In late May of 1813, Jane Austen was staying with her brother Henry in London and took the opportunity to visit three art exhibitions. On Friday, May 21, “to her great amusement,” they saw the exhibition in Spring Gardens of the Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours. Jane reported to her sister Cassandra that, even though “[i]t is not thought a good collection,” the exhibition brought her the pleasure of seeing “a small portrait of Mrs Bingley, excessively like her” (24 May 1813). On Monday, May 24, they went to the Royal Academy of Art’s annual Summer Exhibition at Somerset House and an exhibition of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s works at the British Institution.1 Jane was disappointed not to find a portrait of Mrs. Darcy at either, telling Cassandra, “I can only imagine that Mr D. prizes any Picture of her too much to like it should be exposed to the public eye” (24 May 1813). At Spring Gardens and Somerset House, Austen had the opportunity to view paintings, drawings, and sculptures by over forty women artists who were exposing their works to the public eye. This essay explores the training methods, professional activities, chosen subject matter, and publications of these female artists. In viewing the works of these women, Austen was exposed to their public and professional role as artists in Regency society.
At the same time Austen was observing the offerings of these professional women, her Pride and Prejudice had gained the attention of the public to such an extent since its publication in January 1813 that Anne Isabella Milbanke (future wife of Lord Byron) called it the fashionable novel (Fergus, “Literary Marketplace” 46). Austen undertook her writing career during a time when there had been a dramatic increase in the number of published female authors, rising fifty percent each decade in the second half of the eighteenth century. Although men published more novels than women until the 1790s, by the time Austen’s works appeared in print in the 1810s, novels by women were twice as prevalent as those by men (43). An increasing women’s presence in the visual arts marketplace was also occurring during Austen’s era, as great numbers of women were exhibiting their work in public spaces. The art historian Paris Spies-Gans has found that in the seventy years after 1760, 7,000 works of art were shown by 1,300 women at public exhibitions in London and Paris, comprising seven to twelve percent of the works on display (Revolution 2).
The Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours and the Royal Academy
The organization that was responsible for the 1813 exhibition seen by Austen at Spring Gardens had recently undergone a restructuring. The Society of Painters in Water Colours was established in 1804 and held its first exhibition in 1805, which was so successful that it became an annual event. The society was cooperative, with profits being shared among the exhibitors. Poor financial management and declining visitor numbers led to its collapse in 1812, but later that year it was re-formed, with largely the same membership and with the new name The Society of Painters in Oil and Watercolours. From 1809 to 1820, exhibitions were held at Spring Gardens in the Great Room (the term used for an exhibition gallery at that time). The space was 58 x 44 feet in size and was leased from a Mr. Wigley (Roget 233). From its founding, the society accepted female exhibitors, later admitting a few women as associates, and then members, beginning in 1809 with Anne Frances Byrne (1775–1837) (Yeldham 76–77). Harriot (often misspelled Harriet) Gouldsmith (later Arnold, 1787–1863) became a member in 1812, and her landscapes, along with the work of non-members Elizabeth Mulready (née Varley, 1784–1864) and Mrs. C. White,2 were on view at the 1813 exhibition seen by Austen (Exhibition of the Society of Painters in Water Colours 12–13).
The establishment of the Society of Painters in Water Colours had grown out of artists’ frustration with having their works hung to disadvantage amidst oil paintings at the exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Arts. This august institution was founded in 1768 as “a school or academy of design for the use of students in the arts” (qtd. in Macdonald 62). Its annual exhibition was attended by tens of thousands of visitors, and having one’s art hung there was a mark of distinction. By the time Austen visited in 1813, the Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition at Somerset House dominated public taste and patronage in the visual arts.3
Among the thirty-four founding Academy members were two women, Mary Moser (1744–1819, Fig. 1) and Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807, Fig. 2). Moser specialized in flower painting, and she also produced portraits and historical subjects. Kauffman, a Swiss-born artist who had a successful career in London and Rome, was known primarily for her neoclassical history paintings and portraits. There are no surviving records as to how or why they were chosen as Academicians, but Amanda Vickery speculates that they both “possessed the requisite credentials in history painting which, combined with a level of court favour and professional achievement, probably made them difficult to exclude” (2016). Their participation in the Academy was limited in comparison to that of their male counterparts. They were not allowed to attend life drawing classes, which involved nude models, on the grounds of propriety. This fact is made clear in Johann Zoffany’s painting The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy of 1771–1772 (Fig. 3), which shows the male members of the Academy in a life class. Moser and Kauffman appear only virtually, in two portraits hung high on a wall. Moreover, the women were not admitted to the Council responsible for the oversight of the Academy, so they could play no role in governance.4
Figure 1. George Romney, Mary Moser (c. 1770–71). |
Figure 2. Angelica Kauffman, Self-Portrait (1770–75). |
Figure 3. Johann Zoffany, The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy (1771–72). |
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Members and non-members alike entered works for adjudication and display at the Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition, and Kauffman and Moser were not the only female artists to do so. Women took part in the exhibition on a consistent basis from the very first year, and their participation steadily increased. Beginning with four exhibitors in 1769, by 1800 an unprecedented sixty-five women had work shown in the exhibition (Spies-Gans, “1800”). In 1813, Austen was one of 72,421 visitors to view the works of thirty-eight women artists (plus works on permanent display by Moses and Kauffman), who constituted eight percent of the 476 artists whose work was shown (Exhibition of the Royal Academy; Ardill).
