Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920 @ Tate Britain

This is a huge, varied and very enjoyable show but it springs from an extremely simple premise: for all of western art history, women artists have been discouraged, denied, excluded, overlooked and systematically written out of the record. This exhibition sets out to right this historic wrong by exhibiting some 200 works by 100 women artists from the last 400 years, from around the peak of the High Renaissance in 1520 to just after the First World War in 1920.

Three levels

It can be enjoyed on at least 3 levels.

1. Feminist outrage

First there’s what you could call the feminist level, which is where you read every wall label introducing each of the ten or so rooms, plus the 200 or so picture captions, and quickly come to share the curators’ outrage and barely controlled anger at the million and one ways women were oppressed, humiliated, controlled, restricted and had all their life chances quashed over this long period. In particular, the way individual women artists struggled against all kinds of barriers, broad social ones, and then the ones put in their way by various art institutions – most notably the hidebound Royal Academy which emerges very badly from this survey – art schools, art critics, the entire art world. The curators muster an impressively thorough, extensive and shameful litany of injustices suffered by so many women artists.

2. A (women’s) history of western art

Second, the curators have arranged their exhibits in a straightforward chronological way, starting in 1520, ending in 1920, with a couple of rooms devoted to specialist subjects (flower painting, photography) off to one side.

The point is that, walking through the show you not only see lots of works and read the stories of lots and lots of women artists but, obviously enough, are walking through a history of 400 years of western art – so there’s the simple pleasure of watching how the works reflect the changing styles of art, from Renaissance, through English baroque, 18th century portraiture, Romantic fantasy and so on.

3. Masterpieces

To be honest, a lot of the work feels fairly so-so – good, pretty good, enjoyable enough – but it felt, to me, as if, for the most part, there are only one or two really good pieces in each room, until you reach the Victorian room which is, for me, the standout gallery. But still, a handful of really good works in each of the 10 or so rooms still amounts to a lot of excellent paintings (and drawings and sculptures) to enjoy.

Promoting women artists

I’m going to go easy on the ‘review’ and ‘criticism’ elements of this post, and instead publish as much useful information, and show as many of the actual artworks, as I can. The aim of the exhibition is to promote and publicise women artists who have been overlooked and neglected, so I’m doing my bit to promote as many women artists and as many women’s art works as I can fit into a decent-sized review.

Variety of media

As you might expect, a selection of 200 works from such a vast period features a variety of media or formats, including oil painting, watercolour, pastel, miniatures, drawings, sculpture, photography and ‘needlepainting’. Within the specific form of oil painting there are portraits (lots of portraits), botanical paintings, country cottages, anecdote paintings, allegories and nudes and history paintings.

Chronological overview

The exhibition takes an extremely straightforward chronological approach which, for simplicity’s sake, I’m going to repeat, adding useful links to the handful of artists which the press release mentions or I particularly liked, in each room.

The Tudors

• Levina Teerlinc (1510 to 1576), a miniaturist whose works are brought together for the first time in four decades
• Esther Inglis (1571 to 1624) whose manuscripts contain Britain’s earliest known self-portraits by a woman artist

17th century

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 to around 1656) one of art history’s most celebrated women artists, created major works at the court of Charles I, including the recently rediscovered ‘Susanna and the Elders’ which is on display here, the one big Renaissance-era painting by a woman artist.

‘Susanna and the Elders’ by Artemisia Gentileschi (1638 to 1640) Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024

Mary Beale (1633 to 1699) emerges as a very strong presence for the simple reason that 6 paintings along one wall are by her, a series of portraits in the English baroque style, the sitters all with the characteristic double chins and bulbous eyes of the era. Beale was very successful in her day, and ran a portrait business jointly with her husband from their home in Pall Mall, London. She was praised by male critics and leading male artists of the day such as Peter Lely.

