Modern British Women Painters

By Ralph Peac.o.c.k

It is the privilege of man, in his youth, to ignore his limitations.

For this ignorance he pays in failure the price of a possible success.

In his wiser middle age he does not repent, he finds that it is only by some sort of an attack on his limitations that apparent results are attained, and he learns to take on faith the difference there is in fact between the attainment and the attempt. The experience of a woman is, I take it, very similar. It follows in no way that, because her limitations are different from, and in a physical sense greater than, man's, the brutal laws which go to produce results are in her case different. She is marching along the same road, and though she may have other stopping places by the way and perhaps may take up more modest quarters in the end, it is a journey and an arrival, an effort and a result, and the things seen by the wayside become of significance to her as the painted banners under which she seeks her way.

Englishwomen do not seem to have done much in painting before the generation or two that are just past. Public opinion was against them.

The early Victorian conditions under which a woman like Charlotte Bronte produced her great results in another art are more or less familiar to all, and in the matter of painting the voice of prejudice has had still more to say. By these days it has croaked itself into the feeble hoa.r.s.eness of a respectable and decent old age, and we can already look back to a succession of women painters who seem to have been conscious at first of their leading-strings, but who have shown a development more than corresponding to that of the conditions under which they worked. Kate Greenaway, who died only a few years ago, was no doubt a good example of the charming results to be obtained in leading-strings. To compare her with an artist who works in a similar field to-day is to note an advance, not only of a generation, but of the changing educational conditions within the generation. It is a far cry from Kate Greenaway to Miss Alice Woodward, for instance, and it is difficult to imagine that another age will say anything more, or less, of Miss Woodward than that she was a most distinguished artist.

The leading-strings are gone.

It will always be a special field for women, the production of work in the first place for children, and it is unnecessary to spend time in emphasising or over-emphasising its importance. Art itself reckons little with motives and much with results. In a more general view it would, perhaps, be better to start this small article with some notice of the women painters of the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. There is Mrs. Mary Beale, who was a child when Cromwell was Lord Protector, and who later on painted a most excellent portrait of Charles II. There is some work of hers in the National Portrait Gallery, London, work of the quiet, genuine kind, and better than most of the painting that came for some time afterwards. Then there is Angelica Kauffman, R.A., who provides us with perhaps the only well-known name of the early periods, and there are some portrait-painters of interest, like Miss Catharine Read, of Reynolds'

time, or like Mrs. Anne Mee, of the early part of last century. But it must be confessed that it would be a sorry list for a couple of centuries if it were a fact that women had had the same opportunities and no greater disabilities than the men of the period. It is not indeed until we reach such painters as Margaret Carpenter, the portrait painter, Mrs. Matilda Heming, the landscapist, and Lady Waterford, that more than charming amateur who might have done so much, that we begin to feel we have a reasonable genesis of the worker of to-day. These painters show to us now rather the influences of their time or the limitations of their opportunities, than personalities which are outside such considerations, but they nevertheless provide us with evidence of a very genuine and lively activity.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRITISH SCHOOL, XVIII CENTURY THE SIBYL. AFTER THE PICTURE IN THE ROYAL GALLERY, DRESDEN. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY BRAUN, CLeMENT & CO., PARIS Maria Angelica Kauffman, R.A., Painter 1741-1807]

The work of Mrs. Heming is interesting in a rather more special way.

It is distinctly rare to find the ordinary landscapist of her time working with an eye to truth rather than to the making of a so-called composition of the period, rare enough in fact to place her quite above the ordinary.

It is at first sight a curious thing that more women painters have not even in these days been attracted by pure landscape. It is strange in the sense that they have among them such painters as Lady Butler and Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch. But no branch of art is more that of the specialists than landscape. It developed later in history than any other, and it calls to those who would tire of the didactic in human thought and who might find in the study of any obviously human affair something to remind them of a phase of experience they would, in paint, avoid. No doubt the Empress Frederick turned to landscape as an occupation of relief from the pressing human affairs in which her life was involved, and it is just in such a way that the natural landscapist turns from the human side of life to the more abstract emotions he finds in the garden of the Great Spirit.