Professionalism of female artists
Figure 4. Giuseppe Ceracchi, Anne Seymour Damer as the Muse of Sculpture (1778).
Just as Austen and other authors of her time published anonymously due to fears about harming their genteel reputations by undertaking professional activity, some visual artists of this period exhibited anonymously or without making their full names known. For instance, a “Miss S—” is included in the 1813 Royal Academy catalogue. She and eleven other female artists are listed, along with thirty male artists,5 as “Honorary” exhibitors, designated as such due to their high social standing and/or non-professional status. This list included the Honorable Anne Seymour Damer (1748–1828), who was the granddaughter of a duke on her mother’s side and of a baron on her father’s side. She was also the cousin and goddaughter of Horace Walpole, the renowned writer and art historian, who noticed signs of her talent as a sculptor when she was young. Due to his encouragement and her great financial means, she had access to anatomy lessons with the physician William Cruikshank and formal training with the sculptors John Bacon and Giuseppe Ceracchi, the latter of whom depicted her in a full-size marble as the Muse of Sculpture (Fig. 4).6
Training by such eminent masters in the art of sculpture was not the norm for women at this time. Most art instruction for upper- and middle-class females was conducted by drawing masters or governesses, either at home or at a boarding school such as “one of the first private seminaries in town” attended by the Bingley sisters (PP 16). The instruction was functional in two ways: a basic knowledge of composition and color was deemed necessary for the domestic arts, such as embroidery; drawing and watercolor painting were seen as accomplishments that would make women attractive to prospective husbands.7 As Caroline Bingley outlines, “‘A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages”’ (PP 43).
Lessons in artistic accomplishments were undertaken by the Austen sisters; in 1785 they studied drawing with the watercolorist John Claude Nattes (Barchas, “More”). Cassandra produced the only universally accepted depictions of her sister (Figs. 5 and 6), and as Janine Barchas thoroughly explores in her essay in this edition of Persuasions On-Line, she made pencil and watercolor copies after popular prints throughout her life. Although no extant drawing by Jane exists, Henry Austen’s “Biographical Notice of the Author” states that she “had not only an excellent taste for drawing, but, in her earlier days, evinced great power of hand in the management of the pencil” (Austen-Leigh 139). In a 1798 letter to her sister, Cassandra, she wrote about a gift she had sent a nephew: “I hope George was pleased with my designs. Perhaps they would have suited him as well had they been less elaborately finished; but an artist cannot do anything slovenly. . . . I shall send George another picture when I write next” (17–18 November 1798). In her novels, there are various levels of attention given to the accomplishment of drawing: none of the Bennet girls practices the art, Georgiana Darcy’s drawings in crayons are on display at Pemberley, and Emma Woodhouse has begun but never completed many “[m]iniatures, half-lengths, whole-lengths, pencil, crayon, and water-colours” (E 45). Only Elinor Dashwood seems to take her art seriously, but even she might give in to the tendency of neglecting her acquired accomplishments after marriage.8
Figure 5. Cassandra Austen, Jane Austen (c. 1810). |
Figure 6. Cassandra Austen, Back View of Jane Austen (1804). |
Many women of Austen’s time, however, had artistic ambitions that went beyond the marriage market, obtaining instruction after the “finishing school stage” with professional artists, who were often family friends. Like their male counterparts, they learned to draw and paint from life and by studying the works of other artists. An 1808 interior scene at the British Institution (where Austen saw the Reynolds exhibition in 1813) shows men and women, palettes and brushes in their hands, with their easels set up in front of paintings on the walls (Fig. 7).
Figure 7. John Bluck, Thomas Rowlandson, and Auguste Charles Pugin, The British Institution, Pall Mall (April 1, 1808).
(Click here to see a larger version.)
The fact that these easels hold canvases for oil paintings shows that the mediums used by women artists of Austen’s era defied expectations. In 1796, the artist and diarist Joseph Farington noted that Mary Smirke (1779–1853) wanted to paint in oil, but her father, the artist Robert Smirke, doubted that it was “a manner of practicing the art suitable to the Sex.” Farington told him that if she was given a firm foundation in drawing, she could “practice any branch of art she may be inclined to, and should she prefer painting in Oil,” he would “not discourage it. Angelica is an instance of success” (qtd. in Spies-Gans, Revolution 102). It is true that Angelica Kauffman, along with fellow founding Academician Mary Moser, painted in oil, as did other artists such as Harriot Gouldsmith and Harriet A. E. Jackson (later Browning, active 1803–34), whose works Austen saw in 1813.
