy for the “many and manifold” new exhibitions in London: The Water-Colour societies, the Painter-Etchers, the Pastellists were started because the Academy did not care for water-colour, and hardly knew such things as etchings and pastels existed…the New English Art Club and the Grafton exhibit the younger schools…Last of all the Portrait Painters have set up shop.53 By focusing on one medium or genre and organising the artists who specialised in that area, these societies created a monopoly on a specific set of expertise. The world of art was sub-professionalised into a series of market specialisations, connecting members of the public to trusted authorities in a particular artistic field. The niche nature of these societies, and their overt relationship with art commerce, stood them apart from the broad, generalist exhibitions of the Royal Academy and positioned artists in closer contact to the consumers themselves. The Society of Miniature Painters explained its role as “bringing the public and the artist into direct communication,” while the International United Arts Club wanted “to bring the patron and the art worker into touch with one another…to act as agents for members of the club in the sale and purchase of works of art.”54 In this way, specialised art societies encouraged artists to become more business-like and energetic in their pursuit of clients and sales, in a way that contradicted, to some, the more genteel traditions of older societies, but which generally benefited women seeking to validate their professionalism by selling art.55

1880s in line with the overall economic downtown in Britain at that time. The expanding middle-class thus became a more important component of the art-buying public, and the types of art being produced and the prices demanded had to change accordingly. 52 Art Journal encouraged artists to tap into the middle-class market by studying what, as a class, they wanted out of art, and the prices they are willing to pay and then creating work that filled that gap in the market. “Without lowering the quality of their work,” artists should “endeavour to suit the tastes of the large numbers.” The Business Side of Art,” 249. 53 MacColl, “The Royal Academy,” 887. 54 Quoted in Codell, “Artists’ Professional Societies,” 173. 55 Marcus B. Huish, “Whence comes this Great Multitude of Painters?” Nineteenth Century 32 (1892): 720. Some older and more established societies continued to downplay their exhibitions’ links to commercialism. The Graphic Society, for example, did not allow visitors to ask the prices of work displayed and make purchases, so that meetings “would not degenerate into a bazaar.” “Rules and Minutes of the Graphic Society,” quoted in Codell, “Artists’ Professional Societies”, 171.

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Some women may have found the emphasis on commerce, business and self- promotion in these societies difficult to reconcile with their own and others’ expectations of appropriate female behaviour. But for many others niche professional societies provided expanded opportunities to exhibit and connect with clients and, thus to acquire publicly recognised professional status. As women were already encouraged to pursue genres and mediums such as watercolour, miniatures, pastels and portraits because of their status as less technically challenging forms of art, they were natural occupiers of the corresponding professional societies and were welcomed there on more equal terms than were found at the Royal Academy. The Society of Portrait Painters included four women in its founding group of 27 members in 1891, and some 30 women were represented by its first exhibition.56 One of those was Louise Jopling, an artist who, like many of her male colleagues, joined a number of professional art societies in order to access a variety of different markets and take advantage of multiple exhibition opportunities. In 1887 she was invited to join the Graphic Society, a group which, like many other societies founded in the early parts of the century, sought to liberalise its membership base in the 1880s and 1890s in response to changing market conditions and the emergence of new exhibiting groups. As the secretary noted in his letter to Jopling, “Our old society has at length resolved, in accordance with the spirit of the age, to admit Lady Artists, of professional eminence as members.”57 Jopling was also the first female member of the Royal Society of British Artists and, although she continued to express hope that she would be elected to the RA, membership of these well regarded societies ensured her consistent and prominent position at London’s exhibitions and brought her into contact with potential clients and buyers, helping vouch for her professional status in the eyes of the public.

The proliferation of exhibiting societies at the end of the nineteenth century led to the development of a hierarchy based on the quality and reputation of exhibitors and the prestige associated with the exhibition venue. These factors contributed to the symbolic capital that the society generated and endowed to its artists, and this capital

56 The women members were Louise Jopling, Anna Lea Merritt, Annie Swynnerton and Mary Waller. Society of Portrait Painters: Catalogue of the First Exhibition (London: The Society, 1891). 57 Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 321.

128 had to be weighed by potential exhibitors against the commercial results of a society’s exhibitions, its selection process and commission practices when they were deciding where to send their work. The Dudley Gallery Art Society, for example, was open to all artists and was intended to showcase the work of young and emerging exhibitors.58 This meant that it was comparatively easy for artists’ work to be accepted in the exhibition, and since the Gallery had a good record for sales the society was an attractive option for many women.59 However, the society’s liberal selection processes also meant that it was regarded as a less prestigious exhibiting venue, and this affected the prices artists could demand and the artistic and professional capital they gained by being associated with the society.60 The Dudley also charged up to 75% commission on works purchased at its exhibitions, which significantly lowered profits on any pictures sold.61

The mixed sex exhibiting societies that best served the interests of women focused on select genres or materials. Although there was some danger that membership or participation within these groups would propagate the notion that women were “naturally” more suited to specific types of art, and risk the further marginalisation of women into female genre ghettos, in practice women artists appeared to welcome the opportunity to participate fully in societies’ events and customs. They were proud to place the letters of an organisation after their names, standing, as they did, for their acceptance and recognition as authoritative art professionals. The two national watercolour societies, the Royal Watercolour Society (founded in 1804) and the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour (founded in 1831) both liberalised their positions towards women in the 1880s and 1890s, the former by allowing women,

58 “The Dudley Gallery has been called the nursery of young reputations.” “The Winter Exhibitions at the Smaller Galleries,” Art Journal (December 1882): 378. “Since the Dudley Gallery admits work by artists not yet established, its exhibitions are sometimes uneven and ignored by critics.” “The Dudley Gallery,” Magazine of Art 4 (1881): 342. 59 In 1897 for example, one sixth of the pictures exhibited at the Dudley Gallery Art Society were sold. A.C.R. Carter, The Year’s Art (London: J.S. Virtue and Co, 1898), 108. 60 “In this exhibition, which numbers six hundred and seventy two pictures, there is nothing on the walls of commanding excellence,” remarked the critic for the Art Journal in 1880, who also noted the high percentage of works executed by “lady hands”. The Academy praised the society for bringing to public attention artists who later achieved eminence, but noted that “there is clearly need for both a more rigorous standard in the admission of works and for an effort to impart more variety and interest in the exhibitions.” “The Dudley Gallery Spring Exhibition,” Art Journal (May 1880): 155; “The Dudley Gallery,” The Academy 548 (1882): 447. 61 Joanna Meacock, “The Exhibition Society,” Exhibition Culture in London 1878-1908, 2006, http://www.exhibitionculture.arts.gla.ac.uk/essays.php?eid=02#_ftnref36

129 who had previously been given the title of associate, full membership status in 1890 and the latter by electing its first female member, Kate Greenaway, by invitation in the same year.62 In line with other media-specific societies, the Society of Painters in Water Colour took a more overt position on the commercialism of its exhibitions than the RA. It kept a book of prices inside the exhibition rooms for the convenience of buyers, and policies such as these benefitted women even if they remained exhibitors rather than members.63

Art societies founded in the last two decades of the nineteenth century generally had the most inclusive policies towards women artists. The Society of Painter-Etchers and the Society of Miniature Painters were the two groups where women fared the best in terms of recognition and membership. The Society of Miniature Painters commenced in 1896 with a membership that was limited to fifty professional artists.64 The founding members included Josephine Gibson, Mabel Hobson, Alice Mott and Mrs. Theo Smith-Dorrien, alongside Royal Academicians Edward Poynter and Laurence Alma-Tadema.65 Miniature painting was viewed as “an opening for the artistic working woman of today” because of the delicate and refined nature of the work, and it was one area in which women were taken seriously as practitioners and could earn a steady living.66 Miniaturists relied heavily on portrait commissions, and the society aimed to act as an agent connecting artists with potential clients.67 “The exhibition just closed brought a considerable number of commissions for portraits to the exhibitors,” noted one women’s paper, and as the miniaturist Mabel Terry Lewis commented, these commissions were important as a tangible sign of professional advancement.68

62 Charles Holme, ed. The History of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours (London: The Studio, 1905), 20. 63 “A clerk in the exhibition room with a book containing the prices of all those paintings sent for sale, ready to answer inquiries and to take deposits, would give the artist a much better chance for customers than he would have at the Royal Academy.” John Lewis Roget, A History of the Old Watercolour Society (London: Longman, Green and Co, 1891), 142.c 64 The Society of Miniature Painters,” Glasgow Herald, August 20, 1896. 65 Hearth and Home 277 (1896): 615. 66 “Music and Art,” Hearth and Home 282 (1896): 798. 67 “Miniature portraiture, more than any other branch of painting, depends on the goodwill of society. The condition of its development is the existence of a group of fashionable wealthy people who can indulge in its dainty and exquisite luxury.” “The World of Art,” Glasgow Herald, August 3, 1896. 68 “The Society of Miniature Painters,” Myra’s Journal 1 (January 1897): 9; “A Rising Miniaturist – Miss Mabel Terry Lewis,” Atalanta, November 1, 1897, 80.

130 The Society of Painter-Etchers, established in December 1880, also sought to represent the interests of a select group of artists, many of whom practiced etching in addition to painting and sculpture. The revival of interest in etching at the end of the nineteenth century involved and benefited many women, who were taken seriously in the genre as amongst the best of its practitioners.69 Women could be named fellows of the society from its inception, and Mary Nimmo Moran was elected the first woman member in 1881, followed by Catherine Maude Nichols in 1882.70 Fifteen per cent of fellows between 1880 and 1930 were women, a number that exceeded all other art societies except for the Society of Miniature Painters.71

Fifteen per cent of members over a period of fifty years may not appear a significant proportion. However, the treatment women received at societies that focused on a specialised but profitable segment of the art market, particularly when that specialisation was in line with existing ideals of “feminine” arts, far exceeded that which was found at the other category of group that proliferated at the turn of the century: the anti-establishment or avant-garde society. At the same time as artists who perceived their genre or medium to be ignored by the Royal Academy formed their own specialised societies, a younger generation of exhibitors, interested in new ideas of art emanating from France, broke away too, forming new groups that promised forward looking exhibitions and more open and progressive membership structures. The liberal ideals of these societies, however, did not extend to their attitudes towards female painters, and many continued to share common features with the Royal Academy, particularly when it came to acceptance of male control, pricing practices and organisational structures.72 As Julie Codell notes, breakaway and protest societies

69 Frederick Wedmore’s Etching in England noted a number of successful female etchers. (London: George Bell, 1895). 70 “The Etcher Notes,” The Etcher (September 1881): 18; “The Etchers Notes,” The Etcher (January 1882): 15. 71 Gladys Engel Lang and Kurt Lang, Etched in Memory: The Building and Survival of Artistic Reputation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 269. 72 The exclusion of women from art societies that proclaimed their modernity and embrace of the avant-garde can also be seen as a symptom of the perceived “feminisation”, and associated decline, of the culture that such groups were attempting to distance themselves from. Lisa Tickner writes that English painters at the turn of the century struggled against the “debilitating influence of mass culture, mass politics and the ‘femininsation’ of social life.” Women and femininity were associated with the mediocrity of mass culture and were seen as contrary to the modernist aesthetic, which was “intent on distancing itself from the …banalities of everyday life,” which women were seen to represent. Lisa Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (New Haven;

131 also continued to rely on the same tightly networked group of press, art dealers, gallery owners and buyers as the Royal Academy and other established societies.73 Their participation in this traditional infrastructure made the groups’ “anti- establishment” claims difficult to reconcile, and ensured that women faced the same difficulties in attracting unbiased critical attention and neutral pricing valuations as they did elsewhere.

The most prominent breakaway society was the New English Art Club (NEAC) founded in 1885. The NEAC did not explicitly bar women from its membership, but few women benefited from its professed openness and independence or its elected selection jury. Before 1900 the society was controlled by a close coterie of young male artists, who dominated both the exhibitions’ walls and the group’s administration. The society’s talk of democracy was a “superficial pretence” according to one critic, who labelled the NEAC “an effective oligarchy, a narrow clique in which a number of shifting and hostile talents has circled round one or two fixed points.”74 Although the women who exhibited with the group shared largely the same educational background and artistic principles as their male counterparts, they continued to be viewed as a distinct and separate category, both by members of the society itself and by the critics and commentators who reported on its exhibitions.75 The “otherness” of participating female painters was reflected in the way women’s work was priced and hung, and in decisions regarding membership which continued to reward male artists of a particular social, artistic and educational ilk.76 As Vanessa

Yale University Press, 2000), 203; Andreas Huyssens, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 47. 73 Codell, “Artists’ Professional Societies: Production, Consumption and Aesthetics”, 172. 74 D.S.M., “The New English Art Club,” The Saturday Review 82 (1896): 539. 75 Deepwell, Women Artists Between the Wars, 138. Examples of critics treating women as a distinct and unified category of artists who should uphold artistic principles appropriate to their gender are rife. Commenting on Ethel Walker’s Lydia in 1900 The Outlook’s critic noted “I am more than willing to welcome any woman painter, however imperfect, who should bring to painting a certain fineness of soul that is the prerogative of her sex.” “The New English Art Club,” April 14, 1900, 337. 76 In regard to the relationship between educational background and the NEAC membership the disparity in treatment between male and female artists is clear. The NEAC had a close relationship to the Slade School, where members including Henry Tonks, Wilson Street and Frederick Brown were professors. The Slade was seen as the feeder school for the society – almost half of the male artists elected to the NEAC between 1900 and 1940 were Slade educated. Of the 16 women elected as members in the same period, three quarters attended the school. However women also made up three quarters of the Slade student population. Possessing the appropriate educational pedigree thus did not change perceptions towards women’s secondary status as artists. See Katy Deepwell, “A Fair Field and No Favour: Women Artists Working in Britain Between the Wars,” in This Working Day World:

132 Bell observed, “all the members of the NEAC seemed somehow to have the secret of the art universe within their grasp, a secret one was not worthy to hear, especially if one was that terrible low creature, a female painter.”77 Wallace and Elliot point out that the lack of institutional recognition women received from groups like the NEAC and the associated rhetoric of mediocrity regarding women’s paintings that was constantly articulated in the press influenced women’s own perceptions of their artistic value, and had practical consequences on the opportunities they pursued. Even women such as Bell, who were active in the artistic and social circles of the avant-garde, may have internalised attitudes towards the inferiority of their work and, consequently, failed to promote or price their work at a necessary or appropriate level.78

The NEAC’s attitude towards women painters was fairly typical of modernist or avant-garde exhibiting groups in the early twentieth century. The London Group however, established in 1914 in response to the perceived failure of NEAC to represent modern and emerging art and the continuing conservatism of the RA, was open to female exhibitors and members.79 The society was an amalgamation of two existing groups— the Fitzroy Street Group and the Camden Town Group—along with seceders of the Omega Workshop and other proponents of cubism and vorticism.80 Fitzroy Street and Camden Town members were given automatic membership of the London Group, a condition that allowed Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson, who belonged to the former, to be founding members of the new group, despite the fact that they were shut out of Camden Town on account of their sex. When that group was established in 1911 to “hold within a fixed and limited circle those painters whom they considered to be the best and most promising of the day,” women’s exclusion was justified as a means to avoid including members’ wives or female friends, who

Women’s Lives and Culture(s) in Britain, 1914-1945, ed. Sybil Oldfield (London: Taylor and Francis, 1994), 144. 77 Quoted in Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1983), 36 -37. 78 Bridget Elliot and Jo Ann Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (Im)positionings (London: Routledge, 1994), 81. 79 “The Jubilee exhibition of the New English Art Club seems to have coincided with the formation of a society to supersede it.” “The Revolutionaries,” The Manchester Guardian, January 20, 1914, 8; Roger Fry, a significant supporter of the group, claimed that the London Group did for English post- impressionism what the NEAC had done a generation earlier for English impressionism. J.R, “The London Group Looks Back,” The Manchester Guardian, May 2, 1928, 12. 80 “Art and Artists: The London Group,” The Observer, May 8, 1914, 7.

133 “might not quite come up to the standard aimed at the group.”81 Another explanation from James Manson claimed that the ban evolved from an explicit “disinclination of the group to include Miss S[ands] and Miss H[udson] of Fitzroy Street in the list of members.”82 As Nicola Moorby explains, these justifications reflected the perceived antipathy between women and the modernist impulse, as well as persistent assumptions about women’s amateurism in art.83 The Camden Town Group was designed as a professional platform to help artists sell their work within the art marketplace and, although artists like Sands and Hudson along with others such as Sylvia Gosse and Vanessa Bell, shared the aesthetic concerns of the Camden Town artists, their gender fostered aspersions about their seriousness and professionalism in regard to the business side of art, and their commitment to painting as an all consuming and self supporting lifestyle.

When the Camden Town Group merged into the London Group the ban on women members was lifted, and the society provided women with a valuable entrée into London’s modern art scene. Unusually for art societies at the time, the London Group did periodically include women in the selection jury for its exhibitions, although they were always the only female in the room. Vanessa Bell was elected to the membership in 1919, but as Frances Spalding notes, she had little influence on the committee throughout the 1920s. She “never so far as I remembered raised her voice in contradiction in meetings,” remembered the artist Raymond Coxon. “Roger’s [Fry] booming voice boomed and all was agreed upon.”84 This was typical of women who gained membership of mixed sex professional societies; even when they did overcome the practical and ideological prejudices they faced to be included in

81 Charles Ginner recorded in The Studio: “Another serious point arose, the question of the membership of women. Gilman, strongly supported by Sickert, was in full opposition to such a proposal as he contended that some members might desire, perhaps even under pressure, to bring in their wives or lady friends and this might make things rather uncomfortable between certain of the elect, for these wives or lady friends might not quite come up to the standard aimed at by the group. So it came about that the fair sex found the portals of the Camden Town Group closed on them. “The Camden Town Group,” The Studio (November 1945): 129. 82 Letter from James Manson to Esther Pissarro, 23 November 1911. James Bolivar Manson Collection, Tate Archive TGA 806/2/6. 83 Nicola Moorby, “Her Indoors: Women Artists and the Depictions of the Domestic Interior” in The Camden Town in Context, eds. Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt and Jeniffer Mundy (Tate Online Research Publications, 2012). 84 Coxon quoted from a letter to the author in Spalding, Vanessa Bell, 211.

134 professional groups, they remained shut out of positions of influence within the membership itself.

Throughout the nineteenth century, women artists’ only involvement in the administration of artistic societies was as secretaries in council meetings or helpers at exhibitions where they distributed refreshments or oversaw the price book. When women’s names began to appear on members’ lists in the late nineteenth century, it was rarely as part of the council or members of selection committees and juries. One of the primary reasons for the resistance to women’s administrative involvement stemmed from a deeply rooted discomfort in the notion of women having authority over male members and exhibitors, particularly in regard to their judging of male artists’ work. As Kirsten Swinth posits, pseudo-scientific ideas of women’s natural irrationality and sensitivity were invoked to question whether women had the “dispassion and authority” to judge art works appropriately, and questions were asked about whether male artists would be embarrassed or diminished by female jurors.85

Women’s absence from positions of influence within professional societies did not go unnoticed by feminist-leaning periodicals and press. Magazines such as The Woman’s Signal, Hearth and Home and The Women’s Penny Paper frequently commented on women’s exclusion from the Royal Academy’s hanging committee in their reviews of summer exhibitions. One journalist complained that, “In the large room, which is considered the place of highest honour, it is not wise to expect to find much women’s work till there are some ladies on the hanging committee!”86 The Women’s Penny Paper meanwhile reported on a case in which a woman, of equal merit to her male counterpart, was passed over for a position on a hanging committee on account of her gender—the justification being that the male artist was likely supporting a family.87

Women’s exclusion from administrative and management roles within professional societies was significant, because these positions reflected where members of the art world placed their authority, trust and respect. Council and committee members,

85 Swinth, Painting Professionals, 69. 86 “Signals from our Watch Tower,” The Woman’s Signal, May 5, 1898, 280 87 “Leaderettes,” Women’s Penny Paper, 11, January 5, 1889, n.p.

135 selection jurors and exhibition hangers were gatekeepers within England’s art eco- system. They determined the rules and policies of a society regarding women, adjudicated divisions and disagreements over rules and style and made decisions regarding which artists and what kind of art would be included in exhibitions and where and how it would be hung, choices that also affected pricing and valuations. These decisions mattered, particularly for artists who were on the margins of the cultural establishment or lacked strong artistic connections, a group in which women were disproportionately represented. Inclusion in an exhibition or a prominent hanging position helped artists build their public reputation and could instigate relationships with dealers, print sellers and buyers, which, at an economic level, were crucial. As Deborah Cherry shows, women’s absence from exhibition societies’ decision making processes meant they could play no roles in establishing “professional standards” or categorising “exhibitable art.”88

The societies that first granted women roles within their management were the same genre-specific groups that welcomed them openly as members and exhibitors. Mrs. Theo Smith-Dorrien was chosen as the Secretary of the Society of Miniature Painters at its foundation, and female members including Josephine Gibson went on to serve on the society’s council, allowing them a role in the management of the society’s affairs.89 Lucy Kemp-Welch, a member of both niche and generalist societies, was elected to the council of the Royal British-Colonial Society of Artists.90 Serving as both a member and an administrator of art societies was important to Kemp-Welch because it indicated that her work would be displayed and valued on equal terms to her male counterparts. She eschewed female specific exhibiting societies and pursued membership instead at gender inclusive groups to ensure that her work was seen broadly, and not isolated in a separate market for “women’s art.” As a council member, Kemp-Welch had a role in managing the rules and regulations of a society and determining its hanging and selection processes and, from this position, she could influence the group to adopt more gender neutral practices. In 1913 she was selected

88 Cherry, Painting Women, 165. 89 “Notes on Art and Archaeology,” The Academy 1269 (1896): 150; “Society of Miniature Painters,” Harmsworth Monthly 1, no 2 (1898-99): 79. 90 “Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch,” The Times, 28 November, 1958, 15. Kemp-Welch was also a member of the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the Royal Cambrian Academy, and the Pastel Society.

136 as the inaugural president of a new exhibiting group, the Society of Animal Painters, whose membership included Britain’s leading animal sculptors and artists including Alfred Munnings and Herbert Dicksee.91 It was a sign of the admiration and respect Kemp-Welch commanded from her peers, but also an important symbol of female authority and influence within the art world, even if only applicable to a specialised market.

While genre or medium specific societies were amongst the first to give women management roles, women continued to be overlooked even within this generally sympathetic segment of the market. Generalist societies in London such as the Royal Institute and the Royal Society of British Artists, meanwhile, resisted promoting women members to their council or selection committees. Exhibiting groups based in the nation’s regional centres, however, took a more liberal approach. The Manchester Academy of Arts, in particular, was an organisation that granted women opportunities to exercise artistic authority and influence with an institutional backing. In the late 1890s, Isabel Dacre was a member of the Academy’s council, Emma Magnus its Literary Secretary and Florence Monkhouse one of the organisation’s two auditors.92 Other women were periodically appointed to the council, including Fanny Sugar in 1898 and Louisa Bancroft in 1910.93 Magnus was also the first woman to be elected to the academy’s hanging committee, where she was involved in selecting and curating the annual exhibition at the City Art Gallery.94 The Manchester Academy was known for its embrace of female painters, and it was a target for women seeking recognition through exhibition and membership.95 The academy’s inclusion of women in its management structures fostered this atmosphere and endowed women with new measures of professional authority, which enabled them to influence the city’s artistic culture more broadly.

91 “Biographical Notes,” Lucy Kemp-Welch Papers, Bushey Archive, Bushey Museum and Art Gallery; “Animal Painters' Exhibition,” The Times, October 24, 1919, 19. 92 “Northern Counties Notes,” Hearth and Home, February 11, 1897, 545. 93 “Manchester Academy of Fine Arts,” British Architect, February 18, 1898, 111; “Manchester Academy of Fine Arts: The Annual Meeting,” The Manchester Guardian, February 16, 1910, 3. Fanny Sugars was a “well known Manchester artist” who had been the only artist out of 41 nominees to be elected to the Manchester Academy membership in 1897. “Women’s Doings,” Hearth and Home, March 11, 1897, 722. 94 “Women’s Doings,” Hearth and Home, March 29, 1900, 883. 95 Cherry, Painting Women, 70.

137 The first woman to serve on the hanging committee of a major art exhibition was also given the opportunity by a regional artistic centre. In 1893 Henrietta Rae and her husband Ernest Normand were invited by the Liverpool Corporation to hang the city’s annual autumn exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery.96 Rae’s appointment “broke the spell of masculine exclusiveness in this respect,”97 and was remarked on by the press as a major advancement of women’s role in the art world. Rae referred to her time in Liverpool as the happiest of her life—a comment that reflects the significance of the role to her personal sense of artistic achievement and professional acceptance.98 As the hanger of the exhibition, Rae was also tasked with advising the Purchasing Committee of the Gallery on their acquisitions from the exhibition. She recommended the work of an artist not well known in England at the time, Giovanni Segantini, and it was based on her counsel that the picture was bought by the committee.99 In this role, Rae was elevated to a gatekeeping position, from where she could influence the tastes and direction of the wider artistic community.

Rae’s success in Liverpool may have contributed to her appointment on the women’s work committee for the Victorian Era Exhibition at Earl’s Court in 1897, a commercial exhibition mounted by Imre Kiralfy and London Exhibitions Limited. Rae was the only artist, or professional worker of any kind, selected for the committee of titled women, and as such was tasked with collating and hanging the vast exhibition of women’s art included in the Women’s Work section.100 The exhibition aimed to present the most ambitious collection of women’s art ever shown; previous displays of women artists had been “misleading,” because they had “only received those pieces that were not likely to obtain admission to more important exhibitions.” In her exhibition, Rae wanted to curate the first “genuine display” of the best work by the leading women artists.101 While some of the artists Rae approached objected to showing their pictures in a single sex exhibition, she explained bluntly that the men

96 Arthur Fish, Henrietta Rae (London: Cassell and Company, 1905), 27. 97 Helene L. Postlethwaite, “Some Noted Women-Painters,” Magazine of Art (January 1895): 18. 98 Fish, Henrietta Rae, 70. 99 The purchase of The Punishment of Luxury by Segantini was greeted by protest from the Liverpool community at the time, but the acquisition paid dividends when the artist’s reputation increased in the following years. 100 “Woman’s Work in the Victorian Era,” The Morning Post, January 25 1897, 6. 101 “Women’s Pictures at the Victorian Exhibition, Earl’s Court: Interview with Henrietta Rae,” The Woman’s Signal, July 8 1897, 19.

138 and women’s galleries were hung separately, so women “had to choose between being in our gallery or not at all.”102 Even within the segregated structure of the exhibition, she hoped that the strength of the display would indicate that women’s work should be judged on its own merits, and not as a separate category of “female art”.103 The work was consuming; it took Rae weeks to pen the necessary correspondence and work out the composition of the galleries, but the role also provided her with increased visibility as a leader amongst female artists and allowed her to influence the way women’s art was presented to the general public.104

Rae’s prominent position in a large, generalist exhibition such as the Victorian Era Exhibition was justified by the fact that she was a woman artist judging the work of others of her gender. Apart from her work with the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, it remained rare for women to obtain positions of authority over male artists as selectors or judges, or for them to organise art societies or exhibitions that were taken seriously by the wider art community. Groups like the Artists’ Guild invited well- known women artists to judge their exhibitions, but these societies focused on amateur artists and students, so the presence of female authority was not considered threatening.105

One exception was Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club, which she established in the summer of 1905. While a student in Paris, Bell observed the camaraderie and community between artists that played out in that city’s cafes and artists’ homes. In founding the Friday Club, she hoped to recreate that cultural milieu in London, and facilitate a space in which artists could discuss their ideas and philosophies towards art as well as exhibit work to the public. It was around this time that Bell began to take herself more seriously as an artist, and look at her painting as a viable profession.106 The club was an attempt to surround herself with like-minded workers, and provide a platform for her own and others’ work to gain visibility. She organised meetings for members at

102 Ibid. 103 Ibid. 104 The women’s art section was regarded as the strongest component of the women’s work exhibition. “The Victorian Era Exhibition,” The Times 24 May, 1897, 5. 105 For example Louise Jopling and Henrietta Ward joined William Frith to judge the Artists’ Guild annual exhibition in 1891. “People, Places, Things,” Hearth and Home, November 12, 1891, 820. 106 Spalding, Vanessa Bell, 55.

139 her own home, where she promoted open and frank dialogue, and searched London for suitable rooms in which to hold regular exhibitions.107 Annual shows were ultimately held at the Alpine Club, where a disparate group of artists showed both fine and applied arts. The group had no unifying aesthetic principles, so it fell to Bell to negotiate between different factions and manage the varied personalities and egos in order to put a cohesive show together.108

As her sister observed, “Old Nessa goes ahead and slashes about her and manages all the business and rejects all her friends’ pictures, and don’t mind a bit. She is said to have a genius for organisational and it all seems to interest her.”109 Bell’s role in the club’s management was rarely mentioned in reviews of its exhibitions, which tended to portray the society as a junior version of the NEAC but, within it, she created a space in which women and men’s art were displayed on equal terms, and where women’s impulse towards modern art was encouraged rather than marginalised.110

Vanessa Bell distanced herself from the Friday Club in the 1910s, when she felt that the increasing numbers of amateur artists exhibiting with the group were diluting the society’s purpose.111 Although Bell often denigrated her own art in comparison with her Bloomsbury associates Roger Fry and Clive Bell, she was intent on pursuing a professional course and sought to dissociate herself from the vast core of amateur artists and designers seeking to infiltrate the professional market.112 Like many of her contemporaries, Bell associated art amateurism with women. She was interested in the avant-garde and post-impressionist aesthetic that Fry had introduced to London and in some ways absorbed the gendered hierarchy of genres that associated women with

107 Letter to Clive Bell from Vanessa Stephens [Bell]. c.1905. Charleston Trust, Tate Archive, TGA 8010/2/7. 108 Richard Shone, “The Friday Club,” Burlington Magazine 117 no. 866 (1975): 279. 109 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicholson (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 1: 213. 110 “New English and Other Artists,” The Speaker 14, no. 351 (1906): 270:71; “Other Exhibitions,” The Athenaeum, July 4, 1908, 22. 111 Shone, “The Friday Club”, 283-284. 112 As early as the late 1880s art commentators were complaining about the efforts of art and craft “dabblers” flooding the exhibiting market with inferior wares. Art Journal remarked that, “This would not be to so great an extent if the ability to sketch and painted were regarded, like music and singing, merely as a graceful accomplishment; but unfortunately when the young student produces a little picture, however weak and amateurish it may be, there arises a strong desire to sell it.” “The Business Side of Art,” Art Journal (August 1888): 249.

140 applied arts and men with emerging forces of modernism.113 In this framework, Bell was viewed, and regarded herself, as an exception, rather than proof of women’s artistic ability. While membership of a society’s council theoretically allowed women a greater role in controlling the rules and regulations of a group regarding women, and the chance to influence attitudes towards women artists in general, in practice the tokenistic inclusion of women in the management of mainstream and co-ed exhibiting societies did little to change entrenched, deterministic opinions about the value of female art.

