A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists, 1500-1900

In 1931, the artist Eileen Mayo read Virgina Woolf’s newly published essay A Room of One’s Own. In it, Woolf argues that women’s ability to pursue creative professions depended on their material circumstances. ‘From the beginning of time’, she states, women have lacked access to to income and privacy, the two conditions neessary to create art. What women needed was an independent and secure income and a space of their own to devote solely to their craft; ‘five hundred a year stands for the power to contemplate’ Woolf argued,’a lock on the door menas the power to think for oneself. ¹Virginia Woolf, A Room on One’s Own and Three Guineas, Chatto and Windus, London, 1984, p.99 The essay’s sentiments resonated with Mayo. Her own aspiration to paint professionally was only realised when she achieved an indepndent studio. ‘Years ago, I had no idea of succeeding as a painter’, Mayo wrote, ‘but given the inspiration and the quiet of my own room, I painted my first picture. The great writers and painters of this age are unamimous in agreeing that they owe their most inspired works to being alone. From my own experience, I know it to be true. ²Eileen Mayo, ‘Privacy is Essential:
Miss E Mayo on the Art of Living’,
Birmingham Daily Mail, 12 Feb. 12,
1931. Personal Papers of Eileen Mayo,
Tate Archive, TGA 916/174F

Women worked professionally as painters in Europe from the sixteenth century. While each artist’s experience was individual and specific, all confronted a patriarchal artistic establishment that discriminated against women in many ways, as well as laws and powerful social conventions that defined how women were expected to operate in the world. While the social and cultural context for women changed dramatically from 1500 to 1900, what remained consistent was the impact of women’s education, family relationships and studio arrangements on their ability to practice art professionally. These three, interlinked factors form a common thread in the life stories of women artists in NGV Collection.

Training for Renaissance artists was centred around approved workshops, where students undertook long, supervised apprenticeships guided by established artists. As well as painting techniques, apprentices were taught the technical and artisanal skills that were essential to running a professional studio at the time: grinding and mixing pigments, preparing wood panels and applyling gold leaf. Apprenticeships were rare and, for women, essentially impossible to access. Family networks were the loophole by which most women accessed art trainign and studio space: two integral components of professional art practice. until the eighteenth century, almost all professional women artists who found success were born into artistic families.

Lavinia Fontana (1552-1614) was the daughter of Bolognese painter Prospero Fontana, a successful frescoist who was patronised by Pope Julius III. Prospero taught Lavinia in his workshop and intorduced her to his broad network of mentors and patrons. He also helped arrange her marriage to the merchant and amateur painter Severo Zappi. In an arrangement that was progressive at the time, Zappi moved into the Fontana family home following the marriage and took over responsiblity for managing the household and his wife’s business affairs. He also worked as Lavinia’s studio assistant, painting backgrounds and decorative details. Lavinia eventually took over the Fontana family workshop before relocating to Rome in 1604, to work as a portraitist at the Vatican. Mystic marriage of St Catherine, recently acquired by the Felton Bequest, is a landmark acquisition for the NGV Collection and celebrates the key contribution of Lavinia Fontana, often referred to as the first professional woman artist in history.

Born in Suffolk in 1633, Mary Beale probably received her first art lessons from her father John Cradock, a rector and amateur painter. Unlike Fontana, who trained from an early age in a professional, commercial workshop, Mary was likely taught painting and drawing as an accomplishment, a genteel pastime that was expected of gentlewomen. It was later in her life, and after her marriage in 1652 to Charles Beale, that Mary launched herself as a professional artist. Charles was a colourman – a merchant responsible for preparing and selling canvases and pigments. He took on the role of Mary’s studio manager and kept detailed records of her business transactions, which today provide rare and valuable insights into Mary’s daily working life.

From the 1670s onwards, Mary was the primary earner for the family. She specialised in elegant portraits of the nobility and wealthy. Mary painted the subject’s head and body, based on four or five sittings with the subject in her home-based studio. The background was filled in by studio assistants, who included the Beale’s two sons, Charles and Bartholomew. The latter is the subject of the NGV’s painting Portrait of the artist’s son, Bartholomew Beale, c. 1660, and both sons likely assisted in the background of Portrait of a lady c. 1680, with these works generously joining the NGV Collection with the support of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family. As was the case for Fontana, finding a spouse willing to support the family business was key to Beale’s ability to pursue art as a profession, as well as to fulfil the social expectations on women to be respectable wives and mothers, factors that were important to women artists’ social reputations.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries most art buyers purchased or commissioned art works directly from artists, rather than through art dealers or galleries. The number of people with the means to buy art was small, and traditional patronage groups such as the Church and the aristocracy played an important role in developing artist’s careers. Even after art dealers emerged as the mainstream method of selling art in the mid nineteenth century, working directly with buyers on portrait commissions remained a vital source of income for women, just as it had been for Beale and Fonanta. This was, in part, because women artists’ supposably ‘imitative’ artistic abilities were considered suited to portraiture, as opposed to historical or allegorical painting, seen as more ambitious and challenging. At this time, critics associated ‘feminine’qualities of vanity and imitation with portraiture. While the women painter lacked ‘the power for heroic subjects’ in portraits ‘she possesses her greatest strength’, noted one critic in 1805. . ‘Females are …particularly suited to this branch of art … It is a gift which nature has preferred to grant as a weapon to the weaker’. ³August von Kotzbue referring to Angelica Kauffman, quoted in Angela
Rosenthal, ‘She’s Got the Look! Eighteen-Century Female Portrait Painters and the Psychology of a Potentially “Dangerous Employment”
’, in Joanna Woodall (ed.), Portraiture: Facing the Subject, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1997),
pp. 147–8 While false and stereotypical, these assumptions meant that portraiture was considered a viable and acceptable career for women.