Figure 8. Anne Seymour Damer, Sir Joseph Banks (1812–13).
Women sculptors were rare before the late nineteenth century, and there were only two works by females on display in the Model Academy at the 1813 Royal Academy exhibition: A small group in bronze—Clio Feeding Pegasus, by Mrs. T. Dickins, and Anne Seymour Damer’s portrait of Sir Joseph Banks (Fig. 8). Sculpting in the soft and pliable medium of wax was deemed appropriate for women and was practiced by non-professional and professional artists alike. It was assumed, however, that the weaker female sex was not suited for the manual labor involved with working in stone, wood, or metal. Damer produced wax profile portraits, but, unusually, she also worked in other mediums to create her bust figures from classical mythology, portrait busts of her family and friends, animal sculptural groups, and bas reliefs of allegorical and Shakespearean subjects.9 She produced plaster and clay models, the latter of which were fired to become terracotta and were then sometimes painted to look like bronze. Other clay models were cast in bronze by a foundry (as was the case with her portrait of Banks) or carved in marble. While most artists had their models sent out for copying by specialist carvers, Walpole advised Damer to carve her own marble. A reviewer of the 1784 exhibition, at which Damer made her Royal Academy debut, proclaimed, “The oddity of her achievement is striking!—The marble statues from a female hand!” (qtd. in Spies Gans, Revolution 29).
Figure 9. Anne Seymour Damer, George III (1790–94).
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Damer and the other female artists whose works Austen saw in 1813 were gifted and persistent enough to take their artistic practices in these various mediums into the realm of professionalism. Although Damer always exhibited in the Honorary category at the Royal Academy due to her social status, she sought and executed public commissions during her long career, including a full-length sculpture of George III that is still on display in the Scottish National Register Office in Edinburgh (Fig. 9). Spies-Gans has pointed out that a majority of the women exhibiting in the Royal Academy exhibitions listed their names and addresses in the catalogues, thus inviting potential clients to visit their studios to survey, purchase, or commission artworks (Revolution 12). In 1813, there were twenty-six such women. For instance, Mary Lawrance (later Kearse, 1781–1845) is listed at “Foley street, Foley place.”
The addresses of several of the women that year are listed “as above,” referring to those of their male family members—for example, Mary Green (née Byrne, 1776–1845) at the address of her fellow artist husband, James Green, on “Little Argyll street.” More than two-thirds of female artists with professional ambitions were related by birth and/or marriage to male artists and were either trained by them or at their side as part of a family-based practice (Spies-Gans, Revolution 84). This family support was crucial to their ability to be professional artists, as it was not socially acceptable for women of the genteel and middle classes to earn money from their labor. Mary Moser’s father, George Michael Moser, was a Swiss enamel painter and gold chaser who served as drawing-master to George III during his boyhood; along with his daughter, whom he trained, he was a founding member of the Academy. Angelica Kauffman was trained by and worked as an assistant to her father, Joseph Johann Kauffmann, a muralist and painter. The father and brother of Emma Eleonora Kendrick (1788–1871), who exhibited four portraits in 1813, were both sculptors. The painter and illustrator Robert Smirke, a member of the Academy, trained his daughter Mary, a well-regarded landscape painter; his other children included architects Robert and Sydney and draughtsman Richard. Mary Green, in addition to being the wife of John Green, was the daughter of William Byrne, the brother of John Byrne, and sister of the aforementioned Anne Frances Byrne, all of whom were professional artists. An image from 1803 illustrates how closely a family of artists could work together (Fig. 10). Drawn by Mary Ann Flaxman (1768–1833), it shows men and women sketching as they sit around a table. The group includes Elizabeth Mulready, who exhibited two landscapes in each of the 1813 exhibitions discussed in this essay, and her husband William Mulready.
Figure 10. Mary Ann Flaxman, John Varley, William Mulready and others sketching at a table (1803).
Figure 11. Mary Green, A Young Lady (n.d.).
In addition to training and general encouragement, family members could aid in other matters of professionalism, including advocating for good placement of their works at exhibitions. In preparation for the official opening of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition on the first Monday in May (or sometimes the last Monday in April), a Committee of Arrangement determined where each work was hung. The most prestigious place was the Great Room (here meaning the main exhibition room), and even within that gallery some locations were more favorable. During the first part of April, the committee considered special requests made by exhibitors, at which time artists advocated for themselves and for others. In 1809, the first year in which Mary Smirke exhibited, her View of Arundel Castle earned a place in the Great Room, and the next year her father, Robert, asked whether her “View of Lowther . . . was placed in the Great room or not, that it might be taken away if not so placed” (qtd. in Spies-Gans, Revolution 116). The committee decided to place it elsewhere, so he had it removed from the exhibition. In other instances, women petitioned for the favorable placement of their own art. In early April 1812, Mary Green told Farington, who was a member of that year’s committee, that she was “urgent for a good situation for Her miniatures” (qtd. in Spies-Gans, Revolution 116) (Fig. 11).
