Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Tara on Women and Art

Women & Art (Tara Olivero)




Mary Beale’s Self-Portrait of Mary Beale with Her Husband and Son


Well-known female artists were uncommon but did exist in Enlightenment Europe. A number of Dutch women who were still life painters found moderate success, such as Louise Moillon (1610-1696) and Maria van Oosterwyck (1630-1693). In France, women were admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture), although there was a numerary cap on their membership. In the 1780s, the Académie had four female members, and three of them regularly exhibited their painted work. Female royals and aristocrats became these painters’ patrons; for example, the daughters of Louis XV, Adélaïde and Victoire, often commissioned painter Anne Vallayer-Coster for portraits and figure painting.

England contained its fair share of female visual artists as well. Mary Beale was born in London in 1633 as the daughter of a clergyman. A surviving notebook belonging to her husband, Charles Beale, lists her paintings, their subjects, and the techniques employed for each piece of artwork, indicating that she (along with her husband) mostly desired to test out different painting methods. Art UK notes that her paintings were “mostly bland derivations from Lely,” but she nevertheless found substantial acclaim. Beale was able to help financially support her family through the sale of her portraits to nobility, clergymen, and friends; in 1677, in particular, she was commissioned for 83 works.

Susan Penelope Rosse (1652-1700) was another noteworthy female English artist. She received her training from her father, Richard Gibson, from whom she learned to paint miniatures. Rosse’s miniatures were sometimes smaller than one inch in length, and the subjects of the portraits were typically members of Charles II’s court.

Not all women were “famous” artists, but evidence from women’s journals of that time period explore the various roles that art played in the lives of women throughout Restoration England.
Some women were employed as painters to decorate royal housing, and others painted altarpieces at religious institutions. In addition to painting miniature portraits like Rosse, women were also commonly involved with the arts of calligraphy. Overall, however, “women painters chiefly emanated from ‘artistic’ circles,’” meaning that they were commonly from already-artistic families, and “elite women did not paint or draw for a public audience,” only usually by commission for private consumption of their art (O’Day).

From a young age, drawing was often intertwined with writing in schooling, and girls were most likely taught drawing more commonly than boys because of two reasons: they were not confined to classical curriculum, and drawing would actually be helpful to girls’ embroidery and tapestry skills. Most amateur female artists copied works of other painters, like Mary Beale did. One woman, Mary Waller More, painted at least nine copies of Hans Holbein’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell; copying work was a way to improve technique and work on honing skills such as mixing colors and portraying lighting. Elite women, especially, were able to use the more illustrious paintings in their own homes as examples to copy.
Mary Astell dismissed art as part of the “mindless occupations which kept women from real learning.” Disregarding Astell’s blindness to the value of personal fulfillment through art, documents from the time period prove that art served many purposes in women’s lives beyond simply personal enjoyment. Art occasionally acted as a vehicle for intellectual study. Although flower painting was typically for decorative purposes, some women such as Louise Gurney or Mary Gartside were able to explore their interests in botany through careful study of plants as subjects for their paintings.

Furthermore, the works of female artists served a practical purpose. Women’s portraits of family members were gifted to relatives and friends, serving as a “photo album” of the way that loved ones appeared. Landscape paintings by women also served to record the appearances of their homes, or of locations to which they and their families travelled. For example, in the late 1700s, Elizabeth Howard Manners illustrated her husband’s diaries of their time abroad, in which she was able to visually depict their architectural tours and the landscapes they visited. Female painters were, essentially, “the equivalent of the modern family camera” (O’Day).

On the whole, art served as a way for women to involve themselves in creative, intellectual, and practical endeavors, despite their varying levels of ability or traditional success.

Sources:
O’Day, Rosemary. “Family Galleries: Women and Art in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 2, June 2008, pp. 323-349. JSTOR


Visual:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Zg8JdgttlxqR-DtbyUavFUKfgg5vvzm8X9Exg4Jp-p0/edit?usp=sharing

2 comments: