PAINTRESSES, PAST AND PRESENT
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.
This invasion of womankind into Art, which has also shown itself in a
remarkable way in poetry and fiction, is in no way to be decried. On
the contrary, it has come upon the present generation as a delightful
surprise, as a breath of fresh and sweet-scented air after the heavy
atmosphere which hung over Art in the later days of the nineteenth
century. To mention a few only: Miss Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler),
Lady Alma Tadema, Mrs. Jopling, Miss Dicksee, Mrs. Henrietta Rae, Miss
Kemp Welch, and Miss Brickdale in oil painting; Mrs. Angell, Miss
Clara Montalba, Miss Gow, Miss Kate Greenaway, and Mrs. Allingham in
water-colours have each looked at Art in a distinguished manner, and
one quite distinct from that of their fellow-workers of the sterner
sex.
The ladies named all entered upon their profession with a due sense of
its importance. Many of them may perhaps be counted fortunate in having
commenced their careers before the newer ideas came into vogue, by
virtue of which anybody and everybody may pose as an artist, now that
it entails none of that lengthy apprenticeship which from all time has
been deemed to be a necessary preliminary to practice. Even so lately
as the date when Mrs. Allingham came upon the scene, draftsmanship
and composition were still regarded as a matter of some importance if
success was to be achieved. Nature, as represented in Art, was still
subjected to a process of selection, a selection, too, of its higher
in preference to its lower forms. The same pattern was not allowed to
serve for every tree in the landscape whatever be its growth, foliage,
or the local influences which have affected its form. A sufficient
study of the human and of animal forms to admit of their introduction,
if needful, into that landscape was not deemed superfluous. Most
important of all, beauty still held the field, and the cult of
unvarnished ugliness had not captured the rising generation.
The endeavours of women in what is termed very erroneously the higher
branch of the profession, have not as yet received the reward that
is their due. Placed at the Royal Academy under practically the same
conditions as the male sex whilst under tuition, both as regards
fortune and success, their pictures, when they mount from the Schools
in the basement to the Exhibition Galleries on the first floor of
Burlington House, carry with them no further possibility of reward,
even although, as they have done, they hold the pride of place there.
It is true that as each election to the Academic body comes round
rumours arise as to the chances of one or other of the fair sex
forcing an entrance through the doors that, with the two exceptions
we have named, have been barred to them since the foundation of the
Institution. The day, however, when their talent in oil painting, or
any other art medium, will be recognised by Academic honours has yet to
come.
To their honour be it said, the undoubted capacities of ladies have not
passed unrecognised by water-colour painters. Both the Royal Society
and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours have enrolled
amongst their ranks the names of women who have been worthy exponents
of the Art.
The practice of water-colour art would appear to appeal especially to
womankind, as not only are the constituents which go to its making of
a more agreeable character than those of oil, but the whole machinery
necessary for its successful production is more compact and capable
of adaptation to the ordinary house. The very methods employed have a
certain daintiness about them which coincides with a lady's delicacy.
The work does not necessitate hours of standing, with evil-smelling
paints, in a large top-lit studio, but can be effected seated, in any
living room which contains a window of sufficient size. There is no
need to leave all the materials about while the canvasses dry, and no
preliminary setting of palettes and subsequent cleaning off.
Yet in spite of this the water-colour art during the first century of
its existence was practised almost solely by the male sex, and it was
not until the middle of the Victorian reign that a few women came on
to the scene, and at once showed themselves the equals of the male
sex, not only so far as proficiency but originality was concerned. In
the case of no one of these was there any imitation or following of a
master; but each struck out for herself what was, if not a new line,
certainly a presentation of an old one in a novel form. Mrs. Angell,
better known perhaps as Helen Coleman, took up the portrayal of flowers
and still life, which had been carried to such a pitch of minute finish
by William Hunt, and treated it with a breadth, freedom, and freshness
that delighted everybody. It secured for her at once a place amid a
section of water-colourists who found it very difficult to obtain these
qualities in their work. Miss Clara Montalba went to Venice and painted
it under aspects which were entirely different from those of her
predecessors, such as James Holland; and she again has practically held
the field ever since as regards that particular phase of atmospheric
effect which has attracted attention to her achievement. The kind of
work and the subjects taken up by Mrs. Allingham will be dealt with at
greater length hereafter, but I may premise by saying that she, too,
ultimately settled into methods that are entirely her own, and such as
no one can accuse her of having derived from anybody else.