After the pictures were hung, they were numbered in sequence according to their location, and the same order was followed in the catalogue that visitors consulted as they progressed through the exhibition. The 1813 catalogue lists 945 works in the order in which Jane Austen would have viewed them if she followed this practice. In the Great Room, filled with 244 entries,10 she would have seen twelve by eight female artists, including portraits, studies from nature, landscapes by Mary Smirke and Elizabeth Mulready, and a mythological scene by Harriet A. E. Jackson, an Honorary exhibitor. The 114 entries hung in the Inner Room included a literary scene by Jackson. The Ante-Room, in which fifty-six entries were exhibited, included two portraits by a Miss Singleton, and the Antique Academy, hung with 165 entries, primarily miniatures, included thirty-one portrait entries by twelve female artists. The next grouping in the catalogue is labelled “Drawings, &c”; its 218 entries include portraits, botanicals, a landscape, and an architectural view, from fifteen female artists, eight Honorary exhibitors among them. Next in the sequence came the Council Room, in which works by Academicians were on permanent display, including two flower paintings by Mary Moser11 and four large ceiling paintings by Angelica Kauffman. The Library was hung with ninety-five entries, including a church interior scene by Mrs. Preston Keenan. The last room to be viewed was the Model Academy; the fifty-three works on display here included the sculptures noted above by Mrs. T. Dickins and Anne Seymour Damer, both Honorary exhibitors.
As the list above shows, women’s lack of access to membership or training at the Royal Academy did not dissuade them from participating in its exhibitions. Spies-Gans posits that their participation in competition with their male peers helped female artists to “establish a mainstream, public presence” (Revolution 27). Their works, too, had to be adjudicated into the exhibition by an (all-male) selection committee, which in 1813 included Royal Academy President Benjamin West, George Dance, Joseph Farington, Robert Smirke, Robert Smirke Junior, James Ward, Richard Westmacott, and David Wilkie (Ardill).12 Moreover, the variety of subject matter produced by these female artists mirrored that of their male peers. While still life and flower painting were merely imitative and could therefore be the province of women, history painting was the most elevated and intellectually driven according to the standards of the Academy and was therefore the domain of men.
Subject matter
Figure 13. Mary Moser, Standing female nude (n.d.).
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The fact that women produced history paintings, which included religious, allegorical, mythological, and literary scenes, goes against the long-held belief that they could not do so because they had no access to the life drawing classes essential for anatomical study.13 Surviving drawings show that, although it is not known if they ever attended formal life drawing classes, women were in fact drawing the nude figure. Responding to rumors that he posed for Angelica Kauffman, the Academy model Charles Cranmer said “that he did frequently sit . . . at her house . . . but that he only exposed his arms, shoulders, and legs and that her father, who was also an artist . . . , was always present” (qtd. in Spies-Gans, Revolution 91–92). A 1771 drawing by Kauffman shows a nude male whose entire midsection is covered by drapery (Fig. 12). A signed drawing by Mary Moser depicts a nude female in a classically inspired contrapposto pose (Fig. 13).
Figure 12. Angelica Kauffman, An academic study of a young man on the ground (1771).
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Studies could be made of nudes found in other artists’ drawings, prints, paintings, and sculpture, including plaster casts of works from antiquity. The practice of women studying three-dimensional nudes, however, seems to have been frowned upon by some. An English visitor to the Louvre was shocked to see a female French artist copying a nude male sculpture there, commenting on the lack of propriety that went against his country’s moral values (Yeldham 9). This standard was obviously not universal, however, as, for example, Anne Seymour Damer was one of several women known to have been admitted to the British Museum to study antique sculpture (Myrone).
Figure 14. Angelica Kauffman, Page from a sketch book: No. 87 Apollo Belvedere (1762–66).
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Angelica Kauffman too must have studied from ancient sculptures, as evidenced by a drawing of the Apollo Belvedere found in her sketchbook (Fig. 14). One of the four ceiling panels illustrating the “Elements of Art” that she executed for the Royal Academy’s Council Chamber, and which Austen would have seen in 1813, shows the allegorical figure of Design sketching a classical sculpture known as the Belvedere Torso. Kauffman deviates from tradition in that Design is usually shown as a man. The other three figures in the series are also women: the figure of Colouring has produced a rainbow with her brush, Invention looks to the sky for inspiration, and Composition is deep in thought, her head resting on her hand. (Fig. 15)
Figure 15. Angelica Kauffman, Design, Colouring, Composition, Invention (1778–80).
