Beyond the Frame

Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850 -1900

Deborah Cherry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135094836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte europeo

Beyond the Frame rewrites the history of Victorian art to explore the relationships between feminism and visual culture in a period of heady excitement and political struggle. Artists were caught up in campaigns for women's enfranchisement, education and paid work, and many were drawn into controversies about sexuality. This richly documented and compelling study considers painting, sculpture, prints, photography, embroidery and comic drawings as well as major styles such as Pre-Raphaelitism, Neo-Classicism and Orientalism. Drawing on critical theory and post-colonial studies to analyse the links between visual media, modernity and imperialism, Deborah Cherry argues that visual culture and feminism were intimately connected to the relations of power.

1

ARTISTS AND MILITANTS, 1850–66

Artists and militants

On 16 July 1860 Laura Herford entered the schools of the Royal Academy after a brilliantly orchestrated campaign to secure the admission of women students to an institution which had excluded them since its foundation. She was, she remembered, greeted by Charles Landseer, the Keeper, ‘goodnaturedly, though awkwardly as if he scarcely knew what would come of it’.¹ What indeed? Increasing numbers of women artists were exhibiting and selling their work, newly visible not just as exceptional or outstanding performers, but as a collectivity to be reckoned with. And as a group they were making new demands and generating debate. A newly organised women’s movement was equally demanding and equally provocative of contention and change. From this moment, women’s art and feminism were inextricably intertwined: speech on the one invariably incited discourse on the other. Women claimed representation: in the world of work, in the profession of art, in civil society. When artists joined the women’s movement, the politics of feminism connected to the practice of art.

The reasons for these links lay in part in the development of feminist languages. In speaking of the self, women spoke simultaneously of identity and difference. Feminism’s project was to reorganise the asymmetrical relations of power between men and women so as to change the prevailing concepts of middle-class femininity which defined women as dependent and self-less. Feminists laid claim to a subjectivity which was self-conscious, self-motivated, self-reliant. In refashioning an ideal of liberal individualism developed by and for white middle-class men, feminist subjectivity was marked by class and differentiated by race. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has identified the ‘militant female subject’, local to the west and forged in relation to imperialism and nationalism (issues developed further in the next chapter). Her analysis, which ‘situate[s] feminist individualism in its historical determination’, contains a provocative suggestion, that the creative arts provided a fertile arena for feminist claims to individualism: ‘[T]he battle for female individualism was played out within the larger theatre of the establishment of meritocratic individualism, indexed in the aesthetic field by the ideology of “the creative imagination”.’ This proposition, developed in relation to the ‘creative imagination’ of Jane Eyre (claimed by some as the quintessential feminist heroine), enables a link to be made between feminist activists and woman artists.² Individualism flourished in the nineteenth-century art world: the artist became an intense focus of concern and, as Michel Foucault has put it, a ‘primary means of classification’.³ Between 1850 and 1900, exhibition reviews moved from a leisurely stroll round the gallery to the discussion of individual achievement. Magazines, handbooks and catalogues increasingly carried profiles of artists, while feminist papers featured biographical sketches of women practitioners.

The female militant as artist

By the later 1840s fine art offered singular possibilities for a professional career. Harriet Taylor was convinced that the ‘modes of earning their living’ open to her contemporaries ‘(with the sole exception of artists) consist only of poorly paid and hardly worked occupations, all the professions, mercantile clerical, legal & medical, as well as all posts being monopolised by men’.⁴ Unitarian beliefs and class-specific convictions of the value of work powered feminism’s push for paid employment for middle-class women in the following decade.⁵ Amateur accomplishment in drawing and watercolours could be turned to advantage. Fine art offered independence, economic autonomy and, in the words of Anna Mary Howitt, ‘a life of aspiration’, characterised by ‘strength of determination’, ‘earnestness and fixedness of purpose’ and ‘largeness of vision’.⁶

