CREATIVE WOMEN IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY COLLECTION

This trail has been devised to mark the National Portrait Gallery's recent acquisition of George Romney's portrait of Mary Moser (1744-1819). It highlights creative women in the Gallery's collection from the seventeenth century to the present day. The women selected represent many different fields of achievement, from art and theatre to literature and political thought. While these portraits commemorate individual creativity, a sense of society's changing views on women's nature, place and potential across the centuries is ever present. Often, it is the clash between these two forces that makes the sitters' stories so remarkable.

The web trail has been devised in conjunction with a gallery trail featuring some of the women included here who are currently on display.

Self-portrait by Mary Beale (1633-99)
c.1665

This self-portrait by the artist Mary Beale is a remarkable testament to one of Britain's first professional female painters. Encouraged by uncertainties over the future of her husband Charles's job, Beale set up a successful portrait studio at their home in Covent Garden. The business was a joint venture in every way; Charles primed the canvases, experimented with pigments and managed the accounts while Mary painted. Like Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffman, she was initially trained by her father. The most striking fact about the women artists who made names for themselves before the nineteenth century is that almost all of them were related to male painters. Beale represents herself here with confidence in her role. Perhaps in a conciliatory nod to convention, however, she reminds the viewer that she was also 'creative' in the socially prescribed way; as the mother of two sons whose portrait she has included.

Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707-51)and his sisters Anne (1709-59), Amelia (1711-86) and Caroline (1713-57) by Philip Mercier
1733

Mary Beale was certainly unusual in her professional status. The cult of the female amateur was widespread by the eighteenth century and this group portrait of the Prince of Wales and his sisters portrays the more typical outlets for female creativity. The aim of such pastimes was not to attain creative excellence but to develop accomplishments and charm. Their primary purpose was to make women more attractive for the 'marriage market' although they did help to familiarise society with female involvement in the arts. Music was deemed a particularly appropriate pastime but watercolour painting, flower painting and silhouette cutting, practiced in a domestic setting, also enjoyed huge popularity.

Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) by Sir William Beechey
1793

This majestic, high-minded portrait of the 'Queen of Tragedy', actress Sarah Siddons demonstrates that some women did find ways to express their creativity in public. From her triumphant 1782 season until her retirement in 1812, Siddons dominated the London stage and was respected as a serious talent. To achieve a reputation - or at least an acceptable reputation - as a woman in the theatre was particularly difficult. Women were first seen on the English stage during the reign of Charles II (1660-85) yet it was still considered an immodest and unfeminine occupation over a century later. As intruders in a male world, creative women in general and actresses in particular were at the mercy of slander and gossip which often alleged promiscuity. Siddons sought respectability as well as fame and, moving in aristocratic and literary circles, maintained a remarkably unblemished name throughout her long career.

Mary Moser (1744-1819) by George Romney
1770-1

(This portrait will be on display in the Ondaatje Wing Main Hall until 22 October)

The painter Mary Moser is best known as one of the founder members of the Royal Academy in 1768. She was one of only two women to be honoured in this way alongside Angelica Kauffman. Although excluded from life classes and regular meetings they were allowed to vote and judge medals. Moser's election may have been due in part to the considerable influence of her father, the enamel painter and engraver George Michael Moser. Yet both women were prize-winning artists in their own right and could bring valuable connections, international prestige and patronage to the new Academy. Moser received one of the highest paid commissions of the 1790s when she was invited to paint a decorative scheme at Frogmore House, Windsor, for Queen Charlotte. Moser and Kauffman's unusual status as female academicians made them particularly vulnerable to gossip. Moser was said to be romantically linked to Henry Fuseli while Kauffman was allegedly involved with Sir Joshua Reynolds. In this portrait George Romney depicts Moser with brush poised, as if interrupted while working on one of her celebrated flower paintings.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) with her son Edward (1713-76) attributed to Jean Baptiste Vanmour
c.1717

The daughter of a nobleman, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu went beyond the expectations of her aristocratic birth and gender to become a prolific writer and leader of intellectual society. She was largely self-educated in her father's library and it was the rare chance to travel, offered by her husband's ambassadorial job, that allowed her creative potential to flourish. In this portrait, painted in Constantinople (now Istanbul), Montagu is shown surrounded by the trappings of her luxurious expatriate lifestyle. Far from being confined to English circles, however, she learnt Turkish and explored the city disguised in full Turkish dress and veil. This resulted in her celebrated Turkish Embassy Letters, written between 1716 and 1718, which compared British culture with that of her new home. Significantly Montagu would only allow them to be published posthumously as her social position did not allow her to court fame in this way. In later life, to the horror of polite society, she left her husband and travelled to Italy by herself.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) by Cassandra Austen
c.1810