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Kauffman’s successor in this type of subject matter was Harriet A. E. Jackson. An 1805 drawing by Alfred Edward Chalon shows her among male and female students and artists copying pictures at the British Institution (Fig. 16). On the left side of the picture, the comically tall Douglas Guest, a painter of history scenes and portraits, speaks to her as she stands in front of a canvas on which she is painting putti. Although according to exhibition records Jackson was the most prolific female exhibitor of classical subjects of the first twenty years of the nineteenth century, no extant works by her have been identified. The titles listed in catalogues give an idea of the scope of her oeuvre. Her work demonstrates the tendency for women artists to focus on female subjects in their history paintings, with themes frequently involving separation from, mourning of, or reunion with loved ones, and with an emphasis on the emotional effect on women (Yeldham 120). The two paintings Jackson showed in 1813 were a mythological piece, Clymene Mourning over the Tomb of Phaeton (listed in the catalogue with a quotation from “Ovid’s Metam. Garth’s edit. Vol. i. book ii.”), and a literary work, Edmund and Ella on the Vigil of St. Mark (listed with a quotation from “Montgomery’s Poems, p. 145”).
Figure 16. Alfred Edward Chalon, Students at the British Institution (1805).
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Earlier that year, Jackson had shown Naomi and her Daughters-in-law before the City of Bethlehem-Judah at the British Institution. In the April 1813 edition of Ackermann’s Repository for the Arts, a reviewer of the exhibition commented that although the work was “well coloured, and has considerable pathos,” there was an issue with the inclusion of a nude figure:
It is acknowledged, that a lady may have a genius for composition wherein an exhibition of the naked figure is most congenial to her talent for painting: yet, without wishing to encourage fastidious notions upon the subject of art, allowing full scope to philosophical feelings as they regard study, there are subjects of art not less dignified, where the human figure may be displayed, embracing whatever is fine in composition, expression, drawing, and colouring, and yet clothed. If subjects are occasionally painted wherein the human figure is shewn entirely naked, we cannot but express our wish, that the composition should not be chosen by a lady. (qtd. in Yeldham 120)
This type of sentiment had been shown to biting effect in a satirical print of 1789, The Damerian Apollo (Fig. 17). Working in a studio filled with nude figures, Anne Seymour Damer is shown with her chisel resting on the posterior of a full-size sculpture of Apollo. Her hammer raised threateningly above her head, she is seemingly ready to castrate the figure. Her focus on the production of nude classical figures was seen as immoral and unfeminine, as were her occasional wearing of men’s clothes, her unwillingness to remarry after the death of her husband, and her very close friendships with women.14
Figure 17. Unknown artist, The Damerian Apollo (1 July 1789).
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Despite this negative publicity, Damer was able to have a long and successful career as an artist, with most of her output being portraiture, such as the bust of Banks seen by Austen in 1813. Art historian Charlotte Yeldham has found that almost all early nineteenth-century women artists undertook the genre, with many specializing in it; others began as portrait painters before branching out into other genres. According to Yeldham, portraiture was considered acceptable for female practice because a level of ability could be obtained without intensive training. Moreover, portraiture was seen to involve a skillset that women possessed: “intuition, insight into character, [and] sympathy” (104). Portraiture was frequently practiced by non-professional artists, as evidenced by Cassandra Austen’s two portraits of Jane and by Emma Woodhouse’s attempts to capture the likenesses of those in her circle.15
Figure 18. William Blake, after François Huet-Villiers, Portrait of Mrs. Q (1820).
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Although not considered as important as historical scenes, portrait painting was championed by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy. By depicting sitters with elements drawn from classical forms and figures, and sometimes even in the guises of allegorical or mythological characters, he produced portraits in the “Grand Manner.” In general, portraiture was lucrative because it catered to and flattered wealthy patrons, and practitioners could raise their social status and gain financial stability. Portraiture at the 1813 exhibition at Spring Gardens elicited the notice of Austen herself. As mentioned earlier, she saw a portrait of a women whom she imagined to be Jane (Bennet) Bingley, usually identified as Portrait of a Lady by J.F.M. Huet-Villiers (Fig. 18):16
Mrs Bingley’s is exactly herself, size, shaped face, features & sweetness; there never was a greater likeness. She is dressed in a white gown, with green ornaments, which convinces me of what I had always supposed, that green was a favourite colour with her. I dare say Mrs D. will be in Yellow. (24 May 1813)
Not seeing a portrait that reminded her of Elizabeth (Bennet) Darcy at any of the three exhibitions she views, Austen decides that Darcy would think a portrait of his wife to be too private an object to be seen by the public. This view would be unusual for the time, however, as many people were willing to have their portraits on display.