Single Sex Art Societies for Women

This outcome may have been exacerbated by the fact that women art professionals were not necessarily concerned with furthering the interests of a collective feminist art identity. In the intensely competitive world of art, many women were more invested in the individualistic pursuit of artistic and commercial success than advocating for gender equity on behalf of their female brethren. As Nancy F. Cott explains, the “professional credo, that individual merit would be judged according to objective and certifiable standards,” inculcated the ranks of female artists in the early twentieth century, leading to conflict between women’s individual and collective identity.114 These divisions were visible in the attitudes of women artists towards single sex art societies, which were formed to offer female artists with alternative exhibiting opportunities and, it was hoped, an equal and parallel path to artistic professionalism. Single sex art societies were initially founded in the nineteenth century to address the exclusionary practices of established art societies such as the Royal Academy. The Society of Women Artists (SWA), founded in 1855, sought to provide a separate platform for women artists, where their work would be included and hung on its merits rather than because of gender. It sought to provide an unbiased and supportive space where women artists could come together and forge a community that would further their collective professional goals. As Susan Butlin notes, women’s art societies also aimed to promote the “cultural presence of women”

113 Elliot and Wallace, Women Artists and Writers, 63. 114 Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987), 234.

141 in general, and demonstrate to the wider public the artistic and commercial viability of women artists.115

At the time of its inception, the Society of Women Artists (then the Society of Female Artists) self-consciously set itself apart from mixed or male-dominated exhibiting groups by including ideas of sexual difference within their aims and objectives. While the purpose of the society was to serve the interests of professional women artists who sought to make a living out of their art, it did this by embracing a benevolent separatism, which accepted and celebrated what was distinctive and “feminine” about women’s art. Early accounts of the society in the women’s press reported that its exhibitors would “select subjects which are in harmony with their own natures.” While the Society claimed that some subjects were so inherently masculine that women would be in vain to attempt them, domestic scenes, portraits, flowers and fruits were regarded as “natural” subjects for women to depict.116 In endorsing this gendered artistic ideology, the society and its supporters did not intend to support the devaluing of “feminine” subjects, but rather to counteract their denigration and assert women’s superior artistic powers in those art forms that were natural to her sex.117 This approach grouped the work of women artists together, so that exhibitions were understood to show the collective merit of England’s female art constituency. As Laura Prieto demonstrated in the American context, this type of female art society thus promoted a “feminine professionalism”, which asserted the talents and ability of women while maintaining their separateness as a category of artists.118 This allowed women members to form a collective artistic identity, from which they could draw a sense of belonging and camaraderie and promote a form of cultural authority based on their distinct, gender-determined skills.

115 Susan Butlin, The Practice of her Profession: Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 146. 116 “The Society of Female Artists,” The Lady’s Newspaper, June 6, 1867, 355. 117 As one report concluded, the Society was a “demonstration of woman’s willingness to work out thoroughly the good gifts that are in her.” The exclusively female exhibitions ensured “that appreciation for a speciality should not be confused and lost by being spread over a multiplicity.” “The Society of Female Artists,” The Englishwoman’s Review, May 1, 1898, 581. 118 Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalisation of Women Artists in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 108.

142 However, when it came to furthering women’s professionalism in practical terms by facilitating sales and building connections between artists, art dealers, print sellers and clients, the SWA struggled to compete with mainstream art societies. The society replicated the organisational structures of the Royal Academy by dividing its membership into full and associate members, electing officers and pursuing royal patronage. The elected council dealt with the administrative matters of the society, which included managing requests for membership, selecting the hanging committee and determining membership rates and rules.119 But despite trying to replicate the structures and customs of the RA, hosting a major annual art exhibition and insisting on the professional status of its members, the SWA never achieved the unqualified respect of other players in the art world. Reviews of their exhibitions in The Times, the Magazine of Art and other prominent periodicals frequently tempered praise with remarks about women artists’ lack of technical skills and seriousness of purpose, while those attempting ambitious or “masculine” subjects were criticised as “too vigorous” or “unwomanly.”120 By defining itself by the gender of its exhibitors the SWA allowed critics to propagate the notion of a unified category of “women’s art”, subsuming the individual merits and styles of the exhibitors into a homogenous collective, able to be disregarded quickly and indiscriminately by critics and dealers.

This critical reception affected the prestige associated with membership of the society and the professional and commercial value of participating in its exhibitions. Within the art world, the SWA was regarded as a reputable place for small-scale collectors and buyers to purchase inexpensive art. Its exhibition catalogues reveal that work was priced affordably—in the late 1890s most works were advertised for £50 or less, and many could be purchased for as little as £5 or £10.121 By 1914, the majority of artwork was still listed for between £5 and £20.122 The society only charged its small commission to non-members, so sales from the exhibition were profitable for artists,

119 “Rules of the Society of Women Artists 1919,” Society of Women Artists Records, Archive of Art and Design, AAD/1996/7/1. 120 Art Journal was the periodical most encouraging of the SWA. Its early reviews made note of the educational limitations women faced in regard to drawing from the living model, and it continued to publish lengthy and constructive reviews of the exhibition into the late nineteenth century. 121 Exhibition Catalogues for the 31, 40th, 45th, 51st and 66th Exhibitions of the Society of Women Artists. Society of Women Artists Records, AAD/1996/7/35; 42; 46; 52; 67. 122 Exhibition Catalogue, Society of Women Artists Exhibition, 1914. Society of Women Artists Records.

143 and its focus on smaller scale, affordable art was in line with the contemporaneous shift in the art market towards more modest “drawing room” pictures for middle-class buyers.123 Elizabeth Forbes considered the SWA “a good place for getting rid of little pictures,” noting that she “generally managed to sell there.”124 But in the crowded exhibition landscape of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, competition for sales was strong and the lack of prestige associated with the society was reflected in the profits from its sales. By 1929, when the number of exhibits in the fine art section alone numbered 353, sales from the exhibition amounted to just £295.125

The SWA can be seen as reinforcing, rather than challenging, the notion of women as a separate category of artists and thus, although the society’s all female management structure allowed women to act as council members, selection jurists and hangers, the SWA was avoided or sidelined by many, who saw the organisation as isolating, instead of integrating women into the art market.126 “To group together pictures upon any other criterion save that of merit alone is a confession of inferiority,” claimed one feminist periodical. “To sway the judgement by the assertion of collective femininity—to deprecate criticism, as it were, by offering the unassailable shield of feebleness is to acknowledge the defeat of open competition.”127 The SWA needed the leading women artists of the period to embrace its purpose and take its exhibitions seriously in order to legitimise the society’s position on the art landscape, but many chose to ignore its activities altogether, and those who did contribute frequently sent unsold pictures from previous years, which had already been shown at multiple other venues. That “only the weaker members form themselves into separate societies” was

123 The Society charged a commission of 10% on non-members. Carter, The Year’s Art, 107. As the expanding middle-class replaced ultra-wealthy collectors and connoisseurs as the biggest consumer base for art, the types of paintings in demand changed. The Speaker commented in the 1890s, “If painters are to make a living, they will have to learn to work on a small scale.” Walter Sickert, “Small pictures,” The Speaker, January 2, 1897. See also Patricia De Montfort, “The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition,” in Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present: A Cultural History, eds. Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplede (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 147-159. 124 Letter to Mrs. Forbes (Elizabeth Forbes’ mother-in-law), July 10, 1888. Stanhope Forbes Papers, Tate Archive TGA 9015/4/2/8. 125 This number includes sales from the fine art section and the extensive craft and applied design exhibit. Minutes of the Society of Women Artists Autumn Council Meeting, 1930. Society of Women Artists Records, AAD/1996/7/1. 126 Lucy Kemp-Welch’s biographer, for examples, notes that the artist initially exhibited with the SWA but ceased her involvement with the organisation because she felt it isolated women from the broader art market. Wortley, “Lucy Kemp-Welch”, 13. 127 “Society of Women Artists,” Hearth & Home, February 9, 1899, 531.

144 a common view.128 Gertrude Demain-Hammond summarised the position of many women artists when she claimed, “I prefer to place my work in juxtaposition with that of male artists, that I may be fairly judged and criticised.” Her stance was questioned by a reporter for the feminist leaning Woman’s Herald in 1891: You are like many others, but this hardly shows a proper esprit de corps. If women of the world all unite and send their very best work to their own exhibition the world would be forced to come and see, and they would become a national institution. “No doubt you are right,” Demain-Hammond replied, “but I really have very little time and I always try and send my pictures to the Institute.”129 Like many other women artists, Demain-Hammond prioritised sending her newest and most impressive works to the most prestigious exhibitions, where they had the best chance of attracting press notice and buyers, but this practice hamstrung the relevance of the SWA, which was repeatedly criticised for its lack of original or innovative exhibits. This was a problem faced by other single-sex exhibiting societies, which, despite the challenges faced by the SWA, continued to emerge onto England’s exhibition scene in the 1880s and 1890s.

The Women’s International Art Club was founded in 1899 to provide a collegiate support network and exhibiting platform to women artists who had trained in Paris. It was open to members and exhibitors of all nationalities and encouraged internationalism in its exhibition, but the club was managed from London and the majority of its council and membership were British. The WIAC’s first exhibitions drew submissions from leading women artists including Kemp-Welch, Rose Barton and Louise Jopling, but the club attracted widespread criticism for accepting previously exhibited and unsold paintings and for its lenient and uncritical hanging practices.130 “Art societies of women have been the critic’s despair, ” The Academy claimed.131 Like the SWA, the WIAC did allow women agency over the management of a professional society and provided opportunities for its members to assume the

128 Mrs Oliphant, “Brown Owl,” Atalanta 4 (1894): 733. 129 “Interview: Miss Gertrude Demain-Hammond,” The Woman’s Herald, January 10, 1891, 177. 130 Queen, March 16, 1901. Ladies Field asserted, “The club needs a hard hearted hanging committee – one that would reject without mercy everything that was not up to a respectable standard of excellence. It would cause present pangs and heart burnings, but it would be better for the rejected artists in the long run. January 31, 1903. Press Cuttings 1901-1967. Women’s International Art Club Archive, Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths University. 131 Haldane Macfall, “Women in Art,” The Academy (December 1904): 621

145 roles of jurors, hangers and selectors. “It is quite delightful to see the three young ladies who have done the active part of the preparation presiding at the manager’s desk in turn and conducting the show as they have done from start to finish,” remarked one journalist.132

The fact that prominent female artists like Jopling and Kemp-Welch exhibited with the club speaks to the willingness of professional women to showcase their work widely to broaden their commercial exposure. But, like the SWA, the prestige and value accorded to the club by the press suffered from its choice to exclusively exhibit the work of women—the gendered organising principle inviting similarly gendered attacks on the lack of originality and creativity in female art. Commentators viewed the exhibitions as a means to measure the progress of women as a unified category of artists and seek out the special characteristics that differentiated women’s work from that of their male counterparts, and this ran counter to the professional objectives of many, who wanted their work to be considered on equal terms, commercially and aesthetically, to other artists.133

The questions of whether women artists needed single-sex art societies as platforms to showcase their work and whether these groups furthered or hindered their professional standing remained contested into the early decades of the twentieth century. “Recent attempts to make separate exhibitions of women’s work were in opposition to the views of the artists concerned, who knew that it would lower their standard and risk the place they already occupied,” argued the prominent female painter Anna Lea Merritt. “What we so strongly desire is a place in the large field: the kind ladies who do distinguish us as women would unthinkingly work us harm.”134 Others, however, took a pragmatic approach to their interactions with professional art societies. Artists wholly reliant on sales for their livelihood embraced all exhibiting platforms and welcomed the opportunity to showcase their work on the broadest scale possible. Louise Jopling for example worked with the single-sex SWA, WIAC and

132 Belfast Newsletter, March 1901. Press Cuttings 1901-1967, Women’s International Art Club Archive. 133 Ethics, 15 March, 1902; “Women’s International Art Club,” The Times, March 4, 1912. 134 Anna Lea Merritt, “A Letter to Artists: Especially Women Artists,” McBride’s Magazine 65 (1900): 467.

146 the 91 Club, along with the RA, the Society of Portrait Painters, the New Gallery and others to ensure that her name remained a constant presence on London’s art landscape.

Conclusion

Artist clubs and exhibition societies were key to the professionalisation of art that occurred throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Art occupations were not subject to strict educational and institutional parameters, so professional organisations took on the role of monitoring professional status and standards, representing artists’ interests and facilitating connections between the art world and the broader community. This arrangement could both benefit and hinder women artists’ professionalism—it meant there was no central body to prohibit or restrict their artistic practice, but independent art societies and organisations could bar their involvement on biased grounds and subjective criteria into the twentieth century. Because of their continued exclusion from its membership, mainstream societies like the Royal Academy continued to hold meaning for women artists long after their position as the cultural establishment had begun to erode, the letters ARA and RA continuing to hold value as recognisable symbols of acceptance into the artistic community and of quality, eminence and success. The fact that women did not find a more liberal or accepting outlook in protest and anti-establishment societies—whose broad-minded approach to art did not extend to the advancement of women— reinforced their continued interest in traditional markers of professional acceptance.

Faced with these institutional barriers and aware of the importance of societies to art commerce, many women artists’ approach to art societies was pragmatic; they exhibited widely, taking advantage of opportunities that were to hand, and exploiting changes in the exhibition landscape to their own advantage. Niche and genre specific societies gave women access to specific segments of the art-buying market, some of which were particularly amenable to women’s perceived “natural” talents, and these groups gave women the opportunity to become influencers and gate-keepers in their particular field by occupying roles within the societies’ management. The professional pragmatism that is evident in women’s approach to art societies accounts

147 in some ways for the failure of single sex exhibiting groups to become powerful forces on the exhibition landscape. Women concerned with their own professional advancement and commercial activities were unlikely to invest socially and artistically in societies whose seriousness was questioned by art critics and commentators, and this lack of support from the period’s most respected female artists contributed to those societies’ poor reputations.

Women artists’ approaches to professional societies was thus characterised by pragmatism and individualism. Most women seeking to support themselves through art recognised the significance of societies as spaces of professional interaction, networking, exhibition and commercialism. Few artists or designers could support themselves without access to a professional society to provide them with contacts, exhibition space and introductions to buyers and patrons. Societies were a vital conduit between artists and the public and they facilitated artistic commerce. Membership of a society marked out an artist as a serious art practitioner, whose talents were recognised and vouched for by his or her peers, and this status enabled artists to charge higher prices for their wares, attract more clients and gain press attention and notices. Societies granted women varied levels of access, but women took advantage of the new opportunities emerging out the expanded late nineteenth- century art market and took part in the networking that was necessary to secure visibility in the crowded exhibition landscape. Societies were for many women the greatest and most important link to the business side of art and their greatest chance for socially acceptable self-promotion. Their interactions with professional societies did not bring them visibility and legitimacy in the art world that was equal to that of men, nor vouch for their professionalism, but expanding organisational opportunities did enable more women to operate as artistic professionals than ever before, and access the commercial opportunities necessary to be taken seriously as individual participants in the English art world.

148 Chapter Four: “Finding a Market for her Wares”: Women Painters and the Business of Art

In 1904 the artist Jessie Macgregor spoke in an interview of the difficulties women faced engaging in the business side of art. “A well known artist was my next door neighbour, and had a picture dealer calling regularly at his house,” Macgregor recalled. ‘Why don’t you go in and see Miss Macgregor’s pictures?’ my friend said to his dealer one day. ‘Because I can’t do business with ladies,’ was the reply.” Over time, Macgregor assured readers, she learned how to manage her own business, but she warned that women were “generally at a disadvantage, in a matter of selling.”1 The business of selling art was a crucial part of a professional artist’s career. As the number of both men and women pursuing art increased, so too did the number of paintings, sculptures and design works produced annually swell. “It would appear that the supply of pictures is far in excess of the demand,” commented Art Journal in 1886; artists would do well, they advised, to “pay greater attention to the business side of art.”2

It was no longer sufficient to produce art works in a commercial vacuum without consideration of the trends and gaps in the art market, or to rely solely on the Royal Academy’s summer exhibitions for visibility and sales. The modern art market was a “hustle and scramble,” and artists had to adjust and act accordingly, by seeking out new opportunities to exhibit and promote their work, responding to the needs and desires of new niches and segments in the market and relying more on business- focused intermediaries to separate and elevate their work from the great artistic multitude.3 The size and diversity of the art-buying public was expanding, and the amount of art being purchased was greater than ever before, but artists had to be savvy about their own commercial strengths and understand the mechanics of the art scene to capitalise on the new market conditions.

1 Sybil, “Art as a Career for Girls: An Interview with Miss Jessie Macgregor,” in The Girl’s Realm Annual for 1904 (London: Bousfield and Co, 1904), 934-942. 2 “The Business Side of Art,” Art Journal (August 1888): 249-251 3 “A word to the Dealers,” The Burlington Magazine 47, no. 272 (1925): 221; Henry Stace, “The Business Man in Art,” The Academy, June 22, 1912, 783-784.

149 The rhetoric of art professionalism in the late nineteenth century was slippery and vague but one constant and uncontested feature of professional status was the ability to earn a living wage through the practice of a defined, specialised skill. John Stuart Mill rationalised his claim that “all women artists are amateurs” on the basis that they did not make their living out of artistic practice.4 As one commentator pointed out in 1879, it was only when women entered into market transactions by selling art and receiving commissions that they could consider themselves professionals.5

Accessing the spaces that facilitated art commerce and selling art in a recognised and public way were thus the most important factors in women artists operating and being recognised as professional artists. However, women artists who did devote themselves to the profession in this way, and who relied on it to earn their living, offered a challenge to the “feminine ideal.”6 Women were impacted by the general anxieties about artists’ relationships with commerce and their interactions with the market particularly strongly. Aspiring female professionals, Julie Codell argues, occupied a nebulous category because they had to demonstrate their distance from both amateurish ignorance and business acuity.7 The way women artists and designers approached the commercial opportunities was thus critical to the financial and social viability of their careers, and defined their professional identities.

Despite the vital role selling art played in women artists’ professional practice, scholarship dedicated to women’s relationship with the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century art market is limited, in large part because of the limited nature of archival and source material pertaining to the topic. “[O]verall the account of how and to whom the women artists sold their work is thin,” concluded Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn.8 In her landmark monograph on women artists of 1993 Deborah Cherry stated that, “at present, remarkably little is known about the relations between women artists and those who purchased or collected their work, the ways in which

4 John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Penguin Classics, 2006 [1869]), 92. 5 John Oldcastle “Our Living Artists. Elizabeth Butler,” Magazine of Art (1879): 260. 6 Patricia Zakreski. Representing Female Artistic Labour: 1848-1890 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 64. 7 Julie Codell, The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870-1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1003, 113. 8 Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (London: Virago, 1989), 176.

150 women artists negotiated sales, secured commissions or cultivated their clients.”9 Despite valuable contributions to the field from Patricia Zakreski, Patricia de Montfort and others, twenty years on the growth of the commercial art market and its role in the professional lives of women artists remains under-researched, despite recent scholarly interest in the development of the modern art market in Europe.10

In the past five years the role of London as a significant node in the increasingly international art market of the nineteenth century has been recognised through studies such as The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850–1939, edited by Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich and Thomas Bayer and John Page’s The Development of the Art Market in England. Fletcher and Helmreich conclude that art historians have neglected research into economic factors in recent decades in favour of a new focus on contextualisation and social-historical issues such as race, class and gender.11 In her review of the text, Rebecca Scagg notes that there also exists a scholarly suspicion of viewing art as a mere “function of the market,” which may dissuade researchers from locating artists’ oeuvres within their commercial contexts.12 But the study of social-historical issues such as gender and the interrogation of the art market are not mutually exclusive; the project of women artists’ art-historical recovery, having been underway for more than 30 years, must be situated within our broadening knowledge of the British art market so that the mechanics of how women artists made

9 Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London, Routledge, 1993), 97. Discussing how women commercialised their art, Clarissa Campbell Orr acknowledges, “there is room for more research into how women took the next step and marketed their art.” Introduction to Women in the Victorian Art World ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 12. 10 See Anna Tummers and Koenraad Jonckheere, eds. Art Market and Connoisseurship: A Closer Look at Paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens and Their Contemporaries (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008); Niel de Marchi and Hans J van Meigroet, eds. Mapping Markets for Paintings in Europe 1450-1750 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006); Jeremy Warren and Adrianna Turpin, eds. Auctions, Agents and Dealers: the Mechanisms of the Art Market, 1660-1830 (Oxford: Beazley Arhive, 2008). For France see: Nicholas Green, “Circuits of Production, Circuits of Consumption: The Case of the Mid- Nineteenth Century French Art Dealing,” Art Journal 48, no. 1 (1989): 29-43; Malcolm Gee, Dealers, Critics and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Paris Art Market between 1910 and 1930 (New York: Garland, 1981); Stephen Bann, Distinguished Images: Prints in the Visual Economy of 19th Century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 11 Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich, “Introduction: The State of the Field,” in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850-1939, eds., Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 1. 12 Rebecca Scragg, “Review of The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850-1939, eds. Pamela Fletcher and Anne Helmreich and Thomas M Bayer and John R Page, The Development of the Art Market in England: Money as Muse, 1730-1900,” Victorian Studies 56, no. 2 (2014): 344.

151 a living are fully appreciated. Bayer and Page insist that “any understanding of the art produced within the market structure…must take into account the myriad implications of artists acting as producers, dealers and critics as exchange agents and action makers, auctions as exchange platforms and buyers as consumers of luxury goods.”13 For a study of artistic professionalism, understanding these relationships, dynamics and networks, and how they varied in relation to gender, is even more crucial. Source material revealing the business transactions and commercial relationships cultivated by women artists remain scarce, but recent developments in online databases and digitisation projects do allow for women’s interactions with the art market and its actors to be more clearly mapped on a macro level, so that patterns and trends emerge. Case studies of individual artists, occupying different ranges of the market, offer insight into how those patterns manifested in practice and the practical challenges women faced interacting with the male-dominated public world of art commerce.

The role of commerce in nineteenth-century conceptions of professionalism was complicated for all artists. Although a key aspect of professionalism was control and monopoly over the market, the fact that professions were vocations, motivated not by economic need but by public need, service, and utility was what differentiated them from general labour. This point was particularly pertinent in the cultural industries, where tensions and debates proliferated over the commodification and monetisation of art and taste, which some saw as threatening to the “calling of art making.”14 As will be discussed in more detail below, these tensions were particularly relevant to women, even as general acceptance of artists’ interactions with the market grew in the last decades of the nineteenth century as artists took a more active role in shaping their own collective professional identity.15

It is my contention in this chapter that despite the ongoing tensions surrounding women artists’ interactions with the marketplace, engaging in art commerce was the most powerful means for women to legitimise their artistic practice. This is because entering into economic relationships with buyers and dealers was the clearest way of

13 Thomas M. Bayer and John R. Page, The Development of the Art Market in England: Money as Muse, 1730-1900 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011), 3. 14 Codell, The Victorian Artist, 109 15 Ibid., 11.

152 separating their activities from that of amateurs, whose involvement in art was characterised by personal, non-monetised pleasure. As has been discussed, association with amateur practice was the greatest threat to women artists’ perceived seriousness and professionalism, and so the objective judgement that only market valuation could provide was crucial to their classification as serious, professional art workers. It was the shift from producing work that was “subjectively satisfying”16 to that which was purposefully exposed to the scrutiny of a disinterested market that marked women’s intentions out to her peers as recognisably professional, and deserving of the corresponding status and benefits of that label.

As discussed in the previous chapter, admittance to the Royal Academy summer exhibition or a commercially-focused exhibition society was, for many women, the first step in moving their work into the public realm and initiating relationships with buyers. Exhibition societies were useful and relevant to the process of women “becoming” professional because they indicated recognition and validation from one’s peers and, most significantly, provided a conduit to art sales. Art dealers, commercial galleries and patronage, however, placed women in direct contact with art commerce, and provided the best and widest opportunities for women to be paid for their work, which, in turn, defined their professional status.

Women who aspired to that status, and who needed to sell their work to earn a living, were generally aware of the importance of art selling both symbolically and practically, and adopted a pragmatic, business focused approach to art commerce. They recognised that gendered responses to their work placed limitations on their marketability and saleability, and responded to the desires and demands of the art- buying public accordingly by catering to the sections of the market regarded as particularly suited to women. In doing so, women took full advantage of the new innovations and services provided by London’s increasingly commercial and cosmopolitan art world, and these interactions further loosened the ties between women’s artistic practice and the pursuit of personal pleasure. In practical terms, exchanging art for money was what enabled women to buy materials, rent studio

16 Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 29.

153 space and support their families, but being paid was also the most important and visible marker of their professional status to the broader community, outweighing all other external qualifications and personal attributes traditionally associated with professionalism.

The Business of Art in Late Nineteenth-Century London

Expectations and aspirations as to what an artistic career would provide financially varied, in accordance with the vast range of incomes that existed in England’s multilayered art community. “It may be said that their [artists’] incomes at the present day vary from nothing to many thousands per annum,” reported one magazine for young people, promising that, despite the recent increase in artists, men and women who applied their talent to study, “may be sure of a respectable income.”17 In the early twentieth century, a critically and commercially successful artist could earn above the average for middle-class professionals; George Lambert’s yearly earnings totalled approximately £1000 at a time when L.G. Chiozza Money categorised a yearly income of between £160 (the base income tax level) and £700 as “comfortable.”18 These numbers were based on a largely male workforce. Remuneration received by women working in the same professions as men differed, often based on the expectation that they were not solely supporting themselves or others, and this disparity remained present within the art professions, where it was informed by value judgements about artistic worth and genius. Feminist campaigners took on the issue of women’s wages as one that was as (or more) important than the vote to secure female independence. “One thing women lack above all others,” proclaimed the Freewoman in 1911, “and that thing is money.”19 Virginia Woolf, who constantly identified the relationship between professionalism and earning a living in her writing, noted that women artists faced an additional challenge in supporting themselves due to the necessity for expensive equipment, studios and materials.20

17 Alfred C Harmsworth, “What Shall I be,” Young Folks Paper, December 18, 1886, 388. 18 Anne Gray, Art and Artifice: George Lambert 1873-1930 (Roseville East: Craftsman House, 1996); L.G. Chiozza Money, Riches and Poverty (London: Methuen, 1905), 41-43. 19 “Notes of the Week,” Freewoman, December 7, 1911, 42. 20 Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Bridget Elliot and Jo-Ann Wallace, Women Artists and Writers: Modernist (im)Positionings (London: Routledge, 1994), 65.

154

For a woman artist earning a comfortable living wage was thus “always a chance,” as Louise Jopling explained. For her, professional success came down to the individual, and whether an artist “has the gift of pleasing the public and so finding a market for her wares.”21 By the late nineteenth century, “finding a market” for art involved engaging with the commercial art infrastructure that had developed in England over the course of the century, which included commercial art galleries and print sellers, art dealers, auction houses and the art press. The professionalisation of female artistic practice occurred concurrently to and was intertwined with these developments in the retail market for art—which themselves represented a new professionalism in the fields of selling and marketing visual culture. For women to sell enough art to make a living they had to participate in these complex and interlocking structures and spaces and, in turn, have their worth, prestige and professional status legitimised by the actors and mechanisms that operated within the art marketplace.22 There is no doubt that women were active within this infrastructure; many built reputations and earned a livelihood by selling art through the commercial market system and benefited from the business like approach to art that it facilitated. But, as Jessie Macgregor implied, expectations and attitudes about women’s artistic capabilities, and their interactions with the public realm of business, continued to be an impediment.

The disadvantages women faced in interacting with the commercial art market stemmed, in part, from the public and mercantile nature of the physical spaces the market inhabited. This association between art and commerce was not only problematic for women. The monetisation of art was a broadly discussed issue in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As the number of commercial galleries and art dealers in England increased in line with the growing pool of art consumers, the flow of art and money circulating within the market surged.

Within art-critical discourse, debates about art’s commodification, and whether the increasingly transactional nature of the market tarnished art’s position as rarified

21 Louise Jopling, “Occupations for Gentlewomen,” Atalanta 8, no 88 (1895): 221. 22 Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn describe a “web” of critics, dealers, collectors and patrons, which women artists had to contend with in order to build professional reputations – which in turn determined the worth of their art. Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, 169.

155 culture, periodically arose up to the final decades of the nineteenth century. “The excitement of the stock exchange has been ‘imported’ into the pure and formally unsullied realm of art,” claimed Fraser’s Magazine in 1885, reflecting a view that was underpinned, according to Dianne Sachko Macleod, by “the eighteenth century construction of a pure and ideal art produced independently of the marketplace.”23 Critics who held this idealised view of art as a rarefied commodity that should be bought and sold in a manner that befitted its status as high culture, employed terms such as “art manufacture,” “producer” and “commercialist” to denigrate artists they regarded as too involved in the monetary and transactional aspects of art. Roger Fry repeatedly chastised artists for “corrupting” their work through market influences; he claimed John Singer Sergeant had been bankrupted by market forces and snobbism into producing monotonous society portraits, while Laurence Alma-Tadema was described as a “capable commercialist” whose undemanding, customer-pleasing paintings were likened to margarine. These criticisms, along with those that characterised art galleries as bazaars and department stores, linked artists and exhibition venues to the crass demands of modern consumer culture.24

Not all commentators saw artists’ participation in art commerce as dangerous or disreputable. Art Journal and Magazine of Art were fairly consistent in promoting the commercial aspects of art by announcing art sales and auction results, and advised artists on how to engage with the business side of their profession.25 Rather than hurting their creative output, G.D. Leslie argued that “pecuniary gain” motivated artists to create their best work, claiming that the old masters “by no means despised the remuneration they obtained for their labours.”26 What was consistent on both sides of this debate, however, was an insistence on the respectability of art and artists; to

23 Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle-class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 244. This was a romanticised view of the 18th century art market, which was in reality marked by commercial developments. 24 Pamela M. Fletcher, “Consuming Modern Art: Metaphors of Gender, Commerce and Value in Late Victorian and Edwardian Art Criticism,” Visual Culture in Britain 6, no.2 (2005): 158-160. Fletcher notes that the Royal Academy faced like criticism for its undiscerning commercialism throughout the nineteenth century. 25 See “The Business Side of Art”, 249-251; Art Journal’s “Art Sales of the Year” and “Art Sales of the Season” series. There were some exceptions to these publications support of art commerce. A 1872 review of George Fox’s private art collection, for example, praised the collector for working directly with artists instead of relying on a dealer, thereby removing art from the “atmosphere of trade.” 26 G.D. Leslie, “The Artist in Relation to his Work,” Art Journal (March 1882): 171-172.

156 maintain an untarnished reputation while engaging in the commercial side of their profession it was necessary for (male) artists to be viewed as “gentlemen” by the buying public. This is because the “eminently decorous” English middle-class continued to “perceive a certain aroma of social and moral laxity in the atmosphere of the studio,” into the 1880s, a result, in part, of their “periodical impecuniosity.”27 Popular impressions of artists were still grounded on a “vague and unreasoning prejudice” based on their perceived eccentricity, impulsivity and capriciousness, and this fact, along with the prevalence of anti-commercial discourse in the press, made artists’ social respectability paramount.28

Participating in the commercial side of art was thus crucial to artists’ professionalism, but it was also potentially damaging to the respectability they needed to court middle- class buyers and achieve the aesthetic “purity” demanded by some art critics. As Julie Codell notes, late nineteenth-century concepts of the professional involved a “nexus of economic and social responsibilities and rewards, balancing economic interest with “moral regulation”, standards perceived as conflicting with artist stereotypes.”29 The conflation of economic participation and professionalism was one way for artists to neutralise the risks associated with commercialising their work and the negative perceptions attached to the artist stereotype.30 By linking art commerce to the ideals of professionalism—such as regulated standards, expert knowledge and public good— artists’ interactions with market mechanisms were legitimised under the umbrella of middle-class professional respectability. It was within this nexus of expectations and activities that women artists negotiated their own participation in the art market and managed the ambiguous, sometimes conflicting, claims that participation made on their own professional identities. The means through which women used the mechanisms of the art market to further their own professionalism are best discussed with reference to three separate but interconnected elements within the commercial art world—commercial art galleries, art dealers, and art patrons.

