“[She needs] to give precedence to her brother Felix even if she [is] perhaps as talented as he, she has to cultivate herself more earnestly and eagerly for her real profession, a woman's only profession, being a housewife.”
—Abraham Mendelssohn, father of composers Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn, ca. 1820s
The past few decades have seen much investigation into the apparent lack of women artists in eras before the 20th Century. The search for women painters, poets and composers has returned many artists to the canons of their time, causing modern critics and researchers to reevaluate criteria of such accepted canons in light of what such formally discounted artists have to offer.
Women’s History Month is a fine time to test canonical limits. On March 4th,
2004, The Frick Art and
While the evening’s event was ephemeral—spoken word, background music, and slides of art as opposed to the works themselves—it was meant to serve as a votive offering. Generations of women have painted and composed poetry and music despite the competing demands of their society and the frequent disregard of other artists. Let this event be a celebration and an affirmation of their talent and spirit!
And, hey: Happy Women’s History Month!
Miserable as a governess, Blunden convinced her parents to send her to art school.
In 1854, she made her public debut with the exhibition of two works in a group
show, one of which, The
Seamstress (A Song of the Shirt), dealt with the exploitation of garment
workers. Her earlier works followed similar themes of social commentary and
figural study. Eventually she earned a living painting portraits but focused
her own work on landscapes. Throughout her career, she maintained a noticeably
one-sided correspondence with critic John Ruskin . Ruskin first sought to encourage
Blunden by finding her commissions and copywork. Blunden seems to have imagined
more to their friendship than Ruskin was offering, and her demands on Ruskin
threatened to alienate him as her patron. She eventually did marry the widower
of her sister, became a mother at age 45 and continued painting while raising
a family and writing pamphlets about the same social issues she painted in her
youth.
Julia Margaret Cameron was 48 when her daughter gave her a camera.
She set up a studio In an old greenhouse on her estate and started pulling anyone—from
her friend Alfred Lord Tennyson to neighborhood kids who didn’t run fast enough—
in to pose for her pictures. In 14 years she created 3,000 images ranging from
her grandchildren wearing fake wings mimicking angels to rather sociological
portraits of the native women of Ceylon. The majority of Cameron’s images retain
many of the conventions prevalent in English painting of her time, especially
where subject matter and composition are concerned. Where she was a pioneer
was in her deliberate use of soft focus, a technique that captured emotion as
well as detail. Cameron’s work did much to move photography from science to
art.
Rosa Brett most likely learned to paint from her brother, John, as she is not
known to have had any training. The oldest of 5 children, Brett was expected
to be a surrogate mother for her brothers and sisters while keeping house for
her parents. Within this constrained situation, however, was a love of art shared
by her siblings and her father, an army surgeon.
Brett kept diaries throughout her life, chronicling her own art and her work helping her John as he became a professional painter. He appears to have been supportive of her work—as well he should have been since she often “helped” with his workload. She exhibited very Pre-Raphaelite works at the Royal Academy with some success but was hindered by her domestic duties from making those connections an artist needs to advance. Brett died from cancer at age 45, just 7 years after exhibiting works under her own name as opposed to her pseudonym of “Rosarius.”
Best known as the Pre-Raphaelite “It” Girl, Elizabeth Siddal came from a mercantile
English family and was working as a milliner when she was “discovered” by an
artist connected with the P.R.B. With her red hair, strangely long neck and
hooded eyes, Siddal was not what anyone of her time would call a conventional
English Beauty. Her remarkable looks however, were not lost on artist and poet
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who painted and drew her almost exclusively and eventually
made her his wife.
It appears that Siddal was not a passive artists’ model, eventually trying her own hand at painting, drawing and poetry. While modern critics disagree on her success at any of these endeavors, she was encouraged by Rossetti and renown critic, John Ruskin, praised and purchased her works.
Tubercular from youth, Siddal had apparently developed an addiction to Laudanum, an opiate tincture. She died from an overdose shortly after the stillbirth of her only child, a daughter.
If Liz Siddal was the Pre-Raphaelite “It” girl, Lucy Madox Brown was the Liv
Tyler of the movement, sporting both the pedigree of her father Ford Madox and
her husband, William Rossetti. After the death of her mother, young Lucy was
sent to live with her Aunt Helen, who instilled in the child a love of study
and classical literature.
