A review of Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 – publication and mysterious omissions

Mary Delany (1700-88) was 72 years old when she created a paper collage in Britain. Noticing the affinity between geranium and red scrap paper, she took a pair of scissors and cut off petals freehand. The exquisite plant that grew out of Delany’s watercolor work looked so real that people mistook it for a painting. She had found a new way, she wrote to her niece, “imitating flowers”.

Delany’s collages are stunningly beautiful – almost transparent on black paper. They have watercolor translucency and actual pressed flowers. Two can be seen in this exhibition: a blooming raspberry glowing crimson against the darkness and a fragile white lily shedding its petals, apparently, at night. Perhaps they are emblems of the show itself: discoveries, and rediscoveries, brought out of the darkness into the light.

Tate Britain’s Now You See Us spans four centuries of art by more than 100 female artists. It has been added to revelations. These are miniatures by Levina Teerlinc, a Flemish “paintrix” at the court of Elizabeth I, including one of the young Gloriana with ginger eyebrows attributable to Teerlinc. Vibrant portraits by Joan Carlile (1606-79) depict satin aristocrats with watery eyes and sometimes double chins, real and recognizable women staring out from the canvas.

The poet and painter Anne Killigrew (1660-85) depicts herself barefoot, with an expression of unmitigated disappointment, pretending to be the weeping Venus of Adonis. Sarah Biffin’s exceptional self-portrait on ivory (1821), which neatly incorporates one of her own crisp miniatures, shows the brush tied to the neck of her dress. Biffin was born without arms, painted with his mouth.

For every celebrated masterpiece – Artemisia Gentileschi’s monumental self-portrait c.1638 with dirty nails and a sleeve falling to reveal her strong forearm, as she begins on such a bare canvas – there are at least 10 unknown names . Margaret Meen’s glorious passiflora, spare, exquisite and without a horizon, was painted as a Japanese watercolour, in 1789. Louise Jopling, who studied in Paris and opened her own art school, brings brilliant colors and attractive drawing to Victorian portraiture. Ethel Walker’s large frieze of nude swimmers, from 1920, shows traces of Cézanne and Degas but presents each woman with a distinct identity in the hazy blue light. But he has been ignored just as much as his sister.

Walker has represented Britain more than once at the Venice Biennale, and that goes to the central theme of the show, which is women’s road to recognition as professional artists. Some don’t break through; others rise again that are forgotten (Biffin, for example, despite Charles Dickens’ repeated praise in novels). Others cannot make a proper living.

In 1839, Harriet Gouldsmith (anonymous) published Voice from Picture, a book in which one of her own landscapes claims she was hung badly at exhibitions and sold cheaply to pay the rent. On one occasion, Gouldsmith heard her art being praised at a show only for their enthusiasm to give up on the discovery that she was a woman.

To that end, Now You See US opens not in 1520 but in 1780, with Angelica Kauffman’s saccharine Invention allegations as a goddess in lonely neoclassical wisps. A terrible painting, sure, but it is entitled on two grounds: its personification of the invention as a woman, and because Kauffman was one of the two female artists who co-founded the Royal Academy.

Here is an immediate dilemma: which should come first, the painting or the fact? Should the show present art on its own terms, or for example, evidence, a representation of social history? It’s a particularly complex remit, especially given the huge success of Tate Britain’s Women in Revolt: Art and Activism 1970-90, which only recently closed and is now touring to Edinburgh and Manchester. Now You See Us tries to go all the way.

So here is a wonderful picture from 1857 of sheep on a Highland peak by the French artist Rosa Bonheur, their soft wool led by the fine light of Scotland, the spirit of their proximity beautifully clear. A wonderful work on loan from the Wallace Collection. But although Bonheur was very popular in Britain, especially after the patronage of Queen Victoria, she only visited twice in a few months.

But she has a double role in this show, that is to appear again as an icon of women’s success in a neighborhood picture with Florence Claxton. Women’s Work, 1861, is a satire on professional inequality, alleged to be part of the women walled up inside a ruined house, all the doors and windows blocked. Bonheur alone breaks through the barriers, painting the scene from high up on a ladder. It’s a clear literal skit.

Claxton petitioned hard for women to be admitted to the Royal Academy (there had been none since Kauffman’s day), and joined the campaign for women’s right to attend life classes. A gallery is devoted to historical documents and photographs; but the masterpiece here is not the male nude you might expect but a scary profile one in black chalk by Laura Knight.

Knight is strongly represented by a series of paintings on the edge of a cliff; but what about her nickname, Winifred Knights? The Flood it’s a masterpiece of British modernism, painted in 1920 and eligible as such, but it’s not here. And why are the ethereal and original blue cyanotypes of Anna Atkins (1799-1871) missing from the photography section, along with pioneering photojournalist Christina Broom (1862-1939), whose moving portraits of suffragettes would have been so fitting?

The show is full of flowers, going from Delany right down to Helen Allingham’s tweehouse gardens, all ready for their postcard replicas. And if Allingham, then why not Beatrix Potter’s visionary genius? Weak pre-Raphaelite schlock fills the main gallery, along with Victorian piety such as Emily Osborn’s noblewoman, her eyes dull, awaiting a dealer’s judgment on his latest canvas, while two male artists watch in the background. Anonymous and friendless terminal is mawkish.

Women’s art and women’s history rarely collide in this show. You see it in Ethel Wright’s stunning 1912 portrait of the suffragette Una Dugdale Duval, in an arsenic green dress beneath a wallpaper of obscene fighting cocks, where Wright’s modern bravado meets directly the modern bravado of Wright and her suitor. And you see it in Gwen John’s immortal self-portrait from 1902, small and distant, light catching her eyelashes in a quiet atmosphere, so direct and self-contained: the huge declaration of hypocrisy.

That relaxed image can be seen on the exhibition posters, perhaps promising too much. In the case of even the best of the artists here a little of their work is shown from time to time, entirely separate from the things which have not been left out. There is no doubt that the Now You See Us theme is outstanding. The captions (and the excellent catalog) are excellently written. But social history often clashes with art in this show, words overshadowing images.