‘Anne Sotheby’ by Mary Beale (1676) in ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920’ at Tate Britain

Joan Carlile (around 1606 to 1679) was a portrait painter and one of the first British women known to practise painting professionally. The two paintings here show that she dressed her sitters in the same sheath-like satin dress (see in the Gallery, below)

Maria Verelst (1680 to 1744) Verelst came from a Netherlandish family of artists. Her grandfather, father, uncles and siblings were all artists. Her father and uncles settled in London, and she presumably trained within the family. She appears to have had a successful business and a wide clientele.

18th century

In the 18th century women artists took part in Britain’s first public art exhibitions. The most notable figures are Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, the only women included among the Founder Members of the Royal Academy of Arts. I recently visited the Kauffman exhibition at the Royal Academy where I felt her most successful paintings were her many self portraits and I didn’t like the histrionic and highly posed paintings on themes from classical myth and legend. Same here. The one self portrait is winning, the 2 or 3 classical paintings less so. The exhibition also features two of her large allegorical paintings, in fact the entire show opens with her big painting of the allegorical figure of Invention, designed to rebut the widespread prejudice that women could copy but not invent their own subjects.

Moser is represented by a so-so nude sketch but comes into her own later on, in the Flowers room, where we find a number of her beautifully detailed flower paintings. This room also features works by

Catherine Read (1723 to 1778) was a Scottish artist, most known for her work as a portrait-painter. She was for some years a fashionable artist in London, working in oils, crayons, and miniature. From 1760 she exhibited almost annually with either the Incorporated Society of Artists, the Free Society of Artist, or the Royal Academy.

Mary Black (1737 to 1814) was an English artist known for her portrait paintings. As well as painting portraits, Black taught painting to members of a number of fashionable, aristocratic families. Financial success allowed her to live independently while maintaining a household with servants and a carriage.

Anne Seymour Damer (1748 to 1828) was an English sculptor described as a ‘female genius’ by Horace Walpole.

Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1793 to 1872) was an English portrait painter famous in her day and generally ranked second only to the leading portraitist of the era, Sir Thomas Lawrence. I really liked her portrait of Harriet Brudenell, Countess Howe. The proportions of her body may be very slightly out, but I was taken by the detail of her slightly parted lips exposing her teeth. I don’t know why but this really humanised the portrait. Certainly, compared with the highly stylised early Georgian portraits at the start of the room, this felt fresh and lifelike.

‘Portrait of Harriet Brudenell, Countess Howe’ by Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1834) in ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920’ at Tate Britain

This room is dominated by the huge painting of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as Cynthia from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ by Maria Cosway. A spectacular success when exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1782, this was the work with which Cosway made her mark in London, with a critic at the Morning Chronicle declaring Cosway ‘the first of female painters’.

Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as Cynthia from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ by Maria Cosway (1781 to 1782) Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees / Bridgeman Images

The caption tells us that when Kauffman left London to return to Rome in 1781, Cosway became the leading woman painter in London and was commercially and critically successful.

Miniatures and flowers

Women artists of this era were often dismissed as amateurs pursuing ‘feminine’ occupations like watercolour and flower painting, but many worked in these genres professionally i.e. made a good living at them. There are two rooms devoted to these formats, a small one to miniatures, a big light airy one to botanical art, featuring:

a) Miniatures

Mary Linwood (1755 to 1845) was an English needle woman who exhibited her worsted embroidery or crewel embroidery in Leicester and London and was the school mistress of a private school. In 1790 she received a medal from the Society of Arts. The curators tell us

Linwood combined ‘needle painting’ with canny entrepreneurship. Needlework was banned from the Royal Academy, so Linwood set up her own gallery in London’s Leicester Square, exhibiting needlework copies of famous paintings. The gallery became a must-see sensation, with tens of thousands of visitors paying the shilling entrance fee.

The extraordinary story of miniaturist Sarah Biffin (1784 to 1850) who, despite being born with no arms and only vestigial legs, learned to read and write, and to paint using her mouth. Sounds like a gimmick but her miniatures on display here are actually breath-takingly detailed and exquisite.

b) Flowers

There are a dozen or so female flower and botanical artists featured. the curators single out Augusta Withers, a botanical illustrator employed by the Horticultural Society who was appointed ‘Flower Painter in Ordinary’ to Queen Adelaide and later to Queen Victoria. But all the other botanical painters worked to to a very high quality.