Retrieved by her father after he remarried, Brown started as a model for his works but soon taught herself to paint by helping him at his easel. She studied art formally but never gave up her office duties in the family studio.
Brown was a painter of fine technique who seemed to take the language of her Pre-Raphaelite predecessors and give it a golden light all her own. While she achieved some success, her marriage at age 29 to William Rossetti effectively ended her artistic career. Rossetti supported his wife’s career in theory, but the reality of her responsibilities as a mother of five and caregiver to an elderly mother-in-law meant that her days of exhibition-quality work were over. After caring for her own family and the daughter of her half sister, Catherine, Brown died from tuberculosis at age 50.
Christina Rossetti was the youngest of the Rossetti family that included artist/poet,
Dante Gabriel and influential critic, William. And while these two brothers
were Pre-Raphaelite pioneers in their fields, Rossetti scored the movement’s
first literary success with her still-famous poem The
Goblin Market.
Rossetti turned down at least two offers of marriage, ascribing both refusals to questions of religion. She and her mother were devout members of the Church of England and much of Rossetti’s work dealt with theology and questions of faith. It has also been argued that her refusal to marry may also have been a dedication to her writing. She was, after all, in a unique position, as sister-in-law to both Liz Siddal and Lucy Madox Brown, to see what marriage could do to a woman artist.
Rossetti lived a retiring life in her final years, publishing her last book 13 years before her death. Rossetti’s poems have become part of the accepted canon of Victorian writing, arguably more resonant today than the works of either of her two more famous (at the time) brothers.
Constance Naden was a poet, philosopher, and scientist who was also a lecturer
on Women’s Suffrage in England. Naden published only two volumes of poetry,
the second of which, A Modern Apostle, is notable for her use of scientific
metaphors. Her eclectic career was cut short by her untimely death following
an unspecified operation. Shortly after her death, a complimentary article by
William Gladstone brought her poetry to the attention of a wider public. Five
years later The
Complete Poetical Works of Constance Naden was published.
Mrs. Beach was a one-woman
musical clearinghouse. A concert pianist by age 16 she wrote, played and published
her own music. In a completely analog era predating even radio, Mrs. Beach was
well known for her “parlor songs” that made their way across America via sheet
music produced under her auspices. Proof of public esteem for Mrs. Beach came
in 1893, when she was commissioned to compose a choral work for the opening
of the Women’s
Building at the Chicago World’s Fair (aka, World's Columbian Exhibition
of 1893).
Known on-stage as Clara
Doria, Clara Kathleen Rogers was an accomplished singer and the granddaughter
of a successful songwriter. She followed in her grandfather’s footsteps by writing
popular “parlor songs,” designed to be played and sung in the home. Rogers also
composed chamber music, much of which was outsized and intricate, especially
compared to her sheet-music friendly songs.
Lili Boulanger accomplished
much in her short life. Her gifts as a composer were confirmed when she won
the Prix de Rome in 1913—at 19 years old, she was the first woman to be awarded
this prize for composition. Lili was from a musical family that supported the
musical careers of she and her sister, Nadia. Nadia was also a composer and
outlived her sister Lili by many years, teaching music theory and composition
to such luminaries as Thea Musgrave and Aaron Copeland.
Fanny Mendelssohn was born into a forward thinking family that made its money
in banking but schooled its children—boys and girls alike—in languages, dancing,
mathematics and drawing. Such egalitarianism ended as the Mendelssohn children
approached adolescence. Brother Felix was allowed to continue taking lessons
in composition. Fanny’s lessons were discontinued so that she could learn to
comport herself as a proper housewife.
The formal end of her musical education did nothing to stop her from either composing her own works or critiquing those of Felix. Despite their loving relationship, Felix seems to have frowned upon any publication of his sister’s works, perhaps because she did, indeed, become a proper housewife—albeit a housewife who took over direction of the famous “Mendelssohn’s Sunday Musicales” in 1831, the same year she gave birth to her only child, Sebastian. It was during rehearsals for one of these Musicales that Fanny suffered a fatal stroke. After her death, her family undertook publication of her music.
