The fair sex is so much in evidence in Art to-day (the first census of this century recording the names of nearly four thousand who profess that calling) that we are apt to forget that the lady artist, worthy of a place amongst the foremost of the other sex, is a creation of modern growth.

Paintresses—to call them by a quaint and agreeable name—there have been in profusion, and an author, writing a quarter of a century ago, managed to fill two bulky volumes1 with their biographies; but the majority of these have owed both their practice and their place in Art to the fact of their fathers or husbands having been engaged in that profession.

History has recorded but little concerning the women artists who worked in the early days of English Art. The scanty records which, however, have come down to us prove that if they lived uneventful lives they did so in comfort. For instance, it is noted of the first that passes across the pages of English history, namely Susannah Hornebolt (all the early names were foreign), that she lived for many years in great favour and esteem at the King’s Court, and died rich and honoured: of the next, Lavinia Teerlinck, that she also died rich and respected, having received in her prime a higher salary than Holbein, and from Queen Elizabeth, later on in life, a quarterly wage of £41. Farther on we find Charles I. giving to Anne Carlisle and Vandyck, at one time, as much ultramarine as cost him £500, and Anna Maria Carew obtaining from Charles II. in 1662 a pension of £200 a year. About the same time Mary Beale, who is described as passing a tranquil, modest existence, full of sweetness, dignity, and matronly purity, earned the same amount from her brush, charging £5 for a head, and £10 for a half-length. She died in 1697, and was buried under the communion table in St. James’s, Piccadilly, a church which holds the remains of other paintresses.

Another, Mary Delaney, described as “lovely in girlhood and old age,” and who must have been a delightful personage from the testimonies which have come down to us concerning her, lived almost through the eighteenth century, being born in 1700, and dying in 1788, and being, also, buried in St. James’s. She has left on record that “I have been very busy at my usual presumption of copying beautiful nature”; but the many copies of that kind that she must have made during this long life are all unknown to those who have studied Art a hundred years later.

Midway in the eighteenth century we come across the great and unique event in the annals of Female Art, namely the election of two ladies to the Academic body, in the persons of Angelica Kauffman—who was one of the original signatories of the memorial to George III., asking him to found an Academy, and who passed in as such on the granting of that privilege—and Mary Moser, who probably owed her election to the fact that her father was Keeper of the newly-founded body.

The only other lady artists who flit across the stage during the latter half of that century—in the case of whom any attempt at distinction or recognition is possible—were Frances Reynolds, the sister of the President, and the “dearest dear” of Dr. Johnson, and Maria Cosway, the wife of the miniaturist. These kept up the tradition of ladies always being connected with Art by parentage or marriage.

The Academy catalogues of the first half of the nineteenth century may be searched in vain for any name whose fame has endured even to these times, although the number of lady exhibitors was considerable. In the exhibitions of fifty years ago, of 900 names, 67, or 7 per cent, were those of the fair sex, the majority being termed in the alphabetical list “Mrs. ——, as above”; that is to say, they bore the surname and lived at the same addresses as the exhibitor who preceded them.2

The admission of women to the Royal Academy Schools in 1860 must not only have had much to do with increasing the numbers of paintresses, but in raising the standard of their work. In recent years, at the annual prize distributions of that institution, when they present themselves in such interesting and serried ranks, they have firmly established their right to work alongside of the men, by carrying off many of the most important awards.3

The Royal Female School of Art, the Slade School, and Schools of Art everywhere throughout the country each and all are now engaged in swelling the ranks of the profession with a far greater number of aspirants to a living than there is any room for.

This invasion of womankind into Art, which has also shown itself in a remarkable way in poetry and fiction, is in no way to be decried. On the contrary, it has come upon the present generation as a delightful surprise, as a breath of fresh and sweet-scented air after the heavy atmosphere which hung over Art in the later days of the nineteenth century. To mention a few only: Miss Elizabeth Thompson (Lady Butler), Lady Alma Tadema, Mrs. Jopling, Miss Dicksee, Mrs. Henrietta Rae, Miss Kemp Welch, and Miss Brickdale in oil painting; Mrs. Angell, Miss Clara Montalba, Miss Gow, Miss Kate Greenaway, and Mrs. Allingham in water-colours have each looked at Art in a distinguished manner, and one quite distinct from that of their fellow-workers of the sterner sex.

The ladies named all entered upon their profession with a due sense of its importance. Many of them may perhaps be counted fortunate in having commenced their careers before the newer ideas came into vogue, by virtue of which anybody and everybody may pose as an artist, now that it entails none of that lengthy apprenticeship which from all time has been deemed to be a necessary preliminary to practice. Even so lately as the date when Mrs. Allingham came upon the scene, draftsmanship and composition were still regarded as a matter of some importance if success was to be achieved. Nature, as represented in Art, was still subjected to a process of selection, a selection, too, of its higher in preference to its lower forms. The same pattern was not allowed to serve for every tree in the landscape whatever be its growth, foliage, or the local influences which have affected its form. A sufficient study of the human and of animal forms to admit of their introduction, if needful, into that landscape was not deemed superfluous. Most important of all, beauty still held the field, and the cult of unvarnished ugliness had not captured the rising generation.