Women, I believe, are more held by the personal than the abstract.

Mrs. Allingham may be one of the exceptions. In any case Mrs.

Allingham claims quite a special place for herself in any sketch-survey of the work of English women painters. Few women have shown a more definitely English sympathy in landscape than she has.

Her method is simple, obvious and plain for all to see. For that reason it would fail to appeal in any way to the Eclectics, or to those among them, at any rate, who, in the words of a subtle Eclectic, confound the natural with the commonplace. A distinctly home-bred feeling, such as Mrs. Allingham has among women, or, in the grand manner, Fred Walker among men, is however a very rare thing and is becoming rarer. How far it may, in individual cases, change to other things may be seen in some of the more modern painters, in the remarkably strong work of Miss Margaret Cameron, Miss Biddie Macdonald, Miss Alice Fanner, and Miss Beatrice How. This latter painter has not merely been affected in matters of technique, but gives us, most delightfully, the very sentiment of the country people she paints. It is quite a little miracle of transplanted adaptability.

It has been said that every good woman has in her marching outfit a supply of adaptability which, in sum total, accounts for most of the happiness enjoyed by the human race at large. If so, it may be added that in its superior manifestations the affair is sub-conscious, artistic, most natural and not at all one of the commonplaces of life.

It perhaps explains, or rather is ill.u.s.trated by, the number of painters in the very first rank among women who have shown in their work the influence of some near relative. In any case, Lady Alma-Tadema for one has produced work so extraordinarily good in itself that it is easy to believe the similarity of her technique to that of Sir Laurence Alma-Tadema to be merely one of the happy chances of her life. A very similar thought arises in connection with the work of the late Miss Margaret d.i.c.ksee. It is easy to influence technique, but first causes are not set in action by human hands. If one who did not know her may say so, there is written on the canvases that Miss d.i.c.ksee has left behind the evidence of a most lovable nature.

Mrs. Stanhope Forbes, Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch and Lady Granby are isolated examples whose work has no connection in itself and shows very little affinity, beneath the surface, with the special influences of their time. The strong brushwork of Mrs. Stanhope Forbes, it is true, may be said to have arrived by way of Newlyn, but the fanciful sentiment underlying her work has an arrival quite of its own. Miss Lucy Kemp-Welch has made, and deserved, a place for herself the last few years, and she stands alone among women as an animal painter of power. Lady Granby, who is an amateur, is also an artist. Magna est ars et prevalet. Ave!

Miss Mary Gow, the late Alice Havers, Miss Jessie Macgregor, Miss Anna Alma-Tadema, Miss Lily Blatherwick, Miss Amy Sawyer, and Louisa Starr (Madame Canziana) also make a special appeal, each in her own way.

Mrs. Swynnerton is a lady who has given us a great deal of work of a very high order indeed. In the first place she has always something to say that is worth saying. Her work is exuberant with the joy of life, the joy of colour. Her very brush is surcharged with a high and lavish spirit. Blue eyes look out, so blue, from happy sunburnt faces, so sunburnt, that take their places on her canvases as in a drama to tell us something of her thoughts and of themselves. Mrs. Swynnerton, plus her faults, is genuine through and through. The work of another painter, Mrs. De Morgan, naturally comes into consideration when we turn to symbolism. More tenaciously in earnest and more austere in every way than Mrs. Swynnerton, her work is as the poles apart. The one romps, if the term be allowed, in a flower-spangled meadow, the other's province is the study; and, as is the way with students, her mind is often on the thought of the past rather than with affairs of the present. Before one of Mrs. De Morgan's pictures one thinks through, by way of Burne-Jones, to Botticelli and the great ancestors of art, and it is saying a very great deal for Mrs. De Morgan that in such case one can bless the pa.s.sive hand that gives and the hand that receives.