Peony by Clara Maria Pope (1821) Courtesy the Natural History Museum

19th century

This is, arguably, the best room, with half a dozen or more really good paintings, the equal or superior of any male artist. Possible it’s because the 19th century saw, in art as in every other aspect of life, an explosion of technology, techniques, products and markets. The Industrial Revolution led to a doubling of the British population, and the huge growth in towns like Liverpool and Manchester and across the Midlands, creating new cities, a new wealthy middle class of successful businessmen. these cities wanted to build their own art galleries to compete with London, to hold their own art exhibitions, their businessmen wanted to commission and own beautiful things. The art market exploded. At the same time people got used to a faster turnover of fashions and styles in art as in every other type of industrialised product. Thus it feels like the 19th century room contains more, bigger and more varied works than any of the previous rooms.

It’s packed with great works, one of the most striking of which is ‘The Roll Call’ (1874) by the very successful historical painter Elizabeth Butler.

‘The Roll Call’ by Elizabeth Butler (1874) Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024

On the narrowly political-feminist line, there’s a work close to being a satirical cartoon, Woman’s Work: A Medley (1861) by Florence Claxton, designed to show how women were confined and constricted every way they turned in Victorian society.

More artistically pleasing, but on the same theme, is Nameless and Friendless (1857) by Emily Mary Osborn, which depicts a single woman trying, and failing, to earn a living as an artist in Victorian England.

These are what you might call narrative or anecdote paintings, depicting dramatic scenes, often pointing a moral. They are from the 1850s and 1860s and are reminiscent of Dickens at his most preachy. They may be technically immaculate (Nameless and Friendless is full of stunning details like the exquisitely detailed floor tiles) but they have an aim on you, like a sermon.

Just one generation later and art undergoes a massive sea change, assimilating the technical innovations of either the pre-Raphaelites on one hand, or the French Impressionists on the other, to create an entirely different aesthetic realm. That certainly goes for the works here which I thought were absolutely magnificent:

At The Edge of the Woods by Elizabeth Forbes (1894) was one of my favourite works in the whole show. No reproduction can do it justice. The capture of light and airiness, the pose of the figures, the quiet unassuming location, all have the air of one of Thomas Hardy’s muted provincial tragedies. The curators tell us that:

Forbes spent time at the rural artists’ community in Pont-Aven, Brittany. There, Forbes learned to paint outdoors. She continued to practise this mode of painting in the artists’ community at Newlyn, Cornwall. The Newlyn artists’ emphasis on naturalism ran counter to the prevailing academic style. Forbes painted ‘At the Edge of the Woods’ soon after she built her own mobile studio, which allowed
her to paint landscapes from direct observation, even during winter.

At the other end of the scale from this loose, outdoors naturalism, is the highly polished style of the Olympians, given that nickname because they painted nearly nude figures wearing diaphanous tunics in  classical Roman and Greek settings. Here is Love Locked Out by Anna Lea Merritt (1890). Again this reproduction doesn’t get close to conveying the wonderful luminous feeling of the painting in the flesh. It’s a poignant theme, a lovely pose by an idealised boy, rendered with breath-takingly naturalistic detail.

Love Locked Out by Anna Lea Merritt (1890) in ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920’ at Tate Britain

Lastly, in the same style of sentimental classicism, is the enormous mural-sized painting ‘Psyche Before the Throne of Venus’ by Henrietta Rae which I fell in love with.

‘Psyche before the Throne of Venus’ by Henrietta Rae (1894) (Private collection) in ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920’ at Tate Britain

I know it’s schmaltz, I know it’s kitsch, but I want to live there. The reproduction makes it look much naffer than it is in the flesh. In the flesh one of the most striking elements is the dabs of intense sunlight in the centre at the back of the composition, bright sunlight falling amid the boughs which give a tremendous sense of depth and perspective and of heat. All of that vibrancy is lost in this reproduction which looks like a cheesy postcard. It’s worth the admission price just to see these three magnificent works of art.