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun is an example of a woman artist who benefitted from strong patronage relationships to establish a successful career as a portraitist. Vigée Le Brun’s father, the artist Louis Vigée, recognised his daughter’s talents early, giving her access to his studio and providing tuition. However, Vigée died when Vigée Le Brun was twelve, depriving her of the benefits of an artist father. Her training was sporadic but her natural talent attracted mentors and connections in Paris’s fashionable elite society. Nervous about the influence of marriage on her independence, she nevertheless married the art dealer Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Le Brun in 1776, in part to escape the control of her stepfather, who was pocketing a large portion of Vigée Le Brun’s painting income. The two paintings by Le Brun in the NGV Collection, both gifted by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, are from this early stage of the artist’s career, when wealthy clientele were flocking to Le Brun’s studio to have their portraits painted.

In 1778 Vigée Le Brun painted her first portrait of a twenty-three-year-old Marie Antoinette, beginning a close relationship with the Queen that would produce more than thirty official portraits and cement Vigée Le Brun’s reputation as a portraitist. Although barred from entry to the prestigious French Royal Academy on account of being married to an art dealer, Vigée Le Brun’s relationship with the monarch allowed to her to gain admission. Vigée Le Brun frequently submitted allegorical and historical paintings to the Salon, in a bid to gain recognition in these prestigious genres. However, it was her portrait practice that provided most of her income, particularly after she fled France following the Revolution in 1789.

For many women, marriage and family responsibility were an obstacle to pursuing an artistic career. The nineteenth-century British artist Louisa Starr observed ‘When a [married] woman has a profession, it means in most case that she has two professions’.⁴Louisa Starr, ‘The Spirit of Purity in Art’,
in Ishbel M. Gordon (ed.), Transactions
of the International Council of Women,
T Fischer Unwin, London, 1900, p. 86 Marital responsibilities, childcare and running a household were an interruption to artistic work for all but the wealthiest women. While Fontana and Beale set up professional studios and workshops in domestic settings, most women’s marital homes did not accommodate dedicated studio space. Renting a studio outside the home was expensive and inconvenient, and, in many countries, illegal until the nineteenth century. Married women in England were not allowed to purchase property or enter rental contracts until 1882, for example.

As art education opportunities for women slowly opened up in the mid to late nineteenth century, women increasingly developed their own networks and connections outside of marriage. Through these relationships, artists created their own support systems, more flexible and progressive than the traditional family. Annie Swynnerton developed strong connections with fellow women students at the Manchester School of Art and the famed famed Académie Julian in Paris. Painted in Paris in 1878, the NGV’s The lady in white, gifted by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family reflects the influence of Swynnerton’s training in France, displaying a juste milieu (happy medium) blend of academic realism and Impressionist painterly freedom. Later, Swynnerton shared a studio with her close friend Susan Isabel Dacre, and the pair founded the Manchester Society of Women Painters to offer exhibiting and education opportunities to other women. Also active in the suffrage movement, Swynnerton and other artists and campaigners in her circle participated in ‘matronage’; commissioning and painting portraits of each other that visually represented their friendship and activism. ⁵Deborah Cherry, Painting Women:
Victorian Women Artists, Routledge,
London, 1993, p. 102. Their systems of shared studios, collaborative exhibitions and commissioning modelled a new support system for artists, that was less dependent on patriarchal family structures.

Dr Maria Quirk is NGV Curator, Collections and Research.

The NGV warmly thanks The Felton Bequest for generously acquiring Lavinia Fontana’s Mystic Marriage of St Catherine, c. 1575, for the NGV and acknowledge Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family for their ongoing generosity across the Collection.

Observations is an NGV series that examines the NGV Collection, unlocking its stories through the eyes of international researchers, curators and writers.

Observations is generously supported by an anonymous donor.

This essay was first published in NGV Magazine | Issue 33, Mar–Apr 2022.

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