Her work may very well lead us to a small band of artists, not definitely connected in themselves, but allied with each other in the sense that they work for somewhat similar ends: Mrs. Marianne Stokes, Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale and Mrs. Young Hunter. To these, perhaps, may one day be added a name very little known at present, Miss Milicent E. Gray. It is not unusual in speaking of the work of either of these first three artists, and more especially of Miss Eleanor Brickdale, to refer to the pre-Raphaelite influence in art. It is, however, extremely probable that the influence takes direct effect in these days more as a method than as a conviction. The great conviction itself has leavened Art, and the individualities of these painters are so strong that it becomes in their case a nearer interest to ignore all potters and regard the clay. Mrs. Young Hunter has a quaint flitting fancy that wanders over hill and dale and seizes from life subtle little touches that are full of the elusiveness of tales told after school hours.

Mrs. Marianne Stokes is made of sterner stuff. She has worked of late in that most stern and stubborn medium, tempera, and small things of hers in various exhibitions attract one always with the desire to know more of her most attractive work. Miss Eleanor Brickdale works, or plays, always with an idea. And the idea she is not satisfied to leave until it has taken on for other eyes a most cunning and beautiful bodily shape, in line, in form, in colour--above all in line. She is probably, without knowing it, as good an ant.i.thesis as may be found of the Impressionist, so-called. The Impressionist is the incarnation of the abstract in terms of paint, the Symbolist uses the material to convey definite abstractions in thought. It is, by contrast with music, the motive of symphony as compared to the motive of Oratorio or opera, and the apposite methods may be equally well, or badly, used or abused. Abuse may lead the militant Impressionist to an impa.s.se of a.s.sertive agnosticism as pedantic in its way as the lucubrations of the most literary pedant in paint. On the other side of the lantern you may have Watts, and the painted canvases of a Whistler. So be it.

Art is a long lane with many turnings, and down each there may be found a little house with a fireside and human hearts thereby.

RALPH PEAc.o.c.k.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SILHOUETTE BY NELLY BODENHEIM]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SCHOOL OF BRITISH WATER-COLOUR, 1900.

YOUTH AND THE LADY. REPRODUCED FROM THE ORIGINAL WATER-COLOUR, BY KIND PERMISSION OF CHARLES DOWDESWELL, ESQ., THE OWNER OF THE PICTURE AND ITS COPYRIGHT.

Miss Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, Painter]

Women Painters in the United States of America

During the 19th century, in the United States of America, there came slowly into existence a new school of painting--new often in temper rather than in manner, for its followers usually came to Europe for their methods. Race, climate, religion, commerce, social life, influence art, and the painters of the United States reveal in their work all the characteristics for which their country has long been famous: vivacity, invention, constant enterprise, a democratic enthusiasm, a love of truth (truth often united with romance or else with sensationalism), and last, but not least, a rare felicity in transforming borrowed knowledge into something quite original. It is not often that a civilisation embodies itself in the genius of one man, giving an epitome of all its dominant qualities; but in Mr. John S. Sargent, R.A., we recognise a painter of tremendous gifts who does for the United States what the manly, swaggering Rubens did for Flanders, symbolising a people and a civilisation.

One sign of the democratic spirit in the progress of American Art is to be noticed in the fact that women have partic.i.p.ated largely in the honours gained by the pioneers. It is noteworthy, for instance, that the first book on Women Painters should have been written by an American lady, Mrs Ellet, as far back as 1859. Mrs. Ellet showed great industry, but following a custom rashly encouraged by writers on art, she believed that she could teach painting and sculpture by the use of words alone, in recording biographical facts, and in offering criticisms on work that her readers could not see in ill.u.s.trations.

Written history is the phonograph of all past centuries, but the understanding of art owes little to its words.