* * * * *
The following illustrations find a place in this chapter:--
[Illustration:
5. MILTON'S HOUSE, CHALFONT ST. GILES
_From the Water-colour in the possession of Mrs. J. A. Combe._
Painted 1898.]
The popularity of a poet can hardly be gauged by the number of
visitors to the haunts wherein he passed his day. Rather are they
numbered by the proximity of a railroad thereto. Consequently it
is not surprising that the pilgrims to the little out-of-the-way
Buckinghamshire village where Milton completed his _Paradise Lost_ are
an inconsiderable percentage of those who journey to Stratford-on-Avon.
For though Chalfont St. Giles lies only a short distance away from the
twenty-third milestone on the high-road from London to Aylesbury, it is
some three miles from the nearest station--a station, too, where few
conveyances are obtainable. Motor cars which will take the would-be
pilgrim in an hour from a Northumberland Avenue hotel may increase its
popularity, but at present the village of the "pretty box," as Milton
called the house, is as slumberous and as little changed as it was in
the year 1665, when Milton fled thither from his house in Artillery
Ground, Bunhill Row, before the terror of the plague.[4] Milton
was then fifty-seven, and is described as a pale, but not cadaverous
man, dressed neatly in black, with his hands and fingers gouty, and
with chalk-stones. He loved a garden, and would never take a house, not
even in London, without one, his habit being to sit in the sun in his
garden, or in the colder weather to pace it for three or four hours at
a stretch. Many of his verses he composed or pruned as he thus walked,
coming in to dictate them to his amanuensis, and it was from the vernal
to the autumnal equinox that his intermittent inspiration bore its
fruit. His only other recreation besides conversation was music, and he
sang, and played either the organ or the bass viol. It was at Chalfont
that Milton put into the hands of Ellwood his completed _Paradise
Lost_, with a request that he would return it to him with his judgment
thereupon. It was here also that on receiving Ellwood's famous opinion,
"Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say
of Paradise Found?" he commenced his _Paradise Regained_. He returned
to London after the plague abated, in time to see it again devastated
by the fresh calamity of the great fire.
An engraving of this house appears in Dunster's edition of _Paradise
Regained_, and an account in Todd's _Life of Milton_, p. 272; also in
Jesse's _Favourite Haunts_, p. 62.
[Illustration:
6. THE WALLER OAK, COLESHILL
_From the Water-colour in the possession of the Artist._
Painted 1902.]
That several of Mrs. Allingham's drawings should illustrate scenes
connected with Great Britain's poets is not remarkable, seeing that her
life has been so intimately bound up with one of them, but it is at
first somewhat startling to find that the two selected for illustration
here should treat of Milton and Waller, for was it not the latter who
said of _Paradise Lost_ that it was distinguished only by its length.
The accident that has brought them together here is perhaps that the
two scenes are near neighbours, and, may be, the artist was tempted to
paint the old oak through kindly sentiments towards the author of the
sweet-smelling lines, "Go, Lovely Rose," by which his name endures.
Coleshill, where the oak stands, is a "woody hamlet" near Amersham, and
a mile or two away from Chalfont St. Giles. The tree which bears his
name, and under which he is said to have composed much of his verse,
dates from long anterior to the late days of the Monarchy, when he
was more engaged in hatching plots than in writing verse. If, as is
probable, he viewed and sought its comforting shade, he can hardly have
believed that it would survive the fame of him who received such praise
from his contemporaries as to be acclaimed "inter poetas sui temporis
facile princeps."
[Illustration:
7. APPLE AND PEAR BLOSSOM
_From the Water-colour in the possession of Mr. Theodore Uzielli._
Painted 1901.]
A charming little picture made out of the simplest details is this
spring scene in an Isle of Wight lane. But if the details are of the
simplest character, as much cannot be said for the methods employed
by the artist in their treatment. These are so intricate that the
drawing was perhaps the most difficult of any to reproduce, owing to
the impossibility of accurately translating the subtle gradations which
distinguish the tender greenery of trees, hedgerow, and bank.