Lady Caroline Emily Gray-Hill is among the female artists whose work is on show
A new exhibition celebrates women who were determined to paint in an era when art was dominated by men.
Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists at the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, Wirral, highlights their place in the history of British landscape art.
It tells the story of women artists’ growing ambition and how they got more of a foothold in the art world.
About 40 works from the early 1800s through to the 1980s feature.
Work from relatively unknown artist Elizabeth Campbell is featured in Another View
The exhibition interrogates the term “lady amateur”, which was often used in contrast to the “professional” artist title usually reserved for males.
Melissa Gustin, curator of British Art, said the exhibition champions work by female artists determined to fulfil their creativity but who were often mocked by the establishment.
She said: “They’ve come from being laughed at at every tea table, as Thomas Gainsborough said, to being some of the most recognised women and artists in the world.”
She said: “This exhibition shows how women landscape painters used their art to express their individual gazes, representing multiple viewpoints along the way.
“They explored and interrogated the landscape around them, developing important networks and experimenting with new mediums and techniques in the process.”
Her watercolours record her tour through the Alps painted between 1818 and 1827
Elizabeth Campbell, whose watercolours recording her tour through the Alps were painted between 1818 and 1827, is among the relatively unknown artists featured in the exhibition.
Ms Gustin said the artist, from Yorkshire, was radical for her time.
“She married a Scottish soldier, and after he died in the Napoleonic Wars… she took her young daughter, Thomasina, off to the Continent and spent the next 20 or 30 years essentially having adventures,” she said.
Ms Gustin said she did everything from “mountain climbing to speaking new languages and meeting new people and painting everything along her way”.
“They include a document of her trip over Mont Blanc,” she said.
“They were the first women to do this and they did it in corsets and hoop skirts, painting the whole way.”
The exhibition has landscape paintings from the early 1800s including The Orchard (above) painted in 1887
Work from decorated artist Dame Ethel Walker (1861-1951) is also included in the display.
She exhibited at the Venice Biennale several times, was elected to the Royal Academy, and was given a damehood for her services to the arts in 1943.
She wanted to be known as an artist, not a female artist, Ms Gustin said.
“She felt the discussion around women artists from male artists was counter-productive, and that what really mattered was the quality of someone’s painting or sculpture,” she said.
She said she felt “that they should not be focused on the person’s gender but on how well they actually painted and if they had originality and talent”.
Cumbrian artist Sheila Fell’s work is also celebrated in the exhibition
Work from Sheila Fell (1931-1979) is also on show.
The Cumbria artist preferred the local views to anywhere else even though she travelled in Europe, Ms Gustin said.
“She loved the place she came from in Cumbria and painted that rather than anything else.
“She visited Greece, she visited France and she found them uninspiring compared to Aspatria and the land that she’d grown up in,” she added.
The exhibition runs until 18 August.
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LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