Despite the growing profile of female writers by the Regency period, genteel women were still not expected to make a living from their art. Jane Austen was, however, committed to novel-writing as a profession. Her own domestic circumstances and the confinement of her fictional subjects to the drawing rooms of the rural gentry appeared to place her firmly within accepted codes of feminine behaviour. Even her portrait - the only known image from life - belongs to the private, amateur tradition. But Austen's satirical eye analysed and mocked these constraints even as she seemed to accept them. Her novels scrutinised the tedium and lack of fulfilment that pervaded the life of gentlewomen and promoted independence and autonomy as essential female virtues. Austen persuaded her father and brother to approach publishers on her behalf and her work enjoyed huge contemporary success among both male and female readers.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) by John Opie
c.1797

A number of Regency women dared to challenge social conventions in a more openly iconoclastic way. Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the groundbreaking A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), supported herself, travelled alone and mixed with her male colleagues as an equal. She suggested that education was the key to a woman's creativity and that women would 'no longer degrade their characters with littleness if they were led to respect themselves'. In this portrait she appears with almost ostentatious simplicity. Frank and unadorned, she is hardly the 'hyena in petticoats' described by the contemporary author Horace Walpole. After Wollstonecraft's death in childbirth, her husband, the philosopher William Godwin, worked with this painting above his desk when writing his astonishingly candid biography of her. Proving that Wolstonecraft's theory of women's freedom was still out of step with social expectations, his account of her love affairs and suicide attempts ruined her reputation for a generation.

Ellen Terry (1847-1928) by George Frederic Watts
c.1864

This portrait by G.F.Watts of one of the greatest actresses of the late nineteenth century tells the story of a creative career that was nearly thwarted before it truly began. Watts married Ellen Terry in an attempt to 'remove her from the temptations and abominations of the Stage' and painted this portrait soon afterwards. Their union was shortlived, however, and Terry made a triumphant return to her first love - acting - at the New Queen's Theatre, Holborn in 1867. As the painter W. Graham Robertson later remarked 'If Watts thought he could mould that vital and radiant creature into what he wished her to be, he did not show much intelligence'. She went on to form a legendary twenty-five year partnership with the actor Henry Irving, specialising in Shakespearian heroines and roles created for her by playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw. She led a long and unconventional life both on and off the stage, lecturing in the USA and Australia and pioneering the move away from corsets and the constrictive clothing of her peers.

Louise Jopling (1843-1933) by Sir John Everett Millais
1879

By the second half of the nineteenth century professional woman artists were becoming more prominent. The role of the amateur was sidelined as training opportunities improved and women began to enter private art academies in large numbers. By 1870, Paris - with its all-female ateliers - was the most exciting destination for aspiring woman artists and Louise Jopling received much of her training there. In 1887, following her husband's death and in need of a certain income, she opened her own art school for women. Female painters also became a popular subject for male artists. In this portrait, John Everett Millais depicts Jopling as a captivating society lady. Jopling records sitting to him 'with all the knowledge of a portrait painter' and with 'a designedly beautiful expression'. Her collaboration suggests that her high-profile social status was closely linked to her success and identity as an artist.

Self-portrait by Gwen John (1876-1939)
c.1900

The painter Gwen John is now recognised as one of the great artistic innovators of the early twentieth century. But for many years her reputation remained shrouded in the myth of the solitary recluse and she was overshadowed by her flamboyant brother and fellow painter, Augustus. While certainly reserved, Gwen John was in fact a central figure in Parisian bohemian circles and had strong faith in her own artistic skills. This self-portrait from around 1900 was probably her exhibition debut at the New English Art Club and as such is an important statement of intent for her career. Like most of her work, it is austere and small in scale but its composition boldly invokes a long tradition of old master self-portraits by male artists. Her clothing - practical separates and a dashing bow tie - were typical of the 'New Woman'; a confident female type who began to appear in literature and the press, in both straight and satirical form, during the 1890s.

Dame Ninette de Valois (1898-2001) by F.E. McWilliam
1964

In partnership with Lilian Baylis, the forward-thinking manager of the Old Vic and new Sadler's Wells Theatres, Ninette de Valois was renowned for her drive and vision in the performance, choreography and promotion of English dance. Representative of the growing confidence of women to collaborate and forge their own paths, both were enthusiastic in their desire for a home-grown ballet company which would nurture native talent. It was this opposition to the international 'star system' that gave the young Margot Fonteyn her start. British audiences were notoriously sceptical, however, and De Valois struggled to win them over from the rarefied glamour of foreign ballet troupes. The establishment of the Royal Ballet in 1956 was her ultimate triumph. This bronze bust sculpted the year after her retirement, captures some of the persistent character that lay behind the success of the venture.

