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:
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