Man took advantage of his strength to be
First in the field: some ages have been lost;
But woman ripens earlier, and her life is longer—
Let her not fear.
The fair sex is so much in evidence in Art to-day (the first census of this century recording the names of nearly four thousand who profess that calling) that we are apt to forget that the lady artist, worthy of a place amongst the foremost of the other sex, is a creation of modern growth.
Paintresses—to call them by a quaint and agreeable name—there have been in profusion, and an author, writing a quarter of a century ago, managed to fill two bulky volumes[1] with their biographies; but the majority of these have owed both their practice and their place in Art to the fact of their fathers or husbands having been engaged in that profession.
History has recorded but little concerning the women artists who worked in the early days of English Art. The scanty records which, however, have come down to us prove that if they lived uneventful lives they did so in comfort. For instance, it is noted of the first that passes across the pages of English history, namely Susannah Hornebolt (all the early names were foreign), that she lived for many years in great favour and esteem at the King’s Court, and died rich and honoured: of the next, Lavinia Teerlinck, that she also died rich and respected, having received in her prime a higher salary than Holbein, and from Queen Elizabeth, later on in life, a quarterly wage of £41. Farther on we find Charles I. giving to Anne Carlisle and Vandyck, at one time, as much ultramarine as cost him £500, and Anna Maria Carew obtaining from Charles II. in 1662 a pension of £200 a year. About the same time Mary Beale, who is described as passing a tranquil, modest existence, full of sweetness, dignity, and matronly purity, earned the same amount from her brush, charging £5 for a head, and £10 for a half-length. She died in 1697, and was buried under the communion table in St. James’s, Piccadilly, a church which holds the remains of other paintresses.
Another, Mary Delaney, described as “lovely in girlhood and old age,” and who must have been a delightful personage from the testimonies which have come down to us concerning her, lived almost through the eighteenth century, being born in 1700, and dying in 1788, and being, also, buried in St. James’s. She has left on record that “I have been very busy at my usual presumption of copying beautiful nature”; but the many copies of that kind that she must have made during this long life are all unknown to those who have studied Art a hundred years later.
Midway in the eighteenth century we come across the great and unique event in the annals of Female Art, namely the election of two ladies to the Academic body, in the persons of Angelica Kauffman—who was one of the original signatories of the memorial to George III., asking him to found an Academy, and who passed in as such on the granting of that privilege—and Mary Moser, who probably owed her election to the fact that her father was Keeper of the newly-founded body.
The only other lady artists who flit across the stage during the latter half of that century—in the case of whom any attempt at distinction or recognition is possible—were Frances Reynolds, the sister of the President, and the “dearest dear” of Dr. Johnson, and Maria Cosway, the wife of the miniaturist. These kept up the tradition of ladies always being connected with Art by parentage or marriage.
The Academy catalogues of the first half of the nineteenth century may be searched in vain for any name whose fame has endured even to these times, although the number of lady exhibitors was considerable. In the exhibitions of fifty years ago, of 900 names, 67, or 7 per cent, were those of the fair sex, the majority being termed in the alphabetical list “Mrs. ——, as above”; that is to say, they bore the surname and lived at the same addresses as the exhibitor who preceded them.[2]
The admission of women to the Royal Academy Schools in 1860 must not only have had much to do with increasing the numbers of paintresses, but in raising the standard of their work. In recent years, at the annual prize distributions of that institution, when they present themselves in such interesting and serried ranks, they have firmly established their right to work alongside of the men, by carrying off many of the most important awards.[3]
The Royal Female School of Art, the Slade School, and Schools of Art everywhere throughout the country each and all are now engaged in swelling the ranks of the profession with a far greater number of aspirants to a living than there is any room for.