Art Tour | Women in Art: 17th - 18th Century

Hi, my name is Maria Quirk and I'm the Assistant Curator for Collections and Research here at the NGV. Today I'm taking you on a tour of work by women artists in our collection of 17th and 18th century European paintings. Works by women artists have historically been underrepresented at galleries and museums all around the world. This isn't because they're less talented or weren't successful but because the people who wrote art history had prejudices against women's work. They maybe weren't seen as talented or as having as much natural genius as male artists. Now this is something that galleries, including the NGV, are trying to rectify by including more works by women on our walls. Today I'll be showing you some of our most exciting new acquisitions as well as treasured works from our collection. This work is actually the oldest painting by a named female artist in our European collection and it's by an artist called Mary Beale. Mary Beale was working in the 1600s in England and she was one of the first really successful professional female painters in that country. Mary Beale was taught in part by her father, which was very common for women artists of this time, and from an early age started supporting herself through her art. She married another painter, Charles, and he actually supported her practice as well. He was really her manager helping her receive commissions, prepping her canvases and helping mixing her colours. It was a family business. There was Charles as well as Mary's two sons who both helped in the practice by painting backgrounds. Mary made her living painting portraits of the nobility, the clergy, people in the arts and literature and she was very successful. By the 1670s she was one of the most prolific portrait painters in London. In just one year she painted over 80 portraits, more than one week. The style of Mary's portraits was really characteristic of this time, the Stuart period in England. She excelled at making her subjects look beautiful and she really loved having these quite sculptural painterly backgrounds which we can see in our work and these are the backgrounds which her sons often helped her paint to save her time to focus on the faces. So next we're going to another very successful female portraitist, Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun. Follow me. So here we are surrounded by some of our best portraits from 18th century France and these two portraits are by the celebrated artist Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun. Now women artists in Europe really began painting professionally in the 1600s. By the 1700s, by the 18th century, they could really become successful and well-known and Elizabeth is really an example of that. She was trained by her father which was very common. Women were not really allowed yet into art schools so most women who were artists came from a family of artists and were taught by their fathers or brothers. When Elizabeth's father died, when she was a teenager, she took on supporting her family through her art and she did that through primarily painting portraits of the nobility. She actually became a favourite portrait painter of Marie Antoinette and that really made her name. Elizabeth's great talent was making people look beautiful. She really knew what people wanted at this time from their portraits. Before photography, portraits were really a personal branding exercise. They're a way to show your wealth and your status and your power and even to flirt if you were having a portrait sent to your potential lover. This beautiful oval portrait from the mid-1770s is really a work that helped build Elizabeth's career. It was likely commissioned by the sitter's mother and it may have been a pre-marriage portrait or perhaps sent to one of her suitors. So in this portrait Elizabeth paints the subject as the goddess Diana who is the goddess of hunting. So we can see she's wearing a fur cloak, she has her arrows and she also has a little sickle moon on her headband, which was also another symbol of Diana. Now Diana was also the goddess of fertility and fertility was of course a very important attribute for young women. So she was a great guise for a young woman to be painted in. One interesting fact about this painting is that before it came to the NGV, it was actually owned by Princess Diana's stepmother Countess Spencer. So follow me into the next room. Throughout the 18th century painting was still seen as a very male profession which needed a lot of training but there were other forms of art which women were more expected to practice in. One was textiles and another beginning from the 18th century was ceramics or china painting. We have here two works which were designed by Lady Elizabeth Templeton for Wedgwood. From the 18th century onwards ceramics, decorative chinaware became very popular for middle and upper class English households and companies like Wedgwood which we all still know today became very prolific and successful. They were really marketing towards women, female consumers who were buying these decorative objects for their tables and for their homes. So there was an opening here for female designers to try to appeal to those customers. Elizabeth Templeton was successful in selling her designs to Wedgwood and Josiah Wedgwood, the founder of the company, was a big fan of hers. Her designs typically featured children and women domestic scenes and this was what was expected of her as a female artist. As the 18th century turned into the 19th century women continued to play an important role in china painting and in ceramics. One reason why was because their small hands were seen as particularly suitable for painting the minute designs on tea cups and other forms of china but as the 19th century progressed we do see women becoming leaders in this field and starting their own companies. We have one more work to discuss just over here. So as you walk through the galleries of the NGV or really any collection of European painting you won't see many faces which aren't white. There aren't many depictions of people of colour in historical painting and when they are depicted it's often tainted by systematic racism. So in the 18th century England was still a major slave-owning country. It really built a lot of its wealth on slavery but art played an important role in the abolition of slavery which began in earnest in the late 1700s. There was a woman named Elizabeth Hayrick and she was an advocate for total abolition. In 1825 she formed an activist group called the Female Society for Birmingham and they campaigned for the rights of female slaves. Their main form of fundraising was creating these silk work bags which they would fill with abolitionist literature and pamphlets to distribute to other women. The members of the group made these bags at sewing circles and they were printed with specially designed images. Now this image depicts enslaved women and traditionally slaves and slaved people were depicted as lazy or licentious but these images were really sympathetic to female slaves. They were quite sentimental and they were trying to appeal to upper middle class and upper class women to buy these bags and to support the cause. They sent them to high-profile women like Princess later Queen Victoria and these bags were actually very successful in raising money. Hayrick was very savvy. She actually wouldn't give the money to the main abolitionist societies until they moved to a more progressive platform. She wanted total abolition so not just ending slavery but freeing all people who were enslaved and she was successful in forcing those other societies to move to her more progressive position. Thank you for joining me on this tour of some of the works by women in our 18th century collection.