27 T.H.S. Escott, England: Her People, Polity and Pursuits (New York: Henry Holt, 1880), 233. 28 Ibid. 29 Codell, The Victorian Artist, 109. 30 President of the Royal Academy Frederic Leighton, who approvingly called the public “purchasers” and artists “suppliers,” equated artists’ involvement in economics with professionalism. Emile Barrington, The Life, Letters and Work of Frederic Leighton (London: George Allen, 1906), 2:358-359.

157 Commercial Galleries

In 1877, Henry James praised the easy and democratic way English commercial galleries facilitated picture browsing and buying. He described paying a shilling to “an extremely civil person in a shop front” before passing into a “maroon draped penetralia” where he was supplied with a neat piece of cardboard containing literary explanations of the pictures displayed, “as clever as an article in a magazine.”31 The gallery James described was located on Bond Street in London’s West End, a focal point for the sale of art and luxury goods in the late nineteenth century. Specialist art dealers had operated in England since the early 1700s, selling and acquiring art through auction houses, but the private commercial gallery did not emerge as a means of displaying, marketing and selling art until the middle of the nineteenth century.32

The boom in the art market during those decades encouraged print sellers and art dealers to expand their operations into more sophisticated, often purpose-designed, premises situated in fashionable districts of London.33 Agnew’s, for example, relocated its London office from Waterloo Place to Old Bond Street in 1875 because of the rapid expansion in the firm’s business; its new, spacious building reflected Agnew’s’ status as one of the most influential and successful dealer-run galleries in the country, and the growing perception of art as a luxury commodity.34

Dignified, impressive gallery spaces presented artistic commodities to the public in a way that elevated their symbolic and cultural capital. As Anne Helmreich writes, commercial galleries were spaces not just of display, but also of “sociability, fashionability and prestige,” which allowed consumers to acquire art historical knowledge and display their sophisticated connoisseurship.35 The cluster of commercial galleries that formed around Bond Street in the late nineteenth century

31 Henry James, “The Picture Season in London,” The Galaxy 24, no. 2 (1877): 151. 32 David Ormrod, “The Origins of the London Art Market, 1660-1730” in Art Markets in Europe, 1400 – 1800, eds, Michael North and David Normand (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 182. 33 Giles Waterfield, Palaces of Art: Art Galleries in Britain (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1991) 164. 34 Geoffrey Agnew, Agnew 1817-1967 (London: Bradbury Agnew Press, 1967), 29. 35 Anne Helmreich, “Traversing Objects: The London Art Market at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present: A Cultural History, eds. Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplede (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 138.

158 firmly situated fine art in the luxury retail trade—a fact that contributed to the criticism of art’s commodification discussed above, but which also encouraged the viewing and buying of art as a leisure activity for the fashionable middle-class, for whom art was a means to signify their social status and cultural erudition. The profit- driven side of their business was veiled to these consumers by the comfortable luxury of the gallery interiors, which recalled in style and taste customers’ own homes.36

By the 1880s, private commercial galleries had become central to the way artists gained exposure and drove sales. Galleries pioneered new methods of displaying and exhibiting art that promoted the reputation of a single artist by building a critical and personal narrative around their oeuvre. “One man” shows were largely an innovation of the Fine Art Society’s director Marcus Huish who, in his double capacity of curator and editor of Art Journal, had unprecedented influence to create reputations through the combined force of single artist exhibitions, scholarly catalogues and biographical magazine articles.37 The gallery made money from these ventures through the sale of art along with reproductive prints of the most popular works displayed. Solo exhibitions could be hugely influential in building an artist’s reputation and, it follows, increasing the value and demand associated with their art, but access to them was difficult for artists who were not already established.

Previous critical and commercial success at the Royal Academy or other important exhibitions was one way for women artists to capture the interest of commercial galleries. Elizabeth Butler, for example, parlayed her enormous success at the 1874 Royal Academy summer exhibition into a series of profitable one woman/one picture shows at the Fine Art Society, which helped cement her reputation as both a critically and commercially viable artist. Demand for engravings and prints of Butler’s early military paintings was high, and her Fine Art Society contracts included the rights to

36 Henry James noted of one gallery owner, “In so far as his beautiful rooms in Bond Street are a commercial speculation, this side of their character has been gilded over and dissimulated in the most graceful manner.” “The Picture Season in London”, 153. 37 The catalogue for the Fine Art Society’s 100th exhibition in 1892 claimed “amongst the exhibition to which attention may be directed, the fist place may be assigned to those which are now designated “one man”, the idea of which, as regards living artists, originated with the society.” Quoted in Patricia De Montfort, “The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition,” in Marketing Art in the British Isles, 147.

159 her paintings’ copyright which, until 1897, could be purchased independently from the artwork itself. This arrangement was profitable for popular artists like Butler, who could demand upwards of £1000 for reproductive rights to individual paintings, but it was also highly beneficial to galleries, who often relied on the reproduction market to maintain their finances.38 The Sketch credited the public’s demand for Butler’s pictures for keeping the Fine Art Society afloat.

The space Butler devotes in her autobiography to her dealings with commercial galleries over copyright and solo exhibitions indicates their importance in her career trajectory and professional standing. But few women (or men) experienced the overnight celebrity that catapulted Butler into a bargaining position with Bond Street. While any artist could solicit galleries door to door with a portfolio of their work, most tended to support artists who already had a strong critical reputation or public profile to ensure returns on their investment.39

Any form of critical attention helped raise an artist’s profile and separate them from the anonymous multitude of would-be professionals canvassing galleries. Being noticed and reviewed in general mixed exhibitions was one way for emerging women artists to capture the attention of galleries and promote their own chances for an exhibition or engraving. When Frances Hodgkins arrived in London in the early 1900s she simultaneously submitted work to the New English Art Club and Royal Academy exhibitions and approached commercial galleries about a solo show, despite anticipating “nothing but rebuffs.” She brought her portfolio to the Dowdeswell Gallery and the Fine Art Society, two of London’s most prestigious commercial spaces, but was politely told that her work was unsuitable. “By this time I began to grasp that until I had made some kind of a name I could hope to get no dealer to run a show for me,” Hodgkins wrote to her sister. “They won’t take the risk until they are assured of a success—and they accordingly make all sorts of excuses to get rid of

38 The copyright for Butler’s 1874 picture The Roll Call, for example, were purchased by Dickinson’s Gallery for £1200. Elizabeth Butler, An Autobiography (London: Constable and Co, 1922), 104. 39 The Dowdeswell Gallery, for example, advertised, “artist’s desirous of exhibiting their work are invited to call personally with specimens.” A.C.R. Carter, The Year’s Art (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1910), 10.

160 you.”40 Editor of the Studio, Charles Holme, advised her instead to exhibit at different galleries and general exhibitions before trying to have a solo show.41

Hodgkins’ interactions with Bond Street galleries are illustrative of several issues women artists navigated in their attempts to gain gallery exposure. The circular relationship between receiving critical attention at major exhibitions and holding a solo or small group show was difficult to penetrate—exhibiting societies and the RA did not tend to include artists with no experience or reputation, but commercial galleries were unlikely to support artists who had not achieved success at major group exhibitions. Further, private galleries were by their nature commercial in outlook, and were thus partial to particular genres and styles that, they believed, were in line with the demands of the buying public. At a time when galleries were relying more on middle-class audiences and customers, this demand often translated into small-scale pictures suitable for domestic decoration.42 The expansion of the middle-class art market meant that galleries increasingly staged shows targeting a particular aesthetic niche or sub genre, such as watercolours, flower painting or travel subjects, and these shows provided expanded exhibiting opportunities to women willing to work within those genres. “It is a decided gain to the interest of minor London exhibitions that the fashion has grown for collecting works connected with each other by something more than a common medium,” commented Art Journal in 1882. “Subdivision is one of the most striking conditions of modern life, and upon its judiciousness or injudiciousness depends much of the pleasure and profit of the contemporary world.”43 The commercial success of these trends, however, also led galleries to encourage artists to pursue certain styles and genres in place of their chosen subjects. At the Dowdeswell Gallery for instance, Hodgkins was told that her work was not what the clientele wanted, but “if I had brought flower paintings it would have been quite another matter.”44

40 Letter from Frances Hodgkins to Isabel Hodgkins, 7 March 1902. Letters of Frances Hodgkins ed. Linda Gill (Auckland, Auckland University Press, 1993), 86. 41 Ibid. 42 De Montfort, “The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition,” 156-157; Anne Helmreich, “Contested Grounds: Garden Painting and the Invention of National Identity in England, 1990-1914” (PhD thesis: Northwestern University, 1994), 54. 43 “The Winter Exhibition at the Smaller Galleries,” Art Journal (December 1882): 378. 44 Letter from Frances Hodgkins to Isabel Hodgkins, Letters of Frances Hodgkins, 86.

161 However, many other women profited from commercial galleries’ focus on domestic sized genre pictures, heeding Walter Sickert’s maxim that, “if painters are to make a living, they will have to learn to work on a small scale.”45 The artists who held one- woman shows at the Goupil Gallery between 1886 and 1907 all built their exhibitions around a tight theme based on a specific medium, subject or genre.46 Emily Osborne showed a series of Norfolk and Suffolk rivers in 1886, complementing the popular trend for exhibitions themed around places and travel. Isabel Codrington Pyke-Nott’s 1904 solo exhibition featured a collection of miniatures on ivory depicting views of the Italian lakes, which The Times praised as “full of detail and pleasantly harmonious in their general effect.”47 In the same notice, the paper commented that nearly all the small exhibitions reviewed that week were held by women; it mentioned Helen Allingham at the Fine Art Society, Frances Rodd and Gertrude Prideaux-Brune at the Modern Gallery, and a loan collection of Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale’s pictures, which was being restaged at Leighton House after showing in Bond Street three years prior.48

Although women were the minority of exhibitors at commercial galleries between 1880 and 1914, one or two woman shows were common enough occurrences that they were not regarded a novelty by the art or mainstream press. Women artists, who had achieved a modicum of critical or public attention, and whose work fit galleries’ exhibiting agendas, participated freely in London’s gallery economy and profited from the model of targeting specific market niches with smaller-scale works. The expansion of the middle-class art market in the second half of the nineteenth century was a boon for women artists; it was their desire to own art as a marker of social and cultural status that produced the demand needed to keep the artistic profession afloat at a time when its numbers were swelling.49 “The so called middle-class of England

45 Walter Sicker, “Small pictures,” The Speaker, January 2, 1897. 46 Data collected from Exhibition Culture in London 1878-1908. University of Glasgow (2006) http://www.exhibitionculture.arts.gla.ac.uk/ 47 “Art Exhibitions,” The Times, 17 May, 1904, 15. 48 Ibid. 49 “There are probably very few houses – certainly none whose owners have the slightest pretentions to culture, and are not hampered by want of means – which do not possess some specimens of modern pictorial art,” noted Magazine of Art. Arthur Griffiths, “Treasure Houses in Art,” (January 1881): 266.

162 has been that which has done the most for English art,” confirmed F.G. Stephens, and women artists were an unintended but significant beneficiary of this phenomenon.50

There were, however, limitations to this strategy of targeting middle-class buyers with small-scale paintings. Although the increased number of private galleries that emerged in the late nineteenth century provided women with greater opportunities for commercial exhibitions, not all of these spaces were regarded as equal in the eyes of the artistic community. As Helmreich and Holt argue, different venues generated particular sets of values and associations, which influenced the degree of prestige, critical attention and “symbolic capital” an exhibition conferred on an artist.51 Pierre Bourdieu defined symbolic capital as “the form the various species of capital assume when they are perceived and recognised as legitimate.”52 Under Bourdieu’s reasoning, art holds both economic and cultural capital—it can be exchanged for currency and conveys “forms of cultural knowledge” to those who own or consume it. But art can also be converted into symbolic capital when it is recognised as legitimate and its makers and owners seen as holding and exercising distinction. Symbolic capital influences the social and economic value associated with a piece of art and, because it rests on recognition, the conversion of an artistic good into symbolic capital is linked to its physical location and mode of display. The type of gallery an artist exhibited with, and the cultural associations that gallery generated, was crucial to establishing their art’s economic and symbolic capital and helped explain how certain artistic products were consecrated as legitimate holders of high status.

When Frances Hodgkins showed for the first time at a commercial gallery in 1902 she hoped that the exhibition would constitute a breakthrough in her attempts to penetrate London’s tightly concentrated private gallery system and deliver the critical attention she needed to attract bigger prices and better exhibition opportunities. However the nature of the exhibition, arranged by Hodgkins’ friend March Phillips at the Dore Gallery, lessened the show’s visibility and prestige. Rather than being invited to show by a well-respected gallery manager, Phillips paid to rent the rooms herself and

50 F.G. Stephens, “William Holmam Hunt,” The Portfolio 2 (1871): 38. 51 Anne Helmreich and Ysanne Holt, “Marketing Bohemia: The Chenil Gallery in Chelsea, 1905- 1926,” Oxford Art Journal 33, no. 1 (2010): 43. 52 Pierre Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociological Theory 7, no.1 (1989): 17.

163 undertook much of the organisation and promotion. Although Hodgkins thought of Phillips’ work as amateurish, she had a broad network of literary and artistic friends to invite to the opening reception and purchase her work, inflating her sales in comparison to Hodgkins. As a result, the exhibition did not make “the commotion in art circles I thought it would,” and “business was bad.”53 The next year, Hodgkins was far more excited to be included in a group show at the Fine Art Society—a venue that, she believed, would do more to bolster her reputation and the value of her art. “It is a long way ahead of the Dore show of last November…The Fine Arts confers a certain cachet on one’s work which I hope may prove valuable.”54

While many well-respected galleries entered into agreements such as the one Phillips negotiated, where the financial burden and profits of an exhibition were shared, venues that allowed any artist to hire rooms without being subject to artistic or commercial criteria were low in the hierarchy of exhibition spaces. As Pamela Fletcher notes, a gallery’s exhibition history determined its reputation; what artists had exhibited there, the critics who had attended and the calibre of people working behind the scenes revealed the status and prestige a space possessed.55 Key to all of these factors was the dealer or manager who ran the gallery; a good dealer-run venue was expected to reflect the taste and disposition of the person in charge, who in turn vouched for the authenticity, talent and viability of the artists chosen to exhibit. Exhibition spaces without a specialist dealer or manager to select and curate the artists on display lacked both authority and exclusivity, which were vital to a gallery’s symbolic status.

The Dore Gallery was originally founded to exhibit the work of French artist Gustave Dore and continued to hold exhibitions under the purview of dealer Joseph Fishburn into the early twentieth century, but its six galleries, advertised as being of various sizes and having excellent light, were also available for hire upon application to the

53 Letter from Frances Hodgkins to Dorothy Richmond 20 November 1902. Letters of Frances Hodgkins, 144. 54 Letter from Frances Hodgkins to Rachel Hodgkins 22 July 1903. Letters of Frances Hodgkins, 168. 55 Pamela Fletcher, “Shopping for Art: The Rise of the Commercial Art Gallery, 1850s-90s,” in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 56-58.

164 director, and this lessened the value and prestige associated with its exhibitions.56 The Modern Gallery, which held numerous solo and group exhibitions of women artists between 1900 and 1914, operated exclusively on a rental basis.57 Its New Bond Street location, well-designed exhibition catalogues and art-press advertisements positioned the gallery alongside other dealer-run enterprises, inviting audiences to view and receive its exhibitions as they would any other private venue. But annual advertisements in trade publication The Year’s Art called upon artists to hire the galleries, which were available for “Special and One Man Exhibitions, and At Homes, Soirées, Lectures, etc.”58 This arrangement allowed artists who failed to attract the attention of dealer-run galleries to hold exhibitions, but it diminished the seriousness with which these shows were treated in the press and the value, in monetary terms, of the artwork on display. The Observer, for example, criticised the Modern Gallery methods of advertising a picture “like an American patent medicine.”59 In contrast, the managing dealers of galleries like the Fine Art Society and the Goupil carefully fostered their reputations as art experts and connoisseurs, ensuring that the artists involved in the galleries would benefit from the reflected glow of their cultural knowledge and connoisseurship.

56 A.C.R. Carter, ed. The Year’s Art 1909 (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1909), 434. 57 Pamela Fletcher, “Shopping for Art”, in The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 57. 58 A.C.R. Carter, ed. The Year’s Art 1906 (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1906), 608. 59 “The Modern Gallery,” The Observer, October 21, 1909, 6.

165

Figure 13: Advertisement for The Modern Gallery, The Years’ Art (London: J.S Virtue, 1898).

Holding solo or small group exhibitions at rented venues like the Modern Gallery did not necessarily result in poor press or a shortfall in sales, but it did not confer what Hodgkins referred to as “a certain cachet” to the artist’s work or guarantee the quality or distinction of those exhibiting alongside them. These spaces were a way into the gallery system, but their association with amateurishness is evidenced by the fact that women artists abandoned them as their careers became more successful. Kate Greenaway, for example, held her first exhibitions at the Dudley Gallery, a venue that was leased by a number of different art societies and groups and which was known for its support of young and emerging artists. Although it was not a prestigious venue, exhibiting at the Dudley Gallery served a useful purpose at this stage of Greenaway’s career. Informed by the practical art education she had received at the National Art Training School and motivated by economic necessity, Greenaway was pursuing a

166 career in the commercial branches of art, and the populist Dudley Gallery gave her work broad exposure to potential consumers and employers.60

It was at her first Dudley exhibition that Greenaway’s work came to the attention of the editor William Loftie, who purchased a group of pictures for reproduction in People’s Magazine, and introduced Greenaway to the art-stationery publisher Marcus Ward. Greenaway produced numerous designs for Ward’s greeting card sets over the next nine years and, as well as providing a steady income, this job increased her public renown and introduced her distinctive style to the art-buying public. Later in her career, however, when Greenaway was attempting to move away from her commercial roots and make “more serious use of her talent,” she organised for her work to be shown at the Fine Art Society.61

In exhibiting at the FAS, Greenaway was trying to dissociate her paintings from their overtly commercialist and populist beginnings, and showcase a new, more naturalistic style in a venue that vouched for her seriousness. The President of the RA Lord Frederic Leighton purchased two works from Greenaway’s 1891 FAS solo show, which made £1350 in sales—a considerable figure for an artist who primarily exhibited small scale drawings and water colours.62 Examples such as this one indicate why venues like the FAS were popular with artists; they provided a space that was imbued with artistic credibility while also attracting a sophisticated group of buyers with the purchasing power to make solo exhibitions profitable.

The Role of Art Dealers

Greenaway’s existing reputation as an artist and her well-known style and story contributed to the success of her FAS solo shows. Dealer-run exhibitions at commercial galleries were often informed and marketed on the public reputation and

60 Kristina Huneault, “Kate Greenaway,” in Dictionary of Women Artists, ed. Delia Gaze (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers), 1: 614. 61 Rodney Engen, Kate Greenaway: A Biography (London: Macdonald, 1891), 109-110; “Picture Exhibition Notes,” British Architect, February 13, 1891, 116. This critic noted that “an inspection of these original drawings suggests to us an application of Miss Greenaway’s powers which we do not remember to have met with.” 62 Huneault, “Kate Greenaway”, 614. Greenaway’s attempts to transition from illustrator to fine artist, and the impact of this on her professional career, is explored in more depth in chapter five.

167 personal narrative of the artist, rather than on the objective merit of the artwork involved. As Kirsten Swinth has argued in the American context, dealers sold “the image of the artist,” rather than the artwork itself, an approach that, she argues, hurt women’s chances of securing dealer and gallery attention.63 However, the preference of dealers to work with artists with clear artistic identities and mouldable narratives worked in Greenaway and her contemporary Helen Allingham’s favour. Allingham also began her exhibiting career at the Dudley Gallery before moving to more prestigious venues as her career advanced.64 She showed drawings at Agnew’s and the Walker Art Gallery in the 1880s, but it was her solo exhibitions at the Fine Art Society, and the artistic narrative that these shows projected, that solidified her distinguished standing in the art world.65 The FAS’s marketing of Allingham as the painter extraordinaire of the English rural cottage began with the 1886 exhibition “Illustrating Surrey Cottages,” for which the gallery’s managers chose to commission and highlight a highly curated and narrow selection of Allingham’s drawings that featured the rural cottage as a subject.66 These pictures did not represent the scope of Allingham’s oeuvre, but the tactic was successful in attracting positive attention from the press and consumers, and set the stage for Allingham’s branding as an heir to the English pastoral genre.

Along with curating and editing Allingham’s exhibitions to reflect this narrow scope, the FAS used other tactics to cement their artists’ identities in the public imagination. Art dealers such as Ernest Gambart, David Croal Thomson and the FAS’s Marcus Huish pioneered the use of the exhibition catalogue as a marketing tool. These dealers exploited their connections and relationships with art critics and periodicals to produce informative content for exhibition catalogues that provided sympathetic context to artists’ pictures.67 Established or trusted commentators often wrote the introductory and biographical essays for these catalogues, which sought to earn the

63 Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 110. 64 Helmreich, “Contested Grounds: Garden Painting and the Invention of National Identity in England, 1890-1914,” 36. 65 Ibid. 66 The FAS “commissioned the lady to collect and add to her drawings of cottages with a view to this exhibition.” “Fine Art Society,” The Athenaeum, March 20,1886, 399. 67 Anne Helmreich, “David Croal Thomson: The Professionalisation of Art Dealing in an Expanding Field”, Getty Research Journal 5 (2013): 92-94

168 trust and respect of the reader and create a recognisable identity for the exhibitor that corresponded with a particular niche or segment of the market. The FAS was known for its sophisticated, scholarly catalogues that purported to educate the consumer as much as sell to them.68

Figure 14: A Cottage with Sunflowers at Peaslake by Helen Allingham, c. early 1900s.

The introductory essay for Allingham’s 1886 exhibition positioned her as a champion of cottage preservation with an interest in illustrating and defending the English countryside. The tone of these remarks is reflected in the critical commentary surrounding the show. Despite the fact that the gallery itself stated that the exhibition was “not a representative exhibition of the artist’s work, but a number of drawings of Surrey Cottages,” The Academy described Allingham as “one of those happy artists who has found…their true road and have not been tempted to stray from it,” labelling

68 De Montfort, “The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition”, 154. Art Journal commented “Commercial considerations do not appear to be the sole controlling motive of the exhibitions held…in this gallery. An educational purpose palpably asserts itself on every occasion, and this is perhaps the reason why this gallery has received in so large and pronounced a degree the countenance and support of the educated public. The example, with every exhibition comes the annotated catalogue, and generally a memoir of the artist….” “Art Notes and Reviews,” (December 1881): 377.

169 the artist “the poet of the cottage home.”69 The Saturday Review praised the catalogue for providing information on defenders of rural architecture and noted that the sentiment “cannot but influence the sympathetic visitor.”70

The success of this show prompted the FAS to stage seven more exhibitions of Allingham’s work in the following years based on similar themes. Although some critics noticed that Allingham’s oeuvre was broader than these exhibitions indicated, in general her cottage and countryside works were positively received as new additions to the English pastoral tradition.71 Anne Helmreich argues that the FAS encouraged Allingham and other watercolour painters to pursue these subjects because they appealed to urban-dwelling, middle-class consumers. Patrons of Allingham’s FAS exhibitions tended to be members of the professional classes residing in fashionable middle-class London suburbs, to whom the drawings provided an appealing and accessible rendering of idyllic country life.72

FAS director Marcus Huish ensured that Allingham was well known amongst this consumer group by orchestrating and encouraging the publication of biographical and descriptive profiles on the artist, which appeared in periodicals such as Art Journal and The Strand from the 1880s onwards.73 As the editor of Art Journal, Huish was able to influence the extent of this coverage, and he contributed further to Allingham’s popularity by publishing a full-length companion to the artist and her work in 1903. Allingham supported herself and her family after the death of her husband in the late 1880s and left an estate of £25 000 upon her death in 1926, a

69 “Catalogue of a Collection of Drawings by Mrs Allingham, R.W.S. illustrating Surrey Cottages,” (London: Fine Art Society, 1886), 1. National Art Library Catalogues Collection; Cosmo Monkhouse, “Mrs. Allingham’s Drawings,” The Academy, April 3, 1886, 245. 70 “Art Exhibitions,” The Saturday Review, April 1, 1886, 542. 71 The Athenaeum noted, for example, that Allingham’s depictions of children were superior and more technically advanced than her cottage work. “Minor Exhibitions”, The Athenaeum, May 28, 1887, 710; Anne Helmreich, “The Marketing of Helen Allingham: The English Cottage and National Identity,” in Gendering Landscape Art, eds. Steven Adams and Anna Greutzner Robins (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 50 72 Helmreich, “The Marketing of Helen Allingham,” 47-50. 73 See for example Laura Dyer, “Mrs. Allingham,” Art Journal (July 1888): 198-201; Alfred Baldry, “The Work of Mrs. Allingham,” The Magazine of Art (January 1889): 346-361; “Mrs. Helen Allingham,” The Strand Magazine 10 (1895): 175.

170 figure that indicates the success of Huish’s strategy and the benefits of working with a canny art dealer for artists.74

The Fine Art Society’s marketing strategies also benefited other female watercolour painters including Greenaway, Ella du Cane, Evelyn Heathcote and Helen Milman.75 These artists shared in common a style, genre and subject matter that both lent itself to mass consumption and was considered “natural” to their sex. Their work was highly finished, highlighting the “input of labour” that both dealers and buyers valued, and small in size, which allowed the gallery to reap maximum returns by displaying a large selection of paintings and consumers to purchase works suitable in scale for their urban, domestic dwellings.76 Demand from middle-class consumers had raised the prices associated with travel pictures, landscapes and animal-pictures, and so although these women still routinely received lower prices than their male counterparts, the genres in which they were expected to practice were now at least in- demand commercially.

Interacting with art dealers and engaging in self-promotion remained challenging for some women, who feared that such business exchanges were immodest or indecorous. The expectations on women to be humble and self-effacing were also a hindrance according to one commentator, who noted that young female artists often accepted “defeat rather than even making a show of fighting” in the realm of business.77 The tendency of critics and dealers to categorise women artists solely by their gender made it more difficult for them to build the distinctive artistic identity dealers looked

74 Helmreich, “Contested Grounds”, 52. 75 Heathcote exhibited a series of drawings of Northern Italy inspired by Shelley’s poetry. “Art Notes,” Illustrated London News, December 26, 1891, 839. Milman’s 1905 exhibition featured watercolours of English gardens. List of Watercolours of English Lawns and Gardens by Mrs Caldwell Crofton (Helen Milman) (London: Fine Art Society, 1905), National Art Library Archive. Du Cane showed drawings of gardens from Japan at the Fine Art Society in 1908 and from Madeira in 1910. “Queen at Art Galleries,” Manchester Guardian, May 16, 1908, 8; Catalogue of an Exhibition of Watercolours of Madeira by Miss Ella Du Cane (London: Fine Art Society, 1910), National Art Library Archive. For consumers interest in travel painting see Patricia de Montfort, “Dealers and the London Exhibition Scene,” Exhibition Culture in London, 1878-1908, University of Glasgow, 2006, http://www.exhibitionculture.arts.gla.ac.uk/essays.php?eid=01 76 Thomas M. Bayer, “Money as Muse: The Origin and Development of the Modern Art Market in Victorian England: A Process of Commodification” (PhD thesis, Tulane University, 2001), 225, 229. 77 “Palette and Chisel,” Table Talk, February 14, 1901, 18.

171 for.78 Art dealers’ attempts to develop clear identities and reputations for women thus worked best for artists such as Greenaway and Allingham, who pursued styles of art that were regarded as natural to their sex. The relationship dealers cultivated with Greenaway and Allingham can be seen as tokenistic, as it played on their gender as a marketing tool. But as The Athenaeum pointed out, it was the fact that Allingham and Greenaway were prepared to “meet [the public] half way” by restricting themselves to subjects their sex “instinctively likes,” that they were able to promote and commercialise their work without compromising their feminine decorum or challenge their categorisation as “women artists.”79

Relationships with art dealers were important for artists even if they did not lead to solo exhibitions or exclusive representation. Dealers were prominent and prolific purchasers of art at group exhibitions and auction houses. While they tended not to own the artworks exhibited at solo or special exhibitions, works bought directly from artists or from auction were part of dealers’ inventories and were sold or retained depending on market conditions. A reliable relationship with a dealer could thus help women offset the “fluctuations” of the market.80 Until 1897 dealers could also purchase the copyright to a piece of art, and were willing to pay significant sums for the right to reproduce and sell prints and engravings of works they believed would be popular with the public.81 Dealers accounted for a large number of the sales made at the Royal Academy summer exhibitions and also pre-purchased promising works of art from artists’ studios before they went on public view, and so building relationships and connections with dealers was highly beneficial.82 For women artists to rely on purchases from dealers and sales of copyright, however, they had to produce work that was a “safe bet” for the purchasing dealer. John Millais claimed that dealers were more likely to take risks on new styles and genres than the typical connoisseur but, where women artists were concerned, dealers were most likely to purchase pictures

78 Swinth, Painting Professionals, 111. 79 “Book Review: Happy England,” The Athenaeum, November 28, 1903, 725. 80 Cherry, Painting Women, 101. 81 Fletcher and Helmreich, “Introduction: The State of the Field”, 10-11. 82 Paula Gillett, “The Profession of Painting in England: 1850-1890,” (PhD thesis: University of California, Berkeley, 1978), 209. Gillett quotes Richard Redgrave’s recollection of at the RA exhibitions. “They [dealers] were all waiting at the door at ten o’clock and, on entering, I soon found what a business they made out of the Academy.”

172 that featured popular subject matter and were suitable for mass reproduction.83 These criteria did not always correspond to critical respect; Arthur Fish noted that it was because the work of Maude Goodman, Mary Fowler and Marie Ellen Lucas was not “great art” that it earned the attraction of the public, whose admiration was instead “aroused by the homeliness of [their] subjects.”84

Figure 15: A Moment of Idleness by Maude Goodman, 1894.

The South Kensington-trained Goodman was adept at tapping into popular, mainstream taste. She devoted herself to a style that the Windsor Magazine deemed “domestic idealism” early in her career, wasting no time in “experiments in ambitious impossibilities.”85 Although not well regarded amongst critics, who regarded Goodman and the school of art she inspired as “purveyors of mere prettiness,” Goodman’s work was highly popular with the art consuming public, to whom she was better known than most RAs.86 Art dealers and printers contributed to and capitalised on this renown by broadly disseminating engravings and reproductions of Goodman’s

83 Millais quoted in Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle-class, 240. 84 Fish, “Childhood in Modern British Art”, 742. 85 Helen Postlethwaite, “More Noted Women Painters,” The Magazine of Art, (Jan 1898): 480. 86 “In Passing,” The Outlook, 6, no. 152 (1900): 693; Arthur Fish, “Childhood in Modern British Art,” Quiver 61 (Jan 1904): 742.

