“Now you see us” is the title of an exhibition running at Tate Britain until October. It aims to place before us the output of British women artists over the course of half a millennium, from 1520 to 1920. Along the way, it plucks many names from oblivion and it achieves this without lecturing or hectoring, without portraying them as victims of a conspiratorial patriarchy, and without making any performative claims about their merits vis à vis male contemporaries.
For most of the period under examination, it was never questioned that women possessed talent; it was simply never considered that they would use their talents in a professional, remunerative capacity, certainly not after marriage. Many husbands were humiliated by the idea of their wives earning money. A female artist would typically change her status from professional to amateur when she married. Others would paint anonymously (like Jane Austen’s early novels, written by “A Lady”). (We should not be too amazed by this; the rule forcing women in the UK Foreign Office to resign their jobs on marriage was only rescinded in 1972.) As an illustration of the difficulty women found in using their artistic gifts to make a living, the exhibition presents a portrait of Messenger Monsey, a Cambridge physician, painted in voluptuous pink satin by Mary Black (1737–1814). Monsey was shocked that Black wished to be paid, even though she had dropped her price to well under half of what Sir Joshua Reynolds could have commanded. He felt it improper that a woman should expect to be paid at all. Unsurprisingly, many women artists were hard-up. Male portraitists, as soon as they could afford to do so, might employ an assistant, specialising in drapery and fabrics. Anne Forbes (1745–1834) could not afford this—and her portrait of Margaret, Countess of Dumfries, shows how badly she needed one.
The question of what was seemly brought other challenges: women had little access to training and for centuries were not permitted to attend life-drawing classes. This is why we see an elbow in completely the wrong place in the portrait of Anne Sotheby by the 17th-century portraitist Mary Beale (1633–99). Other obstacles included simple chauvinism: Sir Joshua Reynolds rudely commented that he did not know whether to laugh or cry when his sister Frances attempted to paint; the portrait of Harriet, Countess Howe, in toffee-coloured taffeta, by Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1793–1872), is a work of genius yet twice the artist’s nomination to membership of the Royal Academy was declined. In 1857, watercolour societies admitted women as exhibitors but they were not allowed to play a role in the administration of those societies nor to share in their profits. There was prudery, too. A woman painting nudes provoked horror. In 1885, an outraged male academician pretended to be a pearl-clutching ‘Matron’ in a letter to the Times, protesting about a (female) Baccahnte by Henrietta Rae (1859–1928). Five years later, though, the pert male buttocks in Anna Lee Merritt’s Love Locked Out received rapturous acclaim.
There are plenty of painters on display whose names we know (Vanessa Bell, Gwen John, Laura Knight, Helen Allingham) but a far greater number whose names have vanished from the roster, for no obvious good reason. Joshua Reynolds might not have liked the idea of women painting “serious” canvases. He might have believed they should confine themselves to tapestries, floral paintings and collages. It must be said, that the examples of such pictures on display – the tapestries, the floral paintings, the collages—are absolutely exquisite. Clara Maria Pope’s (1767–1838) peonies and Mary Delany’s (1700–88) flower cut-outs are astonishing; the delicate watercolours of Margaret Meen (1751–1834) are exactly the kind of thing one would want to have on one’s wall. And among the bungling and the amateurism, we find artists who are truly virtuosic, boundary-pushing and pioneering: the photography of Julia Margaret Cameron is well known; the First World War paintings of Anna Airy perhaps less so.
In Colouring, a roundel from the ceiling of Burlington House, now the Royal Academy, painted by Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807), the Swiss-born artist who was one of the two female founder-members of the RA, there is a little green chameleon in the foreground. But the chameleon is largely camouflaged against a patch of equally green grass, one does not immediately notice it, if at all. This might be a symbol for this fascinating show as a whole. After touring this exhibition, one suddenly does see the chameleon, and one realises it was there all the time.
