Governing Cultures

Art Institutions in Victorian London

Colin Trodd, Paul Barlow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351750318
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

This title was first published in 2000. London in the nineteenth century saw the founding of the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Other, less permanent, organisations flourished, among them the British Institution, water-colour societies and the Society of Female Artists. These worked alongside the schools such as the Royal Academy and the Slade School of Art. In this volume, eleven scholars, experts on the individual institutions, analyse their complex histories to investigate such issues as: How did they generate and redesign their publics? What identities did they create? What practice of art making, connoisseurship and spectatorship did they enshrine? These reports elucidate the values associated with the key institutions and describe the responses and adaptation over time to major cultural developments: new movements, political change and the development of the Empire. The volume as a whole offers a fascinating account of the interconnections between these key institutions. Challenging conventional readings of the subject, the Introduction, by Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd, offers a definition of public art during the Victorian period.

II
Communal taste: institutional discriminations

While the essays in Part I of this book all deal with national institutions which claimed to address the totality of the public, this section deals with those institutions which in various ways 'discriminated' among that public, seeking to define a space for specific sections of creative activity (watercolour societies), neglected members of the public (female artists), or those who were seeking a place within the changing art world (the Slade, the Art Union). In this respect, these essays deal with institutions which do not claim to belong to the nation as a whole, and are not-directly at least funded by Parliament. The institutions chosen for discussion in this Part are, of course, only a portion of those which might have been included. Specialist societies established to promote the interests of particular tradesmen were not new. Art schools of various kinds came and went. We have concentrated on these particular institutions because they reveal the tensions operating in Victorian art organizations. The claims of the major galleries and schools discussed in Part I were challenged by special-interest groups who either sought to transform those institutions or bypass them. Thus the Society of Female Artists emerges alongside continuing institutional resistance within the RA to the admission of female students, just as the Slade emerged from the perceived need to provide alternative teaching practices. Likewise, the watercolour societies were continually concerned to assert the status of their medium in the face of neglect and maginalization.

Here, then, the 'public', become competing communities-tied together by shared experience of alienation from the (real or perceived) official positions of the major institutions. Whether unified by sex, aesthetic values, or trade-practice, these institutions articulated 'communities' of cultural identity which were continually engaged in acts of discrimination: defining their community, while responding to discriminatory practices which served to maintain their own marginalization. All the authors within Part II, therefore, seek to study the dynamics of such institutions, their internal tensions. In particular they explore the connection between their construction of niche identities, and their ideological claims to represent a truer community of taste or of citizenship than had been institutionalized at the RA or NG.

5
The Society of Female Artists and the Song of the Sisterhood

Stephanie Brown and Sara Dodd

The history of women's struggles to establish themselves as professional artists in the Victorian period has been well rehearsed over the last twenty years or so. Many interesting points have emerged from this body of research, most notably with regard to career formation. The reasons for women's marginalization within a male-dominated art world define, by implication, the institutionalized culture of the ascendant art scene and its particular valuation of subject matter, style, technique and medium. However, the questions addressed by this essay, of how women sought to define themselves institutionally, and how this process of institutional identity was represented in critical commentary, have tended to become lost or confused with narratives of a putative feminist self-consciousness that comes into being to challenge something called 'bourgeois ideology' or 'Victorian patriarchy'. There is still a tendency among some feminist art historians to see 'Victorian' culture as a repressive rump of objectionable attitudes and institutions against which heroic opponents pit themselves. In so far as female artists achieve a genuinely feminist position, they are seen to somehow escape from their historical condition as Victorians.

This essay questions certain of the more tenuous claims made in the name of such blanket 'theory' by re-evaluating historical evidence in such a way as to connect the processes of institutionalization to contemporary debates about the nature of work, many of which emanated from the materials of Victorian political culture itself and from the discourses it sponsored. Such an approach enables us to engage with issues suppressed or ignored by the dominant accounts of women in the Victorian art world, opening up new areas for research and clarification.

Women and institutions

There is an appreciable literature which gives prominence to the barring of women from the Royal Academy Schools, Laura Herford's subterfuge in gaining entry (using only her initials),¹ and the subsequent fight, throughout the 1860s, for women to gain admission and professional status as Royal Academicians or Associate Royal Academicians. Typically, feminist historians identify this process as a struggle by women to storm the barricades of patriarchal institutions, and they align this art-world activism to battles concerning the franchise and property rights. Such issues are often projected not only into discussion of female exclusion from high art, but into debates involving the portrayal of women in art itself, the problematic question of the nude, and the perceived feminine character of 'lowly' genres such as flower painting, or 'lesser' media such as watercolour. This mix of preoccupations can lead to both productive and confused debate, but the scope of this essay allows for only one manifestation of this to be examined in sufficient detail. It will therefore be proposed that these interacting interests are entwined in consideration of female involvement within institutions, especially in the now traditional narrative of progressive 'barricade-storming'. In contrast to this story, we will argue that the class-based character of female involvement in art has been insufficiently attended to, its connection with discourses of political economy neglected.