Spies-Gans has calculated that portraiture was the most popular subject matter at the Royal Academy exhibitions, with over fifty percent of works between 1769 and 1830 being portraits or miniatures (Revolution 118). The review of the 1813 exhibition in Ackermann’s Repository for the Arts underscores this pattern:
The most prominent feature of the present Exhibition, like many heretofore, is composed of portraits; and although little general interest may be expected to result from a display of heads of persons, the far greater part of whom are only known to a limited circle of friends, yet to the lover of the fine arts there is a charm in light, shadow, and colour, when judiciously arranged, that cannot fail to be felt and acknowledged, be the subject of imitation whatever it may. But even were it not so, the public cannot justly complain of this preponderance of portraits in our national Exhibition, when that same public patronise this department of art, almost to the exclusion of every other. The great talent which our artists manifest in portraiture is at least a proof of British genius, which, were it equally encouraged in other subjects, would alike attain excellence and command admiration. (“Exhibition at Somerset-House” 355)
Figure 19. Thomas Phillips, HRH the Prince Regent, later King George IV (1813).
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Portraits on view that year ranged in size and in the importance of the sitter, from Thomas Phillips’s portrait of the Prince Regent on horseback (Fig. 19), to the miniature Portrait of a Lady exhibited by Mary Green at the 1813 Royal Academy exhibition (one of her three entries that year).17 Green became a miniature painter after studying with the Genevan artist Louis-Ami Arlaud-Jurine, and her work consistently received good reviews. For instance, in 1821 a critic described her style as “unusually firm,” praised her “accomplishing eye for massing the lights, shades, and colour,” and concluded that “the miniatures of this artist are superior to most even of good ones by other [i.e., male] hands” (qtd. in Spies-Gans, Revolution 164).
Along with portraits, landscapes produced by women were plentiful at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1813, Austen saw the work of Harriot Gouldsmith and Elizabeth Mulready at the Society of Painters in Oil and Water Colours exhibition and of Mulready and Mary Smirke at the Royal Academy. Yeldham has found Gouldsmith to be the most prolific female landscape artist of the era, with 204 exhibited works (155). She studied with Elizabeth’s husband William Mulready and counted him and the artist John Linell as her close friends.18 Like Linell, she produced naturalistic landscape paintings and prints in the romantic tradition. In 1818 a critic wrote of Gouldsmith: “her style of landscape painting has nothing in it of common place; it is always a simple, but tastefully selected copy from nature” (qtd. in Yeldham 155). A work from that year, A View of Hampstead Heath Looking Towards Cannon Place, shows a cluster of trees and a meandering split rail fence in the foreground, with a view of buildings in the far background, all set under a sky of dramatic clouds.
Figure 21. Mary Lawrance, Rosa centifolia (1799).
Like landscape paintings, still lifes required no anatomical training and were therefore considered quite appropriate for female artists. Thirteen works by six artists were featured in Ackermann’s Repository for the Arts review of the 1813 Royal Academy exhibition, and the only one produced by a woman was Flowers from Nature by Miss Soilleux, an Honorary exhibitor. The reviewer noted its conspicuous placement in the exhibition (which the catalogue lists as being in the “Drawings, &c.” room) and praised it: “The composition is tasteful, the colouring brilliant, and the execution free, combining botanical truth and the varied hues of nature with pleasing pictorial effect” (“Exhibition at Somerset-House” 355). The most well-known flower painter whose work Austen saw at Somerset House was the Academician Mary Moser; two of her works in this genre were on permanent display in the Council Room (Fig. 20).19 Her compositions are in the tradition of Dutch Baroque floral still lifes in that they were not composed directly from nature (i.e., depicting flowers that bloom at different times) and contain symbolism and/or references to the seasons, in contrast to the accurate botanical studies of Mary Lawrance, who showed her work Flowers from Nature at the 1813 Royal Academy exhibition. By that time, Lawrance had drawn, etched, and colored three publications of flower prints. A Collection of Roses from Nature (1799) was the first book to be wholly devoted to roses, which were newly popular in English gardens at that time (“A Collection of Roses from Nature”) (Fig. 21). She followed this publication with two more, Sketches of Flowers from Nature (1801), and A Collection of Passion Flowers Coloured from Nature (1802).
Figure 20. Mary Moser, Spring and Summer (c. 1780).
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Other artistic and commercial activities
Figure 22. Peltro William Tomkins, after Angelica Kauffman, The Muses Crowning the Bust of Pope (1783).
