Nineteenth-Century Contexts

An Interdisciplinary Journal

ISSN: 0890-5495 (Print) 1477-2663 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gncc20

The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England:

The Education and Careers of Six Professionals

Julie Codell

To cite this article: Julie Codell (2017) The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England: The
Education and Careers of Six Professionals, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 39:4, 333-335, DOI:
10.1080/08905495.2017.1340063

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2017.1340063

Published online: 12 Jun 2017.

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 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 333

of race, class, nation, and religion is repetitive, prescriptive, and bland. By contrast, individual
readings, as Youngkin pursues Egyptian influence throughout a diverse set of Victorian novels,
are beautifully constructed. They make a welcome addition to our understanding of the inter-
section between ancient Egypt and modernizing Britain.

Notes on contributor
Alex Chase-Levenson is an assistant professor of modern European history at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is currently completing a book manuscript about nineteenth-century Britains
cultural, political, and diplomatic engagement with the Mediterranean quarantine system.

Alex Chase-Levenson
Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
alchase@sas.upenn.edu
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2017 Alex Chase-Levenson

https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2017.1340062

The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England: The Education and Careers of
Six Professionals, by Jo Devereux, Jefferson, NC, McFarland, 2016, 264 pp., 41
illustrations, $35 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-7864-9409-5

Despite decades of feminist art history and studies of women artists, the case study
approach Jo Devereux uses here is still viable, since we have so few critical biographies
of Victorian women artists. Women associated with, or followers of, Pre-Raphaelitism
received the earliest attention in Jan Marsh and Pamela Nunns case studies, exhibitions,
and catalogs. Griselda Pollock and Deborah Cherrys feminist studies and Meaghan
Clarkes book on women art writers extended the study of womens roles in the Victorian
art world.
Devereux begins with a summary of womens networks at the most prominent art schools:
South Kensington, the Royal Academy, and the unconventional Slade School. She explores the
public and professional reception of women artists and their common subjects, techniques,
and media. Art schools folded gender ideologies into technical training, e.g., watercolor was
a more ladylike medium than oil paint, no life classes with nude models for women. Successful
women artists established networks largely through male mentors, as essential to their success
as was family support of their ambitions.
Devereuxs subjectsKate Greenaway, Henrietta Rae, Elizabeth Thompson Butler, Helen
Allingham, and Evelyn Pickering De Morganwere among a small number of highly success-
ful women artists. They were included in biographical dictionaries and biographies in the
Magazine of Art, Art Journal, and The Studio. Prominent critics wrote biographies of Alling-
ham (Marcus Huish, 1903), Greenaway (M. H. Spielmann and G. S. Layard, 1905), and Rae
(Arthur Fish, 1905), indicating these women were cultural icons and not marginal. True,
their biographies endorsed hegemonic femininity even for childless or unconventional
artists. Butler (whose sister was writer Alice Meynell) published her autobiography in 1922,
as did several Victorian women artists whose feminist autobiographies were better fit for
the 1920s than the 1890s.
 334 BOOK REVIEWS

