Fashionability, Exhibition Culture and Gender Politics

Fair Women

Meaghan Clarke

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138493568
• eBook ISBN: 9781351027762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Fair Women was the Victorian equivalent of a 'blockbuster' exhibition. Organised by a committee of women, it opened to great fanfare in the Grafton Galleries in London, and was comprised of both historical and contemporary portraits of women as well as decorative objects.

Meaghan Clarke argues that the exhibition challenged contemporary assumptions about the representation of women and the superficiality of female collectors. The Fair Women phenomenon complicated gender stereotypes and foregrounded women as cultural arbiters. This book uncovers a wide range of texts and images to reveal that Fair Women brought together fashion, modernity and gender politics in new and surprising ways. It shows that, while invariably absent in institutional histories, women were vital to the development of the modern blockbuster exhibition.

This book will be of interest to scholars in art and gender studies, museum studies, feminist art history, women artists and art history.

Part I

The Exhibition

1 Exhibiting Fair Women

The Fair Women exhibition in the Grafton Galleries is emblematic of London’s transformation into a modern cosmopolitan city that offers a stage for the debates about the role of modern women and their myriad enjoyments of urban pleasure. The popular press widely viewed Fair Women as a triumph, but it also attracted ridicule. Cartoons offered mocking illustrations of contemporary ‘fair womenhood’ and critics wrote disparagingly about the committee’s curatorial choices, particularly in relation to the decorative arts. What was the exhibition about? To understand this I will firstly consider the venue, the Grafton Galleries, and the involvement of the committee of women before moving on to explore the wider contexts of exhibition history and metropolitan culture. The multiple responses to the exhibition indicate that it was enmeshed in contemporary debates about the representation of women and gender politics.

Fair Women in the Grafton Galleries

Fair Women opened on 12 May 1894 for the summer season, following on from the annual spring run of the Royal Academy exhibition. The Grafton Galleries itself had opened the preceding year as a venue for temporary exhibitions and other forms of entertainment. Started as a company with a share capital of £50,000, it was operated by Thomas Denman Croft as managing director; the art dealer Francis Gerard Prange as art director; and a secretary, Henry Bishop, who had spent two years at the nearby Grosvenor Gallery; as well as a board of honorary directors drawn from law and politics.¹ The Grafton Galleries’s Memorandum of Association placed considerable emphasis on its function as a multi-purpose venue: ‘to carry on the business of proprietors for the exhibition of pictures, sculpture, and works of art generally, and of refreshment rooms and rooms for public and private concerts, receptions, or parties of any kind where music, dancing, or other entertainments may be provided’.² Thus, from the outset the Grafton Galleries was a site for the partaking of artistic, as well as other activities associated with pleasure and leisure in the capital: music, food and dancing.

An article heralding the new gallery in the Magazine of Art announced particularly that the space was grand containing an imposing suite of rooms extending from the entrance on Grafton Street to Bruton Street (Figure 1.1).³ The building was the work of the established London architects J.T. Wimperis and Arber, and a special feature was made of the lighting, with windows not in the centre of the ceilings but contiguous to the centre, as in the break-away Salon at the Champs de Mars in Paris. After entering through a hall, visitors entered the Octagon Gallery, followed by a Large Gallery, a Middle Gallery and then crossed a lobby to reach a Long Gallery or End Gallery (Figures 1.2 and 1.3). The high standards which were brought to bear on the exhibition spaces were equalled in the refreshment rooms catered by Venant Benoist, purveyor by Special Appointment to HRH the Prince of Wales, the House of Commons, and the Aristocracy and Nobility of the United Kingdom.⁴ However, the palatial spaces had to be filled and this required a committee.

Figure 1.1 Plan of the Grafton Galleries, Magazine of Art, 1892, © The British Library Board