Watercolours

Watercolours were for centuries considered a kind of ghetto for women artists who were not considered up to, or banned from practicing, oil painting. The curators give a history of some of the watercolour societies which were created to cater for the large number of women watercolourists.

Watercolour was considered one of the ‘polite arts’ best suited to women. However, there were few opportunities to practice professionally. The principal watercolour societies – the Old (founded in 1804) and the rival New (founded in 1807 and reconstituted in 1831) – restricted the membership of
women. Membership of the Old was limited to six women (in practice, usually four), while the New admitted around ten.

In both societies, women were confined to the category of ‘Lady Members’ until the end of the nineteenth century. They had no say in governance and were denied access to the financial premiums awarded to full members. Since the annual exhibitions of both societies were closed to non-members, most women had limited opportunities to exhibit their work.

Against these odds, many women watercolourists achieved significant commercial and critical success. They enjoyed solo shows and developed commercial relationships with dealers, taking control of their careers. In 1857, a group of women founded the Society of Female Artists (later, the Society of Lady Artists in c.1869, then the Society of Women Artists in 1899) to promote the work of
women artists in Britain.

Highlights here included a fabulous shimmering watercolour view of Venice by Clara Montalba and a series of works by Helen Allingham (1848 to 1926). I know Allingham’s many gentle watercolours of rural cottages in Surrey are considered the height of sentimental cheesiness – you often see them adorning the covers of country cookery books in National Trust shops – but I like them anyway.

Feeding the Fowls, Pinner by Helen Allingham (1890) in ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920’ at Tate Britain

According to Allingham, she sold over a thousand watercolours during her career. Other watercolourists include:

• Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827 to 1891) – dramatic scenes of ruins on the Continent
• Rose Barton (1856 to 1929) – some very atmospheric foggy scenes of late-Victorian London, praised by the Daily Telegraph for her ‘unfailing sense of beauty’

Photography

Again, I’m going to give the curators own summary of women and photography as it’s more informative than any summary I could give and also because it gives you a feel for the details of women’s everyday oppression in Victorian society.

The announcement of photography in 1839 marked a major shift in the art world. In its first decades, photography was a laborious practice that required an understanding of chemistry and optics, as well as expensive equipment. It needed more money, specialist instruction and time than most other art forms. For women who had access to these privileges, the medium provided new opportunities.

From its foundation in 1853, the Photographic Society of London welcomed women members. However, they rarely attended meetings, which were scheduled in the evenings when women required a chaperone to leave the house. The atmosphere of the meetings was described as a ‘men’s club’ and it wasn’t until 1898 that the Society belatedly banned smoking ‘in respect of ladies’ attendance’. Meetings often included papers on new techniques and equipment, providing significant benefits to those who were able to join.

Women participated in London’s first public photographic exhibitions at the Royal Society of Arts in 1852–3 and at the Photographic Society in 1854. The Amateur Photographic Association, established in 1861, also welcomed women from its outset. In the 1890s and early 1900s, London’s
Photographic Salon became a key venue. Founded by the Linked Ring Brotherhood, who promoted photography as a fine art, Salon exhibitors included women from across Europe and the US. A photograph of British photographer Carine Cadby in silhouette, examining one of her glass plate
negatives, featured on the cover of the 1896 Salon catalogue. Despite this, women were not elected as members of the Linked Ring until 1900. By 1909, they numbered just 8 among 63 men.

Obviously there’s a wall of works by Julia Margaret Cameron (1815 to 1879) the Taylor Swift of women’s photography (see the example in the Gallery, below). I was more interested in the other, more obscure figures, such as:

• Frances Elizabeth Jocelyn (1820 to 1880)
• Clementina Hawarden (1822 to 1865)
• Caroline Emily Nevill (1829 to 1887)
• Sarah Angelina Acland (1849 to 1930)
• Eveleen Myers (1856 to 1937)
• Carine Cadby (1856 to 1967)
• Kate Smith (1861 to 1953)
• Minna Keene (1861 to 1943)
• Anne Brigman (1869 to 1950)
• Agnes Warburg (1872 to 1953)
• Emma Barton (1872 to 1938)
• Olive Edis (1876 to 1955)
• Emily Pitchford (1878 to 1956)
• Eveleen Myers (1856 to 1937)

The sheer number began to make me think you could surely mount an exhibition of just Women’s Photography. For me the standout work was a portrait of Zaïda Ben-Yusuf by Gertrude Käsebier (1869 to 1933). I loved the optical illusion whereby the shawl she’s wearing blends into the background curtain, giving the impression that here body is emerging mysteriously from the backdrop.

