Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520–1920

The Tate’s exhibition Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920 is a welcome and arguably overdue counterpoint to an emphasis on the work of male artists in public collections,‍[1] exemplifying museums’ recent efforts to be more inclusive. Through the work of one hundred professional women artists represented by over two hundred objects, it argues that women were a constant presence in the art world from 1520 onward. The exhibition introduces visitors to the artists’ careers and asks why many have been largely excluded from mainstream art histories.

The title appears above the entrance in bold capital letters, somewhat reminiscent of a movie theatre. To the right of the exhibition entrance, the Tate has affixed portraits of twelve of the artists featured in the exhibition, acting as a visual precursor to what is effectively a chronological hang covering a considerable period of approximately four centuries.

Paintings that use allegory to claim creative artistic powers for women draw the visitor into the dark blue anteroom of the exhibition. Angelica Kauffmann’s roundel for the Royal Academy depicts Invention as female, while the Italian artist Artemesia Gentileschi presents herself as an allegory of painting (fig. 1). Gentileschi’s only other surviving royal commission, Susanna and the Elders (Royal Collection, London) is shown alongside works by women artists of the Tudor court.‍[2] The space broadens out to explore four of the first professional women artists working in Britain during the seventeenth century, notably the highly successful portraitist Mary Beale (fig. 2).

Fig. 1, Installation view of entrance to room 2, showing Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura), ca. 1638–39. Oil on canvas. His Majesty The King. Photograph © Tate (Lucy Green).

Fig. 2, Installation view of room 3, showing Mary Beale, Anne Sotheby, 1676–77. Oil on canvas. Tate, London. Photograph © Tate (Lucy Green).

Fig. 3, Installation view of room 2, showing Maria Cosway, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, as Cynthia, 1781–82. Oil on canvas. The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Photograph © Tate (Lucy Green).

The next section, “First Women Exhibitors,” focuses on the early Royal Academy (established 1768), founding members Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, and their contemporaries. The large-scale portraits and history paintings in the room make clear that women artists were a consistent presence in the academy, garnering elite and royal patronage. Vitrines in the center of the room show careful academic studies of the human figure. At the far end of the room, the figure of the Duchess of Devonshire in a portrait by Maria Cosway emerges, life-size, out of a cloud (fig. 3). The show’s premise is made even more clear by a fortuitous overlap in scheduling that made it possible to see the Kauffmann solo exhibition at the Royal Academy on the same day.‍[3]

Around the corner, glass cases reveal what was excluded from the Royal Academy in a section titled, “Just What Ladies Do for Amusement,” a dismissal courtesy of Joshua Reynolds, then president of the Royal Academy. These included the “lesser arts” of needle painting in a self-portrait by Mary Knowles (fig. 4) and early nineteenth-century portrait miniatures by Anne Mee and Sarah Biffin.‍[4]

Fig. 4, Mary Knowles, Mary Knowles at Her Embroidery, 1779. Needlework, silk and wool. Royal Collection Trust © His Majesty King Charles III 2024. Artwork in the public domain; photograph courtesy of the Tate, London.

Fig. 5, Installation view of room 5, showing Clara Maria Pope, Peony, 1822. Bodycolor on card. The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London; and Clara Maria Pope, Peony, 1821. Bodycolor on card. The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. Photograph © Tate (Lucy Green).

A separate room entitled “Flowers” features extraordinarily detailed paintings by Moser and Clara Maria Pope, one of several women who worked as botanical illustrators (fig. 5). Mary Gartside’s hand-colored volume on color theory (1808) is displayed in a case in the center, while Rosa Brett’s meticulous Pre-Raphaelite Thistles (1860; private collection), signed with the male pseudonym Rosarius, is a bridge into the next space.

Fig. 6, Installation view of room 6, showing Rebecca Solomon, Sherry, Sir?, ca. 1858–62. Oil on canvas. Private collection; and Rebecca Solomon, A Young Teacher, 1861. Oil on canvas. Tate, London. Photograph © Tate (Lucy Green).

