Women in the Imperial Art World: Anglo-Australian Women Artists and their Transnational Careers, 1885 - 1907

Abstract

Upon receiving a folio of drawings from the Anglo-Australian artist Sophia Sinnett in 1875, the British art critic John Ruskin replied to her with the advice, 'you must resolve to be quite a great paintress; the feminine termination does not exist, there never having been such a being...as a lady who could paint. Try to be the first'. Almost a century later in Australia, the art historian Bernard Smith opined in his foundational text, 'Australian Painting 1788-1960', 'But women, perhaps because of their status in Victorian and Edwardian society and other reasons that need not be discussed here, did not figure prominently in Australian art prior to the First World War.' Were there so few 'great' women artists in Britain in the late nineteenth century as Ruskin supposed? Were women artists invisible in Australian colonial society, as concluded by Bernard Smith? This thesis is concerned with these questions because the preconception that both British and Australian professional women artists were absent in the imperial art world clouds many accounts of nineteenth-century art history. Furthermore, ideas of 'greatness' and 'invisibility' are foundational concepts in key feminist texts which revise such assumptions. Through careful examination of both quantitative data from exhibition and museum catalogues and contextual evidence from the period, I argue that British-Australian women artists in the late nineteenth century were more visible in the imperial art world than has hitherto been recognised in accounts of British or Australian art. The lives and works of the Anglo-Australian women artists discussed in this thesis do not correspond to the notion expressed by Ruskin that the nineteenth-century woman artist was merely a 'lady who could paint'. Nor do they correspond to Smith's description of a late nineteenth-century art world devoid of women artists. Rather, the research in this thesis reveals that women in the period created considerable works of art and competed in the same imperial art world arenas as their male counterparts. Indeed, as women of empire, they were influential global art citizens. Show more