Zaïda Ben-Yusuf by Gertrude Käsebier (around 1900) in ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920’ at Tate Britain (The Michael G. and C. Jane Wilson 2007 Trust)

Interesting backstory:

Käsebier’s relaxed portrait of Zaïda Ben-Yusuf was probably made at the photographer’s New York studio. From 1897, she and Ben-Yusuf each operated Fifth Avenue premises in the ‘Ladies’ Mile’ shopping district. The district’s clientele sat for Käsebier’s portraits and Ben-Yusuf’s fashion photographs. Some of their peers denigrated their professional careers, but both women depended on their commercial income. Käsebier and Ben-Yusuf showed together at the Linked Ring’s Photographic Salon in 1899 and 1902 and in Paris in 1900 and 1901.

Petitions and protests

A room is devoted to recording the protests and petitions drawn up by women artists at the end of the 19th century demanding access to art colleges and, in particular, admission to nude drawing classes from which they were banned till the turn of the century.

Women were excluded from enrolment at the Royal Academy Schools, Britain’s principal art academy, until 1860. Laura Herford (1831–1870) was the first woman admitted. She had submitted her work for consideration using only her initials and was assumed to be a man. Once women gained entry, they were determined to achieve equal access to training.

Women were barred from the Academy’s life-drawing classes until 1893. Their exclusion from this vital component of art education was justified on many grounds. Chiefly, it was to ‘protect’ women’s supposed modesty, but also because they were considered amateurs who lacked the intellectual capacity to practice art at the highest level. Women students marshalled critical support for their cause and submitted petitions. Life drawing was considered essential to the training of men pursuing careers as artists. Why, they argued, was it not also essential for women?

The Female School of Art, founded in 1842, provided another route into art education. Like several regional schools, such as that in Manchester, it encouraged women into vocational careers in design. Women also had access to private academies, including Sass’s and Leigh’s (later Heatherleys) in London, which prepared students for admission to the Royal Academy Schools. And some women artists, such as Louise Jopling, established their own art schools.

In 1871, the founding of the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London signalled a fundamental change of attitudes. From the outset, the Slade offered women an education on equal terms with men. Studying from life models was a central focus of teaching and by the turn of the century, women students outnumbered men by three to one. Access to life drawing had been regarded as the last barrier to equal opportunity. Now they could study from life, some critics argued it was up to women to prove they could be successful artists.

20th century

The exhibition ends in the early 20th century with women’s suffrage and the First World War. Now on the face of it, this should have been the best and most varied room in the show, but it isn’t. It felt disappointingly weak to me, an anti-climax after the bog bold Victorian room.

Thus it namechecks a number of women artists who developed individual styles and professional careers. these include:

Gwen John (1876 to 1939) – Welsh artist who worked in France for most of her career. Her paintings are mainly portraits of anonymous female sitters, rendered in a range of closely related tones. I’m afraid I’ve always found her work weak and poorly drawn.

‘Self-Portrait’ by Gwen John (1902) Photo Tate (Mark Heathcote and Samuel Cole)

Vanessa Bell (1879 to 1961) – English painter, interior designer, sister of Virginia Woolf and member of the Bloomsbury Group. Bell’s work and career are often made to bear a heavy weight by feminist critics as a pioneer of English Modernism which I don’t think her works actually justify. The four still lifes on display here come over as watered-down versions of the cubism and abstraction which was, of course,  being pioneered in France (and Russia) at around the same time, in the years just before the Great War. What do you think?