In the literature concerned with Victorian art and its institutions, it has been customary to divide female cultural commentators, distinguishing between 'radical' and 'conservative' camps. An artist like Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon is construed as genuinely radical, combining an interest in cultural identity with a commitment to political representation for women. Another individual cited in this context is Harriet Grote, the writer and benefactor of the Society of Female Artists, whom we shall consider shortly. Pitched against these 'oppositional' voices, a figure like Dinah Mulock, the popular novelist and writer of self-improvement texts for genteel women, is defined as conservative, unable to make the leap from supporting a limited extension of women's rights to generating a detailed feminist philosophy. This system of interpretation is implicit in recent works by Paula Gillett, Jan Marsh, Deborah Cherry and Pamela Nunn.² However, this distinction is not without its problems. First, it is not at all clear that there was indeed a crucial difference between radical and conservative positions, simply because both drew upon the tradition of political economy to develop a critical language explaining the social and economic advantages of giving women access to the institutional systems of the professional art world. Both factions made the division between what P. G. Hamerton called the 'feeble dilettantism' of the recreational art confected by 'young ladies' and the art produced by 'authentic' women artists, on the basis of the social and economic utility of professional work.³ In addition, the idea that Bodichon or her friend Anna Mary Howitt claimed a universality to their feminism beyond the threshold of middleclass culture is deeply problematic. So, for instance, we search in vain for any radical statements where they address the status of female models or other such 'drones' within Victorian patriarchy. Here Bodichon's remarks about Elizabeth Siddal, made to Bessie Parkes, a fellow 'sisterhood' feminist, are particularly revealing. In organizing a period of recuperation for the ailing Siddal, Bodichon directed Parkes to avoid all reference to the convalescent's former identity as a model, this to protect the respectability of them all.⁴ In their association with middle-class culture, and in their identification with a 'self-help' ethos, Smith and her friends were as conservative as Mulock and other popular writers. Instead of being recto and verso, it is more appropriate to see radicals and conservatives as overlapping sheets, interleaved in the very claims and attitudes that mark the articulations made by women as institutional agents.⁵

This brings us to the question of what is meant by the term 'sisterhood' and how it could be expressed institutionally. In the writings of Marsh, Cherry and Nunn, the concept seems always about to become a material or social reality.⁶ It would seem that 'sisterhood' is the condition to which women artists aspire, a place in which individualism is surrendered to higher values of collective identity Beyond this, what 'sisterhood' is, or might become, or how it is to be distinguished from networking, is never at all clear. Nor is it evident why it is deemed radical rather than conservative, an authentic condition of social or institutional experience, rather than a lifestyle embraced by a certain type of bourgeois subject. It can be argued here that the 'failure' of such a 'sisterhood' to declare itself as an institutional reality has influenced the way in which the institutions formed by women have been examined within modern feminist discourses.

The Society of Female Artists

The Society of Female Artists (known as the Society of Lady Artists from 1872, when only professional artists were to be admitted, and from 1899 as the Society of Women Artists) was formed in London in 1856 and held its first exhibition in 1857. Art classes as well as exhibitions were organized under its auspices, and it seemed at first to be an important rival to contemporary male-dominated exhibiting societies and institutions. A nomadic institution – it opened at 315 Oxford Street, moved to the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly in 1858, the Haymarket in 1859, Pall Mall in 1862, and ended up at the Gallery of the Society of British Artists, Suffolk Street in 1896 – the SFA has been treated as something of an embarrassment by recent commentators for whom it is insufficiently ideological or radical.⁷ However, it could be argued that in its concern with the productive value of work associated with the 'professional woman', it provided an entirely orthodox model of political economy.

Because its archives were lost in the Second World War, very little is known about the self-definition of an institution described as 'partly philanthropic and partly artistic' by the Art Journal.⁸ Founded by Harriet Grote, the wife of George Grote the MP, the SFA embodied many of the principles and ideas she had accumulated in dealings with the Philosophic Radicals of the 1830s. Harriet Grote is an intriguing figure, though surprisingly, the relationship between her 'feminism' and the political and economic culture of radicalism has been ignored by art historians. However, even a brief account of her interests indicates something of the complex of ideas working through the SFA.

Grote, far more than her husband, was a great political networker and classic publicist for the radical cause in the 1830s. By the 1850s, though, her interests seem to have become identified with the workings of her salon.⁹ This localization of radicalism enabled her to marshal considerable powers of patronage for particular concerns, one of which was the condition of women who aspired to professional status. The formation of the SFA emerged from quite specific debates about the problematic condition of unmarried middle-class women within what was seen to be an unaccommodating labour market. On the basis of her writings about economic and social matters, it seems reasonable to suggest that Grote saw the SFA ...