173 numerous exhibition pictures. “Every print shop in the Kingdom has one of her prints in the window,” noted a fellow artist.87 Goodman’s first agent was Henry Wallis, the manager of the famed French Gallery, who first noticed Goodman’s work when she was still an art student.88 He provided advice and encouragement throughout the early parts of her career and sold paintings such as Ready for the Ball through the gallery, at one point attracting a customer so enamoured with Goodman’s work that he was willing to pay above the ticketed price.89 The Leggatt Brothers also represented Goodman’s work in the 1880s, and paid upwards of £250, inclusive of copyright, for paintings such as Chant D’Amour, a picture that attracted a “remarkable amount of popular admiration” in its engraved form.90 Goodman’s paintings were purchased and reproduced by other dealers and printers including Buck and Reid and the Mendoza Gallery, who were attracted to the work because of its high profitability; the engraving of Want to See the Wheels Go Round, earned its owner over £10 000.91 Goodman’s success demonstrates that women artists did benefit from what Macleod termed as the “major consequence” of increased middle-class art patronage, “the popularisation, or domestication, of art.”92 However, while women like Goodman capitalised on this phenomenon, and benefited from the traditional association between women artists and domestic subjects, the broader link between women artists and populism was a hindrance to those women seeking impartial critical attention and respect.

Another way to attract the attention of dealers and printers was to produce artwork that reflected a particular stylistic trend in the art world, or which created mass publicity upon exhibition. The former method paid dividends for Louise Jopling, whose Five O’clock Tea, painted in the fashionable Japonais style, was bought from the Royal Academy by Agnew’s to her “great delight” for the significant sum of

87 By a Woman Artist, “Varnishing day at the R.A,” The Woman’s Signal, May 2, 1895, 280. 88 Sara Gray, The Dictionary of British Women Artists (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2009), 119. 89 Postlethwaite, “More Noted Women Painters”, 480; “Miss Maude Goodman,” Art Journal (July 1889): 200; The “exclusive French gallery opened their doors to her and made her welcome.” “Women in the World of Art: Maude Goodman,” Hearth and Home, December 3, 1896, 155 90 Geraldine Norman, “£28 000 for German Altarpiece,” The Times Feb 1, 1972, 14; “Women in the World of Art: Maude Goodman”,155; “Un Chant D’Amour,” Auckland Star, December 28, 1901, 1. 91 “New Prints,” Saturday Review, November 2, 1889, 504; “Watching the Tournament,” The English Illustrated Magazine 132 (1894): 1157; “Art and Artists,” Otago Witness, November 20, 1901, 70. 92 Dianne Sachko Macleod “Art Collecting and Victorian Middle-class Taste,” Art History 10, no. 3 (1987): 347

174 £400.93 Agnew’s was a leading firm during this period with enough financial and cultural capital to “buy up the country,” according to Belgravia,94 and the importance of their support is evidenced by Jopling’s frustration when a studio visit from the firm did not result in sales. “I saw [the artist] Fred Morgan,” she wrote in 1876, “and he said that Agnews had bought the whole of their pictures, just after leaving our studio. What a failure I am!...I have no picture making qualities.”95 Jopling regularly visited commercial galleries and dealers’ showrooms, combining social and professional engagements and interactions in order to cultivate her own reputation in the art world and build the connections and networks that led to art sales and patronage.96 Her movements indicate that women could be visible and active participants in late nineteenth-century gallery culture, although it is important to note that not all women were willing or able to exercise the social, artistic and spatial flexibility that allowed Jopling to traverse London’s public and private artistic spaces.97

Despite her talent for negotiating London’s gallery culture and willingness to produce art works that tapped into trends and fashions in the art world, Jopling only periodically sold to art dealers, and did not find her way into a dealer’s “stable” of artists, whereupon her work would have been purchased, marketed and re-sold more consistently. While her Five O’clock Tea was a popular exhibit at the 1874 Royal Academy, it was another artwork by a woman artist at the same exhibition that illustrates the greater effectiveness of the “sensation picture” tactic in securing dealer attention. It was the unprecedented popular and critical success of Elizabeth Butler’s The Roll Call at the 1874 RA summer exhibition that led a number of dealers to court the artist. Art dealers were constantly looking for pictures that captured the public’s attention. Acquiring the copyright of paintings that attracted crowds at the Academy

93 Marion Hepworth Dixon, “The Art of Mrs. Louise Jopling,” Lady’s Realm 15 (1903-1904): 704. Agnew’s also purchased Jopling’s Ophelia for £75. Five O’clock Tea was engraved by Magazine of Art. Louise Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, (London: John Lane, 1925), 68. 94 “Echoes from the Royal Academy,” Belgravia 3 (1874): 423. 95 Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 91. 96 Jopling describes a typical day in Twenty Years of My Life a letter reprinted in her memoir: In the afternoon I went to Wallis’s Gallery. He was very gracious. I met there Mr Burgess (RA) and a Mr Williams. They were going on the Goupil’s [Gallery] to see some French pictures and they asked Percy and me to join them…After luncheon we went and had tea at Morris’, whose Studio is next door…Then we went to the Grosvenor Gallery…” Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 121 97 Patricia de Montfort, “Louise Jopling: A Gendered reading of Late 19th Century Britain,” Woman’s Art Journal, 34, no 2 (2013): 32, 36. De Montfort suggests that Jopling “set a new paradigm of female networking and creativity.”

175 was a safe way for dealers to secure huge profits through ticket sales to one-picture touring exhibitions and the sale of engravings.98 The publicity generated by the success of The Roll Call thus made Butler a highly attractive client; the Fine Art Society was willing to pay £1000 for the copyright of Butler’s next Academy painting and purchase and commission further works because they were near-assured to receive returns on their investment.

As was the case often throughout her career, Butler’s relationships with art dealers were not representative of most women artists’ experiences. While many women profited from occasional purchases from art dealers and the sale of copyrights, and benefited from the professional validation that accompanied those transactions, very few could rely solely on dealers and commercial galleries to earn a living wage. An alternative commercial venue for these artists, whose style and subjects may not have corresponded with the interests of art dealers, was the Grosvenor Gallery, established on New Bond Street in 1877 by Sir Coutts Lindsay. Just as the name and design of the Fine Art Society projected gentlemanly connoisseurship rather than crass commercialism, so too did the Grosvenor position itself as an institution intent on supporting artistic culture rather than facilitating “commercial speculation.”99 Louise Jopling described the Gallery as the “finest building of its kind in London,” with walls covered in red damask and a blue ceiling “powdered with stars.”100 The artistic elite mixed with royal guests at the gallery’s opening and subsequent events and exhibitions, which were embraced by fashionable London society.

Although it did not claim to be a rival to the Royal Academy, the Grosvenor clearly differentiated itself from that traditional institution by its hanging policy and style. Rather than submitting works to be judged by a hanging committee, artists were invited to exhibit paintings of their own choice at the Grosvenor’s exhibitions, where pictures were displayed in one line with ample blank wall space dividing each

98 James Hamilton, A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth-Century Britain, (London: Atlantic Books, 2014), 170-171. 99 John Ruskin, Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain (New York: Bryan, Taylor and Company, 1894), 4: 71; De Montfort, “The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition”, 147. 100 Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 113-114.

176 painting.101 This style of display contrasted sharply with the Royal Academy, where pictures were juxtaposed closely together regardless of style or subject, creating a premium for pictures hung at viewers’ eye line. At the Grosvenor every picture was hung “on the line” and Lindsay made a point of inviting artists who had their work “skied” or ignored by the RA to exhibit, including a large number of women artists.

Although Sir Coutts Lindsay may not have thought of the gallery as a purely commercial venture, the exhibition space did function as a selling point for artists as well as a place for the social activity and networking that facilitated self-promotion and artistic commerce.102 In line with the gallery’s aim of supporting artists Lindsay only levied a small commission of five percent on works sold at the gallery and did not attempt to acquire paintings’ copyright or charge artists a fee to exhibit.103 In 1880 the gallery opened a ladies’ drawing room, where artists and supporters could meet and socialise for an annual membership fee of two guineas, and a ladies’ restaurant was opened in 1888.104 Art Journal noted the Grosvenor’s progressive attitude to female exhibitors soon after the gallery opened: Among other features characteristic of the Grosvenor is the honourable place allotted to the works of female artists, and one is rejoiced to find that in every instance the ladies have proved themselves worthy of such consideration.105

Susan Casteras characterises the Grosvenor’s commitment to women artists as “somewhat revolutionary” in the way that it infused women into London’s male dominated exhibition culture.106 The democratic mode of hanging meant that women artists’ work was consistently placed on equal footing with men, and the fashionability of the venue generated significant exposure. It offered an important showcase for artists working in more avant-garde styles; Evelyn De Morgan exhibited more than 25 paintings at the Grosvenor throughout her career and found the venue a more natural fit for her allegorical and symbolist style than the Royal Academy.

101 Ibid; Mary Watts, George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life (London: Macmillan and Co, 1912), 1: 323; Agnes D. Atkinson, “The Grosvenor Gallery,” The Portfolio 8 (1877): 97-98. 102 Waterfield, Palaces of Art, 159. 103 Colleen Denney, ‘The Grosvenor Gallery as Palace of Art: An Exhibition Model,” in The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England. eds. Susan P Casteras and Colleen Denney (New Haven: Yale Centre for British Art, 1996), 17. 104 Paula Gillett, “Art Audiences at the Grosvenor Gallery,” in The Grosvenor Gallery, 55-56. 105 “The Grosvenor Gallery,” Art Journal (July 1879): 135. 106 Susan P Casteras, “Burne-Jones and the Pre Raphaelite Circle at the Palace of the Aesthetes” in The Grosvenor Gallery, 86.

177 Marie Stillman considered the Grosvenor exhibitions her best chance of having a picture “well placed”, and considered years when she was not able to exhibit there “very unfortunate.”107 Other women to feature at the Grosvenor include Sophie Anderson, Anna Lea Merritt, Louise Jopling, Helen Allingham, Margaret Gillies, Louisa Starr, Annie Swynnerton, Henrietta Rae and Clara Montalba, although Elizabeth Butler, for one, spurned the gallery as the home of the Aesthetes’ “unwholesome productions.”108

In general, the Grosvenor and the New Gallery, founded in 1888 by two of the Grosvenor’s former managers, offered exhibiting and selling spaces that did not highlight the feminine aspects of women’s work for marketing purposes or marginalise them because of gender, and this in itself was a rarity in London’s turn of the century gallery culture. This was the greatest benefit of the Grosvenor and the New Gallery to women artists’ professionalism; it was a space where they could display their work to an audience of sophisticated art buyers without being marginalised or categorised by their gender, and although amateur artists were allowed to exhibit, the fashionable nature of these venues vouched, in large part, for participants’ professionalism.

As has been shown here, however, women artists took a range of approaches to selling art through commercial galleries and art dealers, and, where possible, took full advantage of the new methods of selling and promoting art that were pioneered throughout this period. Like many of their male contemporaries, women displayed pragmatism in their reactions to the changing demands and desires of art buyers, as middle-class art patronage continued to increase. In many cases this involved producing paintings suited to domestic decoration, which often had the additional benefit of including subjects that were considered particularly suited to women’s “natural” talents. Painting for the market in this way did little to improve the artistic reputation of women as a generic category, as the pejorative association between women and unsophisticated populism persisted. But for most women who needed or wanted to make a living through art commercial viability outweighed the desire for

107 Quoted in Ibid., 87. 108 Butler, An Autobiography, 186.

178 critical acceptance, particularly as it was market interactions—which allowed women to objectively “measure herself with her brothers of the brush”109—that did the most to distinguish them as serious, working professionals, as the frequent references to earnings and sales in women artists’ autobiographies attests. Women were an active and visible presence on England’s art market and the seriousness and pragmatism with which they approached their commercial dealings was what separated them from the “glib frivolity”110 associated with female art amateurs.

Portraiture and Patronage

One consequence of the rise of commercial galleries and art dealers in the mid to late nineteenth century was the marginalisation of direct patronage as a mainstream method of selling art. In the early part of the century the “almost invariable rule” of art buyers was to buy “direct from the artist, a method which sounds simple and unobjectionable,” explained The Times in 1909. However, as new methods of buying and selling art emerged, and the size of the art-buying public increased, the shortcomings and challenges of the patronage model became more apparent; “Personal idiosyncrasies came to play too large a part,” The Times reported. “Buyers were exacting, patronising, changeable…after a time the artist would feel humiliated.”111 The rise of dealers and commercial galleries offered artists an attractive alternative to the direct interactions and demands involved with traditional patronage and allowed them more artistic autonomy. The influence of traditional patrons such as the royal family and aristocracy lessened as art works were increasingly produced without commission and then purchased by dealers or anonymous buyers.112 Many buyers preferred the less personal, more professional means of buying art that dealers facilitated. “I am sick of commissioning and dealing with artists,” noted patron Andrew Kurtz. “If in buying from dealers you pay through the nose—you get what you want and what you have seen.”113

109 Oldcastle, “Our Living Artists. Elizabeth Butler”, 260. 110 Codell, The Victorian Artist”, 160. 111 “Mr W.P. Frith, R.A.” The Times November 3, 1909, 13. “A complicated and contradictory mixture of deep gratitude and powerful resentment is thus built into the dynamic of patronage,” notes Marjorie Garber, Patronising the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 2. 112 Bayer, “Money as Muse”, 2. 113 Quoted in Macleod, Art and the Middle-class, 240.

179

However, patronage from established and renowned collectors along with direct commissions from buyers continued to play an important role in the development of artists’ careers. For women struggling to build a reputation and establish a niche in the crowded late nineteenth-century marketplace, the support of a patron—particularly one that was well known within the art world—was an endorsement of talent and an indicator of market value.114 Individual commissions, whereby the artist worked directly with a client to produce a particular art object, remained the primary source of income of many female art practitioners, supplementing the often-unreliable sales from exhibitions and galleries. Reviewing the 1910 exhibition of the Society of Women Artists, The Athenaeum’s art critic reflected on the role of patrons and commissions in the professional success of working artists: “How completely artistic development is dependent upon patronage is not generally realised,” he concluded.115

A number of opportunities remained for women to build relationships directly with buyers, and profit from the referrals and renown that could develop via the support of a well-known or esteemed client. The shift away from aristocratic art patrons, whose collecting practices tended to be based on artistic reputation and connoisseurship, and toward the heterogeneous art public of the middle-class benefited women; middle- class buyers were more likely to purchase art they responded to on an individual, intuitive level, rather than be dictated by their cultural education or artistic knowledge.116 Popular ideas of sexual difference did have some impact on women’s

114 Shannon Hunter Hurtado, Genteel Mavericks: Professional Women Sculptors in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), 93. 115 “Works by Women Artists,” The Athenaeum, March 12, 1910, 314. 116 Author and critic Lady Elizabeth Eastlake described this new trend in art patronage, “The patronage which had been almost exclusively the privilege of the nobility and high gentry, was now shared…by a wealthy and intellectual class, chiefly enriched by commerce and trade…[O]ne sign of the good sense of the nouveau riche consisted in a consciousness of his ignorance upon matters of connoisseurship.” Sir Charles Eastlake, Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts with a Memoir Compiled by Lady Eastlake, (London: John Murray, 1870), 147. When “bankers, merchants, manufactures and successful speculators,” entered the market for art, “It was not always taste that influenced their purchases; indeed, ideas on art were often as singular as their were characteristic.” William R Folkestone, “English Pictures and Picture-Dealers,” Belgravia 2 (May 1867): 290. These attitudes were linked to the shift towards patronage of living artists rather than Old Masters. Wilkie Collins commented in the 1850s, “traders and makers of all kinds of commodities have effected a revolution in the picture world…they started with the new notion of buying a picture which they themselves could admire and appreciate, and for the genuineness of which the artist was still living to vouch…[They] turned their backs valiantly on the Old Masters and marched off in body to the living men.” See Bayer, “Money as Muse,” 144-145.

180 experiences with patrons and commissions. Women were more likely, for example, to attract commissions for work in particular genres and materials, such as miniatures and family portraits, and the prices patrons and buyers paid for these work continued to reflect differences in the ways men and women’s art was valued. Working within these parameters some women were able to develop useful patron relationships, while a select few benefited from the patronage of new collectors from the industrial and commercial classes, who were willing to patronise artists whose art they admired regardless of their sex. Patronage and commissions directly and publically validated women artists’ market worth and competitiveness.

Ella Du Cane and Gertrude Massey were two artists who benefited from a traditional source of patronage: the royal family. Royal patronage was an important component of garden painter Ella Du Cane’s career throughout the 1890s, when Queen Victoria acquired nearly 30 of her watercolour drawings.117 The Queen commissioned Du Cane to paint the gardens of various royal residences, and gave the pictures as gifts to family members, describing the artist in a letter to Empress Frederick as a “very talented young lady with a particular talent for painting flowers.”118 Du Cane received an invitation to Buckingham Palace in 1893 and, such was her popularity with the Queen, that her work was purchased by the Duke of York and his siblings for their mother’s birthday present.119 The royal family continued to support Du Cane’s career both publicly and privately after Victoria’s death. King Edward and Queen Alexandra visited exhibitions of Du Cane’s watercolours at the Graves Gallery in 1904 and the Fine Art Society in 1908, where the King purchased a selection of watercolour sketches for £130.120 Du Cane “persistently capitalised” on these advantages to expand professionally, and her favoured status with the royal family allowed her to

117 Delia Miller, The Victorian Watercolours and Drawings in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (London: Philip Wilson, 1995), 284. 118 Ibid. 119 “Court Circular,” The Times March 1, 1893, 11; Alice Stronach, “A Painter of Gardens: An Interview with Miss Ella Du Cane,” The Girl's Realm (August 1902): 780-781. 120; “Court Circular,” The Times, April 22, 1904, 8; “Court Circular,” The Times, May 12, 1908, 10; “Queen at Art Galleries,” Manchester Guardian, May 16, 1908, 8; Miller, The Victorian Watercolours and Drawings in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, 284.

181 develop a portfolio of stately clients whose grand gardens she was commissioned to paint.121

The miniaturist Gertrude Massey received her first private commission from royalty in 1899, after the Marchioness of Lansdowne, for whom Massey had carried out a portrait commission, brought her work to the attention of the Princes of Wales. From the Marchioness “ripples of recommendation widened,” culminating in Massey’s first “royal portrait” of Peter, the Prince of Wales’s French Bulldog. Securing the support of a high profile patron in the Marchioness early in her career was, Massey found, a valuable means to accelerate her career progression: Most miniature painters and portrait painters in other media start by painting their relatives and then get commissions from their friends. They work up the social scale gradually, getting more and more interesting and well-known sitters as they ascend. I started at the top by painting one of the first ladies in the land—a lady in waiting to the Queen.122 Massey attributed her popularity from this point onwards to the endorsement of the aristocracy and royal family. She noted, “As a result of that work [for the Prince of Wales] people came to me for miniatures and portraits…It is amusing how people follow the example of outstanding personalities.”123

Like Du Cane, Massey was savvy about methods of publicising and capitalising on her royal commissions. She gained permission to reproduce the pictures for popular distribution and asked for her visits to the royal residences to be announced in the Court Circular; “apart from the honour,” she explained, “half the Americans in London will want me to paint their portraits.”124 She credited her royal canine portraits with beginning a fashion for animal miniatures. “All sorts of society people wanted me to paint miniatures of their dogs also. I had four or five visitors daily to my studio.”125 According to Massey, King Edward and Queen Alexandra took an active interest in promoting her career. After discovering that Gertrude and her husband relied on painting for their livelihood, the King took steps to publicise her

121 Alison Redfoot, “Victorian Watercolourist Ella Du Cane: A Study in Resistance and Compliance of Gender Stereotypes, the Professional Art World, Orientalism and the Interpretations of Japanese Gardens for British Society,” (Masters thesis: University of California, 2011), 31. 122 Gertrude Massey, Kings, Commoners and Me (London; Blackie, 1934), 15. 123 Ibid., 14. 124 Ibid., 54. 125 Ibid., 21.

182 work within his circles to ensure that she would get “plenty of sitters.” Massey recalled people arriving at her studio announcing that the King had sent them to have a portrait of themselves or their dog painted. “He was the heartiest and most appreciative patron I have ever had,” she concluded.126 Massey produced over 800 miniatures and portraits in the years following her initial royal commission to become her family’s principal wage earner.

Massey’s career trajectory indicates that patronage from the royal family still had the power to establish artistic reputations at the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time when many traditional authorities and institutions in the art world were losing their influence and prestige. Certainly a greater number of women artists were benefiting from royal attention at this time. Both Queen Alexandra and Queen Mary took a more active interest in women’s artistic pursuits than their predecessor; both were patrons of the Society of Women Artists and regularly made purchases at its annual exhibition.127 These were dutifully recorded in The Times’ “Court Circular” and other newspapers, guaranteeing publicity for the artist. Alexandra and Mary also regularly attended one-woman and small group shows staged by women at London’s West End galleries; Lucy Kemp-Welch, Beatrice Parsons and Kate Wyatt were some of the artists who benefited from the attention these royal visits drew and from “copycat” buyers seeking to imitate royal consumption.128 Anne Helmreich notes that in Parsons’ case, “such noted patrons undoubtedly attracted other purchasers eager to emulate the royal family’s taste.”129 Patronage from the royal family increased the desirability and cachet attached to a woman artists’ work which, in turn, advanced her commercial viability.

Royal patronage was not immune from the changes wrought by the development of the dealer-led art market in the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria herself was a long

126 Ibid., 57. 127 Sir Edward Poynter called Queen Alexandra an “enthusiastic lover of painting.” “Her Majesty, Queen Alexandra,” Art Journal (June 1902): 184; “Queen Honours Them: Mary of England Buys Paintings of Women Artists,” The Washington Post, May 24, 1914; “Court Circular,” The Times, May 11, 1901, 7; “Court Circular,” The Times, February 11, 1902, 10; “Court Circular,” The Times, February 20, 1904, 12; “Court Circular,” The Times, February 13, 1905, 7. 128 Laura Wortley, Lucy Kemp-Welch 1869-1958: The Spirit of the Horse (Woodbridge: Antique Collector’s Club, 1996), 114; “Court Circular,” The Times, June 16, 1906, 11; “Court Circular,” The Times, March 2, 1912, 11; “Queen Alexandra Picture Buying,” The Observer, December 19, 1915, 14. 129 Helmreich, “Contested Grounds”, 90.

183 time friend and patron of the famed dealer Earnest Gambart, who assisted her in hanging pictures.130 The one facet of picture production and selling that remained dependent on direct relationships with clients was portraiture.131 Portrait painting was regarded as an art of collaboration, which required artists to work with customers to fulfil a particular aesthetic, social or ideological vision.132 For this reason portraiture was an unpopular genre amongst many artists, who resented submitting to the whims and wills of a client to the detriment of their own creative impulses. “I was obliged for my daily subsistence to paint not what I knew to be true and right, but what my customers exacted,” wrote one portraitist. He blamed the ignorant taste of the general public for turning him into a “mere journeyman painter,” and warned younger artists not to take up painting unless they were able to pursue a style other than portraiture.133 The new means of selling art offered by commercial galleries encouraged some painters to move away from portraiture as the primary component of their professional practice. At the same time, and as the popularity of Massey’s miniatures indicates, demand for portraits was reaching a new high, as increasing numbers of the middle and upper middle-classes turned to portraits as a means of demonstrating and recording their new status and achievements.134 So while portraiture may not have been the most desirable of artistic genres in the late nineteenth century, it was one that offered many artists steady, profitable work at a time of increasing competition and instability within the art market.

These were the factors that encouraged many women artists to pursue portrait painting as a profession. The general lack of prestige and creativity associated with portraiture encouraged claims that it was a genre particularly suited to women and their mimetic artistic natures. Since the eighteenth century critics had associated “feminine” qualities of vanity and imitation with portraiture, despite the relatively public nature of the genre. While the female painter lacked “the power for heroic subjects,” in portraits “she possesses her greatest strength,” noted one critic in 1805.

130 Jeremy Maas, Gambart, Prince of the Victorian Art World (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1975), 70. 131 Nancy Ann Wisely, “Making Faces: A Sociological Analysis of Portrait Painting,” (PhD thesis, University of Minnesota, 1993), 140. 132 Douglas Lord, “Nineteenth Century French Portraiture,” Burlington Magazine 72, no. 423 (1938): 253. 133 “Experiences of a Portrait Painter,” The Crayon 6, no. 6 (1859): 169-170. 134 Wisely, “Making Faces: A Sociological Analysis of Portrait Painting”, 140-141.

184 “Females are…particularly suited to this branch of art…It is a gift which nature has preferred to grant as a weapon to the weaker.”135 While creatively limiting, these assumptions meant that portraiture was considered an appropriate and acceptable path for the well-trained female professional, at a time when opportunities within the genre were growing. “Portrait painting is undoubtedly a very profitable field of employment to those who are competent to produce correct and pleasing likenesses,” noted Myra’s Journal in an article advising, “What to do with our Daughters.” They instructed women in the profession to paint sitters “at their very best” and noted that most people were likely to pay larger sums for good likenesses of their relatives than they were for any other picture.136

Certainly portraiture was undertaken by many women, particularly at the beginning of their careers, because of its potential profitability. Henrietta Rae began her artistic career by painting portraits and discovered early the importance of recommendations and advocates. Rae’s friendship with the watercolour painter John Steeple led to several introductions and referrals that brought “grist…to [her] mill,” according to Rae’s biographer.137 It was through Steeple that Rae gained commissions for two early portraits of children, along with a portrait of Steeple’s own wife in 1883.138 Portraits provided a steady economic backbone to her career, allowing Rae to experiment artistically in her favoured genre of neo-classicalism. As a young female painter, however, Rae encountered some who were apprehensive to work with her. One potential client from Leicester discovered Rae’s work at the British Artists’ Exhibition, and wrote to her care of the Royal Academy schools unaware of her gender. Rae recounts: As I then had no studio I made an appointment to see him in the corridor of the Academy schools. I can see his surprised look now as a girl student came tripping along, with heels clattering on the stone pavement, bearing his visiting card. “I want to see Mr Rae,” he began. “There is no one else here of the name of Rae,” I replied. “But H. Rae, whose head study I have seen at the

135 August von Kotzbue referring to Angelica Kauffman, quoted in Angela Rosenthal, “She’s Got the Look! Eighteen-Century Female Portrait Painters and the Psychology of a Potentially ‘Dangerous Employment’,” in Portraiture: Facing the Subject, ed. Joanna Woodall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 147-148. 136 “What to do with our Daughters: Painting,” Myra’s Journal, July 1, 1894, 23. 137 Arthur Fish, Henrietta Rae (London: Casell and Company, 1905), 28. 138 Ibid., 31.

185 Society of British Artists,” he urged; and he was quite put out when I explained that it was my signature.139

Rae eventually secured the commission, and many others with both male and female sitters, but youth, gender and lack of reputation could all count against artists trying to secure clients, particularly for prestigious or well-paid jobs. Louise Jopling received a portrait order in 1882 for the sum of 150 guineas, only to later lose the commission to John Everett Millais, to whom the client offered 1000 guineas for the same work. “Such are some of the disappointments of the profession,” Jopling explained.140

In unpacking the different prices present in the situation Jopling describes, it is difficult to separate gender from fame and reputation. Millais was one of the most well known artists of the period, a painter of Prime Minsters and future president of the Royal Academy.141 Jopling herself was aware of the role of reputation and celebrity in artistic success and value and consciously tried to build her own popular renown through social and artistic means. Soon after losing the commission to Millais she painted a portrait of the famed actress Ellen Terry, and exhibited the work at the fashionable Grosvenor Gallery, where it sparked attention and conversation. “It is a great help to an artist to paint a celebrity,” Jopling noted. “The picture is certain of being talked about.”142 Securing portraits of well-known figures, whether they were commissioned or not, was a way for artists to build their profiles as portrait painters and attract new clients and orders. Thanks to her cultivation of her own celebrity, Jopling was, by the 1880s, someone “continuously written about, talked about, drawn and painted.”143 The disparity between her fame and that of Millais’s was present, but not vast. Even well-known women artists like Jopling thus suffered from gendered pricing and valuation practices.

Records of the rates charged by female portraitists are far from comprehensive and the different pricing systems and practices used by women are not broadly discussed in secondary literature, though Deborah Cherry notes that “in the upper reaches of the

139 Ibid., 29. 140 Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 230. 141 See Gordon Fleming, John Everett Millais: A Biography (London: Constable, 1998), 160-168. 142 Ibid., 232. 143 “London’s Drawing Rooms and Their chatelaines: Mrs. Jopling’s,” The Lady’s World (August 1887): 340.

186 market…works by women did not command high prices.”144 The evidence suggests that women routinely charged and received lower rates for portraits than their male counterparts, both for domestic and family portraits and for paintings commissioned by businesses and public entities. The average price for a three quarter length portrait by the painter Frank Holl, for example, was 600 guineas in 1887, whereas Jopling’s rate for a half-length portrait was approximately 150 guineas.145 In harder times, Jopling accepted as little as 25 guineas for head studies, and she regularly charged between 75 guineas and 100 guineas for portraits throughout the 1880s.146 The one commission that rivalled Holl’s average rate was from the Raja of Kapurthala, for a life sized, two-figure portrait in 1880. Significantly, Val Prinsep passed on this job to Jopling after he was too busy to execute it, and the high rate of 700 guineas received may have reflected Prinsep’s own pricing.147

The fact that Jopling regularly received lower prices than those charged by her male counterparts meant that she was compelled to string together continuous orders to make a living. Although she also sold pictures at exhibitions and through dealers, portrait painting was her primary livelihood, and she was highly dependent on referrals, recommendations and repeat clients, along with fluctuations in the market for portraits generally. The Rothschild family, for example, were a major source of commissions that Jopling cultivated in the late 1870s and early 1880s. She painted portraits of Constance and Annie de Rothschild in 1876 and later worked on pictures of Charles and Evelina de Rothschild and their father, Sir Nathan.148 While some of these subjects did not want their portraits exhibited publically, which would have secured Jopling’s work more attention, the patronage of a prominent family contributed to Jopling’s profile as a portraitist and made her a candidate for other high

144 Cherry, Painting Women, 98. 145 “Notes on Current Events,” British Architect, September 3, 1887, 244. 146 For example, Jopling executed a likeness of the Reverend Wood in 1880 for 25 guineas, which she regarded as a “small order”. Around this time she wrote to her son “affairs look very gloomy; money very short; no orders or prospects.” She charged 75 guineas for a “small portrait” of Catharine Williams, the wife of local landowner and mill owner Joseph Grout Williams. Her rate for both the commission lost to Millais and a portrait of Florence Gully, the daughter of William Gully QC, was150 guineas. Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 159-163, 191. 147 Ibid., 125. 148 Unpublished diary extract published on “The Catalogue: Portrait – Miss Constance de Rothschild”, Louise Jopling (1943-1933): A Research Project, University of Glasgow, 2012, www.louisejopling.arts.gla.ac.uk/

187 profile projects. Jopling’s excitement at receiving a Rothschild commission speaks to its significance; “I have an order!!!”, she wrote to her husband.149

Figure 16: Sir Nathan Mayer de Rothschild by Louise Jopling, 1878. © National Trust.