‘Still Life on Corner of a Mantelpiece’ by Vanessa Bell (1914) Tate © Estate of Vanessa Bell

Similarly, Laura Knight had a very long and successful career but if she’s a major figure in 20th century British art (‘one of the leading British women artists of the twentieth century’) then that’s quite an indictment of 20th century British art. Her paintings of women outdoors in Cornwall are bright and charming but… That said, one of the four works, At The Edge of the Cliff, was one of the 3 or 4 best pieces in this final room.

‘At the Edge of the Cliff’ by Laura Knight (1917) in ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920’ at Tate Britain

Historically – in terms of The Cause – Knight is a significant figure: in 1936 she was elected a Royal Academician, becoming the first woman to achieve full membership since the eighteenth century.

In the event, I preferred four other figures who, unlike Bell and Knight, I’d never heard of before, Ethel Wright, Ethel Walker, Anna Airy and Ethel Edis.

Ethel Wright’s ‘The Music Room, Portrait of Una Dugdale’ (1912) is a brilliant variation on the highly coloured just toppling into Modernism art of the Continent, especially of pre-war Russia. This reproduction is rubbish. You have to see it in the flesh to appreciate the luminous greens and reds. NB: green was the symbolic colour of hope in the suffragettes’ rosettes and banners.

‘The Music Room, Portrait of Una Dugdale’ by Ethel Wright (1912) in ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920’ at Tate Britain

Ethel Walker (1861 to 1951) is represented by two smaller paintings and then this vast frieze-like work, ‘The Excursion of Nausicaa’ from 1920. It’s fascinating to compare this with the equally huge work ‘Psyche before the Throne of Venus’ by Henrietta Rae (1894) which I included above. 26 years separate them but what a revolution in art and aesthetics have taken place in that time, hurtling us from the minutely detailed academic perfectionism of the Rae to this post-impressionist masterpiece.

‘Decoration: The Excursion of Nausicaa’ by Dame Ethel Walker (1920) in ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920’ at Tate Britain (photo by Tate)

The more you look the more you see influences from the previous 30 years of revolutionary French painting, namely the non-Caucasian, mask-like faces obviously intended to be of other ethnic groups, some of which recall the stylised Polynesian portraits of Paul Gauguin, some the use of African-style faces in the revolutionary pre-war paintings of Picasso. But you really can tell this was painted by a woman so the figures are not odalisques and exotic nudes to stimulate the male gaze, but more like an international sisterhood of women at home in their bodies and poses.

Then the First World War: there are three or four paintings inspired by the war and 3 or 4 photos in a display case. For me the standout painting is ‘Shop for Machining 15-inch Shells: Singer Manufacturing Company, Clydebank, Glasgow, 1918’ by Anna Airy. This is a big work which draws you in. I liked it for 3 or 4 reasons. 1) I like scenes of industry and toil rather than yet another feebly modernist picture of flowers in a vase. I follow Marx in thinking the world we live in is created by humanity’s labour and I find all records of that labour are both a moral duty and an aesthetic pleasure. 2) I like early Modernism, particularly the wartime Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis, CRR Nevinson and their circle. Although this isn’t that abstract, it’s on the way. 3) Harder to define, but it feels like her technique (of using slabby rectangles of colour, particularly obvious in the shine on the shells) perfectly matches the subject matter. Subject and technique feel wonderfully melded and appropriate.

‘Shop for Machining 15-inch Shells: Singer Manufacturing Company, Clydebank, Glasgow, 1918’ by Anna Airy in in ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920’ at Tate Britain © Imperial War Museum

In 1918, Airy received a commission from the Imperial War Museum, thereby becoming Britain’s first official woman war artist. Her 1.7 by 1.8-metre canvases depict munitions production and war-related heavy industry. She later recalled the hot and dangerous conditions in which she worked. A former Slade student, Airy enjoyed a high public profile, won through exhibition and good reviews at the Royal Academy. In 1915, an art critic hailed her as ‘the most accomplished artist of her sex’. Airy was aware, however, of the prejudice women artists still faced. Galleries and buyers, she said, felt ‘safer with a man’.

