Victorian Artists By: Jim Lane Scotland Forever! by Lady Butler 40"x76", 1881, oil on canvas Leeds City Art Gallery (Click on picture for more work by Victorian artists.)

With the advent of the women's rights movement from the 1970s on, recent art historians have been forced to take a thorough look at the past importance of women in the arts, particularly as applied to the traditionally all-male bastion of painting. Some have been reluctant to do so. Art Historian H.W. Janson's college text, History of Art as late as 1987 contained not a single reference to a female artist (not even Cassatt or O'keefe). Only after his death did his son edit in material on a mere thirteen female artists out of a total of 2,300. However when women themselves such as Lois Fichner-Rathus and Marilyn Stokstad began writing texts for college level art history courses, the work of great female artists ceased to take the form of tacked-on chapters at the end of the traditional text and instead began to stand shoulder to shoulder with that of their male counterparts in the normal context of painting history. And when it did, more than a few art scholars of both sexes found themselves blinking their eyes in astonishment. They didn't recognize the names but the newly discovered "female art" stood up very well on its own, thank you.

We're all familiar with the almost legendary story of the inclusion of female artists Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser amongst the thirty-six founding members of the England's Royal Academy in 1760. What few of us may be aware of is that the NEXT woman to be elected to membership in this august body was not until 1910. For the 101 years following the death of the flower painter, Mary Moser in 1809, the Royal Academy was an all-male club...and deliberately so. Few of us have ever heard the name of the genre painter, Rolinda Sharples, or miniaturist, Annie Dixon, or portrait artist, Margaret Sarah Carpenter, or Watercolorist, Mary Ellen Best. But for their sex, it's very likely all these, and of course many others, would have been Academy painters. In each case they were free to EXHIBIT at the Royal Academy (and did) but were never even CONSIDERED for possible membership.

In London alone, during the nineteenth century, two to three dozen outstanding female artists rose to some prominence painting everything from tight botanical depictions to scenes of military history in all its frenzied glory and humiliating pathos. The names and work of Lucy Kemp-Welch, Sophie Anderson, Marie Stillman, Anna Lea Merritt, and Kate Elizabeth Bunce particularly stand out. (Click on the image above to see work by these artists.) While Rosa Bonheur was painting action scenes of daily rural life in France (later in England), Elizabeth Thompson, better known by her married name of Lady Butler, was painting scenes from the Crimean War and Waterloo on a very masculine scale. Her Roll Call (1874) and Scotland Forever! (pictured above, 1881) forced even the classic male chauvinist critic, John Ruskin, to admit in seeing them that he'd been wrong in previously asserting that "...no woman could paint." Ruskin was not the first, nor the last man to have to eat those words. All during the latter third of the twentieth century, they've been a staple part of the diet of very many male art historians.

Although there were quite a few of them, the life of a female artists during Victorian times was fraught with all manner of disillusionment and dispair as Anna Bronte portrays in her novel, Tenant of Wildfell Hall published in 1848:

The heroine, Helen, sees her dreamed-of art career literally going up in smoke as her irate husband trashes her studio. It was a typical Victorian view of the woman's place in the grand scheme of things. Any form of profitable endeavor on the part of women in Victorian era England was considered by society, especially it's male members, as being little short of disgraceful; an indication that a woman's husband either couldn't adequately provide for her himself, or was so weak-willed as to be unable to stop her. Needless to say, neither scenario painted a very flattering picture of the husband.

So, how DID the dozens upon dozens of female artists of the era learn their trade and come to ply their skills? Well, fortunately, not ALL Victorian husbands were as intolerant as Helen's. In quite a few cases, they actually welcomed the extra income...theirs to oversee of course...though they usually considered their wives as mere amateurs at their art, amusing themselves between episodes of childbearing, with a hobby which might be somewhat profitable at times. In other cases, they were widows supporting themselves and small children through their labors; and in a few other cases, they were forthright women who had never married, or had divorced their husbands (or been divorced by them) now working to make ends meet at whatever trade they might possess...barely a step above prostitutes in other words.

Quite often these women, such as Henrietta Ward, came from art families and were taught their skills by their fathers, uncles, mothers, or brothers. Frequently watercolor was the medium of choice. And despite impressions to the contrary, it was really not all that difficult for young women to receive formal instruction in painting, usually in the form of private classes, or with small groups of other like-minded girls, from a professional artist, always interested in picking up a few extra pounds for what often amounted to little more than a paying audience as he worked. Actual instruction varied from quite attentive to total silence as the instructor did his own thing. And from the 1850s on, a women could receive a free art education at a government school of design...learning to design and decorate ceramics, textiles, and other household industrial products. But even with such training, the more comely a woman's presence, the more difficult it was for her to find gainful employment, inasmuch as any would-be employer anticipated losing her to marriage, pregnancy, and a family in a very short time. Presumably, the less marriageable had a better chance.

After the 1860s, women were admitted to Royal Academy schools, but it wasn't until 1893 that they were permitted to sit in on classes drawing the nude male figure. Even then, the classes were optional, and special efforts were made not to offend their "delicate sensibilities." The model might be undraped except about the loins. He was to wear bathing drawers, and a cloth of light material nine feet long by three feet wide which was to be wound around the loins over the drawers, passed between the legs, and tucked in over the waistband. Finally, a thin, leather strap was to be fastened round the loins to insure that the cloth remained in place. What, no suspenders? No matter, in Victorian England at the time, there was little, if any, market for paintings depicting the male nude anyway (OR grown men in diapers)...regardless of the sex of the artist.

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Jim Lane is fifty-ish, balding, bearded, bespectacled, professorial, outgoing, knowlegable about a lot of things, expert on a very few. He grew up in the small town of Stockport, situated on the Muskingum River in Southeastern Ohio. He graduated from a un-noteworthy business college in Cincinnati, from the U.S. Air Force, and from Ohio University where he also obtained a masters degree and wracked up several hours of post-graduate work as well. For most of his professional life he's run a portrait business out of his home, specializing in sports portraits done in pencil and colored pencil.

Happily married for 30 years, Jim taught elementary and high school art for 26 years and also spent many enjoyable hours in the front of a local community college classroom. Recently he has retired from teaching in favor of painting, traveling, writing, designing web pages, and "...doing things I've never done before."

E-mail Jim at: jimlane@jimlaneart.com

Visit The Jim Lane Collection at:   http://www.jimlaneart.com

Or Jim Lane's Arty-fact Archives at:   http://www.1st.net/users/jimlane/Archive.html