“Victorian Spectacle” addresses the fascination with exhibitions as they multiplied to become an international phenomenon. In the large, brightly lit room, the sizeable canvases of later Victorian artists, presented on bold red walls, impress viewers from a distance. Immediately to the right are earlier Pre-Raphaelite works on a smaller scale, with the short career of Joanna Mary Wells represented by an exquisite angel in Thou Bird of God (1861; private collection). Several artists offer clues about the lives of working women. Rebecca Solomon’s Sherry, Sir? (ca. 1858–62; private collection) and A Young Teacher (1861; Tate and the Museum of the Home, London) depict a servant and a professional caretaker, the latter modeled after the Jamaican-born artist’s model and domestic worker Fanny Eaton (fig. 6).‍[5] To the left of the entrance, Emily Osborn’s Nameless and Friendless (1857; Tate, London) portrays a woman artist visiting a dealer, while Florence Caxton’s political satire “Woman’s Work”: A Medley (1861; Martin Beisly Fine Art, London) includes a portrait of the famous French artist Rosa Bonheur, whose Sheep in the Highlands (1857; Wallace Collection, London) hangs to its right.‍[6]

Fig. 7, Elizabeth Butler, Calling the Roll after an Engagement, Crimea (known as The Roll Call), 1874. Royal Collection Trust © His Majesty King Charles III 2024. Artwork in the public domain; photograph courtesy of the Tate, London.

Like Bonheur and Osborn, the battle painter Elizabeth Butler secured wealthy patrons including Queen Victoria. Butler’s Roll Call (1874; Royal Collection, London), an image of frozen, beleaguered soldiers answering the roll call after battle in Crimea, was so celebrated that it had to be guarded by a policeman at the Royal Academy (fig. 7). Butler narrowly missed membership in the Royal Academy due to the male members closing ranks to exclude her after she won the first ballot; the 1879 voting record and her photograph are in a case near the painting.

Fig. 8, Installation view of room 6, showing left to right: Susan Durant, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1853. Plaster. The Castle Howard Collection, York; Mary Thornycroft, Princess Helena (1846–1923) as “Peace,” 1856. Marble. His Majesty The King; Edmonia Lewis, Bust of Christ, 1870. Marble. The Bute Collection at Mount Stuart, Rothesay, Isle of Bute; and Harriet Hosmer, Puck on a Toadstool, 1850s. Marble. Rotherham Museums, Arts and Heritage, Rotherham. Photograph © Tate (Lucy Green).

In the center of the room are three mid-century sculptures that suggest a wider transatlantic context where gender, class, and race intersect. Susan Durant’s portrait bust of Harriet Beecher Stowe (ca. 1857; Castle Howard Collection, York), the abolitionist and women’s suffrage activist, was shown at the Royal Academy and the 1862 International Exhibition.‍[7] American Harriet Hosmer’s Puck on a Toadstool (ca. 1850s; Rotherham Museums, Arts and Heritage, Rotherham) also gained international success; Hosmer was a leader in a community of American neoclassical artists working in Rome, where materials and workshops were more accessible. Another artist working in Rome was the Indigenous (Mississauga, Anishinaabe/Ojibwe) and Black sculptor Edmonia Lewis. Her Bust of Christ (1870; The Bute Collection at Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute), was commissioned by the Marquess of Bute in 1870, and Lewis, who was Catholic, also completed works centered on abolitionist and Indigenous themes, eventually moving to Paris and then London (fig. 8).‍[8]

The walls around the sculptures lead into the 1870s and 1880s, when London offered new opportunities for exhibiting artworks that were favorable to female artists. The visitor is introduced to artists who took up French-influenced plein air painting. Both the Canadian artist Elizabeth Armstrong Forbes and Austrian artist Marianne Stokes were associated with the New English Art Club and the Newlyn School after moving to Cornwall. Stokes’s Passing Train (1890; private collection) is evocative of modernity: a woman in a vibrant red cloak shares the canvas with steam in motion (fig. 9). The canvas was shown at the newly opened Grafton Gallery; like many of her colleagues, Stokes took advantage of the manifold exhibiting opportunities emerging for artists.

Fig. 9, Marianne Stokes, The Passing Train, 1890. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Artwork in the public domain; image available from: Wikimedia Commons.

Fig. 10, Installation view of room 6, showing Louise Jopling, Through the Looking-Glass, 1875. Oil on canvas. Tate, London; and Louise Jopling, A Modern Cinderella, 1875. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photograph © Tate (Lucy Green).