In the earlier decades of the century the decision to become an artist had been largely driven by family pressure and/or financial necessity. Eloise Stannard grew up in an extended artist family in Norwich in which, as she recollected, ‘there was imposed on her the necessity of contributing to the family exchequer’.⁷ These pathways remained in place throughout the century: contributing to the family finances was one of several factors which influenced Anna Mary Howitt’s writing and painting. But in the 1840s professional practice was also undertaken as part of a feminist commitment to paid work for middle-class women. Young women in progressive families were given a sound education, some access to art education, materials and studio space, and most importantly the encouragement and confidence (in varying degrees) needed to become professional artists. In accounting for Rebecca Solomon’s pursuit of a career, Monica Bohm-Duchen has emphasised the confluence of several factors: her father Meyer Solomon’s prosperity; the influence of her mother, Catherine Levy, an amateur artist; the example of her brothers, Abraham and Simeon (both painters); and the formation of Anglo-Jewry in the first half of the century. The Solomon family, she writes, was ‘on the one hand loyal to its Jewish roots and on the other anxious to succeed in English gentile society’. Here ‘artistic ambition and Jewish feminine respectability could co-exist’.⁸ Families of radical dissent produced many young women who became artists and activists: Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), Eliza Fox, Anna Mary Howitt, Emma Novello, Rosa Le Breton and Caroline E. Hullah grew up in a network of households connected by kinship, friendship, religious sympathy and strong interests in civil rights identified by social historians as a ‘genealogy of reform’.⁹ Laura Herford was a cousin of Bessie Rayner Parkes (to become the editor of The English Woman’s Journal) and related to an extensive Unitarian network in Birmingham and London.¹⁰ Educated in Unitarian schools in Cheshire and Warwickshire, she settled in London at the age of 18 to study art. Barbara Leigh Smith and Eliza Fox were both daughters of Radical members of Parliament, Benjamin Leigh Smith and W.J. Fox. Anna Mary Howitt was the daughter of the writers and editors William and Mary Howitt. What distinguishes them from contemporaries who maintained a distance from the women’s movement was an early grounding in radical politics and their contact with women active in the feminist politics of the 1840s.

Reflecting on ‘several remarkable women of an older generation’, Bessie Rayner Parkes named as significant Harriet Martineau, Mary Howitt and Anna Jameson, singling out the latter, an art historian, ‘for the influence she exerted, not only in her writings, but in her person’. According to Parkes,

The department of intellectual activity in which she naturally took most interest was that of the artist; and a group of young women, who pursued art in one or other of its branches, were among her constant visitors during her sojourns in London.¹¹

In turn, Jameson’s views were questioned by younger friends whose politics drew them into public activism. Older writers and artists offered encouragement, instruction, support and examples of independent women who were outspoken on women’s rights, social and political issues and cultural matters. Margaret Gillies, well connected in Radical circles of the 1840s and a consistent supporter of feminist initiatives in the following decades, offered tuition and advice to those wishing to study as artists. Harriet Taylor, whose stirring advocacy of work, autonomy and the vote for women was published in 1851, had earlier befriended the young Eliza Fox, sending her a gift edition of John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (which included the dedication tacitly acknowledging Harriet Taylor’s co-authorship). Writing to Fox’s father, Taylor explained,

I sent it to Miss Fox because when I knew her in her early youth she appeared to interest herself strongly in the cause to which for many years of my life & exertions have been devoted, justice for women.

The gift strategically backed Eliza Fox’s transition from art student to professional practice, for it was in this letter, quoted above, that Taylor wrote of men’s monopoly in the world of work.¹² Julia Smith, a close friend of Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Jesser Reid (founder of Bedford College), put her weight behind the decision of her niece Hilary Bonham Carter to go to Paris for nearly a year, ‘to make a great stride with her drawing there…. free from all home cares’. For her niece Barbara Leigh Smith she provided a rigorous course of study which included detailed commentary on demanding contemporary texts. She was relieved to see

all the young women of [her] acquaintance getting hold of some occupation or at least feeling the want of it. Few sit down contented now, with the life that was considered to do very well in my young days, made up of a little music & a little drawing and a good deal of visiting.¹³

These cross-generational contacts facilitated the development of languages for speaking oppression, injustice and inequality which exploded into discourse in the 1850s. Sally Alexander has explained that ‘Victorian feminism arose from a sense among many women of social injustice and grievance.’¹⁴ These new languages enabled young women to fashion a sense of self, determine a career move and oppose reluctant parents: Eliza Fox insisted on making a transition from amateur accomplishment to professional endeavour; Emily Mary Osborn demanded and secured limited access to art training.¹⁵