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Prints such as Lawrance’s were popular during this time, and there was also a fashion for “furniture prints,” which were framed and hung on the wall as opposed to being kept in a portfolio. They were produced using a stipple technique that creates subtle tonal variations. David Alexander has shown that there were more of these prints engraved after Angelica Kauffman’s works than of any other painter in England, and he has compiled a checklist of 311 examples (179–89) (Fig. 22). Stipple prints were also made after Anne Seymour Damer’s sculptures, including Sleeping Dogs (Figs. 23 and 24) and The Immortal Nelson (Figs. 25 and 26), and Mary Green’s miniatures, such as her Portrait of Queen Adelaide when Duchess of Clarence (Figs. 27 and 28). The enlarged distribution made possible by the multiplicity of the print medium garnered artists greater sales, reputations, and commissions.
Figure 23. John Carey after Anne Seymour Damer, Sleeping Dogs (1785). |
Figure 24. Anne Seymour Damer, Two Sleeping Dogs (1784). |
Figure 25. After Anne Seymour Damer, The Immortal Nelson (1805). |
Figure 26. After Anne Seymour Damer, Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson, Viscount Nelson (1827). |
Figure 27. Francis Engleheart after Mary Green, Her Most Excellent Majesty Queen Adelaide (1830). |
Figure 28. Mary Green, Queen Adelaide (1792–1849), when Duchess of Clarence (c. 1818). |
Figure 29. Emma Eleonora Kendrick, George Gordon Noel Byron (1812).
Artists could also increase their income by becoming instructors. Mary Lawrance described herself on the title page of A Collection of Roses from Nature as a teacher of botanical art, Mary Moser taught the daughters of George III and Queen Charlotte, and Mary Smirke earned money by giving lessons in drawing. Smirke and others also supplemented their income in other ways, such as painting copies of other artists’ works.20 Although her own works were primarily landscapes, Smirke was commissioned by the portraitists George Dance and Thomas Lawrence to copy their paintings (Sloan 204). Emma Eleonora Kendrick was commissioned by Lady Caroline Lamb to copy a portrait of her ex-lover Lord Byron by George Sanders, which was in the possession of Byron’s publisher, John Murray. Kendrick’s portrait miniature was set in a gold locket inscribed “ne crede Byron” (“do not trust Byron”) (Fig. 29).
The commercial efforts of women artists demonstrate that although they could undertake an artistic career due to their genuine passion for painting, financial considerations were often involved. Elizabeth Mulready began exhibiting at the Academy in 1809, two years after separating from her husband, seeking a way to earn a living for herself and her three sons (who all became artists) (Spies-Gans, “Exhibiting”). Harriot Gouldsmith proved to be both assertive and innovative in her commercial activities. In addition to engaging in the profit-sharing of The Society of Painters in Water Colours, she produced landscape prints and sold them by subscriptions, arranged to have her works sold at auction, organized a one-woman exhibition from which collectors could purchase the work by lottery, and wrote a book titled A Voice from a Picture, by a Female Artist of the Present Day.21
Artists and authors
It is interesting to note that although she had no concerns about listing her name in exhibition catalogues, Gouldsmith published A Voice from a Picture anonymously in 1839. Likewise, Anne Seymour Damer, who always listed herself as the creator of her sculptures, anonymously published a novel, Belmour, in 1801. Gouldsmith and Damer were following the practice of many female authors who published their first works anonymously. For instance, Frances Burney and Ann Radcliffe identified their authorship on subsequent novels only after their reputations had been established (Fergus, “Professional Woman Writer” 2). Austen’s name did not appear on any of her works during her lifetime.22
Despite all of Gouldsmith’s commercial efforts, she constantly found herself on the brink of insolvency. A Voice from a Picture, published in the same year she finally married, at the age of fifty-two, was an account of her struggles as a professional woman. Female visual artists, as well as writers, were not always able to survive financially without the help of their family members and husbands. It is fortunate that the limited funds of the unmarried Jane and Cassandra Austen and their widowed mother were supplemented with contributions from the Austen brothers, as the total of approximately £650 that Jane earned from her writing during her life could not support their household (Fergus, “Literary Marketplace” 47).
Along with monetary help, Austen’s male relatives assisted in getting her novels in front of the public eye. Like Mary Smirke’s father, who advocated for the advantageous placement of her work at the Royal Academy exhibitions, Austen’s father offered the manuscript of First Impressions (an early version of Pride and Prejudice) to the prominent London publishers Cadell & Davies, knowing that it was important that it appear first “under a respectable name” (qtd. in Mandal 42). Her brother Henry acted as her unofficial literary agent, negotiating with Egerton and later with John Murray. Austen, like many women artists whose work was cultivated in artistic families, had her own circle of relatives who were published authors, including her mother’s cousins Cassandra Leigh Cooke and James Henry Leigh, as well as her brothers James and Henry (Fergus, “Professional Woman Writer” 4).