Works by the portrait artist and activist Louise Jopling are featured on the opposing wall: Through the Looking Glass (1875; Tate, London), a newly acquired self-portrait, and a painting of a female model dressing entitled A Modern Cinderella (1875; private collection) (fig. 10). Jopling was a highly successful artist who exhibited widely; A Modern Cinderella was included in the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Additionally, Jopling was one of several artists who campaigned publicly for suffrage and women’s education.‍[9]

Fig. 11, Installation view of room 6, showing Henrietta Rae, Psyche Before the Throne of Venus, 1894. Oil on canvas. Private collection, courtesy of Martin Beisly Fine Art. Photograph © Tate (Lucy Green).

Women were determined to demonstrate expertise in figure painting, seeking training in life study outside the academy. The display of nudes at the 1885 Royal Academy resulted in an extended furor in the Times, in part because women artists were among the exhibitors.‍[10] Occupying much of the end wall of the gallery, Henrietta Rae’s enormous Psyche Before the Throne of Venus (1894; private collection), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1894, was perhaps the ultimate riposte to critics (fig. 11). Rae was actively involved in contemporary exhibition culture, sitting on the Hanging Committee of the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition, and curating the Women’s Section of the 1897 Victorian Era Exhibition, the catalogue of which is displayed in a vitrine in front of the painting.‍[11] Rae’s work is flanked by a large-scale female nude, Annie Louisa Swynnerton’s Mater Triumphalis (1892; Musée d’Orsay, Paris), which was exhibited at the New Gallery and the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Swynnerton was the only artist in the room to gain associate membership in the Royal Academy, albeit not until in 1922.‍[12]

Later nineteenth-century works include those by women artists who exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery (opened 1877), the home of Aestheticism or “art for art’s sake.” Laura Alma Tadema, who had a highly successful career, painted interiors influenced by seventeenth-century Dutch painting, while other Grosvenor Gallery artists, such as Evelyn de Morgan and Marie Spartali Stillmann, were more directly linked with late Pre-Raphaelitism. The intensely colored neo-Pre-Raphaelitism of Deceitfulness of Riches (1901; private collection) by Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1901, coinciding with her solo show at the Dowdeswell Galleries.‍[13]

After “Victorian Spectacle,” the visitor moves through three smaller spaces dedicated to the mediums of watercolor and photography, followed by art training. The first features landscapes by Barbara Bodichon, founder of the Langham Place Circle, a reform collective in the 1850s, and artists who established reputations in the medium later in the century, such as Helen Allingham and Rose Barton.‍[14]

Fig. 12, Julia Margaret Cameron, Mountain Nymph, Sweet Liberty, 1865. Photograph. Wilson Centre of Photography, London. Artwork in the public domain; photograph courtesy of the Tate, London.

Fig. 13, Installation view of room 9, showing Emily Osborn, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ca.1884. Oil on canvas. The Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge. Photograph © Tate (Lucy Green).

Fig. 14, Installation view of room 10, showing Ethel Wright, The Music Room, Portrait of Una Dugdale, ca. 1912. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Photograph © Tate (Lucy Green).

Women were early practitioners of the new medium of photography as evidenced by the albumen prints by Julia Margaret Cameron (fig. 12) and Clementina Hawarden. In the darkened niche to the right of the exhibition space is a selection of later prints by women who shared the aesthetic interests of the Linked Ring—such as Eveleen Myers, Zaïda Ben-Yúsuf and Gertrude Käsebier—despite no women being elected members until 1900. Jewel-like, backlit facsimiles of autochromes evidence the work of photographers, including Olive Edis, who experimented with color in the early twentieth century.‍[15]

The final nineteenth-century section continues the conversation begun earlier in the exhibition, “Art School.” One wall is occupied by a blown-up photograph of female students at the Slade, founded in 1871, where—unlike the Royal Academy—women were not barred from life study. Bodichon, who organized the 1859 petition calling for admission to Royal Academy Schools, is present at her easel in a portrait by Osborn, as is Jopling, who operated an independent art school that prioritized direct study from nude life models (fig. 13). Adjacent to these are examples of nude studies by women students.