Despite their successes, these women remain unfamiliar to the general public. British
artists, both male and female, suffer relative obscurity compared with their French contem-
poraries who have, until recently challenged, been credited as the sole inventors of mod-
ernism. The boom in exhibitions, essays, and books on the Pre-Raphaelites, Frederic
Leighton, James Tissot, Albert Moore, William Powell Frith, and the industry of James
Whistler studies have somewhat remedied this but have not affected the reputations of
Victorian women artists, rarely if ever highlighted in retrospectives or one-artist
exhibitions.
Devereuxs excellent close readings of paintings that are still belittled as merely sentimental
or conventional take these works seriously through the kind of analyses reserved for canonic
artists works. Her readings, which certainly merit better reproductions than the poor ones
here, reveal these artists subtle resistance to hegemonic gendering. Devereuxs comments
are incisive on light and shadow in Allinghams paintings, the theme of loss in her work,
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and her figures refusal to look at the viewer in a subtle rejection of conventional eroticization
of female figures. On Princess Louise, Devereux provides a clear summary of obstacles for
women sculptors whose difficulties were even more insurmountable than what women pain-
ters faced, although Devereuxs Galatea metaphor for Louise at times seems forced. Devereuxs
rich analysis of Butlers hitherto unexamined methods for conveying motion captures what is
unique in her works beyond just the military subject to reclaim her as a skilled draughtsman.
Devereux effectively integrates literature and art when poetry inspired or paralleled Green-
aways illustrations. On Rae, Devereux deftly summarizes the late-century debate on nudity
in art and compares/contrasts Raes treatment of the classical nude with that of Frederic
Leighton and John William Waterhouse. A Christies auction in 2000 sold Raes Hylas and
the Water Nymphs for a robust (for Rae) $818,141. But attention to prices is uneven in the
book and does not permit comparisons with Raes contemporaries.
Devereuxs thesis is that each artist accommodated, negotiated, and resisted gender conven-
tions in her work. Her analyses embrace theory (Gilles Deleuze on folds) as well as rich archival
information about professional experiences, exhibitions, and career trajectories. But her
approach is somewhat myopic, the downside of case studies, reflected in her uneven bibli-
ography and factual errors. She condemns critics who tended to conflate the woman artist
with her work (135), but male artists were read in the same way (e.g., manly Millais,
effeminate Burne-Jones, self-sacrificing G. F. Watts); sincerity was in the Victorian criti-
cal lexicon and read into paintings, as was the artists presumed moral fiber and gender iden-
tity, all conjectured. The Grosvenor closed amid financial difficulties and did not move to the
New Gallery (175), which was the Grosvenors competitor, and Rossetti never exhibited at the
Grosvenor (106). Ruskin certainly tried to dominate women artists, but he also bullied male
artists until they each in turn broke away angrily from his attempt to control their work.
Women artists who traveled were not at all isolated (e.g., Barbara Bodichon, Marianne
North), but at home in many places (47). And why expect their work to be more marked
by a single aesthetic element than mens art?
Devereuxs focus on these women tends to isolate each one rather than situate them in a
deeply layered Victorian art world. There is no examination of these artists patronswhat
prompted Mrs. J. R. Cardeza of Philadelphia (220) to buy Raes nude painting Sirens
(1903)? How did Raes and De Morgans appropriation of the Old Masters fit into Aestheti-
cisms neo-Classicism? Allegory in De Morgans work needs more integration with De
Morgans religious beliefs that fueled her work. Devereux sometimes refers to women artists
by their first names, which infantilizes them.
The choice of subjects for case studies is always troubling. Princess Louise was not a fully
professional sculptor due to her royal duties and status. Sculptors Mary Thornycroft or Susan
 NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 335

Durant, both Louises art teachers, might have been more coherent subjects in the context of
the books themes. Given other scholars work on De Morgan (Elise Lawton Smith 2002) and
Allingham (Anne Helmreich 2001), perhaps feminist activist-artists Bodichon, Louise Jopling,
or Henrietta Ward, all successful, might have been better subjects.
Devereux reveals these artists depth, modernity, and aesthetic negotiations over social
strictures and popular taste. Art historians busily unearth male Academic and popular
artists to historicize and complicate the nineteenth-century art world and to understand the
vitality of public taste and market forces. Women artists merit the same attention and posi-
tioning in the contexts of the nineteenth centurys visual culture, its increasingly international
art market and global dissemination of art, and Victorian modernism.

Notes on contributor
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Julie Codell, Art History Professor and affiliate faculty in Film, Gender Studies, and Asian Studies,
wrote The Victorian Artist (Cambridge 2003; rev. 2012), and has edited 13 books and special journal
issues and published articles on Victorian art and the art press, imperialism in India, and film, on
such topics as replication, transculturation, orientalism, the signification of dress in paintings, pho-
tography, Britons going native, working-class models, political economy, and colonial authors in
the Victorian press.

Julie Codell
School of Art, Arizona State University
julie.codell@asu.edu
2017 Julie Codell
https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2017.1340063

Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the Natural History of the Self, by Alexis Harley,
Lewisburg, Bucknell UP, 2015, xiii +213 pp., $85.00, ISBN: 978-1-61148-600-1 (hb), ISBN:
978-1-61148-601-8 (e)

Evolutionary theory precipitated perhaps the most radical historical shift in humans attempt
to come to terms with their relationship to nature, and as Alexis Harley points out in Auto-
biologies, it gave rise to a brief but marked period in which Victorian authors turned to auto-
biographical writing as a way to think through the implications of natural selection for
individuality. Despite the fact that work on Victorian science and literature has rapidly
expanded in the past three decades, there has been little literary criticism that explicitly
addresses Victorian life writing on science. This book contributes significantly to this under-
developed but important area of scholarship through a series of incisive readings across a range
of autobiographical genres (including diaries, letters, the elegy, and the memoir) which
address, in profound and powerful ways, the relationship between individual identity and
an ever-evolving natural world.
Autobiologies owes a great deal to Gillian Beers Darwins Plots, and might be seen as a criti-
cal counterpart to that work. Whereas Beer addresses Darwins scientific writing and Victorian
fiction, Harley focuses on Darwins autobiographical writing and various forms of literary life-
writing by other Victorians. Like Beers book, the first half is dedicated to close reading
Darwins writing, and the second half traces the literary inheritance of narrative structures