Women, Art and Money in Late Victorian and Edwardian England

The Hustle and the Scramble

Maria Quirk

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350263680
• eBook ISBN: 9781501343063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Artist Monographs

Women, Art and Money in England establishes the importance of women artists' commercial dealings to their professional identities and reputations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Grounded in economic, social and art history, the book draws on and synthesises data from a broad range of documentary and archival sources to present a comprehensive history of women artists' professional status and business relationships within the complex and changing art market of late-Victorian England. By providing new insights into the routines and incomes of women artists, and the spaces where they created, exhibited and sold their art, this book challenges established ideas about what women had to do to be considered 'professional' artists. More important than a Royal Academy education or membership to exhibiting societies was a woman's ability to sell her work. This meant that women had strong incentive to paint in saleable, popular and 'middlebrow' genres, which reinforced prejudices towards women's 'naturally' inferior artistic ability – prejudices that continued far into the twentieth century. From shining a light on the difficult to trace pecuniary arrangements of little researched artists like Ethel Mortlock to offering new and direct comparisons between the incomes earned by male and female artists, and the genres, commissions and exhibitions that earned women the most money, Women, Art and Money is a timely contribution to the history of women's working lives that is relevant to a number of scholarly disciplines.

Part One

From Student to Studio

1

Training for the Market

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the number of art schools in England increased significantly and rapidly. ‘There are schools of art without end’, marvelled The Girl’s Own Paper in 1892.¹ The art writer Tessa Mackenzie found it difficult to produce a catalogue of London art schools in the mid-1890s because the art education landscape was constantly changing and growing.² One reason for the swell in art schools during this period was increased demand from women, who were seeking to gain the skills needed to earn a living through art or to occupy their time in a productive way that was in line with societal expectations of appropriate female behaviour. As this demand was met with the establishment of new schools by both male and female art teachers, the ease with which women could access art training and the choice and variety of schools that were available to them increased. By the 1880s it had never been easier for women to begin their education in fine or illustrative art.

The purpose of this chapter is to examine what effect, if any, the different types of education that were available to women by the end of the nineteenth century had on women’s ability to sell their work. I argue that the presence of female amateur students in England’s art schools meant that educational qualifications did not legitimize women artists’ professional intentions, and ongoing gendered bias meant that education did not facilitate women’s entry into art societies or art dealers’ lists, as it had the power to do for male students. Attendance at a prestigious art school did not have a measurable impact on women’s market value. The type of education that was most closely linked with ongoing remuneration was apprenticeship-style training, which prepared women for specific and in-demand roles within the art marketplace.

Education and the professional ideal

The expansion of educational opportunities for aspiring women artists should have made it easier for women to achieve professional status and to be recognized as serious actors within the art market.³ Education and training was a key pillar in traditional understandings and definitions of professionalism, for both art and other occupations.⁴ From the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards, art academies controlled access to what was considered ‘legitimate’ artistic training, which, H. T. Nicely explains, was a ‘necessary ingredient for professional success’.⁵ These institutions, which included London’s Royal Academy schools, reorganized methods of art training to establish objective and measurable standards of practice, and they gained a monopoly on the specialized knowledge expected of professional artists. It was through professionally focused, academic training that artists gained access to life study, which was considered central to artists’ education and practice in the nineteenth century. Familiarity with the human body was typically seen as private, mysterious or forbidden by those outside of the field, and so possession of this knowledge formed an important part of artists’ claims to professionalism.⁶ As properly trained specialists, they were sanctioned to practice the normally taboo activity of observing the human figure and benefit from the technical and artistic advantages that accompanied that study in a way that amateur artists, or those studying outside legitimate educational institutions, could not.⁷ Theoretical and technical knowledge acquired from a formal and controlled learning environment helped artists secure expert, or ‘serious’ status in the eyes of the public.⁸

The expanding field of art education in the nineteenth century saw a fragmentation and specialization of art training, a process which lessened the Royal Academy schools’ monopoly on legitimate art education but increased the expectation for artists to acquire specific qualifications to practise in their chosen artistic occupation. The relationship between standardized training and professionalism was appealing to women artists in the mid- to late nineteenth century, who agitated for equal access to all areas of art education. Professional training purported to judge individuals on their talents, in line with ‘empirical, rational and objective standards’.⁹ If women could access suitable training, and achieve success according to the criteria of that program, it followed that their qualification would be judged and respected on its merits, and the individual would be deemed to hold the necessary specialized knowledge and expertise to practise art professionally. But the educational route to professionalism did not deliver on this objective and meritocratic promise.