Now You See Us culminates in the diversity of engagements with modernism and politics of the early twentieth century. Works by Ethel Walker, who exhibited at the New English Art Club and the Women’s International Art Club, include the impressionist The Garden (ca. 1899; Bradford District Museums and Galleries, CBMDC) and the fresco-like Decoration: The Excursion of Nausciaa (1920; Tate, London), which depicts an ethereal female community.‍[16] Nearby are vividly colored works by the acclaimed figurative artist Laura Knight, who finally achieved full Royal Academy membership in 1936, and Ethel Wright’s The Music Room: Portrait of Una Dugdale (ca. 1912; private collection) in which Dugdale wears a striking, suffrage-green dress (fig. 14).‍[17] Larger paintings of war work face more intimate portrait and still life pieces by Gwen John, Vanessa Bell, and abstract studies by Vorticist Helen Saunders.‍[18]

In sum, Now You See Us is expansive and richly diverse with material. Many of the loans are from private collections, giving visitors the opportunity to view rarely seen, and even unknown, works. There are several large loans from the Royal Collection, a welcome addition to a more accessible, albeit ticketed, space. There are many opportunities for close examination of archival evidence, for example of ongoing advocacy for access to training and women’s rights. A real strength of the exhibition is its attention to the contemporary critical reception of the work; this is often revealing and amplifies the curator’s argument that, in many cases, women were successful professionals within their own lifetimes. At the same time, it is clear that “woman artist” is not a unified category; contemporary sources and the works themselves evidence radically different experiences of professional practice. Not surprisingly, gender intersects with class, ethnicity, and race.

The exhibition and catalogue aim to explore four hundred years of women artists as exhibitors and as navigators of public institutions and societies. Curator Tabitha Barber begins her catalogue essay “Faint Footprints in the Sand” by citing Ellen Clayton’s condemnation of the Royal Academy for its exclusion of women artists; as Barber observes, Clayton’s 1876 two-volume work English Female Artists, dedicated to none other than Elizabeth Butler, provides an historical precedent for establishing the existence of professional artists (11­–15). The catalogue is structured around the exhibition’s sections; this is useful in introducing artists and works, some of whom are more familiar than others. Rather than longer essays, short texts related to individual artists or groups of artists are given thematic subheadings. Importantly, the works are made visible through plentiful color illustrations, occasionally supplemented by small photographs or reproductions from the press that give a flavor for the breadth of the show. There are many contributors, indicated by initials, and these include scholars who have amassed a wealth of expertise.‍[19]

A disadvantage of such an enormous undertaking is that many of the artists or chronological periods would merit an exhibition of their own. It is sometimes difficult to think more broadly about how the works might have related to stylistic trends and movements within the periods they were produced, not to mention their political, social, and cultural contexts. While some artists are represented by more than one example of their work, the oeuvres of each, plentifully displayed in many blockbusters dedicated to male artists, remain unknown (admittedly in some cases unknowable due to the absence of surviving works) and, of course, not all are represented.‍[20] The Royal Academy show that gives Kauffmann solo status demonstrates an alternative.

Moreover, visitors may ask why women artists or artist-women require segregation to be “seen.” Ironically, this show is in a sense a reimagining of the “Woman’s Work Section” in the Victorian Era exhibition Rae curated in 1897; at the time many women, including Butler, were anxious about the subcategorization of women’s work in exhibitions. Many, though not all, artist-women in the nineteenth century were actively engaged in egalitarian, feminist politics and subsequent attempts at women’s exhibitions were not unanimously welcomed.‍[21]

Now You See Us is not unique in its approach; over the past year there has been a flurry of exhibitions of work by women in Europe and North America.‍[22] Why is the theme recurring in 2024? Not only is there evidence of an historical ambivalence, but there have now been decades of feminist scholarship on several of the artists featured in the show.‍[23] In the catalogue essay entitled “Travelling Hopefully,” Pamela Gerrish Nunn recounts her experience of curating such a show at the Nottingham Castle Museum in 1982 (16–19). Digital research has productively opened new arenas of inquiry, yet the prevalence of professional women artists in the nineteenth century has been long established.‍[24] Nonetheless, narratives centered on sensational biography and uniqueness, or discovery, repeat in discussions of women artists. These approaches complicate attempts to dislodge canonical rhetoric or forestall cyclical remembering and forgetting.

What Now You See Us does highlight is the lack of representation of women in big museums. While several of the artists have been featured in solo exhibitions, especially in recent years, these have often been in galleries outside London. Moreover, national institutions have been implicated in the process of “unseeing” women artists.‍[25] The shift in public collections, such as the Tate, to collect and display more work by women is much more recent.

The purpose of artist-women shows now, as then, is tactical. Many of the artists in Now You See Us are still not represented in major public collections (or they have remained unseen, languishing in store). Therefore, large group shows can contribute to institutional shifts by reorienting collections. The aspirations of Now You See Us are and will be manifested in acquisitions and displays in permanent galleries.‍[26]