Following her series of Rothschild portraits, many of Jopling’s commissions came from the groups that largely maintained demand for portraiture in the late 1800s—the professional middle-class and minor gentry, including the tea merchant and art collector W.R. Winch, local landowner Joseph Williams and Queen’s Counsel William Gully, later the 1st Viscount Selby. Many of these jobs required Jopling to travel out of London and stay as a houseguest of her client, a prospect that could prove challenging to a female artist travelling alone. As Patricia de Montfort notes, professional visits to country houses could present painters with the opportunity to make valuable social connections, but the presence of an “economically independent,

149 Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 109. Original punctuation.

188 professional female” in a family home also led to awkward or uncomfortable interactions, which women artists had to learn to negotiate tactfully.150 Portraiture involved interacting with a broad range of people of different genders and social classes, and traversing disparate, sometimes unknown, public, private and social spaces; respectability in behaviour, dress and demeanour was thus vital to women artists’ success and reputations within the genre.151

Jopling’s career demonstrates several of the issues and practices female portrait painters faced at the end of the nineteenth century. Women were broadly accepted as portraitists, and with the right social and artistic connection they could construct viable, even profitable careers within the genre. Orders and commissions were highly dependent on recommendations, referrals and reputation, and women cultivated their profile and networks within the bounds of acceptable and appropriate feminine behaviour. Ethel Wright, for example, relocated her studio to the fashionable area of Lowndes Square, which was a suitable and convenient setting for the sitters she was trying to attract.152 She was known as a “great favourite of society,” and an “excellent hostess,” two traits that raised her public profile and allowed her to move in the same circles as potential clients.

Women were also not generally confined to portraits of their own gender. Ethel Mortlock made a career out of painting prominent men, including politicians, war heroes and ambassadors, and gained commissions from the Royal Navy, the Conservative party and the Prince of Wales.153 Like Jopling, she was canny in pursuing high profile subjects who would attract attention upon exhibition. She secured sittings with the explorer and solider Colonel Fred Burnaby shortly before his fatal trip to Egypt in 1885, which brought him posthumous fame as a hero and martyr in General Gordon’s Sudan campaign. Mortlock made the most of this fortuitous

150 De Montfort, “Louise Jopling”, 32. 151 Cherry notes that Jopling presented herself as an “utterly respectable but nevertheless stylish professional woman,” and this allowed her to appeal to both middle-class patrons and the more liberal tastes of the art world. Cherry, Painting Women, 90. Instances when she veered too far towards the avant-garde in dress are remarked upon in her memoirs, where she recalls one client’s horror when she chose at dinner not to wear a neck ribbon, designed to enhance the modesty of her low cut evening gown. Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 43-44. 152 “Women in the World of Art,” Hearth and Home, October 22, 1896, 881. 153 “Our London Letter,” Dundee Courier, February 26, 1886, np; “A Lady’s Letter on Current Topics,” Hampshire Telegraph, May 29, 1886, np.

189 timing; hers was the last portrait painted of Burnaby before his death, and she exhibited it to great interest at the Royal Academy shortly after. She was invited to present the portrait to the Prince and Princess of Wales at Marlborough House, and later exhibited the painting for public view at Dierken’s Art Gallery in London and at galleries in Manchester and Birmingham.154

Mortlock also executed the first English portrait of Mary Endicott, the American heiress and “social lioness” set to marry Joseph Chamberlain, and this commission— regarded as the sensation of the season—brought interest from American clients.155 Mortlock received £130 for a three quarter length portrait of Edward S. Mostyn Price in 1892, but claimed to charge as much as £1000 for commissions from foreign ambassadors. However, as Mortlock named this price during bankruptcy proceedings, as a means of explaining her debts by way of unpaid portrait commissions, this number may have been inflated.156 Nevertheless, she was respected as a “painter of men’s portraits” who took on “first rate” military, political and society subjects with equal success.157 Portraits by female artists were generally valued less economically than those by comparable male counterparts, and the job sometimes presented challenging social and professional situations for artists to navigate but, as a speciality, portraiture provided a relatively stable and sustainable livelihood to women with the means and determination to foster their reputations and cultivate client relationships.

Besides portraits, the most personal and sustained relationship artists could cultivate with clients was direct patronage. “In the eighteenth century and before artists were visited by their patrons who bought what the artist had to sell and commissioned him to paint what he was pleased to paint,” explained George Moore.158 By the 1890s, Moore claimed, the West End art dealer had replaced the patron as the most likely visitor to an artists’ studio. Significant late century art collectors such as George McColloch and Henry Ismay chose not to work directly with artists to build their

154 “Chit Chat,” Sunday Times, May 22, 1885, 6; The Times, June 26, 1885, 2. 155 “Society,” Bow Bells, November 16, 1888, 319. 156 R.H.J Griffiths, “Ethel the Bankrupt Portrait Painter,” Family Tree Magazine, 22, no. 1 (2006): 71. 157 Florence Fenwick Miller, “The Ladies Column,” Illustrated London News, June 16, 1888, 647; “Royal Academy,” The Times, May 25, 1883, 4. 158 George Moore, Modern Painting (London: Walter Scott, 1893), 153.

190 collections, relying instead on the selection committees of major exhibitions and dealers to curate the best “blue chip” investments for their private galleries.159 William Frith believed that this arrangement benefitted artists. “[T]he “patron” may have peculiar taste, or no taste at all,” he noted: …[He] may be as full of whims and fancies as he is of ignorance, and then the life of the painter is not a happy one. For many years I have always sold my pictures to what is called “the trade” and have invariably escaped the tribulation that so often attends the patrons’ patronage.160

But although it was less common in the 1880s and 1890s than it was a century earlier, direct patronage, whereby a client paid a stipend in return for first access to paintings, or established a regular buying pattern with an artist, was still a feature of the art ecosystem at the turn of the twentieth century that many artists relied upon. In the middle decades of the century, it was the direct, personal patronage of collectors like George Rae and Frederick Leyland that made the aesthetic experiments of artists like Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones viable. “Without these patrons Rossetti would have been forced to adapt his powers to pleasing personal taste,” noted Art Journal. “By their help he was able to work out his own theories of art.”161

Similarly, at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was avant-garde artists who both attracted and were most reliant upon, involved, reliable patrons. English impressionists and post-impressionists such as Walter Sickert, Augustus John and Mark Gertler attracted patronage from collectors and art-lovers sympathetic to their modern style and methods.162 Aristocratic women involved in literary and artistic society were an important and welcome source of patronage for this group of artists; as well as providing financial support by paying stipends, purchasing art and commissioning decorative schemes, they took on the “vague but important role” of facilitating useful introductions to other buyers and collectors within their social networks.163 Few women, however, benefited from the support of this group of female

159 Macleod “Art Collecting and Victorian Middle-class Taste”, 343-345. 160 W.P Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1888), 157. 161 Lionel Robinson, “The Leyland Collection,” Art Journal (May 1892): 136. 162 Anne Gray, ed. The Edwardians: Secret and Desires, (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2004), 66. 163 Oriana Baddeley, Judith Collins and Teresa Grimes, Five Women Painters, (Oxford: Lennard Publishing, 1989), 18; Diane Sashko Macleod, “Women As Patrons and Collectors: 1900-1940,” Oxford Art Online, 2009.

191 patrons. Lady Ottoline Morell, Lady Ian Hamilton and Lady Cunard, amongst others, favoured male artists of the avant-garde, with whom romantic and sexual relationships sometimes coalesced with artistic patronage.

The scarcity of collectors in this mould willing to patronise female artists reflects women’s uneasy relationship with avant-garde and modern forms of art in general. The association between women and the feminine, domestic and imitative in art distanced them from conventional understandings of cultural modernity, while women’s less privileged critical and commercial position in the art world meant they were less able to take the aesthetic and social risks necessary to be involved in progressive art movements. One of the few women artists to benefit from patrons of avant-garde and modern art was Gwen John, and she was aided in this regard by her brother Augustus. He recommended Gwen’s art to one of his own patrons, the American John Quinn, after he discovered she was struggling financially. Augustus John was a trusted guide to Quinn and so his recommendation of Gwen John was taken seriously, particularly as it came at a time when Quinn was looking to expand his collection with new and modern artists.164

Gwen was anxious about fulfilling the expectations of such a relationship, and was slow to respond to Quinn’s offers of support. “I find it difficult to thank you as I wish to for your offer to buy my pictures regularly and to send me the money regularly,” she wrote to Quinn in 1912. “I cannot decide my answer now but will in a few weeks. It would be very good for me to have money regularly and so be able to have good models, but I am not sure at this moment whether my pictures will be good.”165 Although Quinn was a non-demanding patron, Gwen experienced the same tension felt by many other artists involved in patronage relationships; as Sue Roe explains, Gwen’s desire to paint “freely and intuitively” had to now co-exist with her responsibility to Quinn.166 His preferences for oils and portraiture were taken into

164 Sue Roe, Gwen John (London: Chatto and Windus, 2001), 124-125. See also Ysanne Holt, “New York, London, Ireland: Collector John Quinn's Transatlantic Network, c.1900–1917,” Visual Culture in Britain, 14, no.1 (2013): 56. 165 Letter from Gwen John to John Quinn, 17 November 1912 in Gwen John, Gwen John: Letters and Notebooks, ed. Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan (London: Tate Publishing in association with the National Library of Wales, 2003), 77. 166 Roe, Gwen John, 132.

192 account in her choice of subjects and materials, and she expressed regret and shame at her struggle to complete pictures by the expected time.

Laura Knight shared Gwen John’s concerns about direct patronage relationships. Although not an avant-garde artist, she was one of the few women to be offered sustained, direct patronage early in her career. The connoisseur and collector William Hartshorne offered Knight £250 a year to paint a series of portraits in 1896, shortly after Knight submitted her first picture to the Royal Academy. In her memoir, Knight records that she was “saved from this fate” by a financial crisis in the Hartshorne family, indicating her distaste for the obligation and creative limitations such a relationship would engender.167

Other women, however, received patronage from collectors and connoisseurs that was of a less formal nature than the arrangement offered to Knight. Prominent late nineteenth-century art collectors of the commercial class included the works of women artists like Evelyn De Morgan, Louise Jopling and Henrietta Rae in their personal galleries. The Liverpool ship owner William Imrie was one of De Morgan’s few steady patrons; he purchased Dryad from the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885 and went on to commission seven more paintings throughout the 1890s, including Cassandra and Helen of Troy.168 Rae was one of the many women artists to have work purchased by George McCulloch, whose collection of British and European art by living artists was considered one of the finest in England.169 McCulloch paid the considerable sum of £1000 for Rae’s masterwork Psyche at the Throne of Venus, a huge canvas featuring fourteen female figures, in 1894 and he also collected multiple works by Marianne Stokes, Laura Alma-Tadema, Emmie Stewart Wood and Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes.170

167 Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936), 66. 168 A.M.W Stirling, William De Morgan and his Wife (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1922), 192; “Flora,” De Morgan Centre, http://www.demorgan.org.uk/Flora. 169 “Mr George McColloch,” The Times, December 13, 1907, 8. 170 “The Painters of the Pictures,” Western Mail, October 12 1894, np; Royal Academy Winter Exhibition. Exhibition of Modern Works in Painting and Sculpture. Forming the Collection of the late George McCulloch (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1909).

193 McCulloch did not claim to have a special interest in supporting women artists and did not forge close, personal relationships with the ones he patronised; he primarily purchased art from major exhibitions and was driven by personal taste and the desire for good investments. In this way, his attitude towards collecting women artists was somewhat typical of late nineteenth-century art patrons; he did not discriminate against work by women, and purchased it when he liked it personally or considered it a solid investment, but women artists were not central to his collection or regarded as the centrepiece within it. In some regards, McCulloch’s collection reflected women’s position in the art world generally—they were accepted as legitimate participants within it but their status, both commercially and critically, was minimal. Nevertheless, being a part of such a high profile collection bolstered artists’ reputations and public profile.

Merton Russell Cotes was one of the few patrons to emerge from the merchant and professional classes who did have an active interest in collecting the work of female artists. Although in many ways his collecting practices reflected typical urban, middle-class taste, Cotes had a particular penchant for both representations of the female form, and works by female artists.171 He purchased works by women from the early nineteenth century along with examples by the most well-known living female painters such as Lucy Kemp-Welch, Evelyn De Morgan and Louise Jopling; a painting by Laura Alma-Tadema was his favourite of the entire collection. Once Anna Lea Merritt’s Love Locked Out became the first work by a woman artist to by bought for the nation by the Chantrey Trust, Cotes immediately ordered a copy to be produced for his own collection.172 Cotes purchased art from a variety of sources; as well as visiting artists in their studios he bought work from the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy and Walker Gallery in Liverpool and frequented auctions and dealer-run galleries. Collectors like McCulloch and Cotes did not enter into traditional patronage relationships with women artists, but having paintings purchased by recognised collectors was a sign that the artists’ work was worth collecting, and it

171 Giles Waterford, “Paintings from the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth,” The Magazine Antiques, 155, no. 6 (1999), 261; “The Art Collection,” The Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, 2008, http://www.russell-cotes.bournemouth.gov.uk/Explore-The-Collections/The-Art- Collection.aspx 172 Ibid.

194 placed women’s work alongside prestigious “blue chip” artists like Millais and Leighton. Although it did not offer the financial stability that direct patronage provided, it was a significant marker of professional credibility that was free from creative or professional obligation.

Conclusion

For women, engaging with the art market and art consumers was the threshold for professional status. More than any other facet of their artistic practice, selling art legitimised women artists’ worth. Exchanging their goods for a price set and validated by the art market indicated that their art was objectively valuable. Explaining the development of the French impressionist Berthe Morisot’s career, Annie Higonnet notes that, “Professional means in part impersonal—that is, what goes beyond the subjectively satisfying.” Even for an artist like Morisot, who did not need to earn money to support herself, the public scrutiny and validation that came from selling art was paramount to forming a professional identity. “I don’t want to work anymore for the sake of working,” she explained to her sister, noting that selling her work was her “only ambition.”173 Higonnet argues that the first “public signal” of Morisot’s professional status was thus when she sold four pictures to the art dealer Durand Ruel. For women, the transition from subjective to objective validation was vital. Women were more expected than men to produce art for their own pleasure and for the benefit of their family and friends. If women did not remove their work from this realm of domestic appreciation and subject it to the scrutiny of the market, then they would never move beyond amateur status, no matter how talented, well-trained or socially connected they were.

Paradoxically, the facet of artistic practice that was most important to women’s professionalism was also the one where they faced significant challenges socially and psychologically. Exchanging goods for money and entering into economic transactions and contracts was largely a male privilege, and although women were a visible presence in the commercial art world by the late nineteenth century, some expressed reluctance towards these interactions. Whether these aversions were real or

173 Higonnet, Berthe Morisot, 29, 78.

195 a contrived and strategic attempt to conform to traditional feminine behaviour is sometimes unclear. Louise Jopling wrote openly about her financial struggles and pursuit of commissions and sales in her memoir, and was a campaigner for women’s economic and legal rights, but still felt the need to issue the disclaimer: “The monetary side of an artist’s career seems sordid. Somehow in asking for money for one’s work, one has the feeling…of being a robber and a thief.”174 In her memoir, however, she expresses annoyance at the low prices her pictures fetch. Elizabeth Butler, too, expressed ambivalence towards the business side of her artistic career. The detailed account of her sales, exhibitions and commissions included in her autobiography indicate that she took pride in her selling-power and was savvy about the art market, but she claimed to rely on (male) advisors because she had “not been favoured in that way myself.”175 The fact that two of the most well-known and respected women artists of the period expressed conflicted, somewhat contradictory, opinions towards the basic professional premise of selling art illustrates the ambiguous position of women artists in relation to the art market.

Women artists confronted these difficulties in various ways. Some capitalised on the existing ideas about women’s natural artistic talents to satisfy a niche in the market, and achieved professionalism by pursuing forms of art superficially deemed unchallenging or domestic. The growing number of small commercial galleries benefitted both male and female artists alike; they provided artists with a direct showcase to art-consumers and, if the gallery’s reputation was solid, reflected well on the artists’ own credentials. It was not uncommon for women to receive solo exhibitions at these venues, and dealers were willing to use the marketing tools at their disposal to promote women if they considered their art sufficiently saleable. Women such as Helen Allingham and Elizabeth Butler benefited from this pragmatic, commercially-directed approach. In general, however, dealers did not take risks on women; it was those who worked in highly commercial genres or whose work created its own publicity that benefited from their services. Women artists as a group received less substantial critical attention and smaller prices for their work than their male

174 Jopling, Twenty Years of My Life, 26. 175 Butler, An Autobiography, 104.

196 counterparts, and for this reason they were not as likely to attract the attention of dealers.

Women artists also supported their artistic careers through more traditional methods of selling art such as portrait commissions and other forms of patronage. Portraiture was the backbone of many artists’ careers, and demand from the middle and upper middle-classes provided steady work to women such as Louise Jopling, Henrietta Rae, Mary Fowler and Ethel Wright. Art collectors, including the royal family, did not discriminate against women artists, but were more likely to commission or purchase work that reflected their “natural”, feminine artistic aptitudes. Miniatures, infant portraiture and flower painting were genres in which women artists were likely to attract commissions, and by fulfilling this niche some maintained stable and successful carers.

Few women attracted the kind of sustained, involved patronage that provided male artists with consistent income and the opportunity to experiment artistically. Collectors tended to respond to works by women artists on a personal level, rather than pursue them for the sake of connoisseurship. Although they faced conflicting messages on the virtue of selling art, the attitude of most women towards the art market was pragmatic. Engaging with the business side of art was essential to earning a living and achieving professional status, and so women interacted with the infrastructure of the art market to the fullest extent they were able. Each had their own strategies and tactics to balance the necessity of art commerce with the expectations of feminine respectability. The social and cultural capital gained from their training, studio practice and organisational memberships facilitated and strengthened what were the key interactions and relationships of their professional lives.

197 Chapter Five: “A good and steady income may be made”: Making a Living through Commercial Illustration

In 1893, Henry James commented that the “illustration of books, even more of magazines, may be said to have been born in our time, so far as variety and abundance are signs of it.”1 The last decades of the nineteenth century were a pivotal period in the development of publishing and print culture. After the “golden age” of illustrative wood engraving in English magazines in the 1860s, advances in printing technology saw illustrations became “more a matter of course” in all forms of printed media.2 For artists seeking a livelihood in the crowded and competitive late nineteenth-century art market, the advent and subsequent mass popularity of illustrated magazines, books and other printed material was a boon. The success of daily and weekly illustrated papers, in particular, created new demand for illustrators with the gift for “rapid reproduction.”3 “The number of persons of both sexes who have begun to draw for the daily papers, advertisements, [and] books is something enormous,” noted Joseph Pennell in 1890.4

Although popular with both male and female artists, press illustration was noted in publications such as Women and Work and Myra’s Journal as a suitable pursuit for women seeking remunerative artistic employment. Henry Blackburn, the editor of Pictorial World and owner of London Society magazine wrote two articles on illustration for Women and Work, in which he explained the pursuit as a “new form of employment for women…developing daily.”5 He described one method of illustration, which involved using an etching needle to draw on waxed plates, as an art—“for it is an art,” he claimed—particularly suited to women. “Its scope and

1 Henry James, Pictures and Text (New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1893), 1. See also Amy Tucker, The Illustration of the Master: Henry James and the Magazine Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 1. 2 Joseph Pennell, “A New Profession Wanting Professors,” The Contemporary Review, 58, (July 1890): 121. 3 “Employments for Gentlewomen: Art,” Myra’s Journal, November 1, 1898, 40. 4 Pennell, “A New Profession Wanting Professors,” 21; “[T]he appearance of an illustrated newspaper in London, producing and consuming thirty to forty illustrations daily [is] an important event in the artistic world because of the prospect for employment opened out by such undertakings,” noted Henry Blackburn. “The Illustration of Books and Newspapers,” The Nineteenth Century 27, no. 156 (1980): 213. 5 Henry Blackburn, “Artistic Employment for Women,” Women and Work, July 4, 1874, 2.

198 usefulness for sketches and drawings in outline are as yet only half developed, and will, I believe, only be developed by the firm, delicate touch of a woman’s hand.”6 This was a was time-consuming method, so Blackburn believed that women would be favoured by employers because, “for some mysterious reason, women’s time is considered of less value to other people than men’s.”7

It is worth noting that some articles purporting to advocate women’s inclusion within the illustration profession were referring specifically to the practice of engraving illustrations on wood blocks, which was one means of producing and printing illustrations for the press. These articles drew a distinction between the more creative pursuit of draughtsmanship and the technical, imitative process of engraving; it was the latter practice that some regarded as specifically suited to women’s smaller, more delicate hands and mimetic artistic abilities.8 To draw on wood for illustration was a demanding pursuit, which required the artist to have a good understanding of the engraving and printing process and be proficient in producing strong, accurate lines— an artistic attribute largely associated with men. Despite the fact that women such as Adelaide and Florence Caxton and Mary Ellen Edwards achieved success as press illustrators by drawing on wood in the 1860s and 1870s, the notion that women were unsuited and incapable of working within this masculine art form remained prevalent. In 1882 Charles Ross, the editor of Judy magazine, produced a cartoon that lampooned the attempts of a woman artist drawing on wood, despite the fact that Ross employed female artists, including his own wife, to produce illustrations for his magazine.9

6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Implicit in this division is the idea that women would be engraving the work of male artists. Georgiana and Edward Burne-Jones, who worked together to produce engraved drawings, modelled this ideal of female labour for a short time. John Ruskin wrote approvingly of the division of labour in this relationship, “I can’t imagine anything prettier or more wifely that cutting one’s husband’s drawing on the woodblock: there is just the proper quality of echo in it and you may put the spirit of and affection of fidelity into it which no other person could. Only never work too hard at it.” Quoted in Georgiana Burne-Jones, Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (London: Macmillan and Co, 1906), 1: 233. 9 Catherine Flood, “Contrary to the Habits of Their Sex? Women Drawing on Wood and the Careers of Florence and Adelaide Claxton,” in Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, eds. Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 110.

199 By the end of the nineteenth century, new printing technologies allowed pen and ink sketches on paper to be transferred onto printing blocks without the process of engraving. These advancements diluted the gendered division between the creative and imitative components of producing illustrations and made it easier for artists without specialised and technical training to submit illustrations to periodicals. Myra’s Journal recommended that these artists take additional classes in press drawing from a dedicated studio—such as Blackburn’s own on Victoria Street—and then approach magazines and newspapers as a journalist would, sending work to one paper after another until her work was accepted.10 The benefit of press drawing, they claimed, was that it was a relatively steady occupation once an artist’s name was established; “Once a footing has been obtained, a good and steady income may be made,” advised one journalist.11

Surprisingly little has been written on the work and professional experiences of women illustrators of this period, despite the fact that they made up a significant portion of the illustrative workforce. General studies of the illustrated book or Victorian publishing largely bypass their contributions or ignore their presence altogether, mentioning Kate Greenaway, and perhaps Helen Allingham, but few others. Geoffrey Wakeman’s Victorian Book Illustration focused primarily on the technological developments that occurred within the field of illustration between the beginning of the nineteenth century and the 1890s, illuminating little about the professional experiences and working conditions of the illustrators, be they male or female.12 The business side of illustration, and the material conditions that governed their production, are also sidelined in Frank Weitenkampf’s early study of The Illustrated Book, which concentrates on technological advancements and the differing techniques of etching, aquatint, lithography, and wood engraving. His chapter on children’s books is primarily interested in the development of colour printing, rather than the employment opportunities the emerging field offered to illustrators.13

10 “What to do with our Daughters,” Myra’s Journal, May 1, 1894, 23; “Employments for Gentlewomen: Art,” 40. 11 “Employments for Gentlewomen: Art,” 40. 12 Geoffrey Wakeman, Victorian Book Illustration (Newton Abbot : David & Charles, 1973). 13 Frank Weitenkampf, The Illustrated Book (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938).

200 Artists are more at the centre of Percy Muir’s Victorian Illustrated Books, where Kate Greenaway’s work is examined in relation to the emergence of colour printing. Although Muir begins his study of Greenaway with the disclaimer that “she was not, let it be admitted a great artist,” his text begins to explore the material conditions of her success and the influence of her popularity on the illustration business. However, no other women are discussed in detail and women’s visible presence within the illustration industry is marginalised.14 Morna Daniels, meanwhile, mentions briefly only two women in her Victorian Book Illustration and claims that Eleanor Vere Boyle was “the only noted woman illustrator of the 1860s,” ignoring the work of the Caxton sisters, Mary Ellen Edwards, Helen Allingham and more.15

More recently Catherine Flood has illuminated how women artists took advantage of the commercial opportunities offered by new forms of graphic media to cement their professional status in the latter half of the nineteenth century.16 Dawn and Peter Cope’s survey of early twentieth-century children’s book illustration highlights the professional activities of women artists in this field, but By a Woman’s Hand: Illustrators of the Golden Age remains one of the only texts to reveal and explore the breadth of women who participated in the commercial illustration industry in this period, offering short, biographical sketches of women illustrators and brief examples of their work.17

This chapter responds to this gap in the existing literature by examining women artists’ interactions with the mechanisms and infrastructure of commercial and press illustration to reveal the practical and economic conditions experienced by women working in the industry. It argues that illustration was the field of art in which women were the least constrained or held back by their gender; the commercial basis of the art form meant that it valued the more gender-neutral traits of expediency, accuracy, and reliability over artistic reputation which, as has been shown, was a notoriously subjective and variable concept when it came to women. Women benefited from the

14 Percy Muir, Victorian Illustrated Books (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1971). 15 Morna Daniels, Victorian Book Illustration (London: The British Library, 1988), 65. 16 Flood, “Contrary to the Habits of Their Sex?”, 107-122. 17 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery: The Illustrators of Children’s Books and Postcards, 1900-1950 (London: New Cavendish Books, 2000); Mary Carolyn Waldrep, By a Woman’s Hand: Illustrators of the Golden Age (New York: Dover Publications, 2010).

201 high demand for domestic, familial and nursery subjects, and many took advantage of women’s perceived affinity for sentimentality. Women’s dominance in this genre was not seen as threatening to the male artistic establishment, because it did little to disrupt male artists’ economic advantage.18 This aspect of women’s success in illustration can be seen as limiting, as it reinforced stereotypes about women’s artistic abilities that were potentially damaging to the gender as a whole.

In general, however, the newness of commercial and press illustration as industries meant that they were places where innovation and diversity could prosper, at least in comparison to fine art. Editors and publishers were willing to hire female illustrators, and the portability and convenience of the art form meant that it appealed to women trying to fit their professional practice into their domestic spaces and routines.19 As a relatively immediate and direct art form, illustration could be a precarious and unstable profession, but it also had the power to provide women with the exposure, legitimacy and economic stability they needed to operate as professional artists much more quickly than could usually be achieved through painting. It may have been more difficult for women to receive critical respect or institutional recognition through illustration, but the art form presented the best and swiftest route for women to achieve objective, market-derived validation of their work and economic viability— the two factors that were, I argue, the most significant to women’s professionalism in this era, both in terms of external perception and lived experience.

The rise of press and commercial illustration as a viable, and for many, necessary, career path for pictorial artists complicated and blurred the division between fine art and commercial art, and this affected the perceived professionalism of women illustrators.20 Underlying prejudices against illustration as a commercial art form persisted. Drawing for the press was not routinely taught in government schools of art, in part because drawing masters did not keep up to date with the new processes and technologies it involved. This meant that, from an educational standpoint,

18 Ellen Mazur Thomson, “Alms for Oblivion: The History of Women in Early American Graphic Design,” in Design History: An Anthology, ed. Dennis Doordan (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995), 83. 19 April F Masten, Art Work: Women Artists and Democracy in Mid Nineteenth-Century New York (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 188. 20 Pamela Gerrish Nunn, “The Mid Victorian Woman Artist, 1850-1879” (PhD thesis: University College London, 1982), 295.

202 painting continued to be positioned as the pinnacle of an artistic career, despite the fact that for many art students, “the only possible career…is that of illustration, or design.”21 As the nineteenth century drew to a close, and a greater number of respected and celebrated artists experimented in press and book illustration, its advocates pushed for illustrators to receive “recognition as original artists.”22 The potential for profitable work offered by print illustration encouraged both established artists and newcomers to produce art for newspapers and magazines, and to allow existing works to be reproduced for the purposes of illustrating serialised stories and articles, and this built the prestige associated with illustration while further blurring the lines between fine and commercial art.

The popularity of press and commercial illustration as a full-time career or secondary occupation also problematised popular conceptions of artistic professionalism. Michele Bogart asserts that illustrators experienced an unresolved professional identity because of the “clash of their socio-economic and artistic aspirations and the instabilities and setbacks of their actual careers.”23 While painters could engage with consumers and buyers through intermediaries such as art dealers and galleries—who, to some extent, regulated and controlled supply and demand in the market for painting—illustrators dealt with a “less organised market.”24 They were at the coalface of art commerce, dependent on their relationships with editors, publishers and authors for regular work. There was thus an onus on illustrators to produce work that was accessible and saleable, and that took into account the taste of the public—a fact that contributed to a backlash against illustration from within the artistic profession in the late nineteenth century. There was also tension between illustrators and painters over remuneration and earnings, as the success and popularity of illustrated serials and magazines furnished select illustrators with high incomes and public recognition. This success provoked indignation amongst some sections of the artistic community who criticised the overtly commercial nature of illustrative artwork. Illustrators were clearly not “disciples of the artistic muse” who lived and

21 Henry Blackburn, The Art of Illustration (London: WH Allen & Co, 1896), 216. 22 Ibid., 3. 23 Michele H Bogart, Artists, Advertising and the Borders of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 38. 24 Ibid.

203 painted for “their ideals alone.”25 Addressing the new generation of women illustrators working for American and European magazines by 1910, the New York Times noted that “commercialism with a big C has entered the lists of illustrative art as opposed to old fashioned and out of date idealism.”26

This criticism ignored the fact that most artists, including even “eminent painters” had an economic rationale to take up illustration, and had little control over the subject or style of their work.27 The overcrowded field of illustration was a buyer’s market, and the majority of artists only earned a modest income and had little job security.28 To demand high rates or contracts from publishers illustrators had to be “thoroughly experienced” and “considered safe” according to the editor of Art Journal. “You will not get much for your first effort, even if they show ability,” he warned young artists. “Better let the publishers have the pictures at their own price until you have become independently busy, then put up your prices.”29

Women were particularly vulnerable to criticism regarding artistic commercialism because of the nature of the commissions they tended to receive. As Simon Cooke points out, women illustrators were more likely to receive commissions for work that was sentimental or domestic in nature—and these constraints have led some critics to label women illustrators such as Mary Ellen Edwards and Helen Stratton as producers of trivial, unoriginal illustrative ephemera.30 Illustrators for magazines were expected to produce images that were recognisable and accessible, and to ground the accompanying prose or fiction in a domesticated, familiar reality. As women tended to be associated with domesticity and mainstream taste in popular culture, women illustrators have been particularly open to criticism regarding their talent, originality

25 “A Latter-day Industry and its Rewards: How a Group of Illustrators is Making Fortunes by Drawing Pictures of the ‘Modern Girl’,” New York Times, February 6, 1910, 9. 26 Ibid. 27 “The Business Side of Art,” Art Journal (August 1888): 251 28 H.W. Bromhead, “Some Contemporary Illustrators,” Art Journal (September 1898): 268-272. 29 Quoted in Bogart, Artists, Advertising and the Borders of Art, 40. 30 Simon Cooke, “Mary Ellen Edwards and the Illustration of the 1860s,” Work and Reputation, 2014, http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/edwardsme/cooke.html

204 and artistic credibility. These suspicions problematised their professional status, particularly when they entered the realm of commercial illustration.31

The aesthetic and critical value awarded to these art forms notwithstanding, the new printed materials that emerged in the late nineteenth century opened up a range of new artistic employments, which were eagerly sought after by women seeking to make a living through art. Illustration contributed significantly to the broader artistic and visual culture of late nineteenth and early twentieth century England, and the specialised, remunerated occupations it encompassed were central to many aspiring women professionals attempting to earn a living through artistic practice.