By the later 1840s a women’s art alliance had formed in London bringing together writers, painters, sculptors and students committed to women’s practice of art and to feminist politics. The politics of friendship and the friendship of politics have for some years been recognised as central to the formation of the women’s movement.¹⁶ With its knots and breaks, slacks and tensions, and its fabric of interconnections, weaving provides a useful analogy for uneven and changing patterns and textures of friendship shaped by proximity and distance. Eliza Fox, Laura Herford, Anna Mary Howitt and Barbara Leigh Smith can be woven in time and again to places, moments and campaigns. For others, looser or temporary connections can be projected. Sarah Ellen Blackwell, sister of the physician Elizabeth Blackwell, a member of the extensive Blackwell family and cousin to Bessie Rayner Parkes, was in Britain in the later 1850s; joining the alliance, she brought invaluable experience from the American women’s movement. Ties were made through portraiture, Eliza Fox, for example, painting a portrait of Harriet Martineau. Close links were established between those who studied together. Eliza Fox and Anna Mary Howitt, for example, attended Henry Sass’s art school together, going every day from 1844 to 1847. In the early 1850s Anna Mary and Jane Benham studied in Munich and there was some possibility of Eliza Fox joining them. They were visited by Barbara Leigh Smith, touring Europe with Bessie Rayner Parkes. Parkes dedicated her volume of Poems of 1855 to Barbara Leigh Smith and she inscribed the opening poem ‘The World of Art’ to ‘AMH and all true artists’. A poem of 1852 portrayed Leigh Smith and Howitt as two artists, one striding the landscape and one in her tiny room. Howitt exclaimed delightedly, ‘What pleasure to find my dear little room set in such a sweet poetic setting and in such good and noble company.’ The friends holidayed together, worked together, visited each other and consulted each other about their activities. On sketching expeditions Howitt advised Leigh Smith on technique: ‘Anna Mary says my little oils are very good for 1st productions from nature[.] My landscape is very PRB.’ In January 1856 on the Isle of Wight, Howitt read Heine to her, ‘as we sat together here in our studio overhanging the stormy sea, after our day’s painting’. Art and politics were inextricably threaded together. When Parkes accompanied Howitt and Benham on a sketching trip in the summer of 1853, she gathered material for a poem, ‘Helen’s Answer’, which spoke of a woman artist’s determination to succeed ‘[s]triving against the hindrance of time/And all the weight of custom’. Reporting their adventures to Marian Evans (George Eliot) in January 1856, Leigh Smith solicited her signature on a petition ‘I have set going’ to reform the laws relating to married women’s property and requested the names of ‘any Ladies to whom I can send sheets’.¹⁷ On one of these excursions, Leigh Smith sketched Parkes astride a mountain gorge, holding her volume of poems. Parkes sports a short jacket and skirt, worn with sturdy boots, so much a hallmark of her personal style that she could relate a tongue-in-cheek story of an occasion when an admirer was deterred by her distinctive footwear: ‘It was damp, & I (who always you know my dear always look to pure Kantian reason & not to female adornment) had put on my – Big Boots.’ Reformed dress which certainly facilitated outdoor activities was also the subject of a humorous poem by Leigh Smith:

Oh! Isn’t it jolly

To cast away folly

And cut all one’s clothes a peg shorter

…

And rejoice in one’s legs

Like a free-minded Albion’s daughter.

…

When bodies are free

Their spirits shall be

Of a quite unknown elevation.

And women who dare

To show their feet bare

Be a glorious part of the nation.¹⁸

Into these lines is distilled a heady brew of feminism and nationalism.

Writing of the friendships of these years, Howitt used the terms ‘sister’ and ‘sisterhood’. An Art Student in Munich (a volume of recollections from her visit to Munich) cast Leigh Smith as Justina, ‘my beloved friend out of England, the sister of my heart’. The book narrates an intense relationship between two women painters, whose proximity is conveyed in the descriptions of their rooms, dedicated to painting and to living, neither exclusively workspace nor domestic interior: ‘there stood two sister easels, and a sister painting-blouse hung on each: the casts, the books, the green jug with flowers’. From the sitting room, hung with their sketches, are g...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Artists and militants, 1850-66
• 2 In/between the colonial theatre: visuality, visibility and modernity
• 3 The ‘worlding’ of Algeria: feminism, imperialism and visual culture
• 4 Harriet Hosmer’s Zenobia: a question of authority
• 5 Tactics and allegories, 1866-1900
• Appendix: selected publications on Algeria, 1857—68
• Notes
• Suggestions for further reading
• Index