Victorian Female Artists

The Victorian period was an era of constantly shifting and contradicting ideologies concerning women, which extended over many areas of society and culture including politics and the media, the family and domestic field as well as the contemporary and traditional beliefs within the art institutions. The body of the belief systems about women and the feminine ideal that are present in each of these areas involve a combination of established or traditional ideas versus those of a contemporary and revolutionary nature. Whether traditional or revolutionary these evolving ideologies played a consistent and prominent role in regulating the methods by which women produced their art and the subject areas and genres in which they employed themselves. Significantly, the increase of feministic values throughout the nineteenth century dramatically changed the ways in which women could produce art, and also the ways in which their critics assessed them compared to the more traditional beliefs about propriety and established feminine spheres that constrained women artists earlier in the Victorian period.

The Victorian period is often characterised by its emphasis on the importance of political correctness and proper behaviour in specific spheres of gender and class within society. Early in the Victorian era the established and traditional spheres prescribed to women had a profound effect on their limited creative outlets and subsequently their position within the arts. To examine and assess the ways in which women were constrained in their employment from both a practical perspective and from the perspective of the ways in which they were critically viewed by society, it is important to consider the prescribed ideal feminine identity that women were pressed to achieve. Indeed, an established ideology of the Victorians was to achieve the highest attributes according to ones gender. This highlights the Victorians' idea that women were radically different to men not just physically but also mentally and emotionally as well. The ideal Victorian woman was dainty, graceful, domestic and above all obedient, and as men were considered to be the physically stronger sex it was established that they were also psychologically more powerful and able. Therefore, women's activity was generally confined to this stereotype of femininity, leading to the domination by men in the arts and beyond.

If an early Victorian woman did wish to employ herself in something creative she was generally guided towards refined and simple crafts that did not require much skill as a means of occupying herself. The art of oil painting was seen to be unfeminine because it was too smelly and dirty for the delicate Victorian female and therefore sand pictures, feather pictures and shell-box-making was praised to the skies for their suitability as a creative outlet for ladies. However, considering the element of having spare time in which to fill displays the class boundaries that also played a role in determining women's creativity. While it was the social norm for the bourgeois woman to have spare time for creative pursuits the working-class woman was a worker both inside and outside the domestic sphere, and therefore had little time or reason to engage herself in such recreations. As well as displaying the prevalent class women artists were emerging from in this period, the key point here it seems, is that women of any class were very much confined to the domestic sphere from a number of perspectives concerning their feminine identity.

The idea that women's abilities were limited in comparison to men's may be argued to stand as the basis for the way that women were viewed within the arts also. Within the Academies a great importance was placed on the hierarchy of the genres, for example History painting was thought of as the most important subject and themes relating to still life were thought to be the lowest form of fine art. When examining the limited selection of female artists work from the early to mid 19th century, one area of subject matter seems to be prominent; the theme of flowers. Flower painting was thought to be a suitable subject for women to pursue because it occupied a low rank in the hierarchy of genres which would not intimidate them and it therefore seems that if a female artist dared enter the masculine sphere of the fine arts she was generally pressured to conform to the rules that were established by men. It was noted that fruit and flowers are always welcome from the hands of ladies, which displays the way that women were slowly penetrating the masculine spheres and being excepted into educational institutions but it also demonstrates the extent that traditional ideologies about women were still a prominent and consistent issue guiding their efforts.

It may be argued that there are a number of reasons as to why society considered this to be an appropriate subject matter, however few of them seem to suggest that it was due to the female artists own, autonomous choice. Firstly, when considering the female artist being limited to produce her art in the home due to the established belief that this was where she ought to be, one can see how limited her choice of subject matter becomes simply for practical reasons relating to physical space. Also, to consider again the ideal Victorian female who is seen as delicate and considered closer to nature than men, flowers seem to be an appropriate theme not only because they can be physically accessible to women in the home and garden, but also because the elegance and trimness associated with flower painting parallels the idea that women should be beautiful and fragile.

When Mary Harrison nee Rossiter's (1788 Ð'- 1875) husband ran into financial difficulty she began to sell her paintings as means of helping to support her family. Unsurprisingly the subject matter she chose was flower painting which would have been a practical and attainable still life subject for her to work on but also would have been readily accepted by the Victorian buyer as a fashionable, contemporary piece to be enjoyed. Furthermore, it is significant to note that her main choice of medium was watercolour, as this relates to the idea that watercolour was thought by the conventional mind to be cleaner and easier to manipulate than oil and therefore seems to correspond with dainty and elegant Victorian female persona. Another pair of female artists that illustrate the praise concerning the conformity of women towards these ideologies by the critics of the time, yet also create an example of the changing contemporary views of women artists are the sisters Martha and Annie Mutrie. The flower paintings produced by the sisters were described as neither miniature nor unusually large for the genre which seems to express the notions that women were