Jean Muir (1928-95) by Glenys Barton
1992

This elegant statuette of the designer Jean Muir reflects the assured femininity of her clothes, first conceived under her own name in the radical atmosphere of the 1960s when notions of 'a woman's place' were undergoing rapid change. Known for her unpretentious approach to fashion, Muir designed for all shapes and sizes, liberating the body in easy fluid fabrics with a technical expertise that won her international respect. She considered it a failure if someone noticed one of her dresses before the woman who wore it. With characteristic and often abrasive common sense she stated 'I've always hated fashion hanging on a skirt lengthclothes should be unimportant'. Many high-profile artists and actresses were among her fans yet it was a compliment from the wife of a theatre producer that Muir most treasured; 'your clothes make me feel like a woman - not a rather boring housewife and mother of three children'.

Germaine Greer (b. 1939) by Paula Rego
1995

Wearing her favourite Jean Muir dress, the feminist writer and scholar Germaine Greer is captured by Paula Rego in this dynamic pastel portrait commissioned especially for the National Portrait Gallery. Greer has done much pioneering work in the exploration of women's creativity, highlighting in particular the internal and external obstacles faced by women artists through the centuries. Rego, better known for her narrative paintings of the ambiguous relations between the sexes, rarely accepts commissions but the appeal of depicting Greer was strong. She presents her with little artifice; her hands calloused from gardening and her shoes falling apart at the sides. Greer was equally enthusiastic about sitting for Rego, having previously written of her work; 'it is not often given to women to recognise themselves in painting, still less to see their private world, their dreams, the inside of their heads, projected on such a scale and so immodestly, with such depth and colour'.

Fiona Shaw (b. 1958) by Victoria Russell
2002

One of the most exhilarating classical actresses of the contemporary British stage, Fiona Shaw has specialised in pushing women's participation in theatre to its extremes. Infamously playing the part of Richard II in 1995 she remarked, 'King Richard is not really a man, he is a god.' For Shaw - whose performances often involve nudity - the question of female identity has become the focus of her creativity rather than something to be overcome or ignored. In a similar vein, one of the artist Victoria Russell's main concerns is to challenge the way women are looked at in art. Usually depicting them nude or in their underwear, Russell aims to give power back to her sitters by showing them as much like themselves as possible. As an approach to employ with an actress, more used to appearing as someone else, it results in a particularly insightful image of a great performer.

Ms Dynamite (b. 1981) by Spiros Politis
2002

In 2002, the singer Ms Dynamite became the first solo black female to win the prestigious Mercury Music Prize. Against the backdrop of an urban music scene largely characterised by macho posturing and materialism, she started out as one of the first female garage MCs in London. Of her early performances she has said; 'There were a lot of people, women and men, who were like 'That's a man's job, its something that men do. And I proved them wrong quickly'. Ms Dynamite takes inspiration from reggae, roots and hip-hop fusing them with lyrics describing her own experiences growing up in an area dominated by violence and drugs. 'I am not here to be a stereotypical feisty young girl that just wants to get up on stage and chat' she asserts, 'I'm actually here with what I believe is something important to say'. Her stated intention to 'just make people think more' has made her a credible role model, reflected in this photograph of her in a Nottingham schoolyard.

Suggestions for further reading

Mirror Mirror; Self-portraits by women artists by Liz Rideal, National Portrait Gallery 2001
The Obstacle Race by Germaine Greer
A World of Our Own; Women as Artists by Frances Borzello, Thames and Hudson 2000

The National Portrait Gallery's acquisition of Mary Moser by George Romney was made possible with generous support from The National Art Collections Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Creative women web links

Genesis - women's history sources in the UK based at The Women's Library, London

Nine Living Muses

Mary Herbert, Countess of Pembroke
Lucy Countess of Bedford
Margaret 'Peg' Woffington

Catherine Macaulay
Fanny Burney
Mary Shelley
Maria Cosway

Emily Bronte
Julia Margaret Cameron
Adelina Patti
Lucie, Lady Duff-Gordon

Emmeline Pankhurst
Virginia Woolf
Vita Sackville-West
Vivien Leigh
Ethel Smyth

Joan Armatrading
Bridget Riley
Glenda Jackson
Julie Christie

Doris Lessing
Zaha Hadid
Sarah Lucas

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All images and text are subject to copyright protection. 22 November 2008