The most significant shift in women’s art education in the second half of the nineteenth century was access to life study. Access to the nude model was regarded as a marker of professional study during this period, and women artists in the middle decades of the nineteenth century argued that this educational barrier was preventing them from pursuing the full spectrum of artistic genres and subjects.¹⁰ The foundation of the Slade School of Art in 1870 was a turning point for women’s access to the model in an institutional setting; the Slade offered co-educational classes for the study of the half-draped model and a single-sex class for the female nude.¹¹ Throughout the 1880s and 1890s other art schools matched the Slade’s policy on women’s life study. The Royal Academy schools, considered the institution most resistant to pedagogical change, was the last major art school to grant its female students access to the nude model in 1903. With the Slade’s policies in place, and the last major educational barrier to women’s fine art practice seemingly removed, Art Journal claimed that women had achieved open and equal access to the art profession; ‘it thus rests with themselves to prove how far their power matches their aspirations’.¹²

The gradual liberalization of women’s access to education did little to change long-established critical and popular opinions about women’s ‘natural’ artistic aptitudes and the value and commercial judgements that accompanied them. It also did not act as a bulwark against accusations of incompetence or amateurism. While access to high-level training and life study endowed women with the knowledge and experience they needed to work in traditionally prestigious genres, including history painting and neo-classicism, women who exhibited work in those genres remained susceptible to gendered critiques of their skill. The fact that women could access life study, and still not reach the top ranks of the profession, was seen as a sign of women’s ‘innate’ lack of genius. In 1899, the Saturday Review claimed that the ‘experiment’ of equal education ‘has been tried, girls in vast numbers have studied art under the same conditions as men … and practically nothing has come from it’.¹³ In 1900, The Athenaeum noted that it was ‘remarkable that the practice of [women] painting nude figures from the life … has not had the effect (which should be its justification as well as its aim) of regulating, elevating and chastening the style and taste of those who devote themselves to it’.¹⁴ Not only did art education at an established institution not vouch for women’s seriousness, but any perceived failures in women’s art after they had received that training could be positioned as proof that, even with a thorough education, women still lacked the ‘natural’ creativity and inventive power to create great art. This critical rhetoric demonstrates the deeply embedded ideology of sexual difference that underpinned attitudes towards women artists and their work, which was justified in the language of biological determinism. Education, it was argued, could not ‘supply the place of a kind of inventive gift’.¹⁵

One reason for the continued prevalence of ideas of gender difference in art schools was the presence of ‘female accomplishment’ students. The large number of women ‘dilettantes’ enrolled in England’s major art schools encouraged a presumption of amateurism on the part of educators that damaged the reputation and advancement of would-be professionals.¹⁶ The multitude of ‘female accomplishment’ students bolstered the art school sector economically; their fees provided livelihoods for the men and women who ran private art schools and worked as tutors, and helped support large, independently funded institutions such as the Royal Female School of Art.

Despite this, the gatekeepers of the education establishment derided their presence. The changes to the Royal Academy schools’ admission processes in 1890 were, in part, motivated by a desire to limit the number of women students who were perceived to be amateurish. The reforms decreased the number of stippled drawings applicants submitted and added a requirement for drawings from the life, including a life-sized head and arm. ‘The first advantage [of the reforms] will be the exclusion of the ordinary run of the lady students, as only the best of them will be equal to the new and more painter-like test,’ enthused one commentator.¹⁷ Women who passed the new admission test would be allowed access to a partially draped female figure, in an attempt to improve the standards of female students.

Although these reforms were justified as a means of improving student standards and adapting to educational developments, they were also a response to the high success rate of female students under the previous system, which some in the art world found disconcerting .¹⁸ The Magazine of Art ascribed women’s success in the RA schools to the fact that the application process was suited to their ‘mimetic’ and dexterous artistic temperament. Stippling rewarded artists who were patient and technical rather than creative or vigorous, and so the result was work, ‘which was especially well adapted to female genius, carried in a large majority of women, while of those students whose latter successes did credit to their Academy training, by far the greater proportion were men’.¹⁹ The changes to the rules would result, it was hoped, in the admittance of a smaller number of female students, which would be in proportion with their subsequent success rate as artists.²⁰

Among women artists and supporters of female professionalism, the changes to the RA schools’ admission processes were welcomed. The inclusion of life drawing in the schools’ application prompted new preparatory schools to open, which broadened female students’ access to models. Harold Copping and Percy Short, for example, founded a drawing studio on Great Ormond Street to pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Introduction: Money, Professionalism and Reputation
• Part One From Student to Studio
• Part Two Commerce, Enterprise, Display
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright