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Not Intended for the Public: A Look at Amateur Women Painters

© Jessica Cresseveur

Not all paintings appear on canvas, wooden panel, and the like. In addition to these media, some paintings have been produced on more "domestic" surfaces, such as furniture, jewellery, and dining implements. In many instances, as with many publicly exhibited paintings produced by women throughout history, the identity of the artist is unknown. Up to this point, I have focused the scope of my articles on professional women painters, i.e. those who produced art as a paying career, often exhibiting their works in the public sphere. This month, however, I intend to discuss those women whose artistic production remained within the private sphere and whose identities as artists were rarely, if ever, recorded. Collectively, they are known as the amateurs.

In mid eighteenth-century England, it became the norm for young women of the upper and middle classes to be considered more marriageable if they were "accomplished" in such fine arts as painting, drawing, and music. This was due to the growing popularity of parties at private houses as venues for young unmarried women and men to meet and eventually court-born out of the belief that public venues in large cities, such as Bath and London, were becoming sites of ill repute.(1) At such gatherings, women possessing artistic and musical talent drew more attention than their untalented counterparts. Furthermore, women of the upper and middle classes could use such talents to occupy their spare time and to entertain at gatherings that they and their future husbands would host or attend.

Whitney Chadwick explains that many of these women attended boarding schools where they learned drawing and watercolour painting. Whereas career-minded artists in training learned by using unmixed paints, drawing from live models (clothed and unclothed), and training rigorously, the daughters of the English elite learned from "impoverished gentlewomen" and drawing manuals, produced landscape paintings, and painted with ready-to-use watercolours (which, unlike the academic unmixed pigments, would not be messy and soil the students' dresses). These facilitations made painting and drawing popular among the upper classes.(2) Furthermore, since these women were confined to boarding schools during their training, not pursuing professional careers, and remaining within the private sphere to practice their talents once fully trained, amateur art production was soon approved as an acceptable pursuit.(3)

A common kind of painting that amateurs produced with watercolour was the miniature.(4) The surface for a miniature could range from canvas and panel (to display as one would other forms of art) to ivory (to wear as jewellery). This both stemmed from and confirmed the belief that women were incapable of abstract thought which made their intellectual capacity inferior to that of men. This "inferiority" made them more suitable for small-scale detailed work.(5) On the other hand, successfully producing such small paintings required patience, steady hands, and skill. Small surfaces left little, if any, room for mistakes. As if that were not enough, watercolour is a thin, aqueous medium. An unsteady hand is only one of many things that could go wrong, causing the paint to run beyond its intended borders.