Still, the enthusiasm that fired Mrs. Ellet was shared by many of her countrywomen, and to it we owe some truly clever artists, like the four sculptors, Harriet Hosmer, Florence Freeman, Edmonia Lewis and Emma Stebbins, or like the following painters: Emily Sartain (portraits and genre), Sara M. Peale (portraits), Mrs. J. W. Dewing (portraits, subject pictures, flowers and still-life), Annie C. Shaw (cattle and landscapes), Mrs. Adele Fa.s.sett (portraits) Mrs. Elisa Greatorex (landscapes), Mrs. Henry A. Loop (portraits), Ella A. Moss (portraits), Jennie Browns...o...b.. (subject pictures), May Alcott (copies after J. M. W. Turner and still-life), Elizabeth Boott (figure subjects), Charlotte B. Coman (landscapes in the manner of Corot), and that delicate recorder of pleasant secrets learnt from nature in the fields, Fidelia Bridges. The very t.i.tles of this lady's pictures have the fragrance of field flowers or else they glow with the plumage of birds. It has been said of Fidelia Bridges that her art sings little pastoral lyrics, and her art is certainly very fresh and sweet, charmed with much sympathetic appreciation of nature in some of her unnumbered smiling moods. For Fidelia Bridges, like Birket Foster, paints as though the year were all springtime, a series of twelve May months, all full of gaiety and bounty. She seldom takes heed of that eternal warfare which accompanies Nature's bountifulness, filling the seed-carrying winds with the presence of death, and setting every living thing to prey upon another. To this part of Nature's life Fidelia Bridges usually shuts her eyes, unlike Miss E. M. Carpenter, whose landscape art reveals at times the menacing suggestion of great rivers and of high solitary mountains.

It would serve no useful purpose to enumerate all the earlier women painters of the United States. They worked bravely and well, and if their doings are now forgotten or undervalued, it is only because the harvest sowed by them is being reaped by the present generation.

To-day the names of at least two American women painters, Mary Ca.s.satt and Cecilia Beaux, are known in every country where good art is studied. Mary Ca.s.satt, the only pupil of Degas, is bracketed always with Berthe Morisot, for both ladies became Impressionists at about the same time, adding the charm of their personalities to a rugged revolt in art. The work of each has great interest, but that of Mary Ca.s.satt is the more attractive and the more enduring. It is not overburdened with a heavy adherence to methods originated by men; and it is richer with the emotions of the painter's own heart. To Mary Ca.s.satt, Impressionism is a chosen dialect, a means by which she can express herself in colour and form; to Berthe Morisot, on the other hand, it was in itself the final word in painting. So, mistaking the clay of art for the finished statue, she obeyed the methods of a school with so much zeal and so much self-sacrifice that her own nature became enslaved to the difficulties of technique. Compare Berthe Morisot's able study (page 211) with the charming homeliness of Mary Ca.s.satt's picture (page 157), and you will see at a glance how wide is the difference between the emotional and aesthetic value of the subjects represented. Berthe Morisot remains a student, while Mary Ca.s.satt pa.s.ses beyond technique to a universal delight in childhood.

She feels both the pathos and the humour of the beginnings of our life, and she makes infancy welcome in art because she understands it and shows no maudlin sentiment.

Something of the same kind is done by Miss Cornelia Conant, in her domestic picture called "The End of the Story" (page 151); and another view of child-life, delightfully rendered by Helen Hyde, may be seen in colour on page 145.

The pictures by which Miss Cecilia Beaux is represented in this book show very clearly that her genius has dramatic strength, sustention, and flexibility. The portrait on page 182 is handled with a sculptural vigour that responds admirably to the character of the sitter, while the "Mother and Child" (page 121) has a quietness of tone, a reserved simplicity of style, a permeating suggestion of pathos, having much in common with Whistler's portrait of his mother. Miss Cecilia Beaux is a dramatist in her studies of character, and her art is probably more subtle and more various than that of any woman painter who has devoted her life to portraiture. The reader will do well to contrast her style with that of Mrs. Anna Lea Merritt, the first woman painter whose work was purchased by the Chantrey Fund, London (page 139).

It is fitting now that a list should be given of other leading artists of the United States, though their work is not represented here, owing to the adventures in delays that attend a despatch of letters from London to America.

