When women weren’t allowed to make art
Tate Britain’s latest exhibition charts 400 years of women making art, despite being told they can’t.
Dame Ethel Walker, Decoration The Excursion of Nausicaa, 1920. Photo: Tate
To strip or not to strip? Nicola Coughlan delighted Bridgerton fans recently by agreeing to star in the series’ longest sex scene. Her nude appearances in the Regency-era drama were deemed ‘very brave’ by some.
Women’s bodies are, to borrow from Barbara Kruger, perpetual ‘battlegrounds’. What to show, what to hide, what is appropriate? Many females go through some sort of conversation like this daily.
Louise Jopling, A Modern Cinderella, 1875. Private collection
But for the women in Tate Britain’s show ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520-1920’, it was a career-defining question. Women appearing naked in museums has never been a problem – as Guerrilla Girls famously pointed out. However, women artists wanting to have their work exhibited faced a completely different hurdle. How about a woman artist painting a naked woman? Ah, that is where it gets interesting.
Until the very late 19th century, women were not allowed to attend life-drawing classes, so could not train to depict nudes. It was deemed inappropriate. So when, in 1875, Louise Jopling painted her model changing clothes (still very much dressed by today’s standards) her naked shoulder caused a stir.
Joan Carlile, Portrait of an Unknown Lady, 1650-5. Photo Tate
Still, shoulders didn’t always cause a drama. Portrait of an Unknown Lady, 1650s by Joan Carlile shows quite a bit of shoulder and even some breast. It was of course part of the fashion for that time. Who decides whether shoulder is or isn’t a problem – that is the question.
Joan Carlile was one of Britain’s first professional artists, at some point employed by the Royal Household. Her portraits were popular and often included lavish silk gowns and dramatic landscape backgrounds. However, like many other artists in this show, she is largely unknown today and only a small number of her works still exist. This show is a rare opportunity to see them.
Julia Margaret Cameron, Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty, 1865. Wilson Centre of Photography
I am not a great fan of women-only shows. I find the concept a little reductive – are these artists only worthy of mention because they are women? Shouldn’t we appreciate them for their art, not their gender? But this exhibition had a pleasant, if not dramatic, effect on me: all the 100-or-so artists in the show were ok. Yes, there, I said it.
There were some who stood out, of course. Among them, for me, was Julia Margaret Cameron with her arresting photographs – still able to grasp the attention of people on my social media feeds. Artemisia Gentileschi and Angelica Kauffman have both had recent one-woman shows and more general exposure – and rightly so. The work of Vanessa Bell, of the Bloomsbury group, sticks out like a sore thumb, in the most positive way. There is also the quiet confidence of Gwen John’s paintings.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), c.1638-1639. Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024
But overall, this could just be a show of ‘Art in Britain 1520-1920’. There are endless portraits, landscapes and still-lives, but also religious and mythological scenes; there is societal critique and humour, but also images of war. What struck me was that these were just your average professional artists – some exceptional, some quite regular, some trying new things, others just doing their job. But then – they were not just your average professional artists. Each work in this show is evidence of perseverance, a battle fought for the right to be average or exceptional, to be like the others – like men.
Slade School of Art was the first institution to offer female students education on equal terms with males. It was founded in 1871. So, all the female artists who came before that were either self-taught, or taught at home or learned together with men, but not with the same access.
Angelica Kauffman, R.A, Colouring, 1778-80 © Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: John Hammond
One notable lack of access was to life-drawing classes – otherwise seen as the basis of classical art education. Women artists were then accused of not being great at it. Regardless of whether or not that was true, it was not surprising, considering they couldn’t even learn it. Nowadays we can do it in a pub on a Wednesday night, but remember who paved the road to that pub: all the women in this show.
In her satirical painting ‘Woman’s Work’: A Medley, 1861 Florence Claxton reveals the lack of opportunities for professional employment. Some women are seated around a central male figure; we see that doors for medicine and law are shut, education is almost secretive and the only person to scale the confining wall is the artist Rosa Bonheur. The painting was deemed ‘vulgar’ – need you ask why and by whom? Claxton was part of the UK’s first organised movement for women’s rights. So were other artists in this show – including Barbara Leigh Bodichon, one of the group’s leaders. She is believed to be the first woman artist to have had a solo, self-funded exhibition.
Vanessa Bell, Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece, 1914. Tate © Estate of Vanessa Bell
While Bodichon’s work for women’s rights was revolutionary, her watercolours conformed to Victorian ideals. A few decades later, Anne Brigman’s suffrage work and rejection of societal norms lead her to make nude self-portrait photographs in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. If they were performance artworks they would still cause a stir today. In 1907, one of them gained the highest medal at the Birmingham Photographic Society. The nude gained acceptance. Or has it?
One of the largest works in the show is Dame Ethel Walker’s The Excursion of Nausicaa, 1920. It is an unapologetic celebration of female bodies and sexuality. Walker is one of those artists who was famous and successful in her own time, but has since disappeared from the radar. She represented Britain at the Venice Biennale – the most prestigious international showcase of art, whose latest iteration is happening this year. A Dame Commander of the Order of British Empire, Walker famously proclaimed: ‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist — bad and good.’
Gwen John, Self-Portrait, 1902. Photo Tate (Mark Heathcote and Samuel Cole)
So how could this good, or great, artist with her enormous painting have escaped my notice up to this point? It seems the answer lies in the artist’s private life – she was lesbian. She did not make Odysseus the centre of this depiction of the Greek tale. And that might have been too much for the art establishment. I would say, if there is one painting that makes this show worth seeing, it is this one. I doubt you could miss it: six feet high and twelve across, it dominates the room. It reminds me of my visits to Kenwood Ladies’ Pond. And makes me wonder: maybe, there are times when places are better without men – like ponds and art exhibitions?