Press and Book Illustration

Most of the women artists represented on the pages of illustrated newspapers and magazines practiced illustration alongside other artistic and commercial pursuits; it was one means of making the money necessary to sustain an artistic career. The relationship between illustrative work and fine art in the careers of these women, and the professional impact of each pursuit, functioned differently for each artist, as the examples of Kate Greenaway and Helen Allingham (nee Paterson), two of the most well known female illustrators of the period, illustrates. Allingham began working as an engraver while a student at the RA schools in the 1860s and her skills led to commissions from well known illustrated journals, including Once a Week and Aunt Judy’s Magazine. She built a strong reputation as an illustrator for these publications, and, in 1870, was offered a position on staff at the Graphic, an influential weekly newspaper credited with revolutionising the way illustrations and artists were used in print.32 As well as contributing to the fashion pages, Paterson provided the illustrations for high profile literary serialisations such as Victor Hugo’s Ninety Three and Mrs Oliphant’s Innocent and illustrated Cornhill Magazine’s publication of

31 Mary Waldrep also makes the point that, “not surprisingly, women illustrators were most often assigned themes relating to home and children, sentimental tales, romances and fairy tales.” Waldrep, By a Woman’s Hand, vii. 32 Pamela Dalziel, “Illustration”, in Thomas Hardy in Context, ed. Philip Mallet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 66.

205 Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd.33 Allingham was one of the few women employed on staff at a major pictorial publication, and the work provided her with a steady income at a time when she was relying on art for her livelihood.

She gave up the post after her marriage to the author William Allingham in 1874, Helmreich suggests, because of the “societal prescriptions against the employment of married women,”34 but she continued to practice art professionally and her tenure in magazines established her reputation within the art world.35 She is an example of an artist who began in commercial art and progressed into the world of fine art—by the end of her career she was better known as a watercolour artist than a graphic artist.36 In this way her illustrative work did not restrict her artistic practice to a commercial art ghetto; like male artists such as John Millais and William Holman Hunt she benefitted professionally and economically from staking a claim in both worlds and moved between the two with relative ease.

For Kate Greenaway, the transition from illustration to fine art and back again was more complicated. Greenaway established her reputation as a commercial artist in the emerging greeting card business after she was introduced to William Hardcastle Ward, the London manager of the influential art-stationers Marcus Ward and Co, in the early 1870s.37 Greenaway offered Ward a sample of her work in the form of a Valentine’s card which, to Ward’s surprise, sold over 25 000 copies in the weeks following its publications. This success earned Greenaway £3 and the promise of a continuing working relationship with the company.38 The Belfast-based Marcus Ward and Co had won the respect of the art world in the late 1860s with their carefully designed, well-produced stationery and cards, which influenced the foundation of similar firms in the subsequent decades.39 Art Journal praised the company for

33 “Etchings from Pictures by Contemporary Artists: Mrs. Allingham,” The Portfolio (January 1878): 34. 34 Helmreich, “The Marketing of Helen Allingham: The English Cottage and National Identity,” 45. 35 “Etchings from Pictures by Contemporary Artists: Mrs. Allingham,” 34. 36 Nunn, “The Mid-Victorian Woman Artist”, 297. 37 “Notes on Art”, The Academy, August 23, 1884, 128. 38 Rodney Engen, Kate Greenaway: A Biography (London: Macdonald, 1981), 44. 39 Marcus Ward and Co originated as a partnership between John Ward, James Blow and Robert Greenfield in 1802 and developed into the firm known as Marcus Ward and company in the 1830s. It won a medal in colour lithography at the Great Exhibition in 1851 and began mass-producing cards, calendars and other printed stationery in the 1860s. It began publishing Christmas cards in 1867.

206 producing cards that were “excellent examples of art, well drawn and decorated with much taste.”40 It was Ward who encouraged Greenaway to include her watercolour portraits of children, which he had seen displayed at the Dudley Gallery in the late 1860s, into her illustrative work and it was this subject which, paired with sentimental verses, became the successful formula in the Ward/Greenaway collaboration.

Although some have portrayed the narrative of Greenaway’s career as one of overnight success, her years as a freelance illustrator were laborious and testing.41 Ward was a demanding employer who challenged his artists to produce work that conformed to his aesthetic standards and to the exacting requirements of the lithographer. Greenaway’s diaries suggest that she was singularly focused on her career and producing work that would win the praise of her commissioner. “Fatigue promises reward, perseverance gets the prize,” she recorded in her notebook.42 With the help and advice of her father John, a wood engraver, and her early patron editor William Loftie, Greenway also began providing illustrations for children’s books and periodicals, and her increasingly distinctive style was rewarded financially. She earned £124 from three commissions in 1874 and, as Marcus Ward began re-issuing her card designs in different formats and her reputation as a book and magazine illustrator grew, so too did her income.

Her relationship with Ward, however, was fundamentally exploitative. She was not consulted or remunerated when her designs were continually re-issued by the publisher and she was compelled to sever her relationship with the company in the late 1870s, although Ward continued to control the rights to illustrations that he already owned. Under the Window, the “breakthrough ” book that she both wrote and illustrated, was issued by a different publisher, Edmund Evans, with whom Greenaway was able to negotiate better terms, and the extraordinary critical and

40 “Marcus Ward’s Christmas Cards,” Art Journal (January 1874): 295. 41 Earnest Dudley Chase, for example, suggested that Greenaway “became famous overnight” after her first exhibition of drawings. The Romance of Greeting Cards: An Historical Account of the Origin, Evolution and Development of Christmas cards, Valentines, and Other Forms of Greeting Cards from the Earliest to the Present Time (Dedham, Massachusetts: Rust Craft, 1956), 17. 42 Quoted in Engen, Kate Greenaway, 45.

207 commercial success of this book freed Greenaway from the demands of exploitative editors and magazine deadlines.43

Figure 17 A Apple Pie by Kate Greenaway, published by W&J Mackay in 1886.

The widespread popularity of Greenaway’s work in the 1880s, which included self- authored books of verse, Christmas books, almanacs, and illustrations for other authors, led to the development of a veritable Greenaway industry, with fabrics, wallpaper, dolls and clothing items manufactured in a style inspired by Greenaway’s idealised pastoral aesthetic.44 As her obituary in the Graphic pointed out, Greenaway unconsciously birthed her own stylistic school with a singular design style and subject focus.45 The spread of the Greenaway look was stimulated by the actions of her editors and copyright holders, whose publishing programs took full advantage of Greenaway’s popularity. The spate of gift books and special editions issued by various publishers in the winter of 1884 alone included 40 000 copies of Painting

43 Ibid. 44 Waldrep, By a Woman’s Hand, 1-2. 45 Anne Lundin, Victorian Horizons: The Receptions of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway (London: The Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press), 2001), 203.

208 Book, a collection of her early card designs, the almanac The Language of Flowers, and The English Spelling Book.46 Financially Greenaway was appreciative of her popularity, which allowed her to support her family and build a new, purpose designed studio home, but the crowd of imitators who made up the “Greenaway School” also troubled her. They flooded the market with iterations of her style, weakening demand for the original product. Greenaway considered giving up book illustration, which she now largely viewed as an economic vehicle; “I don’t want to do any books for other people—I’d rather do other things,” she wrote to her editor. While her books remained popular in the United States, over-saturation of the market contributed to the fashion for Greenaway’s illustrations fading in the late 1880s and 1890s.47

Greenaway’s friendship with Helen Allingham, begun when the two were students and rekindled in the late 1880s, inspired her to shift focus away from commercial illustration and re-engage with her gallery career. She sold her drawing Bubbles to the soap manufacturer Pears to help fund her new artistic approach, and organised a solo exhibition at the Fine Art Society in 1891, which showed new water colour landscapes. Although the exhibition brought in £1350 in sales—a high figure compared to similar exhibitions held by other female artists—the £964 that Greenaway received was far less than the what she earned from her more successful books, and examples of her early illustrative work were much more popular with buyers than her landscape painting.48 The critical and commercial response to her next solo exhibition in 1894 was similarly disappointing; it raised only £1067, of which Greenaway received £799, and critics continued to focus on the examples of her early work rather than acknowledge her new direction. Those who did engage with the newer paintings noted their derivate aspects and the influence of Allingham on her landscapes and figure studies.49

46 Engen, Kate Greenaway: A Biography, 116. 47 Imitation of her style “did her reputation harm” according to Mrs Edmund Evans, the wife of Greenaway’s long time editor. Some of them “out Kate-Greenawayed Kate Greenaway in their caricatures, and many people did not know one from the other.” Quoted in M.H Spielmann and G.S Layard, Kate Greenaway, (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905), 59. 48 Engen, Kate Greenaway, 171. 49 Magazine of Art, for example, commented “she is less happy when she gives her small people a landscape setting after the fashion of Mrs Allingham.” “Art in February,” (January 1894), 19. The

209

At her FAS exhibition in 1898 it was again the old pictures of “dressed up babies” that sold well; “I felt so depressed about it,” Greenaway noted to Violet Dickinson.50 Greenaway supported herself financially through the later years of her life by selling her personal archive of original illustrative art at these exhibitions, and by attempting portrait commissions, but the subdued response to her more naturalistic watercolour paintings left her despondent.51 “It is rather unhappy to feel that you have had your day,” she wrote to a friend. “Yet if I had just enough money to live on I could be so very happy, painting just what I liked and not thought of profit…it’s rather difficult to make enough money in a few years to last for your life. Yet now every one is so tired of things—that is what it comes to.”52 Greenway’s trajectory demonstrates both the advantages and the limitations of book illustration, and the dangers of relying too heavily on one style of illustration and reading market. In Greenaway’s case, the popularity of her distinctive aesthetic encouraged publishers, critics and consumers to pigeonhole her creative abilities. She was so defined by the success of her illustrative work that her attempts to practice other types of art were stymied, and this produced both financial and creative frustrations throughout her career. Unlike Helen Allingham and other, male artist/illustrators Greenaway’s success in the field of illustration limited rather than expanded her professional opportunities. While they may not have achieved Greenaway’s lasting fame, it was women who had diverse and adaptable styles of drawing who were more likely to achieve stability and longevity within the illustration profession.

The explosion of the youth and adolescent reading market in the second half of the nineteenth century, which Greenaway pioneered, was a boon for women illustrators. The revolution in illustrated periodical publishing affected child readers as much as

Sunday Times noted that the work Ned Walker, Stacey Marks and Allingham had all been “drawn upon.” “Art and Artists”, January 29, 1894, 8. 50 Letter to Violet Dickinson, February 22, 1898. Quoted in Spielmann and Layard, Kate Greenaway, 226. 51 Spielmann and Layard, Kate Greenaway, 237. Greenaway wrote to Lady Dorothy on December 28 1900, “I can’t say the public rush to buy my work now – I don’t believe they will sell one at the Fine Art. It seems to me I shall have to keep to my idea of doing portraits if I wish to make money.” Kate Greenaway Papers, de Grummond Collection, The University of Southern Mississippi REF: 8/51. http://www.lib.usm.edu/legacy/degrum/public_html/html/research/findaids/greenaway.htm 52 Letter to Lady Maria Ponosby, April 22, 1897, quoted in Spielmann and Layard, Kate Greenaway, 212.

210 adult ones; by 1900 more than 160 children’s magazines were published in England.53 Illustrated books aimed at the juvenile market, meanwhile, brought more “grist to the mill” of booksellers and publishers than practically any other genre.54 New books appeared on the market constantly throughout the year and, during the Christmas season, they “poured forth in bewildering profusion,” according to one contemporary critic.55 Claudia Nelson explains that it was the “stimulus of newly inexpensive and effective colour printing techniques and the new right of illustrators to copyright their work” that contributed to the profusion of both cheap and ornately produced children’s books aimed at the middle-class reading market.56 The influence of Kate Greenaway and the success of her Under the Window can also not be underestimated. In the year following the release of that book, Belgravia noted the publication of fifty “Fine Art Gift Books” aimed at younger readers, all emulating the style of Greenaway’s text.57 The popularity and prevalence of these books meant that book and art critics took them seriously; columns dedicated to reviewing new juvenile literature were found in literary journals and in periodicals such as Art Journal. 58

Although the juvenile book market provided employment opportunities to both male and female artists, the subject matter and styles that characterised the genre lent themselves to women and their perceived “feminine” artistic sensibilities, particularly when it came to books aimed at “nursery” readers and young girls. 59 Women artists did not dominate the field, but they made up a highly visible presence within it, and

53 Diana Dixon, “From Instruction to Amusement: Attitudes of Authority in Children's Periodicals before 1914,” Victorian Periodicals Review 19, (1986): 63-7. 54 “Behind a Booksellers’ Counter,” The Bookman 1, no. 3 (1891): 105. 55 “Juvenile Books,” The British Quarterly Review, 53, no 105 (1871): 290. 56 Claudia Nelson, “Growing Up: Childhood,” in A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F Tucker (London: Blackwell Publishing, 1999). For more on the expansion of the juvenile reading market in the 19th century see Martyn Lyons, “New Readers in the Nineteenth Century: Women, Children, Workers,” in A History of Reading in the West, eds. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 325-331. 57 A.A. Strange-Butson, “Art in the Nursery,” Belgravia 49, 194 (1882): 223. 58 See for example “Christmas Cards and Children’s Books,” Art Journal (December 1896): 380. 59 Girls’ Realm articulated the widespread view that women were naturally suited to children’s illustration. “There must be some inherent quality in women which makes them so peculiarly happy and successful in that little corner of art which covers the picturing of toy and children’s books. It is, I wonder, some fairy mixture of imagination and motherliness, touched with the dexterity of the artist, that helps them not only to realise but also to depict those things that most readily appeal to the heart of the child?” (London: SH Bousfield and Co, 1903). The American illustrator and art teacher Howard Pyle, whose many female students Jessie Willcox Smith and Violet Oakley claimed “Girls are, after all, at best, only qualified for sentimental work.” Pyle, “Why Art and Marriage Won’t Mix,” The North American, June 9, 1904.

211 their participation and success within the genre allowed some to achieve widespread professional and popular renown. As Dawn and Peter Cope explain, however, the professional experiences of women book illustrators remain predominantly “clouded in mystery” due to lack of scholarly recognition and research into their work and a paucity of relevant source material pertaining to their commercial activities.60 This lack of information and acknowledgement belies the fact that illustrators were major drawcards in the juvenile book market, as was also the case for some adult periodicals, and were a “purchase point” for middlebrow and highbrow consumers alike.61

Children’s books and youth orientated almanacs and Christmas books were largely sold on the strength of their pictures, and this allowed illustrators to cultivate much larger public profiles and consumer bases than they would as fine artists. Mary Ellen Edwards’ name was used to advertise upcoming serialised stories in place of the name of the author; in one case neither the author’s name nor the title of the story were mentioned, as Edwards’s illustrations were positioned as the primary attraction.62 Hilda Cowham, Mrs Seymour Lucas (Marie Cornelissen) and Mabel Lucie Attwell all had high enough profiles to sell serialised children’s stories, gift books and almanacs on the strength of their names alone. Like Greenaway, these artists cultivated distinctive styles focusing on the characterisation of children, which set their work apart from the multitude of imitative illustrative work aimed at the youth market, and this made them valuable commodities for publishers.63 Attwell and Cowham parlayed their popular, unique aesthetics into ongoing relationships with the publishing houses Raphel Tuck, Blackie, and Cassell.64 Their involvement in these publishers’ gift books

60 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 8. 61 Emily Jenkins, “Trilby: Fads, Photographers and “Over Perfect Feet,” Book History 1, no.1 (1998): 223. 62 “Notice”, The Argosy (November 1879): 322. 63 Cowham’s pictures of children “had distinct individuality”, noted the Birmingham Daily Post, March 8, 1900, np. The Athenaeum commented that she “has the merit of a style of her own in portraying children.” “Books Review,” December 9, 1911, 731. “She is perhaps the only lady artist in her particular line of work who combines artistic ability with a dainty sense of real humour,” claimed Edith Young. Girls’ Realm Annual (London: Bousefield ,1902). Magazine of Art noted that Lucas’s pictures of “little folks” were drawn “more sympathetically” and with “greater refinement” than any other artist. Helen Postlethewaite, “Some Noted Women Painters” (January 1896): 19. See also Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 186. 64 Cowham also wrote and illustrated her own books, as was a popular path for children’s book illustrators. Sara Gray, The Dictionary of Women Artists (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2009), 82.

212 also contributed significantly to their professional profile and status since, as Lorraine Janzen Kooistra demonstrates, artists were considered to be more important contributors to gift books than the authors, poets and engravers who were also involved, and were well paid for their designs.65

In contrast, some publishers, particularly those who specialised in cheap editions of children’ stories, did little to publicise the work of the artist. Some publishers did not allow their artists to sign their own work, and this lack of accurate attribution has contributed to the difficulty scholars experience tracing the career trajectories of women in this field.66 Others women never achieved the degree of success and fame that allowed artists like Attwell and Greenaway to sell work on the strength of their name alone, but were employed in-house by publishers to produce consistent, attractive illustrations for a broad range of publications. Millicent Sowerby, for example, received a £150 retaining fee in 1915 from the publisher Henry Frowde, for whom she produced numerous illustrations from 1910 onwards.67 Most children’s book illustrators also pursued other forms of illustration, and continued to exhibit oil or watercolour paintings to maintain their visibility within the fine art world, although the popularity of children’s books, magazines and gift books did allow some to focus solely on this market, developing their aesthetic into a recognised, marketable and highly profitable illustrative brand.

As women illustrators were vulnerable to generalised classification and categorisation on account of their gender, many benefited more from lower profile illustrative commissions and in-house retainers than they did from the highly visible and popular work of the kind Greenaway produced, particularly when it came to securing a broad range of work and transcending genre limitations. Artists such as Fannie Moody and Gertrude Demain-Hammond cultivated sustained careers as illustrator/artists by working across a variety of genres and varying their styles and subject matter to fit individual commissions. Moody and Demand-Hammond produced illustrated stories and special editions for the Graphic and the Detroit Free Press amongst others and

65 Lorraine Janzon Kooistra, Poetry, Pictures and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011), 21. 66 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 25. 67 Ibid., 229.

213 worked for book publishers alongside exhibiting at mainstream art societies in London.68 Demain-Hammond’s primary source of income was illustrating books for girls, commissioned by publishers such as by Blackie and Macmillan, but she was also a respected water-colourist and was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colour in 1896.69 In 1891 she noted having “so much on order,” that her eyes gave out; “I do not make a large fortune,” she explained, “but I earn quite as much as I want, and I always have more work than I can execute.”70 Here, Demain-Hammond models the type of professional stability that moderate success in illustration could generate. Publishing different types of work in multiple publications provided continuous and public validation of her credibility and ongoing exposure, two factors that “all professional artists needed.”71 Her willingness to engage in the business side of illustration by forging relationships with editors and publishers, along with the reliability and consistency she demonstrated in balancing various freelance commissions, vouched for her seriousness and dedication to the craft.

Mary Ellen Edwards was another artist who modelled this strategy throughout her career, as she pursued work from multiple sources and altered her style to fit the aesthetic demands of clients. In the 1860s and 1870s she worked on staff at the Graphic while also contributing to the Illustrated London News, the Argosy and Belgravia. Her work for these magazines reflected the style of “poetic naturalism” that characterised illustrative art in the 1860s, and it was her ability to work in this style, and produce illustrations directly onto wood blocks, that helped secure her standing as an in-demand illustrator at some of England’s most influential magazines.72 She illustrated serialised novels for Anthony Trollope and Charles Lever and collaborated with well-regarded male illustrators such as William Holman Hunt and Walter Crane. After her marriage to the children’s book illustrator John Charles Staples in the early 1870s, Edwards adapted her style and approach to allow the couple to collaborate on projects, and became known as “one of the pioneers in the

68 “Interview: Miss Fannie Moody,” The Woman’s Herald, June 6, 1891, 515; Interview: Miss Gertrude Demain-Hammond,” The Woman’s Herald, January 10, 1891, 177. 69 “Notes on Current Events,” British Architect, June 5, 1896, 395. 70 “Interview: Miss Gertrude Demain-Hammond”, 177. 71 Masten, Art Work, 165 72 Cooke, “Mary Ellen Edwards and the Illustration of the 1860s.”

214 production of colour printed books for children.”73 They illustrated numerous stories for the author and poet Fred E. Weatherley and Edwards produced illustrations for youth focused magazines such as The Girl’s Own Paper and Little Folks, and for novels targeted at the rapidly growing market for adolescent girls.

Although she also continued to illustrate novels for adults, including those by the travel writer Matilda Charlotte Houston and the suffragette Isabelle Fyvie Mayo, the homely, sentimental work Edwards’ produced, at the behest of editors and publishers, for children and adolescents has come to define her legacy. In his Illustrators of the 1860s Forrest Reid ignores Edwards’s versatility and varied artistic oeuvre, which included more than 3000 illustrations, and instead focuses solely on her most conventional output.74 Edwards “would occupy a higher position among our illustrators had she not repeated herself so monotonously,” he notes, overlooking the changes and adaptations that occurred in her work throughout her career.75

Reid’s assessment reflects the challenge illustrators faced balancing the often contradictory pull of “market forces and aesthetic goals.”76 Illustrators were largely aware that the work editors and publishers commissioned was often derivative or repetitive, but most had little choice but to accept well-remunerated work when it was available; they recognised the importance of producing popular and familiar styles. It was Edwards’s very reliability, and ability to produce illustrations that fit within the parameters of a particular project, that made her work saleable to editors. Illustrators were “expected to make a decent drawing of any subject given” and to respond to “the ideas and requirements of the editor or publisher,” and in this sense Edwards was the ideal illustrative artist.77 As Dawn and Peter Cope assert in relation to the artist Anne Anderson, illustrators who achieved long-term success had the ability to precisely identify the market to which their work was targeted to and produce work that fulfilled the demands of that niche.78 It is in this context that the American illustrator Mary Hallock, who decried the necessity of producing “stupid commonplace

73 Helene Postlethwaite, “More Noted Women Painters,” The Magazine of Art, (January 1898): 484. 74 Ibid. 75 Forrest Reid, Illustrators of the 1860s (New York: Dover, [1928] 1975), 261. 76 Masten, Art Work, 179. 77 H.W. Bromhead, “Some Contemporary Illustrators Art,” Journal (September 1912): 268. 78 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 74.

215 ‘popular’ subjects” instead of her own original work, compared herself to a mercenary.79 The willingness to adapt and conform to the artistic vision of others, however, is easily misinterpreted as conventionality and repetitiveness and this partially accounts for why the professional activities of artists like Edwards and Demain-Hammond are not more widely recognised.

In cultivating multiple sources and markets for her work and diversifying her style, Edwards modelled the strategy employed by many women illustrators to secure a consistent income. This approach was economically necessary for most, and beneficial in terms of demonstrating artistic versatility, but it was also demanding of artists, who had to acquire and then manage contracts, orders and deadlines from multiple editors and publishers. The business correspondence of Helen McKie, one of the most prolific graphic illustrators of the 1910s, indicates the extensive behind the scenes negotiation and administration involved in sustaining a freelance career. She was offered advertising work from the stationery company J.M Kronheim after her work was displayed at the South Kensington School’s National Exhibition and, throughout the next decade, gained commissions from referrals, recommendations and word of mouth. The tight timeframes and limited instructions she received reflect the difficult working conditions press and commercial illustrators dealt with.

A letter from Forget Me Not magazine from November 1912 asks for the illustrations for a short story to be provided within six working days, stipulating only that they include “a nice pretty heroine, please.”80 McKie was paid between five and eight guineas for individual commissions from Queen, The Autocar and Bystander in the mid 1910s.81 In 1915 she was employed on staff at the Graphic and Bystander, but found the terms of her contracts limiting at a time when her work was in high demand from other publishers. She complained to the Graphic’s editor: I do not think that the conditions are fair to me having regard to the amount of work which I do for you. Particularly so far as the Graphic is concerned it

79 Quoted in Darlis A. Miller, Mary Hallock Foote: Author-illustrator of the American West (Norman: Unniversity of Oklahoma Press, 2002), 22. 80 Letter from editor of Forget me Not to Helen McKie, November 12, 1912. Helen McKie Papers, Victoria and Albert Archive of Art and Design, Reference number: AAD/2005/5/4. 81 Letter from Iliffe and Sons to Helen McKie, December 13, 1919; Letter from Bystander to McKie, January 8, 1917; letter from Field and Queen Publishers, September 14, 1915. Helen McKie Papers.

216 cannot be said that you keep me fully employed…I have had some very good offers with regard to colour work since my exhibition and as you know I have had in the past to refuse these because of my agreement with you, although your company takes practically none of my colour work.82

As McKie’s business correspondence indicates, illustration work was abundant in the early twentieth century but, as contractors and freelancers, women artists had to build good relationships with publishers and editors, and be willing to negotiate the terms of their employment to ensure they could gain enough work to earn a sufficient income. Press illustration in particular often involved strict deadlines and required artists to fulfil the creative vision of an editor or author with little precise guidance. In the late 1870s, Ellen Clayton noted that newspaper illustration involved “a very unpleasant amount of hurry, bother, downright drudgery, and ‘night work’”.83 By the 1910s, working conditions had intensified. “Things are moving so fast that the conditions under which the great illustrators of the last generation, like Millais and Fred Walker worked, have largely passed away,” noted Art Journal in 1912. “The profession has become overcrowded, and the pressure daily becomes greater.”84 As competition within the field grew, Arthur Rackham warned that young artists should not pursue illustration as a profession unless they were also furnished with an independent income or a secondary means of earning of a living, like teaching.85 Specialised training in illustration was increasingly expected of artists required to produce realistic, dynamic and attractive drawings on demand, but most mainstream art schools remained uninterested in teaching illustrative forms of art into the first decades of the twentieth century.

Founder of the Press Art School Percy Bradshaw noted that student artists graduated knowing only how to paint “Italians peasants, Greek Maidens and other stock models of the life class,” despite the fact that editors wanted artists who could draw “up-to- date everyday people” such as “policeman and Pullman cars, pretty girls and smart men.” Art schools disapproved of such commonplace subjects and “were emphatically not concerned with finding a market for their students’ work,” he

82 Draft of letter to Mr Will of the Graphic, Helen Mckie Papers. 83 Ellen C. Clayton, English Female Artists (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876), 2:45. 84 Bromhead, “Some Contemporary Illustrators”, 268. 85 Arthur Rackham gave this advice in a letter to an aspiring artist in 1909, quoted in Derek Hudson, Arthur Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1960), 36.

217 noted.86 Mabel Lucie Attwell’s experiences bore out this claim; she found the training in classical drawing supplied by Heatherley’s Art School and St Martin’s School of Art desultory and largely irrelevant to her future carer, as she was already receiving consistent work from publishers.87 Attwell left school willingly after she was commissioned by W&R Chambers to illustrate a series of children’s books by well known-authors, including Mrs Molesworth.88 Despite the limited training opportunities and overstocked market, press and commercial illustration were still regarded as more attainable and realistic careers for artists than painting, a pursuit that Bradshaw regarded as “hopeless” for those without private means of income.89

In order to acquire the myriad contracts and commissions that illustrators like McKie relied upon to make a living, newcomers had to act as their own publicists, and hawk their portfolios to as many editors and publishers as they could access. Myra’s Journal informed young women that perseverance, push and industry were just as important to an illustrator’s success as talent. “She must…send her work from one paper to another till she gets something accepted,” they instructed.90 To first gain the attention of editors, illustrators “trudged the concentration of streets around Covent Garden,”91 where book publishers’ offices were located. Mabel Lucie Attwell claimed that she would never forget the trembling fear she felt on her first visit to a publisher’s office, or the joy of receiving a guinea on her way out in return for her illustration.92 These firms were so inundated with aspiring artists that they hired special doormen to deal with their inquiries. The writer and critic Frank Swynnerton fulfilled this role while working as a clerk at J.A. Dent and Co in the early 1900s, and he remembered particularly “the lady art students in long cloaks and eccentric witch-like hats who brought so many hopeless children’s books for consideration.”93 His comments

86 Percy Bradshaw, Drawn from Memory (London: Chapman and Hall, 1943), 40. 87 Attwell sold her first drawing to a magazine at the age of 14 for two guineas. “Soon after that I was doing quite a lot of work for publishers,” she noted. “Not important, but it was enough to live on and pay my fees at the art school where I studied for five hard years…practically from the time I left school I’ve been able to earn my bread and butter as an artist.” Quoted in Chris Beetles, Mabel Lucie Attwell – An appreciation (London: Pavilion Books, 1988), 11. 88 Ibid. 89 Bradshaw quoted in Michael Felmingham, The Illustrated Gift Book 1890-1930 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988), 23. 90 “What to do with our Daughters”, 43. 91 Felmingham, The Illustrated Gift Book, 26. 92 Attwell quoted in Beetles, Mabel Lucie Attwell, 10. 93 Quoted in Felmingham, The Illustrated Gift Book, 26

218 suggest that the popularity of children’s literature, and the expectations on women to pursue this genre, led to an over supply of illustrators in the field, who were invariably grouped together on account of their gender.

Women were more likely to find their start in magazines or newspapers, where the demand and turnover of illustrated material was much higher than in book publishing. Once established in that field women could receive up to £10 a page from leading papers for their illustrations, although less famed publications with smaller circulations paid substantially less. Just as working with well-respected art dealers could advance the prospects of painters, illustrators benefited from the support and championing of other illustrators, editors and publishers won over by their work. Alice Bolingbroke Woodward began her career creating scientific drawings for her father, the Keeper of Geology at the British Museum, and credits the support of the influential illustrator and critic Joseph Pennell with separating her work from the multitude of aspiring illustrators. Pennell “blew my trumpet for me with the result that Macmillan and Dent gave me a book and I got some work on the Daily Chronicle which was just starting illustrations,” Woodward recalled. “I was frightfully proud.”94 From these beginnings Woodward pursued a long career in illustration, splitting her attention between book illustration, where she enjoyed long relationships with publishers Blackie and George Bell and Sons, and scientific illustration. Other artists were aided by family members or friends who were also in the illustration business; Evelyn Stuart Hardy’s uncle, the animal painter Heywood Hardy, helped find Evelyn work in-house at the Sporting and Dramatic and the Gentlewoman, while the illustrator Edward Johnson helped establish his niece Mary Ellen Edwards in London’s art scene.95

Compounding the challenges that were facing illustrators attempting to build a multi- faceted artistic career was the fact that illustrative art continued to be viewed by many

94 Quoted in Bertha E. Mahoney, Louise Payson Latimer and Beulah Folmsbee, eds. Illustrators of Children’s Books 1744-1945 (Boston: The Horn Book Inc, 1941), 374-375. 95 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 138. Cooke, “Mary Ellen Edwards and the Illustration of the 1860s”.