1. Sarah C. Sears (Mrs. J. Montgomery Sears), pupil of Turner, Brush and Tarbell; prizes at New York, 1893, Chicago, 1893, Paris, 1900, Buffalo, 1901, Charleston, 1902. 2. Miss Mary L. Macomber, pupil of Boston Museum; prizes at Boston, 1895, Atlanta, 1895, National Academy of Design, 1897, Pittsburgh, 1901. 3. Miss Katherine Abbot, bronze medal at Paris, 1900. 4. Miss Elizabeth F. Bonsall, pupil of Howard Pyle, prize winner at Philadelphia, 1885, 1888, 1897. 5. Miss Matilda Browne, pupil of Dewey and Bisbing, medals at Chicago, 1890, National Academy of Design, 1899 and 1901. 6. Miss Maria Brooks, pupil of the Royal Academy Schools, London. 7. Mrs. Brewster Sewell, pupil of Duran in Paris, of Chase in New York; winner of several prizes, as at Charleston in 1902. 8. Rosina Emmet Sherwood, pupil of Chase and of Julian's School, Paris; prizes in Paris, 1889, Chicago, 1893, Buffalo, 1901. 9. Mrs. Emily M. Scott, prizes at Buffalo, 1901, New York, 1902.

10. Miss Rhoda H. Nicolls, born in England and studied in England; a frequent prize-winner. 11. Edith M. Prellwitz, a frequent prize-winner and a pupil of Brush, in New York, of Julian, in Paris. 12. Lydia Field Emmet, pupil of Bouguereau, in Paris, of Chase, in New York; prizes at Chicago, 1893, Atlanta, 1895, Buffalo, 1901. 13. Mrs. Kenyon c.o.x, pupil of the National Academy of Design; prize-winner at Paris, 1900, at Buffalo, 1901. 14. Emma L. Cooper, Medals at Chicago, 1893, Atlanta, 1895. 15. Mrs. Charlotte B. Comans, Medal at San Francisco, 1894. 16. Miss Clara S. MacChesney; and last, but not least, Miss Mary F. MacMonnies.

W. S. S.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRITISH SCHOOL, CONTEMPORARY THE QUEEN AND THE PAGE. AFTER THE ORIGINAL PAINTING, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY DIXON & SON, LONDON Mrs. Marianne Stokes, Painter]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRITISH SCHOOL, XVII CENTURY PORTRAIT OF THE ENGLISH POET, ABRAHAM COWLEY (1618-1667). FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY W. A. MANSELL & CO., AFTER THE ORIGINAL PAINTING IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON Mrs. Mary Beale, born Cradock, Painter 1632-1697]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTRAIT OF KING CHARLES II OF ENGLAND. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY W. A. MANSELL & CO., AFTER THE ORIGINAL PAINTING IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, LONDON Mrs. Mary Beale, born Cradock, Painter 1632-1697]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRITISH SCHOOL, XVIII CENTURY CARICATURE OF EDWARD GIBBON, HISTORIAN. IN THE PRINT ROOM, THE BRITISH MUSEUM Lady Diana Beauclerk, Amateur 1734-1808]

[Ill.u.s.tration: CUPIDS. AFTER AN ENGRAVING BY F. BARTOLOZZI, R.A.

Lady Diana Beauclerk, Amateur 1734-1808]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRITISH SCHOOL, XVIII CENTURY ARIADNE. AFTER THE ORIGINAL PAINTING IN THE DRESDEN GALLERY, FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY V. A. BRUCKMANN, MUNICH Maria Angelica Kauffman. R.A., Painter 1741-1807]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BRITISH SCHOOL, XVIII CENTURY PORTRAIT OF MISS HARRIOT POWELL. FROM A MEZZOTINT BY RICHARD HOUSTON. THE PROOF LENT BY MR. ALFRED DAVIS Miss Catharine Read, Painter Died about 1786]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTRAIT OF MISS JONES. FROM AN ENGRAVING BY J.

WATSON, DATED 1767. THE PRINT LENT BY MR. ALFRED DAVIS Miss Catharine Read, Painter Died about 1786]