The endeavours of women in what is termed very erroneously the higher branch of the profession, have not as yet received the reward that is their due. Placed at the Royal Academy under practically the same conditions as the male sex whilst under tuition, both as regards fortune and success, their pictures, when they mount from the Schools in the basement to the Exhibition Galleries on the first floor of Burlington House, carry with them no further possibility of reward, even although, as they have done, they hold the pride of place there. It is true that as each election to the Academic body comes round rumours arise as to the chances of one or other of the fair sex forcing an entrance through the doors that, with the two exceptions we have named, have been barred to them since the foundation of the Institution. The day, however, when their talent in oil painting, or any other art medium, will be recognised by Academic honours has yet to come.

To their honour be it said, the undoubted capacities of ladies have not passed unrecognised by water-colour painters. Both the Royal Society and the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours have enrolled amongst their ranks the names of women who have been worthy exponents of the Art.

The practice of water-colour art would appear to appeal especially to womankind, as not only are the constituents which go to its making of a more agreeable character than those of oil, but the whole machinery necessary for its successful production is more compact and capable of adaptation to the ordinary house. The very methods employed have a certain daintiness about them which coincides with a lady’s delicacy. The work does not necessitate hours of standing, with evil-smelling paints, in a large top-lit studio, but can be effected seated, in any living room which contains a window of sufficient size. There is no need to leave all the materials about while the canvasses dry, and no preliminary setting of palettes and subsequent cleaning off.

Yet in spite of this the water-colour art during the first century of its existence was practised almost solely by the male sex, and it was not until the middle of the Victorian reign that a few women came on to the scene, and at once showed themselves the equals of the male sex, not only so far as proficiency but originality was concerned. In the case of no one of these was there any imitation or following of a master; but each struck out for herself what was, if not a new line, certainly a presentation of an old one in a novel form. Mrs. Angell, better known perhaps as Helen Coleman, took up the portrayal of flowers and still life, which had been carried to such a pitch of minute finish by William Hunt, and treated it with a breadth, freedom, and freshness that delighted everybody. It secured for her at once a place amid a section of water-colourists who found it very difficult to obtain these qualities in their work. Miss Clara Montalba went to Venice and painted it under aspects which were entirely different from those of her predecessors, such as James Holland; and she again has practically held the field ever since as regards that particular phase of atmospheric effect which has attracted attention to her achievement. The kind of work and the subjects taken up by Mrs. Allingham will be dealt with at greater length hereafter, but I may premise by saying that she, too, ultimately settled into methods that are entirely her own, and such as no one can accuse her of having derived from anybody else.

The following illustrations find a place in this chapter:—

5. MILTON’S HOUSE, CHALFONT ST. GILES
From the Water-colour in the possession of Mrs. J. A. Combe.
Painted 1898.

The popularity of a poet can hardly be gauged by the number of visitors to the haunts wherein he passed his day. Rather are they numbered by the proximity of a railroad thereto. Consequently it is not surprising that the pilgrims to the little out-of-the-way Buckinghamshire village where Milton completed his Paradise Lost are an inconsiderable percentage of those who journey to Stratford-on-Avon. For though Chalfont St. Giles lies only a short distance away from the twenty-third milestone on the high-road from London to Aylesbury, it is some three miles from the nearest station—a station, too, where few conveyances are obtainable. Motor cars which will take the would-be pilgrim in an hour from a Northumberland Avenue hotel may increase its popularity, but at present the village of the “pretty box,” as Milton called the house, is as slumberous and as little changed as it was in the year 1665, when Milton fled thither from his house in Artillery Ground, Bunhill Row, before the terror of the plague.4 Milton was then fifty-seven, and is described as a pale, but not cadaverous man, dressed neatly in black, with his hands and fingers gouty, and with chalk-stones. He loved a garden, and would never take a house, not even in London, without one, his habit being to sit in the sun in his garden, or in the colder weather to pace it for three or four hours at a stretch. Many of his verses he composed or pruned as he thus walked, coming in to dictate them to his amanuensis, and it was from the vernal to the autumnal equinox that his intermittent inspiration bore its fruit. His only other recreation besides conversation was music, and he sang, and played either the organ or the bass viol. It was at Chalfont that Milton put into the hands of Ellwood his completed Paradise Lost, with a request that he would return it to him with his judgment thereupon. It was here also that on receiving Ellwood’s famous opinion, “Thou hast said much here of Paradise Lost, but what hast thou to say of Paradise Found?” he commenced his Paradise Regained. He returned to London after the plague abated, in time to see it again devastated by the fresh calamity of the great fire.

An engraving of this house appears in Dunster’s edition of Paradise Regained, and an account in Todd’s Life of Milton, p. 272; also in Jesse’s Favourite Haunts, p. 62.