219 as a second rate pursuit, resorted to only out of economic necessity.96 Christiana (Chris) Demain-Hammond, Gertrude’s sister, was named as one of the top three illustrators working in England in the 1890s, but in his appreciation of the artist Alfred Forman positioned illustration as inferior to painting: [She] was amply endowed with all the specific qualities necessary for the attainment of eminence as a painter either in water-colours or in oils; but circumstances determined that she was to devote her talents more particularly to the pen and ink illustration books and of stories appearing in weekly journals or in monthly magazines.97

Although Chris Demain-Hammond was a prize student at the Lambeth School of Art, and had a distinguished tenure at the Royal Academy schools, she experienced what Meaghan Clarke claims was a common hesitation amongst women artists—doubt in their own ability to create profitable art at the “highest” level. Demain-Hammond, “had misgivings as to her ability as an oil painter to achieve with sufficient rapidity a reputation that would justify her in having adopted art as a means of livelihood,” Foreman reported. “She felt clear intimations from within that in “black and white” she might hope more speedily to attain such results as were rendered necessary by her condition of dependence on her own resources.”98 According to Forman, Chris Demain-Hammond’s decision to pursue illustrative work rather than fine art was motivated by her need to rapidly establish a profitable and reliable career, and by feelings of inadequacy in the field of oil painting, despite her extensive and distinguished training. In Demain-Hammond’s case this decision yielded positive results; she experienced solid and continuous success as an illustrator of magazines and books, and her work was in demand from papers including Illustrated London News and Sketch along with publishers Macmillan, Cassell and George Allens. Illustration and advertising work allowed Demain-Hammond to support herself economically and adopt the trappings of an artistic lifestyle—she maintained a studio in Hammersmith, joined artistic societies and moved in cultured social circles. However Hammond herself admitted that the work was not as artistically fulfilling or prestigious as fine art. “If I had not required to earn money at once, I should have

96 The Examiner noted that although “Press illustration has done much that is good for the welfare of art,” it suffered from a “total want of recognition.” “The Pictorial Press and the Painters,” August 10, 1878, 1007. 97 Alfred Forman, “Chris Hammond: In Memoriam,” The Argosy (July 1900): 343. 98 Ibid., 348.

220 preferred to paint pictures,” she explained, outlining what was undoubtedly a common experience. “Perhaps I may be able to fulfil my early ambition some day—who knows?”99

Although more and more artists were blurring the divisions between fine art and illustrative art in the late nineteenth century, there continued to be an uneasy relationship between illustration and the art world in general.100 The mercantile nature of illustrative art was obvious, and this lessoned the creative and artistic merit of the work in the eyes of some.101 To be commercially orientated was, to certain critics, a sign of being “un-artistic”, a producer of wares rather than a serious creator of art.102 However, as the case of Chris Demain-Hammond demonstrates, the decision to primarily pursue illustrative art instead of fine art was often a matter of circumstances rather than choice. It is impossible to generalise about women’s personal reaction to or enjoyment of the profession when so little first hand material is available, and the impact of illustrative pursuits on the critical and commercial success of women’s fine art practice was dependent on the individual circumstances and style of the artist. What is clear, however, is that press and book illustration was a legitimate, if not prestigious, artistic pursuit that offered many women artists the remunerative opportunities needed to sustain a career within the art industries. And somewhat paradoxically, it was precisely the commercial nature of illustration that made the art form so significant to women artists’ professionalism.

While any artist, amateur or professional, could paint a picture in oils or water colour and submit it for consideration at the Royal Academy summer exhibition, working on-staff at a magazine or receiving commissions from a book publisher were indisputably professional activities, because they represented an artist’s ability and

99 Demain-Hammond quoted in Margaret Bateson, Professional Women Upon their Professions: Conversations (London: Horace Cox, 1895), 22. 100 Pat Donlon, “Drawing a Fine Line: Irish Women Artists as Illustrators,” Irish Arts Review 1 (2012): 81. 101 It seems widely accepted that periodical illustration was undertaken out of economic necessity in the case of both men and women. George du Maurier was a trained painter but undertook a career in illustration as a means to support himself and his family in a way that was both artistic and respectable. He described the occupation as “not the highest unfortunately, but a paying one I suppose.” The Young George du Maurier: A Selection of his Letters, 1860-67, ed. Daphne du Maurier (London: Peter Davies, 1851), 264. 102 Fletcher, “Consuming Modern Art,” 159

221 willingness to sell. Selling, and the objective validation that it represented, was essential to women’s ability to practice and be perceived as a professional artists—as important, April Masten confirms, as their ability to create art in the first place.103 Publishing illustrations was an endorsement of women’s technical skills, their knowledge of aesthetic trends and styles, their reliability and consistency as workers and their business acumen.

Women who achieved success as illustrators were rewarded with the benefits of professional status: occupational and economic stability, the respect of their industry peers, and authority within their field. It is thus unsurprising that while some took up illustration purely as a means of supporting or supplementing their fine art practice, others considered success in book or magazine illustration their primary professional objective. Honor Appleton, for example, studied sculpture and painting at the South Kensington schools and the RA Schools with the sole view of becoming an illustrator, inspired by the work of other women in the field such as Annie French, Hilda Cowham, Kate Greenaway and Mabel Attwell.104 The artists who were most successful in negotiating the traditionally masculine sphere of publishing were those who were willing to adapt and diversify their style and methods to appeal to different editors, consumers and reading markets. And while some continued to be pre-judged and categorised in accordance with their gender, these restrictions were less problematic for those who took advantage of their “natural” artistic affinities to excel in the abundant children’s book and female-orientated illustration work that was available.

Cards, Valentines and Printed Ephemera

The contentious relationship between illustration and the broader art community was particularly relevant to artists who made their living through the “purely commercial

103 Masten, Art Work, 205. 104 104 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 82. Appleton went on to illustrate over 150 books throughout her career. She took a “very businesslike” approach to being an illustrator and spent hours studying children’s movements to achieve her naturalistic style. Alan Horne, “Honor Charlotte Appleton (1871-1951), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/view/article/69285.

222 side of art” producing the “artistic” printed ephemera present in every day life.105 The popularisation of new printed materials such as greeting cards and posters offered women the opportunity to pursue artistic occupations without having to engage personally with the pressures and constraints of the over-stocked art market nor having to negotiate with the infrastructure of editors and publishers that surrounded press illustration. Employment as a designer at an “art publisher” specialising in stationery and greeting cards provided women with the rare opportunity of earning stable income while having their artwork widely printed and dispersed.

Henrietta Rae criticised women artists who created Christmas card illustrations instead of “really important” pictures for lacking in ambition and seriousness, suggesting that women’s pursuit of these occupations damaged the collective reputation and standing of women artists.106 Rae’s views are reflected in the lack of research and scholarship dedicated to the artists involved in this industry, which belies the commercial interest in these printed materials that existed during the period of their production. Christmas and greeting card illustration was viewed as a legitimate and, significantly, attainable artistic pursuit for the multitude of women seeking remunerative employment through art, and the development of the industry both reflected and contributed to popular trends in nineteenth century visual culture. In terms of their professional contribution to, and impact on, popular culture, commercial press illustrators had an influence that was beyond what most gallery- focused painters could achieve.

The first artist-designed Christmas card was created by John Horsley RA in 1846 for the personal use of his friend Henry Cole, who wanted a “ready to mail” card to replace the customary but time-consuming practice of writing Christmas letters.107 Cole sold about 1000 extra copies of this card through the publisher Joseph Cundall for a shilling a piece, and the tradition of sending and receiving Christmas cards

105 “Employments for Gentlewomen: Art”, 40. 106 “Lady R.A’s: Henrietta Rae,” The Pall Mall Gazette, August 16, 1888, n.p. 107 “Christmas Cards,” The Times, December 25, 1883, 5; J.C. Horsley, “Christmas Cards,” The Times, December 28, 1883, 4; “World’s Oldest Mass Produced Christmas Card,” Southern Methodist University, 2009, http://www.smu.edu/News/NewsIssues/oldestchristmascard.

223 slowly grew in popularity through the middle decades of the nineteenth century.108 The numbers of cards circulating each year reached its apogee in the 1880s, resulting in a new demand for original, artistic designs that responded to popular taste and were suited to mass reproduction.109 In the early stages of their development Christmas cards were “simple and inexpensive trifles” of little artistic import, as publishers’ experienced difficulty persuading well-known and able artists to contribute designs. By the 1880s, however, there was a growing market for more tasteful and artistically minded cards; “popular requirements nowadays insist that the Christmas card shall possess something of art in its design,” reported The Times, “and with this demand manufacturers have of course to comply.”110

Stationery publisher Raphael Tuck and Sons cemented the relationship between Christmas cards and the art world in 1880 when it instigated the first artistic competition for Christmas card illustration. Competing entries were displayed in a widely reviewed exhibition at the Dudley Gallery and 500 guineas of prize money was distributed to the winners, who included Alice Square, Harriet M. Bennett and Kate Sadler.111 Judged against conventional pictures, some of the designs took “a very respectable position,” claimed Magazine of Art, who also noted that the competition was a particular boon to “lady artists,” of whose designs “a large proportion” were bought by the company.112 Stationers continued to find illustrators through sponsored and magazine-run competitions throughout the 1880s and 1890s, and artists also found freelance work by calling on the offices of stationery companies personally. Ethel Parkinson for example, entered into a sustained relationship with the stationers C.W Faulkner by visiting the firm’s offices with her portfolio and asking to see Charles Faulkner directly. Faulkner responded well to Parkinson’s business-like approach to illustration, and Parkinson produced more than 300 cards and postcards for the company over a period of twenty years.113 Other illustrators were represented

108 “Early Christmas Cards,” Bow Bells, 32, no. 414 (1895): 573. 109 An estimated four and a half million cards were sent in the seven days prior to Christmas in 1877. Michelle Higgs, Christmas Cards (Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications, 1999), 9. 110 “Christmas Cards”, 5. 111 Charles H. Lewins, “The Home of the Christmas Card: An Interview with Mr Adolph Tuck,” The Ludgate (December 1900): 174. The competition was judged by Sir Coutts Lindsay, Marcus Stone, G.H Boughton and Solomon J. Solomon. 112 “The Exhibition of Christmas Cards at the Dudley Gallery,” Magazine of Art (January 1881): 74-76. 113 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 188.

224 by art agents, who negotiated commissions from stationers, publishing companies and advertising firms, although it is difficult to determine how many female artists found work in this way. When Mabel Lucie Attwell approached the agents Francis and Mills, who represented many of the artists involved in the prestigious, all-male London Sketch Club, she was told that the firm was “not interested in the work of young ladies,” although they made exception for Attwell based on her exceptional saleability.114

The popularity of Christmas cards in the last three decades of the nineteenth century created “quite a new trade” of artistic industry, opening up opportunities for “artists, lithographers, engravers, printers and ink and pasteboard makers.”115 Women artists were involved in the production of Christmas cards in two ways. Some, like Squire, Sadler and Bennett, contributed designs to various publishing firms on a freelance basis as a means of supplementing their income from a range of other artistic pursuits. Female artists were paid between three and six guineas for a single design and were expected to submit illustrations in coordinating sets of four, each measuring between three and six inches.116 Publishers such as Hildesheimer, Marcus Ward and Co, Raphael Tuck and Sons and Alfred Grey were considered to produce cards of the highest artistic quality, and women applied to these firms on an individual basis to sell their designs.117 Artists were also employed on staff at publishing firms to produce designs in-house. Women dominated this field of employment; the two head designers at Tuck and Sons were women, and they controlled a “small army of lady artists,” who produced the firm’s original designs.118 At Birn Brothers the permanent design staff was made up entirely of women, who both produced designs and executed the hand-painted cards. The firm also purchased 600 sets of designs from external sources annually, and the majority of freelance designers patronised were

114 Beetles, Mabel Lucie Attwell, 13-14. Francis and Mills were founded in 1899. The Artist noted that Francis and Mills were “a great deal more than mere business representatives. They took complete control of their artist clients and provided a constant flow of work for them.” The Artist 97 (1892): 23. 115 “Christmas Cards”, 5. See Also The Strand Magazine 107 (1944): 61. 116 “Chats with Celebrities: Miss Kate Sadler, the Rose Painter,” Hearth and Home July 2, 1891, 205; “What to do with our Daughters,” Myra’s Journal, February 1, 1894, 23. 117 “Christmas Cards,” Fun, December 13, 1882, 257; “What to do with our Daughters,” Myra’s Journal, April 1, 1894, 23. 118 Lewins, “The Home of the Christmas Card,” 177.

225 women.119 Artists employed on staff worked eight hours a day and earned from ten shillings to three guineas a week, with extra overtime each busy season. Their jobs were eagerly sought after. “This work appeals to so many that there are constant applications for a post in the studio,” Leily Bingen reported. “A permanent list is kept of ladies waiting to enter when there shall be a vacancy.”120

Bingen claimed that a successful and prolific freelance designer could earn an income of between £500 and £900 a year by selling designs for cards and gift books to art- publishers like Birn Brothers.121 Whether any female designers received remuneration of this scale seems questionable, due to the fact that most continued to pursue other remunerative work such as book illustration, advertising and portrait commissions in addition to freelancing for stationers, but the rates of pay were high enough to attract numerous artists to the profession, and the high turnover of designs meant that the demand for new illustrations was perennial. Christmas cards and gift books were a highly visible form of illustration and new designs were routinely reviewed in major papers and art periodicals. This coverage provided some publicity and name recognition to the artists involved, and also served to acknowledge the viability and legitimacy of commercial illustration as an artistic profession. Adolph Tuck claimed that his company’s greeting cards popularised Kate Sadler’s flower paintings, which “assisted her reputation as one of the first painters of roses very materially.”122

However, artists who were too closely associated with Christmas card and gift illustration could also find that the work damaged their artistic reputations more broadly, and hindered their success in other, more “serious” artistic fields. “If Miss Alice Squire would change her monotonous and somewhat irritating method of painting the human figure…she might rise to higher things than the Christmas card- like work which we have learnt to associate with her name,” noted Artist in a review of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colour Exhibition in 1897.123 Squire was a

119 Designers patronised by Birn Brothers included Harriet Bennett, Helena and Bertha Macquire and Pauline Sunter. Leily Bingen, “Christmas Cards: Their Origin and Manufacture,” The Windsor Magazine, 7, December 1897, 116-122 120 Ibid. 121 Ibid. 122 Lewins, “The Home of the Christmas Card,” 176. 123 “The Spring Exhibition,” Artist 19 (May 1897): 219.

226 member of the RI and the Society of Women Artists and exhibited regularly, but she supported herself primarily through illustrative work, and this association evidently had some impact on her critical reputation as a water-colourist. While Adolph Tuck claimed that Sadler never “regretted that we reproduced her designs,” the artist herself gave up illustrating cards as soon as she could support herself through watercolours. “I may say that now I do not take any pride in them,” she said later of her Christmas card designs.124

Commercial illustration continued to grow as a field of work for artists into the first decades of the twentieth century. The advent of cards for Christmas popularised other forms of specialised stationery and novelties dedicated to occasions such as birthdays and Easter, the use of which “appears to be extending concurrently with the Christmas custom,” according to The Times in 1883.125 Despite advancements in photographic reproduction illustrated postcards continued to be produced in high numbers, and there was also a role for the artist in the production of posters, wallpaper and fabric design, advertisements and calendars.126 Of the artists who found this work “congenial and profitable” Michael Felmingham singles out Mabel Lucie Attwell as an artist who parlayed a distinctive and popular style into a successful artistic brand. Commercial art was “not to be scorned,” he notes.127 Certainly the reach and exposure of the products these artists designed was far greater than that which most fine artists could achieve. It was estimated in 1891 that between ten and twelve million birthday cards were circulated in England each year with a comparable quantity exported abroad, and competition amongst publishers for the best designs and verses was high.128 Well known artists and Royal Academicians could ask “a couple of hundred pounds for a design and get it,” noted one commentator but, in general, RAs preferred “not to have their work confined to the narrow limits of a birthday card.”129 The women artists who provided publishers with most of their designs, of whom the most successful included Bertha Maguire and Annie Simpson, received a far more modest rate per card.

124 Lewins, “The Home of the Christmas Card”, 176; “Chats with Celebrities”, 205. 125 “Christmas Cards”, 5. 126 Norman Alliston, “Pictorial Post Cards,” Chambers’ Journal 2, no, 99 (1899): 745-748. 127 Felmingham, The Illustrated Gift Book, 28. 128 Alfred Lord Tennyson, for example, was offered 1000 guineas to write twelve short birthday poems. “Birthday Cards,” The Strand Magazine (January 1891): 245. 129 Ibid.

227

Illustrated picture postcards were another correspondence-related development that provided work to artists in the early years of the twentieth century.130 Although postcards were used as a means of distributing images from the 1870s onwards, before 1900 English postal regulations prohibited the sending of picture postcards with handwritten messages written on the address side of the card. After increasing the size of postcards private companies were permitted to produce in 1899 to bring the law in line with European standards, and allow English companies to compete with the popular artistic cards produced on the continent, the Parliament legalised in 1902 the inclusion of written messages on the back of postcards.131 As David Gwynn explained, these changes brought about an “explosion in the production of picture cards” for both personal and commercial use and popularised the pastime of postcard collecting, heralding a golden age of postcard illustration that continued until the 1920s.132

Publishers and businesses who used postcards as a means of advertising their wares worked with artists in two ways: by specially commissioning illustrations to promote a book or product, or by purchasing the rights to an existing painting for the purposes of reproduction, a strategy pioneered by Pears Soap’s use of the John Millais painting Bubbles. Postcards were particularly popular as a means of marketing products and books to children, and so many illustrators of nursery-books found additional work producing postcards to advertise confectionery, medicines and sanitation products. Book publishers also distributed promotional postcards featuring samples of a book’s illustrations to retailers, book clubs and lending libraries, which were intended to attract orders and act as reader keepsakes.133

130 The Postcard magazine called postcards a “postal revolution”. The Postcard, December 27, 1889, np. 131 Initially only five words were permitted on the back of postcards, but this rule was later relaxed. Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 18. See also Adolph Tuck, “Picture Postcards and the Postmaster General,” Manchester Guardian, April 7, 1923, 7. 132 David Gwyn, Wales from the Golden Age of Picture Postcards Through Time (Gloucestershire: Amberley Publishing, 2009), 1. Postcards were singularly collectable – they were cheap, accessible, attractive and appealed to many different tastes and markets. Monica Cure, “Text with a View: Turn of the Century Literature and the Invention of the Postcard” (PhD thesis: University of Southern California, 2012), 7. 133 See also “To Our Readers: Apologia Pro Vita Nostra”, The Picture Postcard, 1, (1900): 1.

228 As the demand for new and original picture postcards grew, book, magazine and stationery illustrators diversified their practice to include the new form, while young or emerging artists found the medium to be an effective way to enter the illustrative profession. Mabel Lucie Attwell, for example, began her career by contributing illustrations to magazines and producing book illustrations, but found immediate success with picture postcards following her initial publications for Valentine and Sons in 1911 and 1912. She had a particular skill for formulating ideas for postcards that caught the public’s imagination and “command[ed] a wide sale,” infusing her typical, sentimentalised depictions of children with a “cartoonist’s wit.”134 Such was the popularity of her postcards that the publisher issued an illustrated catalogue of all her designs in the 1920s and kept her early postcards permanently in print.135 One of Attwell’s postcard designs could sell up to half a million copies, and this unprecedented popular success, along with her keen business acumen, was the catalyst for the “wealth of subsidiary merchandising material” that brought Attwell widespread fame, and made her depictions of children ubiquitous throughout the first half of the twentieth century.136

Attwell’s designs were populist by their nature, satisfying the public’s continuing demand for sentimental, sometimes saccharine depictions of children, but the postcard market was broad and catered for many different tastes. There was scope for artists to translate their own styles and subject matter into postcard design and to experiment artistically with the form. Sybil Barham chose to work with postcards after she graduated from the prestigious Herkomer School because the confined format of the medium suited her own preference for small canvasses. She developed a long relationship with the publisher C.W. Faulkner beginning in 1905 and translated her penchant for muted, autumnal tones, earthy, pastoral subjects and experimentations with light into her commercial work.137

134 Stationery Trades’ Journal 34 (1913): 18; Brian Alderson, “Mabel Lucie Attwell (1879-1964), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/view/article/30499. 135 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 83. 136 Ibid., 85; Beetles, Mabel Lucie Atwell, 9; Alderson, “Mabel Lucie Attwell (1879-1964)”. 137 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 88.

229 The accessibility of postcards and printed novelties was also attractive to artists looking to build their public profiles. Maude Goodman’s domestic genre paintings were so popular with buyers that they often sold at private views before they were exhibited to the public at the Royal Academy.138 When Raphael Tuck commissioned Goodman to produce a series of pictures for calendars, postcards and gift books in the early 1890s her work became accessible to a vast number of people outside of the typical art-buying public, who purchased the reproduced postcards in their millions.139 For an artist such as Goodman, who courted mainstream, popular taste, this level of exposure and renown was invaluable, increasing the value of her original paintings and their copyright.

For artists without Goodman’s reputation remuneration for postcards, calendars and cards was variable and depended on the size and scope of the project, and on the artist’s relationship with the publisher. Illustrators who had a distinctive style or series of characters were in a good position to negotiate continuing royalties along with upfront payments. Chloe Preston, for example, received a 10% royalty on the sale of the calendars she designed for Hodder Stoughton in 1914, which featured the characters from her children’s books Peek-A-Boos.140 While some artists used pseudonyms to sign their commercial illustrations, or chose not to sign their names at all to obscure the work from their more prestigious patrons, for others postcards, posters and greeting cards were a unique and rewarding art form in its own right, which was pursued out of choice rather than necessity.141

Conclusion

138 Postlethwaite, “More Noted Women Painters”, 480; “Miss Maude Goodman,” Art Journal (July 1889): 200. 139 Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 133. 140 Ibid., 201. 141 Ivy Millicent James, an artist who enjoyed a long career illustrating for Raphael Tuck and CW Faulkner, is an example of an artist who was fascinated by cards an art form in their own right. Flora White too preferred postcard illustration to painting or book illustration. “I work very quickly, I have a great deal of freedom of choice in my subject matter, complete the artwork and receive payment. There’s too much fuss with books,” she explained. Dawn and Peter Cope, Postcards from the Nursery, 161, 253.

230 There is an argument to be made that women artists found work in commercial illustration because the field was regarded as less prestigious and artistically challenging than fine art. Women illustrators could be paid much less than well- known Royal Academicians for similar designs because women’s work was not awarded a comparable value. For all the reviews of Christmas cards and artistic novelties in Art Journal and other periodicals, commercial illustration was widely regarded as inferior to fine art, and even to book illustration. It was the antithesis of both the technical, ambitious oil paintings rewarded by the RA and the innovative, progressive work favoured by anti-establishment societies like the New English Art Club. Women’s relative success in the field of commercial illustration might thus be seen as an indication of the lack of esteem and value placed on their talents by the wider artistic community.

When it comes to assessing how these occupations affected women’s professionalism, however, such views are of limited relevance. As head designers, artists or freelance contributors to stationers and publishing firms, women took on specialised roles that often required dedicated training. Their work was closely intertwined with the market, as commercial illustrators were responsible for producing designs that would sell or appeal to tens of thousands of readers. This necessitated a close understanding of aesthetic trends and consumer demands, and the ability to create designs that fulfilled the sales goals of the publisher while retaining artistic integrity.

The remuneration offered by stationery firms enabled successful commercial artists to earn higher and more consistent incomes than they would likely achieve through painting. Within the professional art world’s internal system of stratification commercial illustration was poorly regarded. However to the extent that professionalism can be described as encompassing the economic relationship between the expert and the client, commercial forms of art facilitated, rather than diminished, women’s professional status. And paradoxically, the view that commercial and illustrative art were inferior art forms abetted this professionalism. As the American editor of St Nicholas Magazine Frances W. Marshall claimed in 1912: As illustrators women find themselves in a profession where they stand shoulder to shoulder with their brothers in art. For the publisher, the

231 advertisers, the seller of prints and picture cards is interested only in the finished product, and has no concern whatever as to sex of the producer.142

While this statement may be over generalised, the sentiment goes some way to explaining women’s success in the field of illustration. Women’s adaptability, their willingness to fulfil the demands of their employer and their perceived “natural” empathy and lack of ego were, in the case of illustration, qualities that helped rather than hindered women’s pursuit of consistent artistic work. Marshall explained: In this career the natural adaptability of women is a decided advantage. For an illustrator must be biddable, willing to follow the author’s lead and subordinate the expression of her own personality to the text which her pictures accompany…Their work demands a certain power of impersonation, the ability to lose one’s self in a character and experience, the emotion the person in the story or the poem is supposed to feel.143

Access to the field of illustration and to the spaces and actors that operated within it— publishers, stationers, editors and agents—provided women with a better chance of earning a living through art than perhaps any other criteria or standard of artistic professionalism. Although their accomplishments may have been due to the perceived limitations or inferiorities of the art form, the determination, talent, pragmatism and business acumen of the women who succeeded in the field reflected the factors women artists needed to practice art professionally at the turn of the twentieth century, factors that were more important, I argue, than traditional measures of professionalism.

142 Frances W. Marshall, “Qualities that Make for Success in Women Illustrators,” New York Times, December 15, 1912, 11. 143 Ibid.

232 Conclusion

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

The shifting meaning and value attached to the label of “amateur” problematised and complicated what it meant to be a professional artist in the mid to late nineteenth century, for women in particular. Amateurism had traditionally been associated with the refining leisure activities of the upper class, and so the term encompassed the pursuits of gentlemen who practiced art for the purposes of pleasure and cultivation as well as female accomplishments. However as (male) artists became increasingly concerned with defining and defending the status of their work by adopting the attributes and behaviours of professional culture, the meaning of the term amateur became more feminised and pejorative; it came be understood as the opposite of professional.

As the nineteenth century progressed, amateurism thus became a “constant threat” to the perceived seriousness and value of artists’ practice, because the line separating amateur and professional artistic enterprise was difficult for the public to discern.2 In the absence of a central regulating body to separate bona fide professional practitioners from amateur dabblers, markers and symbols of professionalism were adopted and developed throughout the eighteenth and, predominantly, the nineteenth century. Inspired and influenced by the structures and characteristics of traditional professions such as the law and the church, these markers and qualifications were a

1 “The Contributor’s Club: The Decline of the Amateur,” The Atlantic Monthly, 440 (1894): 859. 2 Julie Codell, The Victorian Artist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 114.

233 means of controlling who could claim the title of “professional artist.” Because amateur artists were assumed to produce inferior work, and amateurs were now almost universally understood to be women, these regulating structures also served the purpose of excluding women from professional practice. While there were women making money from art throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the identity of the “artist-as-creator” was, as Gordon Fyfe concludes, still “produced through the aesthetic subordination of women.”3

The rules, memberships, and qualifications developed during this period as a means of legitimising art professionalism attune with modern sociologists’ mode of defining professionalism as a collection of attributes common to a professional occupation.4 In the case of art in the late nineteenth century, these attributes can be summarised in a few key characteristics: specialised knowledge derived from a thorough art education, including life study, at a respected institution; membership of a recognised professional society; possession of an artistic studio suitable for the production, display and promotion of art; and validation of the unique expertise and talent of the practitioner through patronage and commissions. These traits can be seen as criteria for achieving professional status in the art world, and as women’s access to the institutions and organisations connected to those criteria was restricted, professionalism was clearly defined as a masculine sphere. Even as the institutional barriers to women’s access to art education and exhibitions gradually dissolved in the last decades of the nineteenth century, the link between amateurism, bad work, and women artists remained. The greatest obstacle to women’s ability to practice and be recognised as professional artists, and enjoy the economic and social benefits that accompanied that status, was their association with amateurism.

This thesis has thus been concerned with interrogating the markers and criteria of nineteenth-century art professionalism to determine which were the most relevant and important to women seeking to be recognised as professional artists at the turn of the twentieth century. In evaluating both the practical and perceived benefits and

3 Gordon Fyfe, Art, Power and Modernity: English Art Institutions, 1750-1950 (London: A&C Black, 2001), 85. 4 Terrence J. Johnson, Professions and Power (London: Macmillan Education, 1972), 23.

234 consequences of educational qualifications, organisational membership, studio provisions, and art selling and publishing, it has determined that a woman’s professionalism, defined largely by the seriousness and commitment of her artistic enterprise, and the objective, intrinsic value of her work, was largely judged on her ability to sell. The view commonly held by scholars of women’s art history that women’s entry on equal terms to England’s major art schools served as a turning point in their ability to practice as professionals has thus been challenged. While educational qualifications held the promise of meritocratic and objective validation, the fact that art schools were populated by “accomplishment” students, who did not intend to use their expertise for the purposes of selling art, weakened the legitimising power of specialised art training—for women if not for men. Recognisable talent and learned expertise were undoubtedly important to women’s ability to pursue art as a career, but the source of their training had little impact on their eventual professional achievements. What was most important to the process of women “becoming professional” was rather their commercial ambition and success. Access to education, studio space and organisational memberships were beneficial to the extent that they supported that end by strengthening the recognition artists’ received from their peers and validating their self-respect and professional self-identification. At a time when tensions surrounding the commercialisation and commodification of art were prevalent, it was women who were able to balance expectations of appropriate female behaviour with the objective validation of art commerce who reaped the benefits of recognised professional status.

This focus on the commercial aspect of women artists’ careers has meant that my research has been largely concerned with an economic group still marginalised in social and art history—self supporting middle-class women. The artists I have considered throughout this study were predominantly drawn from the middle or upper middle-classes and were obliged by economic or social circumstances to support themselves through painting and illustration. This thesis has looked at what happened when women of this class and background, who were not expected to use their talents for pecuniary gain, entered the commercial arena, and interrogated how they differentiated themselves as serious working professionals. The narrative of women and work in nineteenth-century historiography still focuses largely on the working

235 class experience and on un-waged middle and upper class female labour. Some scholars, meanwhile, have viewed highlighting the commercial and economic history of art and artists with suspicion, as if studying art within its market context devalues its history, and social and moral purpose. However, it is only through situating women artists within their economic context that the mechanics of how women made a living through art can be fully understood, and their status as working women reclaimed.

The expansion of educational opportunities and access for women in the second half of the nineteenth century has often been posited as a watershed for women artists’ seeking to enter the professional art world.5 Art schools were the conservers of the specialised skills that professional artists claimed to monopolise. In an occupation free from official barriers of entry, and without a standard career progression marked by formal registration and promotions, affiliations with respected institutions like art schools resulted, Wouter de Nooy argues, “in some degree of artistic prestige” for the artist, which in turn influenced the success of their career.6 Women did enter England’s art schools in larger numbers than ever before during this period and, due in large part to their own agitation and campaigning, enjoyed greater access to life study and co-educational classes. Those agitators believed that equalising the conditions of women’s art education would ensure that their pictures were judged “without reference to the sex of the artist.” As long as female students displayed “hard work [and] thorough study,” than she would be “fairly entered” into professional competition, argued The Englishwoman’s Review, a staunch supporter of women’s education that firmly believed that that access to serious art training had been the major obstacle to women pursuing artistic careers.7

In practice, however, women who were accepted into major art schools continued to be judged according to their sex. Many aspiring professionals recognised that the visibility of amateur students reflected poorly on their own intentions and ambitions. Laura Knight, for example, claimed that her seriousness as a student was disregarded

5 See Frances Borzello, A World of Our Own: Women As Artists (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 129. 6 Walter de Nooy, “The Dynamics of Artistic Prestige,” Poetics 30 (2002): 147. 7 The Englishwoman’s Review, November 15, 1877, 510.