Figure 1.2 Octagon Gallery, Grafton Galleries, 1892, © The British Library Board

Figure 1.3 Large Gallery, Grafton Galleries, 1892, © The British Library Board

The Committee

The Fair Women catalogue frontispiece followed a traditional format listing the Grafton Galleries’s honorary directors as well as the three staff members. But, importantly it also listed a large committee responsible for the exhibition, one made up entirely of women. The nineteen-strong ‘Committee’ was a formidable group, a mixture of aristocratic and wealthy middle-class genealogies, and some had direct links to the gallery directors and staff. The Marchioness of Granby, Lady Hothfield and Countess of Wharncliffe were wives of directors of the gallery.⁵ Eleanor Croft was the wife of the Grafton Galleries’s managing director.⁶ The Committee formed as a result of these connections and wider social networks. The fifteen others listed were the Duchess of Devonshire, the Duchess of Portland, the Duchess of Sutherland, the Marchioness of Salisbury, the Marchioness of Bristol, Countess of Radnor, Countess of Crawford, Countess of Dudley, Countess of Ilchester, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Lady Iveagh, Lady Wantage, Lady Middleton, Lady Cecil Scott-Montagu and Mrs. Astor.⁷ The Committee contributed to the exhibition in various ways that were immediately visible: significantly as lenders, but also as sitters and even as an artist. Although all members were aware of the social capital gained in acquiring and displaying portraits, some were more familiar with historic family collections of art, while others were in the midst of amassing their own great collections. Several had themselves gained renown as sitters during the preceding decades. The Duchess of Devonshire was one of the dominant members of London society and had just married the Duke of Devonshire in 1892, after the death of her first husband, the Duke of Manchester, thereby earning herself the label the ‘double-duchess’. Three years later she achieved further acclaim for the costume ball she threw to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee, where she dressed as Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra.⁸ The Marchioness of Granby, Violet Manners was an artist and a member of the Souls, an avant-garde circle that combined culture, intellect and politics.⁹ Her self-portrait of 1891, a three-quarter profile with aesthetic long hair and direct gaze, emphasised these characteristics (Figure 1.4). A professional portrait artist, Manners’s works had been exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, New Gallery and Royal Academy.¹⁰ At Fair Women, Manners’s portrait of Sibyl Fane, Countess Westmoreland, a fellow-member of the Souls, was hung in the End Gallery (Figure 1.5), as well as Miss Norah Bourke, who would marry Manners’s brother, Harry Lindsay, the following year and later gain acclaim as a garden designer (Figure 1.5). Susan Montagu-Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, Countess of Wharncliffe and her husband were important patrons of the arts and hosted Bohemian society dinners. She was later described by the celebrated actress Lillie Langtry as: ‘Brilliantly clever and artistic, it would have been difficult to find a more perfect example of the grande dame than was the tall, handsome Lady Wharncliffe. … But oh! after the first dinner at Wharncliffe House, she smoked cigarette after cigarette, and my country soul was shocked!’¹¹ Her husband lent a large collection to Fair Women, which included family portraits of the celebrated writer and traveller Mary Wortley Montagu, who, like Lady Wharncliffe, had an unconventional persona. Adelaide Maria Guinness, Lady Iveagh, another Committee member, was a great socialite and in the course of only four years, between 1887 and 1891, she and her husband, the brewer and philanthropist Edward Cecil Guinness, first Earl of Iveagh, had acquired a large picture collection, buying principally from the dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons, spending over £530,000 on 200 pictures. The core of their collection echoed Fair Women’s focus on eighteenth-century portraits by Reynolds, Romney and Gainsborough.¹²

Figure 1.4 Self-portrait, Violet Manners, Duchess of Rutland, 1891, © National Portrait Gallery, London

Figure 1.5 Countess of Westmoreland, Violet Manners, c.1892, Portfolio, 1894

Bankers were a group that merged more easily with the aristocracy during the nineteenth century, as exemplified by Committee members Harriet Sarah Wantage and Angela Burdett-Coutts (Figure 1.6). Both had inherited their wealth through banking and had risen to prominence as independent philanthropists and benefactors.¹³ Another Committee member, Helen Matilda Chaplin Radnor, had a personal interest in portraiture, family collections and genealogies, having compiled four years earlier a Catalogue of Pictures at Longford Castle and Categorical List of Family Portraits.¹⁴ Her detailed catalogue itemised the Radnor collection of European pictures and family portraits room by room. She included ‘private’ financial information: in the Muniment room she had uncovered private account books and was therefore able to trace the sale and acquisition of the majority of works that entered the family collection between 1720 and 1823. This meticulous cataloguing of the collection put her in dialogue with developments in public institutions. The systematic documentation of collections was vital to the professionalisation of curatorship. Radnor was in close contact with one of these new professionals George Scharf, director of the National Portrait Gallery, who gave a detailed account of the collection in his sketchbook and diaries.¹⁵ In addition, Radnor’s husband was treasurer of the Royal Household under Salisbury, and there were other women on the Committee who held considerable sway in political circles. Interestingly, they came from both Tory and Liberal camps: however, this meant that as a group, these women had significant cross-party influence. Georgina (Alderson) Gascoyne-Cecil’s husband was the Conservative leader of the Opposition, Lord Salisbury, who would oust William Ewart Gladstone’s Liberals to become prime minister again the following year. In contrast, Alice Harriet Hothfield’s husband had served as a Lord-in-Waiting (government whip in the House of Lords) in the Liberal administration of Gladstone. Mary Dahlgren Paul Astor was the wife of the New York property millionaire who had recently relocated to England and purchased the Pall Mall Gazette. Nonetheless she had found her place in society easily and reportedly had a fondness for jewels worn by famous women.¹⁶

Figure 1.6 Angela Burdett-Coutts, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, Francis Henry Hart, 1882, © National Portrait Gallery, London

The diversity of the Committee was key to the success of the exhibition; ther...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of plates
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• PART I The Exhibition
• PART II Modern Fair Women
• PART III Fair Women Redux
• Bibliography
• Index