Mary Moser, at the time when she and Angelica Kaufmann joined the ranks of the “Forty,” was the only flower painter in the Academy, with the exception of John Baker. If Angelica Kaufmann, with her brilliant beauty and talents, has eclipsed her humbler friend, yet Miss Moser contrived to secure a very fair share of artistic success. She gained very practical recognition from the royal family, the Queen commissioning her to paint a room at Frogmore, for which she was paid £900. The whole decoration of this room was in flowers, flower-painting being Miss Moser’s speciality. The last time she exhibited at the Academy she sent a figure subject.
Fanny Reynolds, the retiring and unappreciated sister of Sir Joshua Reynolds, was one of Angelica Kaufmann’s many friends. Perhaps she did not object to the romantic devotion paid by her famous brother to the fascinating young Italian artist who captivated all hearts. Frances Reynolds had many difficulties in the way of her artistic studies. She got no help or even encouragement from her brother, who, far from tendering her any advice, disliked to see her paint, and ridiculed her miniatures, which, he said, “make other people laugh and me cry.” Perhaps James Northcote, Sir Joshua’s pupil, was right when he said that Miss Reynolds’s portraits were an exact imitation of Sir Joshua’s defects. This would account for the unfavourable judgment and harsh treatment poor Fanny always received from her brother.
Mrs. Cosway, another of Angelica Kaufmann’s friends, and one of a very smart circle, first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780. She was the daughter of an Englishman, or Irishman, named Hadfield, who kept an hotel at Florence, and sent his little girl to a convent to be educated. She wished to become a nun, but was dissuaded from that course by her mother desiring her company when her father died, and the family moved to England. It was Angelica Kaufmann who eventually completed the work of converting Maria Hadfield from a religious to a secular life. Her husband was an R.A., wealthy, and much admired as an artist. Mrs. Cosway, like her husband, painted miniatures, and was very successful. She also possessed a good deal of musical talent, and was personally attractive, so that between them Mr. and Mrs. Cosway made numerous friends and quantities of money, for Cosway had a keen eye to business, and could turn everything to account. Their receptions were noted, and were attended by artists, men of letters, the most exclusive of the fashionable world, and also by royalty. But all this splendour faded away when Cosway took up the cause of the Revolutionists in France. His friends turned their backs on him, his wife’s health failed, their only child died, and the last years of their married life were spent in a dull house in the Edgeware Road, London. After her husband’s death, Mrs. Cosway went back to her native country.
In the closing years of the eighteenth century there were many landscape painters among women, but in the early part of the nineteenth century they declined, very few exhibiting at the Royal Academy. It was, however, a flourishing period for portrait painters. “Never before or since have so many lady artists obtained such honours in a most difficult branch.”[61] Mrs. Carpenter, who lived between 1793 and 1877, was pre-eminent among these, and was a regular exhibitor at the Academy from 1814 to 1866. Mrs. James Robertson was a clever miniature painter, and was elected a member of the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg. She was also an exhibitor at the Royal Academy during the same period as Mrs. Carpenter.
It was not an easy matter at the close of the last century and the beginning of the present to obtain instruction in miniature painting, and the women who excelled did so entirely by their own laborious efforts. Later on this branch of the art fell into desuetude. Flower and fruit painting came much into vogue early in the century. It is a curious thing that the amateurs of art should have fallen so much into the background in the first half of this century. In the last decade of the eighteenth century the amateurs were rather distinguished. There were numbers of “honorary exhibitors” between 1793 and 1800 at the Royal Academy, who seem to have been so described because they were amateurs like Miss Spilsbury, Miss Serres, and other ladies.
It seems strange that in music women have shown so little creative power. They have proved first-class executants, but as composers they have not attempted any great flights. With a few exceptions their productions have been confined to the lighter kinds of music, to songs and the simpler class of pianoforte works. They have rarely attempted orchestral pieces or the more elaborate forms of vocal composition. Symphonies, oratorios, operas, or even cantatas have very seldom issued from the pen of a woman. It is not, however, impossible that creative capacity may have existed in many women without finding direct expression or acknowledgment. Mendelssohn narrates how he was summoned to play before the Queen, who wished that he should accompany her in one of his compositions. He asked Her Majesty to select her favourite song, and when the Queen had chosen what she called quite the best, Mendelssohn was obliged to confess that the song was his sister’s work, not his own. The elder Mendelssohn would probably have seen more impropriety in his daughter’s name appearing in print than in his son taking credit for what he had not composed. Just as Caroline Herschell’s large share in her brother’s astronomic labours and Fanny Mendelssohn’s authorship were not acknowledged, so is it impossible to say that musical genius may not have been the heritage of some among the women of famous composers’ families.
But women have always delighted in playing and singing, even in those early periods of our history when music in this country was chiefly a thing of ear and memory, there being hardly any musical literature and very few professional instructors. In the middle ages, throughout the Renaissance period, and down to the last century, music was part of polite education for both sexes. At the present day a gentleman may go comfortably through life with no more, if as much, knowledge of music as a Board School child, and not be accused of lack of breeding. For a woman in the middle and upper ranks, music has remained an essential feature of education. Indeed, it has been made far too much of, and many years are often wasted in attaining a very moderate degree of executive skill, with little pleasure or profit, by those who have not sufficient natural ability to make prolonged study useful.
In the present century the musical education of women has made great strides. Every opportunity has been taken for latent talent to develop by means of the best instruction. The academies and schools of music have raised the standard of private teaching, besides directly educating vast numbers of students. The result is an ever-increasing number of really able performers and teachers, but very few composers. To the executive power of women there is no limit beyond that of the instrument. With regard to vocalism, there is the barrier of climate. We are not a nation of vocalists, and though there is a very large amount of respectable talent it is seldom that England produces a great singer.
One proof of the advanced musical education of women is to be found in their frequent presence as performers in high-class orchestras. It used to be a rare thing to see a woman appear on a concert platform in any capacity but that of vocalist or pianoforte player. Now she takes her place quite naturally among the “strings.” To play in concerted music means a wider training, and one that has only become possible to women in recent times.
The English have always been a music-loving nation. The records of early times show in what esteem music was held. The harp was the favourite instrument of our forefathers. The possession of a harp was one of the three things necessary to a gentleman or a freeman in Wales, and slaves were not permitted to play on it. A gentleman’s harp was never seized for debt, because he would then have been degraded to the rank of a slave. The minstrel was as essential to English social life in the middle ages as the cook or the henchman. A writer in the thirteenth century speaks of the good singers in England at the court of Henry II. Erasmus in the sixteenth century remarks of the English:—