In another register are the war photos taken by various women, the single most striking one being the bluntly titled ‘War’ by Olive Edis (1919).

War by Olive Edis (1919) in ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920’ at Tate Britain (Wilson Centre for Photography)

Edis was Britain’s first woman war photographer. She was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to photograph the activities of servicewomen on duty in France and Flanders. This bleak, blasted landscape captures the impact of the First World War and hints at the completely transformed post-war scene, in which women finally won the vote and were to play a larger and larger role in all areas of society, not just the arts but politics, the sciences and so on, which is why this is where the exhibition comes to a halt.

A modest suggestion

Recently I visited the Design exhibition at Japan House. Surprisingly, Japan lacks a national museum of design, but enterprising curators have begun asking the country’s leading designers to select objects which ought to go in one. They’ve begun selecting, labelling and curating the works before they have the institution to house them.

Same here. Why not make this exhibition the basis of a permanent gallery of women’s art? Why not approach some of Britain’s super-rich women and ask them to donate to the purchase of a state-of-the-art gallery with the space to continue expanding and grow into the largest collection of women artists in the UK? Why not the world?

The thing about this exhibition is that, when you read the labels, you discover that a lot of the works here are on loan from private collections. What a shame if, at the end of the run, so many of these great pieces, often the key works of really important women artists, just disappear back into private rooms in private houses and languish unseen.

I can foresee the objection that, instead of being hived off into a woman’s ghetto, the point of the exhibition is to reinstate women artists so that many more of them take their place alongside their male contemporaries in national collections, such as Tate Britain, the National Gallery and so on. But space in these institutions is already tight. For every female work you insert you’d have to take down a male one, which might prove controversial and time consuming. Also there is the niggling point that some of these women are not as good as their direct male counterparts. If you only have space for a few Elizabethan miniatures in a collection which would you display, works by Nicholas Hilliard or by Levina Teerlinc? Well, Hilliard and so the Teerlinc would be consigned to oblivion again.

Why not start from scratch, untrammeled by institutional history or space, and display room after room of great women’s art from across the centuries?

Gallery in chronological order

1560s

Portrait of a Lady holding a Monkey by Levina Teerlinc (1560s) Victor Reynolds and Richard Chadwick

1639

Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura) by Artemisia Gentileschi (1638 to 1639) Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024

1655

Portrait of an Unknown Lady by Joan Carlile (1650 to 1665) Photo Tate

1660

Sketch of the Artist’s Son, Bartholomew Beale, Facing Left by Mary Beale (around 1660) Photo Tate

1779

Needlework Picture by Mary Knowles (1779) Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024

1780

Colouring by Angelica Kauffman (1778 to 1780) © Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photo by John Hammond

1780s?

Standing Female Nude by Mary Moser (no date) The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

1782

Rubus Odoratus by Mary Delaney. Courtesy the British Museum

1825

The Canon Hall Muscat Grape by Augusta Innes Withers (around 1825) Courtesy the Royal Horticultural Society, Lindley Library

1860

Wild Flowers at the Corner of a Cornfield by Martha Darley Mutrie (1855 to 1860) Photo Tate (Seraphina Neville)

1861

A Young Teacher by Rebecca Solomon (1861) Tate and the Museum of the Home

1865

Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty by Julia Margaret Cameron (1865) Wilson Centre of Photography

1875

A Modern Cinderella by Louise Jopling (1875) Private collection

1917

A Dark Pool by Laura Knight (1917) © Estate of Dame Laura Knight. All rights reserved 2024 / Bridgeman Images

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Related links

• Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520 to 1920 continues at Tate Britain until 13 October 2024
• Exhibition guide
• Large print exhibition guide i.e. all the wall captions (PDF)

Related reviews

• Women artists in the 20th and 21st century ed. Uta Grosenick (2003)
• 50 Women Artists You Should Know (2008)
• Women, Art and Society by Whitney Chadwick (2012)
• 100 more reviews of women artists and photographers

• More Tate Britain reviews

Posted by Simon on June 22, 2024

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