Austen had her own artistic output in mind as she focused on finding the faces of her characters from Pride and Prejudice in the 1813 exhibitions, and in her letter to Cassandra she did not relate anything about the artists whose works she saw. If she followed the standard practice of consulting the catalogues as she walked through the exhibitions, however, she would have read the names of women who exposed their work to the public eye, establishing a public presence by announcing their identity as artists and claiming “authorship” of their works. Austen did not do this herself in print, publishing Pride and Prejudice anonymously. The novel’s popularity, which was rising at that very moment, however, eventually led Henry Austen to reveal her authorship to his acquaintances. In September 1813 she wrote to her brother Frank about that fact, saying that she hoped he and his wife would respect her wishes to keep the secret, but that “I shall rather try to make all the Money than all the Mystery I can of it.—People shall pay for their Knowledge if I can make them” (25 September 1813). Although she would not publish under her own name, Austen was as concerned with her professional status as the female artists whose works were on view at Spring Gardens and Somerset House.
NOTES
1Janine Barchas explores the Reynolds exhibition on http://www.whatjanesaw.org.
2When a female artist is mentioned in this essay without a first name and/or dates, it is an indication that this author was unable to find that information.
3See Solkin’s Art on the Line for a thorough history of the Royal Academy.
4Women were not admitted to the Royal Academy schools until 1860, and another woman was not elected as a full Academician until 1936. Annette Wickham’s “A ‘Female Invasion’ 250 Years in the Making” is an excellent history of women at the Royal Academy.
5I have calculated all such statistics by reviewing the 1813 Academy catalogue.
6I first explored the work of this then little-known artist in my Master’s thesis in 1996. Since that time, Damer has been the subject of a novel by Emma Donoghue, biographies by Jonathan David Gross and Richard Webb, and various exhibitions, including In Focus: Celebrating Sculptress Anne Seymour Damer (2021–22) at Walpole’s home Strawberry Hill, which she inherited after his death.
7Maureen McCue discusses the era’s protest against female accomplishments as substitutions for the substantive education of women. However, she sees women’s domestic art practices and the consumption of other aspects of visual culture as offering “an avenue for the exploration of self” and as “important ways to demonstrate one’s skill, knowledge and taste” (135).
8Lady Middleton, of course, after her marriage “celebrated that event by giving up music, although by her mother’s account she had played extremely well, and by her own was very fond of it” (SS 41), and Mrs. Elton lists several married women who have “‘entirely given up music’” (E 299).
9Her work was included in John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, and Barchas proposes that Austen visited that exhibition in 1796 (What Jane Saw).
10I use the term “entries” instead of “works” because some of them seem to include more than one work: e.g., Mary Green’s entry #438, “Portraits of G. Spence, Esq. and a lady.”
11In 1793, Mary Moser married Captain Hugh Lloyd, so in the 1813 exhibition catalogue she is listed as Mary Lloyd. In the context of art history, she is generally called by her maiden name.
12Mary Smirke therefore had two family members on the selection committee that accepted three of her landscapes into the exhibition, all hung in the Great Room.
13See, for example, Linda Nochlin’s “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”
14These facts led her to being labeled a Sapphist, including in the pamphlet A Sapphick Epistle, from Jack Cavendish to the Honourable and most Beautiful, Mrs D*** (1771). It is unknown if she self-identified as such.
15Jeffrey Nigro explores how Cassandra Austen experimented with the artistic conventions of the time in her images of Jane. For discussions of how Emma Woodhouse’s production of Harriet Smith’s portrait helps add to the growing self-awareness of the heroine, see McCue (137–38) and Wells (201).
16Martha M. Rainbolt (among others) believes that the most likely attribution for this portrait is Huet-Villiers’ Portrait of a Lady, but Deirdre Le Faye lists three other possibilities, all miniatures by Charles John Robertson: Portrait of Lady Anderson, Portrait of Mrs. Clarke of Weston-Place (as listed in the catalogue; Le Faye notes that it is actually “Welton”), and Portrait of Lady Nelthorpe (Jane Austen’s Letters 416–17).
17See Zohn’s “Portraits of Imperfect Affection” for a discussion of portrait miniatures in Austen’s life and works, including her comparison of her novel writing to “the little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush” (16–17 December 1816).
18The Mulreadys married in 1803 and were formally separated in 1810. Kathryn Moore Heleniak recounts the possible causes for their separation, which may have included William’s romantic involvement with Linell and Gouldsmith, who were both his students (William Mulready 8–13).
19In the 1813 catalogue, these works are listed with the title “Flowers” and as having been presented in 1770. The only two paintings currently in the Royal Academy’s collection, Summer and Spring, are listed as being painted and given by the artist ca. 1780, and I suspect they are the same works.
20Royal Academy rules prohibited the display of copies in its exhibitions (Puetz). Barchas points out that the tendency of the time to champion imagination over imitation has led to an under-appreciation of Cassandra Austen’s copies after prints (“More”).
21For an excellent overview of Gouldsmith’s work and commercial activities, see Heleniak’s “Money and Marketing Problems.”
22Cassandra Austen signed some of her pictures with her initials (Barchas, “More”).