236 because, for the majority of girls in her classes at the Nottingham School of Art, “art was no more than one accomplishment among other forms of higher schooling, before taking place in society as a lady.”8 Gendered attitudes towards women’s “natural” artistic aptitudes also remained; Knight was chastised for drawing “like a man” and told to develop her “feminine side.”9 Improved access to high quality art training and life study did increase the viability of art as a profession for women, but it did not, as The Englishwoman’s Review optimistically predicted it would, remove the tendency of art teachers, critics and buyers to group women artists together and measure their merits “by a standard supposed to be suited to women alone.”10 Women who achieved commercial success as artists and were seen by their colleagues to be professionals came from a variety of educational backgrounds. Graduating from the Royal Academy schools or the Slade did not legitimise a woman’s artistic practice and there was no set method of training or educational qualification that could secure a woman professional recognition.

Where educational qualifications had the clearest link to professional outcomes was when it took the form of specialised, applied art training. Press, fashion and commercial illustration and engraving were growing industries in the late nineteenth century, and there was demand for qualified and experienced illustrators. Unlike fine art, jobs in illustration and commercial drawing were sometimes directly linked to the holding of specific educational qualifications. Obtaining training at a school such as Henry Blackburn’s illustration studio or the Chromolithographic Studio, which had links to industry and in-built work experience, was thus a practical strategy for women art students, and the fact that these forms of art were seen as aligning with women’s “natural” aptitudes made it easier for graduates to find employment. Specialised art training and apprenticeships thus supported women’s professionalism because it facilitated and expedited their entry into paid work.

The material condition that was most important to women becoming professional was studio space. While studio provisions have not received as much attention as

8 Laura Knight, The Magic of the Line (London: William Kerber and Co, 1965), 77. 9 Laura Knight, Oil Paint and Grease Paint (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1936), 48, 57. 10 The Englishwoman’s Review, November 15, 1877, 510.

237 educational qualifications in studies on artistic professionalism, the second chapter of this thesis demonstrated that access to studios was central to women artists’ perceived professionalism, as well as to their own self-identification as artists, which, in turn, fostered their commercial confidence and ambition. Studios provided the practical conditions for women to produce the art they needed to sell to legitimise their professional intentions. As examples of women who struggled to acquire independent studios because of familial, domestic or financial circumstances indicate, the character and location of studio space tangibly affected the type of art a woman could produce, and it follows, her commercial viability. In a context where a woman’s commercial ambition was central to her perceived professionalism, possession of a studio was also a public indicator of her commitment to that goal. Studios had representational meaning during this period; they were part of a culturally recognisable artistic tradition and were seen as places of creativity, of production and of industry. For a woman to move her artistic practice outside of the drawing room and into a specialised studio—even if that studio was still inside of her home—was thus a signal of the seriousness and longevity of her enterprise, and her intention to create art for purposes beyond that of the pleasure and enjoyment of herself and family. Moreover, studios were a place to carry out the social and commercial interactions expected of professional artists. They were spaces for the display and promotion of art, activities that supported women’s efforts to sell their work. In this way, possession of a studio was an important attribute of women artists’ professionalism because it made visible the seriousness of their enterprise and facilitated the production and promotion of saleable art.

Art school qualifications, studio space and membership of artistic societies were recognised markers of professionalism at this time and for male artists, whose seriousness and commitment to their craft were largely taken for granted, these attributes might be enough to vouch for their professional status. For women however, of whom amateurism was expected, talent, training, studios and memberships were not enough to prove the professionalism of their artistic enterprise. The real value of these qualifications and spaces to women’s professionalism was in the extent to which they separated her from the assumption of amateurism by supporting and facilitating her ability to sell. Describing the success of the American

238 artist Eliza Greatorex in 1885, one critic noted she challenged the “generally prevalent idea” that women artists were “hopelessly incompetent amateurs” by making “art a source of income.”11 While some male artists were questioning whether the overt commercialism of the art market might devalue their professionalism, and the higher motives of public service and economic disinterest that it was meant to embody, women artists did not have the luxury of opting out of the market system. Their male counterparts might be recognised for their talent on their own account, or even argue that working for money diminished the purity of their artistic ideals, but women proved their talent and ability through sales. Women were thus compelled to produce saleable work that appealed to the demands of the market, and to diversify their output to include illustration, portraits, and other genres and mediums to which they were seen as particularly proficient. This economic and professional strategy reinforced the widespread view that women were “naturally” suited to these commercial, domestic and “middlebrow” modes rather than more academic or avant- garde forms, and this circular logic ensured that women then did not receive the patronage and support necessary to experiment in those styles.

The importance of artistic societies to aspiring women professionals was thus more than the credibility or prestige that might be conferred by their membership; for many women the exhibitions and events hosted by artistic societies were the most accessible conduits to art commerce. It is unsurprising then that most women took a pragmatic approach to their interactions with art societies. While many continued to view the Royal Academy as the ultimate symbol of establishment acceptance even after its relevance to the broader art world began to wane, most took full advantage of the genre or material-specific societies that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. These groups responded to the demands and desires of the increasingly middle-class art-buying public and were often more overtly commercial than older societies like the RA, which benefited women seeking socially appropriate ways of promoting and selling their work. It was these societies that were, I argue, the most useful to women’s professionalism both practically and in terms of public perception. It was here that women had the greatest opportunity of achieving society membership

11 “Our Female Artists: Fair Hands Under Whose Touch the Canvas Glows and Lives,” New York World, 15 March, 1885.

239 or a gate-keeping role within a group’s management. The fact that these societies catered to a specialised segment of the market meant that they were useful in connecting women artists with a particular group of clients, and tended to attract a more select audience than generalised exhibitions.

Specialised societies were usually seen as more prestigious and exclusive than women’s exhibiting groups, in large part because the most famous and respected women artists of the period chose not to embrace the single sex, “separate but equal” ethos. All-female societies encouraged critics and buyers to view women artists as a unitary category, and many women were aware that being associated with other women—some of them amateurs—in this way was not the best way to improve the market value and saleability of their work or prove their own seriousness. Because they knew that selling their work at high prices and to high profile buyers was their best chance of proving their professionalism, most women wanted to save their newest and most impressive work for exhibitions that would attract the most buyers and attention. This hamstrung the ability of groups like the Society of Women Artists to become truly competitive or significant in the crowded late nineteenth-century exhibition landscape. Here, the pragmatic, economically focused attitude of aspiring women professionals is evident.

It was thus selling art—perhaps the most contentious aspect of professionalism for artists—that was the threshold for women artists’ professionalism. For male artists, painting or illustrating without financial reason or ambition was a point of pride and respect. In his tribute to the former RA President Lord Frederic Leighton, artist and founder of the Slade School Edward Poynter made a point of noting that, although Leighton’s works were highly valued, he did not need to make money from his art; he was not, as Queen Victoria termed it, “painting for money.”12 Leighton, an artist who had risen to the very top of the Victorian art world, did not need to prove his professionalism via the market. His professionalism was based on judgement of his paintings, and his qualifications, memberships, connections and studio-home visibly

12 Quoted in Paula Gillett, Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 47.

240 reinforced that status. So solid were his professional credentials that validation by the market was unnecessary, even déclassé. The high prices Leighton received for his works were not seen as transactional, but rather as recognition for the services he rendered to the broader community. As Paula Gillett explains, “particular pride was taken in the belief that the profession’s official leader [Leighton] from 1878 to 1896…painted by choice, a motive unsullied by the need for income.”13

Leighton’s reputation for painting for pleasure, and for the refinement and cultivation of himself, his friends and the nation, strengthened his professional bona-fides. When applied to women artists, however, the attributes that helped secure Leighton his position at the centre of the art establishment were seen as the defining characteristics of amateurism. Women did not have the option of proving their professionalism through the traditional criteria of specialised knowledge, economic disinterest, institutional membership and public service, because these attributes were, by the last decades of the nineteenth century, also accessible and applicable to amateur practitioners. Women who fulfilled those criteria were thus not inevitably judged to be professional. So while women were aware of the tensions surrounding art and pecuniary gain, and perhaps felt them even more profoundly as unnatural occupiers of the commercial realm, exposing their work to the objective validation of the market was the best way to establish their professional purpose. And while concerns over the propriety of women’s business interactions were occasionally aired in critical discourse, and by women themselves, in general their place in the market system was accepted, if perhaps not embraced, by those who worked within the art market.

Women were early adopters of new methods of selling and displaying art made possible by the popularisation of commercial art galleries and dealers, and even benefited from middle-class buyers’ predilection for small scale and domestic pictures in these decades. Commercial and press illustration, meanwhile, were relatively quick ways for women to confirm their market worth. Having work accepted by business- orientated editors, and published or printed for mass consumption provided a constant, public and objective validation of women’s work. It was an industry in which women’s “natural” artistic attributes of empathy, adaptability and

13 Ibid., 54.

241 fastidiousness were seen as advantages, and success in illustration provided women with a better chance of validating her professional status and earning a living wage than perhaps any other aspect of professional artistic practice.

In evaluating the usefulness and relevance of the key markers of artistic professionalism to women’s ability to practice and be perceived as professional artists, this thesis had interrogated the value of professionalism as a framework for understanding women’s artistic enterprises. It has not done this, however, by expanding the definition of the term to encompass or illuminate the activities of women amateurs, as has been a trend in recent scholarship on women artists. Rather, I have tested the usefulness of the framework for working women, who wanted or needed to earn an income via artistic practice. In doing so, I argue that the attributes and qualifications associated with artistic professionalism—which were derived and shaped around the male experience—are not sufficient to explain the route by which women “became” professionals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because standards of professionalism were applied differently to men than they were to women.

While conforming to the traditional professional criteria, such as educational qualifications, organisational membership and the possession of studio space, may have resulted in male artists achieving professional status, these markers did not serve to separate women artists from amateur practice in the same way. Evaluating the success or tenure of a woman’s career through the lens of these professional criteria is thus problematic, because there is not a straightforward or linear correlation between possession of these traditional professional markers and women’s actual professional status. The artistic practice of professional women artists is best understood instead through studying their economic and commercial relationships and interactions, as these were the markers of professionalism that were the most relevant and pertinent to women.

Louise Jopling, whose statement on the importance of remunerative work opened this thesis, provides an apt case study of the professional expectations placed on women artists and how they differed from those applied to men. Jopling was one of the most

242 recognised professional women artists of her time, and she did not acquire this status through her education, acquired relatively late in life at a foreign atelier, her family background or even her institutional memberships. While Leighton elevated his professionalism by distancing himself from the market, Jopling secured her professional status by embracing the “hustle and the scramble” of selling art.14 It was her commercial ambition, her visibility at exhibitions, her broad network of portrait clients, her regular visits to art dealers and showrooms—her willingness, that is, to take on every opportunity for commercial advancement that presented itself, that differentiated Jopling from her amateur counterparts. And, significantly, critics and commentators did not treat this visible commercial drive derisively or suspiciously. Instead, the press almost always commented on it positively, as a marker of the seriousness and commitment with which Jopling approached her craft. Jopling took care to preserve and promote her faultless moral and social reputation, but in this way she was no different from male artists, whose viability as professional artists also relied on their perceived status as respectable gentleman.

As a woman, Jopling could not rely on traditional markers of professionalism to be taken seriously as an artist and, as someone who relied on art to support her family, her determination to sell art was twofold. The association between women and amateurism that intensified throughout the nineteenth century meant the standards of professionalism were applied differently to women then they were to men. Louisa Beresford, the Marchioness of Waterford, was a talented water-colourist who trained under Gabriel Rossetti and exhibited work to acclaim at the Grosvenor Gallery in the 1870s and 1880s. However she did not exhibit her work at commercial galleries and tended to give it away as gifts rather than sell it for profit. Writing in 1880, she identified this economic ambition and imperative as the distinction between professional and amateur when applied to women artists. Beresford described her own status as “one who would have been an artist if it had been her fate to earn her bread.”15 As Pamela Nunn explains, her amateur status was explained by her absence from the public, commercial sphere; “by not putting her work out for sale, she tacitly

14 A word to the Dealers,” The Burlington Magazine 47, no. 272 (1925): 221 15 Quoted in Augustus Hare, The Story of Two Noble Lives Being Memorials of Charlotte, Countess Canning and Louisa Marchioness of Waterford (London: G Allen, 1893), 3:361

243 declared it not worth buying, which in the contemporary society meant not very good, nor serious.”16

Middle-class women artists only achieved professionalism by entering into market transactions. At a time when amateurism and professionalism in art were “debatable ground,” sales were the most objective and convincing way of establishing women’s seriousness, commitment and willingness for hard work, and for measuring her worth and talents fairly against “her brothers of the brush.”17 Working for money took women’s artistic practice decisively out of the realm of the subjective, domestic and private and placed it firmly into the public sphere of art commerce. There is still much work to be done in tracking the business relationships, patronage models and market interactions of women artists in this period, which will be made possible with the opening up of fresh archives and records. It is only through uncovering women’s interactions with this economic side of art that their status as middle-class working women can be reclaimed, and the contribution of their business-orientated pragmatism to popular understandings of women, work and professionalism fully recognised.

16 Pamela Nunn, “The Mid-Victorian Woman Artists: 1850-1979,” (PhD thesis: University College London, 1982), 259. 17 Codell, The Victorian Artist, 114; John Oldcastle “Our Living Artists. Elizabeth Butler,” Magazine of Art (1879): 260.

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Bayer, Thomas M. “Money as Muse: The Origin and Development of the Modern Art Market in Victorian England: A Process of Commodification.” PhD thesis, Tulane University, 2001.

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245 Butlin, Susan. “A New Matrix of the Arts: A History of the Professionalisation of Canadian Women Artists, 1880-1914.” PhD thesis, Carleton University, 2008. ——— . The Practice of her Profession: Florence Carlyle, Canadian Painter in the Age of Impressionism. Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009.

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De Montfort, Patricia. “Dealers and the London Exhibition Scene. Exhibition Culture in London, 1878-1908, University of Glasgow. 2006. http://www.exhibitionculture.arts.gla.ac.uk/essays.php?eid=01 ——— . “The Fine Art Society and the Rise of the Solo Exhibition.” In Marketing Art in the British Isles, 1700 to the Present: A Cultural History, edited by Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplede, 147-164. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. ——— . “Louise Jopling: A Gendered reading of Late 19th Century Britain.” Woman’s Art Journal, 34, no 2 (2013): 29-38.

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Dixon, Diana. “From Instruction to Amusement: Attitudes of Authority in Children’s Periodicals before 1914.” Victorian Periodicals Review, 19, (1986): 63-67.

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Felmingham, Michael. The Illustrated Gift Book 1890-1930. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1988.

Fisher, Kathleen. Conversations with Sylvia: Sylvia Goss, Painter 1881-1968. London: Charles Skilton, 1975.

Fletcher, Pamela and Anne Helmreich, eds. The Rise of the Modern Art Market in London, 1850-1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011.

Fletcher, Pamela. “Consuming Modern Art: Metaphors of Gender, Commerce and Value in Late Victorian and Edwardian Art Criticism.” Visual Culture in Britain 6, no.2 (2005): 157-170.

247 Flood, Catherine. “Contrary to the Habits of Their Sex? Women Drawing on Wood and the Careers of Florence and Adelaide Claxton.” In Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, edited by Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski, 107-122. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013.

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Fyfe, Gordon. “Auditing the RA: Official Discourse and the Nineteenth-Century Royal Academy.” In Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Rafael Cardoso Denis and Colin Trodd, 117-132. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

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Garner, Lara. “Palace of Art: Victorian Studio-Houses in the Museum Context.” PhD thesis, Baylor University, 2012.

Gaze, Delia, ed. Dictionary of Women Artists. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers.

Gray, Anne. Art and Artifice: George Lambert 1873-1930. Roseville East: Craftsman House, 1996.

Gray, Anne, ed. The Edwardians: Secret and Desires. Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 2004.

Gray, Sara. The Dictionary of British Women Artists. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2009.

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Gerrish Nunn, Pamela. “Alienation, Adoption or Adaptation? Aesthetic Painting by Women.” Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens 74 (2011): 141-155. ——— . “Dorothy’s Career and Other Cautionary Tales.” In Crafting the Women Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain, edited by Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Patricia Zakreski, 167-86. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013. ——— . “The Mid Victorian Woman Artist, 1850-1879.” PhD thesis: University College London, 1982. ——— . Problem Pictures: Men and Women in Victorian Painting. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995. ——— . Victorian Women Artists. London: The Women’s Press, 1987.

Gill, Linda, ed. Letters of Frances Hodgkins. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993.

Gillett, Paula. “Art Audiences at the Grosvenor Gallery.” In The Grosvenor Gallery: A Palace of Art in Victorian England, edited by Susan P Casteras and Colleen Denney, 39-58. New Haven: Yale Centre for British Art, 1996.

248 ——— . “The Profession of Painting in England: 1850-1890.” PhD thesis: University of California, Berkeley, 1878. ——— . Worlds of Art: Painters in Victorian Society. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990.

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Griffiths, R.H.J. “Ethel the Bankrupt Portrait Painter.” Family Tree Magazine, 22, no. 1 (2006), 71-73.

Hadjiafxendi, Kyriaki and Patricia Zakreski, eds. Crafting the Woman Professional in the Long Nineteenth Century: Artistry and Industry in Britain. Farnham: Ashgate, 2013. ——— . What is a Woman to Do? A Reader on Women, Work and Art, C. 1830-1890. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011.

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Hamilton, James. A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Atlantic Books, 2014.

Hayllar, Mary Gabrielle. “Framing the Hayllar Sisters: A Multi-genre Biography of Four English Victorian Painters.” PhD thesis, University of New South Wales, 2012.

Helland, Janice. Professional Women Painters in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Commitment, Friendship and Pleasure. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. ——— . The Studios of Frances and Margaret Macdonald. Manchester: Manchester University press, 1996.

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Helmreich, Anne. “Contested Grounds: Garden Painting and the Invention of National Identity in England, 1990-1914.” PhD thesis: Northwestern University, 1994. ——— . “David Croal Thomson: The Professionalisation of Art Dealing in an Expanding Field.” Getty Research Journal 5 (2013): 89-100. ——— . “The Marketing of Helen Allingham: The English Cottage and National Identity.” In Gendering Landscape Art, edited by Steven Adams and Anna Greutzner Robins, 45- 60. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.

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Higgs, Michelle. Christmas Cards. Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications, 1999.

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249 Hoock, Holger. The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Hudson, Derek. Arthur Rackham. London: Heinemann, 1960.

Hunter Hurtado, Shannon. Genteel Mavericks: Professional Women Sculptors in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012.

Hutchison, Sidney. The History of the Royal Academy 1768-1968. New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1968.

Huyssens, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Janzon Kooistra, Lorraine. Poetry, Pictures and Popular Publishing: The Illustrated Gift Book and Victorian Visual Culture. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011.

Jenkins, Emily. “Trilby: Fads, Photographers and “Over Perfect Feet.” Book History, 1, no.1 (1998): 221-267.

Lamb, Joseph Frank. “Lions in their Dens: Lord Leighton and late Victorian Studio Life.” PhD thesis, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1987.

Lang, Engel Gladys and Kurt Lang. Etched in Memory: The Building and Survival of Artistic Reputation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

Larson, Margali. The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.

Lawton Smith, Elise. “The Art of Evelyn De Morgan.” Woman’s Art Journal 18 no.2 (1997/1998): 3-10. ——— . Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the Allegorical Body. London: Associated University Presses, 2002.

Lee, Vernon. Vernon Lee’s Letters. Privately Printed, 1937.

Lees-Maffei, Grace. “Professionalisation as a Focus in Interior Design History.” Journal of Design History 21, no.1 (2008): 1-18.

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Lundin, Anne. Victorian Horizons: The Receptions of the Picture Books of Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway. London: The Children’s Literature Association and Scarecrow Press, 2001.

Maas, Jeremy. Gambart, Prince of the Victorian Art World. London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1975.

250 MacCarthy, Fiona. The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination. London: Faber and Faber, 2011.

Macleod, Dianne Sachko. Art and the Victorian Middle-class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ——— . “Art Collecting and Victorian Middle-class Taste.” Art History 10, no. 3 (1987): 328- 350. ——— . “Women As Patrons and Collectors: 1900-1940.” Oxford Art Online. 2009. .http://www.oxfordartonline.com.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/subscriber/article/grove/ar t/T2022267.

Maggs, Olive. Anna Lea Merritt's Murals: Wall paintings in a Surrey Church. Surrey: The Society for the Arts and Crafts Movement in Surrey, 2011.

Mahoney, Bertha, Louise Payson Latimer and Beulah Folmsbee, eds. Illustrators of Children’s Books 1744-1945. Boston: The Horn Book Inc, 1941.

Malatesta, Maria. Professional Men, Professional Women: The European Professions from the Nineteenth Century until Today. Translated by Adrian Belton. London: Sage, 2011.

Marsden, Jonathan, eds. Victoria and Albert: Art and Love. London: Royal Collections Publications, 2010.

Marsh, Jan and Pamela Gerrish Nunn. Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. London: Virago, 1989.

Miller, Delia. The Victorian Watercolours and Drawings in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen. London: Philip Wilson, 1995.

Moore, Henrietta. Space, Text and Gender. London: Guilford, 1996.

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Nicholson, Nigel. ed. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

251 Ormrod, David. “The Origins of the London Art Market, 1660-1730.” In Art Markets in Europe, 1400-1800, edited by Michael North and David Normand, 167-86. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998.

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Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880. New York: Routledge, 2002.

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Thirlwell, Angela. William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis. New Haven: University Press, 2003.

Tickner, Lisa. Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century. New Haven; Yale University Press, 2000. ——— . The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign, 1907-14. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

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253 ——— . “Women Patron-Builders in Britain: Identity, Difference and Memory in Spatial and Material Culture.” In Local/Global: Women Artists in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Deborah Cherry and Janice Helland, 121-136. Aldershot: Ashgate: 2006.

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Wortley, Laura. Lucy Kemp-Welch 1869-1958: The Spirit of the Horse. Woodbridge: Antique Collector’s Club, 1996. ——— . “Lucy Kemp Welch: The Hunt for the Artist Behind the Horses.” Antique Collecting (February 1997): 13-15.

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Online Resources

Exhibition Culture in London 1878-1908. University of Glasgow (2006) http://www.exhibitionculture.arts.gla.ac.uk/

Louise Jopling (1943-1933): A Research Project. University of Glasgow (2012) http://www.louisejopling.arts.gla.ac.uk/

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Selected Autobiographies, Memoirs and Contemporaneously Published Biographical Studies

Bradshaw, Percy. Drawn from Memory. London: Chapman and Hall, 1943.

Burne-Jones, Georgiana. Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. London: Macmillan and Co, 1906.

254 Butler, Elizabeth. An Autobiography. London: Constable & Co, 1922.

Canziani, Estella. Round about Three Palace Green. London: Methuen, 1939.

Cartwright, Julia. The Life and Work of George Frederick Watts, R. A. London: Art Journal Office, 1896.

Eastlake, Charles. Contributions to the Literature of the Fine Arts with a Memoir Compiled by Lady Eastlake. London: John Murray, 1870.

Fish, Arthur. Henrietta Rae. London: Cassell and Company, 1905.

Frith, William Powell. My Autobiography and Reminiscences. London: Richard Bentley and Sons, 1887.

Housman, Laurence. The Unexpected Years. London: Cape, 1937.

Jopling, Louise. Twenty Years of My Life, 1867-1887. London: John Lane, 1925.

Knight, Laura. Oil Paint and Grease Paint. London: Macmillan, 1936. ——— . The Magic of the Line: The Autobiography of Laura Knight DBE. London: William Kimber, 1965.

Layard, G.S and M.H. Spielmann. Kate Greenaway. London: Adam and Charles Black, 1905.

Massey, Gertrude. Kings, Commoners and Me. London: Blackie and Sons, 1934.

Meeson Coates, Dora. George Coates: His Art and His Life. London: JM Dent and Sons, 1937.

Merritt, Anna Lea. Love Locked Out: The Memoirs of Anna Lea Merritt. Boston: Museum of Fine Art, 1981.

Rossetti, William. Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti. New York: Charles Scribner, 1906.

Rutter, Frank. Art in My Time. London: Rich and Cowen, 1933.

Stephens, F.G. Artists at Home. New York: Appleton and Co., 1884.

Stirling, A.M.W. William De Morgan and his Wife. London: Thornton Butterworth, 1922.

Ward, Henreitta. Memories of Ninety Years. London: Hutchinson and Co, 1924. ——— . Mrs Ward’s Reminiscences. London: Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, 1911

Watts, Mary Seton. George Frederic Watts: The Annals of an Artist’s Life. London: Macmillan, 1912.

255 Selected Primary Sources and Articles.

“Art Amongst Women in the Victorian Era.” The Englishwoman’s Review, October 15, 1897, 209-214.

Bateson, Margaret. Professional Women Upon their Professions: Conversations. London: Horace Cox, 1895.

Bingen, Leily. “Christmas Cards: Their Origin and Manufacture.” The Windsor Magazine, 7 December, 1897, 116-122

Blackburn, Henry. The Art of Illustration. London: WH Allen & Co, 1896. ——— . “Artistic Employment for Women.” Women and Work, August 8, 1874, 5. ——— . “The Illustration of Books and Newspapers.” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review 27, no. 156 (1980): 213-224.

Bromhead, H.W. “Some Contemporary Illustrators.” Art Journal (September 1898): 268-272.

“The Business Side of Art.” Art Journal (August 1888): 249-251

Carter, A.C.R, ed. The Year’s Art. London: J.S. Virtue and Co, 1898.

“Chats with Celebrities: Miss Kate Sadler, the Rose Painter.” Hearth and Home, July 2, 1891, 205-206.

Chiozza Money, L.G. Riches and Poverty. London: Methuen, 1905.

Clayton, Ellen. English Female Artists. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1876.

Crozier, Gladys B. “Elizabeth Stanhope Forbes.” Art Journal (December 1904): 382-384.

Dale, Darley. “Lady Artists.” London Society (November1898): 487-490.

Dixon, Marion Hepworth. “The Art of Mrs Louise Jopling.” Lady’s Realm, 15 (1903-1904): 702-709.

Escott, T.H.S. England: Her People, Polity and Pursuits. New York: Henry Holt, 1880.

“Experiences of a Portrait Painter.” The Crayon 6, no. 6 (1859), 169-170.

Fenwick Miller, Florence. “Ladies Column.” Illustrated London News, October 12, 1889, 480.

Folkestone, William R. “English Pictures and Picture-Dealers.” Belgravia 2 (May 1867): 290-294.

Freiderichs, Hulda. “An Interview with Mr G.F Watts, R.A.” The Young Woman (December 1895): 76.

F.M. “The Work of Miss Ethel Wright.” Artist 22 May, 1898, 33-43.

256

F.M.G. “Famous Women: Lady Artists at Home.” Ludgate Monthly (May 1893): 197-205

Goodman, Walter. “Artists Studios: As They Were Then and as They Are – II.” Magazine of Art (June 1901): 397-402.

Harmsworth, Alfred. “What Shall I be.” Young Folks Paper, December 18, 1886, 388-389.

Hobhouse, Emily. “Women Workers: How They Live, How They Wish to Live.” Nineteenth Century 47 (1900): 471-484.

Holme, Charles. ed. The History of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolours. London: The Studio, 1905.

Huish, Marcus B. “Whence comes this Great Multitude of Painters?” Nineteenth Century 32 (1892): 720-732.

“Interview: Miss Gertrude Demain-Hammond.” The Woman’s Herald, January 10, 1891, 177.

“Kate Greenaway’s Home.” Bow Bells 18 (1892): 164.

“Lady R.A’s: Henrietta Rae.” The Pall Mall Gazette, August 16, 1886.

“A Lady Sculptor: A Chat with Miss Mary Grant.” Heart and Home, May 19, 1892, 17.

“A Latter-day Industry and its Rewards.” New York Times, February 6, 1910, 9.

Leslie, G.D. “The Artist in Relation to his Work.” Art Journal (March 1882): 171-172. ——— . The Inner Life of the Royal Academy. London: John Murray, 1914.

Lewins, Charles H. “The Home of the Christmas Card: An Interview with Mr Adolph Tuck.” The Ludgate (December 1900): 174-180.

“London’s Drawing Rooms and Their chatelaines: Mrs. Jopling’s.” The Lady’s World (August 1887): 340.

James, Henry. Pictures and Text. New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1893. ——— . “The Picture Season in London,” The Galaxy 24, no. 2 (1877): 149-161.

Jopling, Louise. “Occupations for Gentlewomen.” Atalanta 8, no. 88 (1895): 221-223.

Mackenzie, Tessa. The Art Schools of London. London: Chapman and Hall, 1895

Mcfall, Haldane. “Women in Art.” The Academy (December 1904): 621

“Marcus Ward’s Christmas Cards.” Art Journal (January 1874): 295.

Marshall, Frances W. “Qualities that Make for Success in Women Illustrators.” New York Times, December 15, 1912, 11.

257

Merritt, Anna Lea. “A Letter to Artists: Especially Women Artists.” McBride’s Magazine 65 (1900): 463-469.

Meynell, Alice. “Laura Alma-Tadema.” Art Journal (November 1883): 345-347.

Miller, Frank. “Angelica Kaufmann, Royal Academician.” The English Illustrated Magazine 175 (1898): 20-26.

Monkhouse, Cosmo. “Mrs Allingham’s Drawings.” The Academy, April 3, 1886, 245

“The New Type of Studio.” The Athenaeum, 26 September, 1919, 954.

Oldcastle, John. “Our Living Artists. Elizabeth Butler.” Magazine of Art (January 1879): 257-262.

Pennell, Joseph. “A New Profession Wanting Professors.” The Contemporary Review 58, (July 1890): 121-132.

“The Pictorial Press and the Painters.” The Examiner, 10 August, 1878, 1007.

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Archives Consulted

Tate Archive

Eileen Mayo Papers

Stanhope Forbes Papers

Vanessa Bell Papers

Arthur Fish Correspondence

Grace English Collection

Ethel Sands Collection

Edna Clarke-Hall Papers

Victoria and Albert Archive of Art and Design

Helen McKie Papers

Society of Women Artists Records

Dora Lunn Papers

Margaret Calkin James Papers

259

National Art Library

Fine Art Society Catalogues

Clifford Gallery Catalogues

Peterson Gallery Catalogues

Modern Gallery Catalogues

Japanese Gallery Catalogues

Leicester Gallery Catalogues

Isadore Spielmann Correspondence

A.L Baldry Correspondence

Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths University

Women’s International Art Club Archive

Violet Pinwill Papers

Watts Gallery Archive

Mary Seton Watts Papers

George Frederick Watts Papers

Bushey Archive, Bushey Museum and Art Gallery

Lucy Kemp-Welch Papers

260