Reclaiming female agency with Elizabeth Prettejohn

From Harvard University, American art historian Elizabeth Prettejohn is one of the major researchers on painting of the Victorian era. She exclusively confided in the latest developments about the core of the matter.

Les Carnets de Viviane: How did you get interested in the art of the Victorian era?

Elizabeth Prettejohn: I did my first degree at Harvard University and at that point I was most interested in nineteenth-century American art. When I came to London to do the Master’s degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art, I thought that I would be in England only for a short period and that I should therefore take advantage of the opportunity to study British art. That was in 1985 and I have never gone back to America – and am still studying Victorian art! I suppose, therefore, that you could say that my interest had an element of chance or serendipity about it. However, I was also fascinated by a problem that I encountered, and didn’t understand: British Victorian art had a very low reputation at the Courtauld, the principal British institution for the study of the history of art. It had an even lower reputation in the States; I had scarcely encountered it at all in my undergraduate course at Harvard, even though the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard had an excellent collection of Victorian artworks. I wanted to understand why this thriving period of art production had such a low academic and scholarly status; that motivated me to embark on studying it. Since I still don’t understand why that is so – I am still studying Victorian art.

Albert Moore, Juin flamboyant, 1885
Huile sur toile, 47 x 47 cm
Musée d'Art de Ponce, Porto Rico

LCdVV: When and how did you feel the representation of women was a key issue for specialists who research the period?

E.P.: From the first moment I began to study the period, it was obvious that the representation of women was an important endeavour for Victorian artists and the Victorian artworld. In my early work I was most interested in the artists of the Aesthetic Movement (Leighton, Rossetti, Whistler, Burne-Jones, Moore, Solomon, Watts); later I became interested in the Pre-Raphaelite circle – for all of these artists, the representation of the female figure was a crucial intellectual and aesthetic issue. However, the scholarship on that issue was generally weak and unenterprising; much of it was very biographical or anecdotal in character and focussed on the lives and loves of the women in Pre-Raphaelite or Aesthetic circles.

LCdVV: How would you place your work in relation to feminist and gender studies, notably those by Jan Marsh and Griselda Pollock? Do you think it is appropriate to dedicate studies only to female artists and models?

E.P.: I particularly admire the work of Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, whose groundbreaking article of 1984 on Elizabeth Siddall really changed the field. Since then, other scholars have done extremely valuable work in bringing to attention a wider range of women artists; a particularly important example was the exhibition Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists, curated by Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn in 1998. However, the research done so far merely scratches the surface. Not only are there – quite literally – hundreds of Victorian women artists who remain unexplored in the scholarly literature; the existing studies even of the most famous of them (Siddall, Evelyn De Morgan, Joanna Boyce Wells, Marie Spartali Stillman) are very limited and tend to concentrate on the most basic issues about women’s position in the Victorian world. I feel strongly that scholars both of women artists (and models) and of Victorian art in general (including male artists) need much more sophisticated analytical methods for evaluating the aesthetic characteristics of works of art if we are to break new ground in writing the history of Victorian art. That history should include both male and female artists and models. Indeed, the male model is an area of great interest on which there has been astonishingly little research.

LCdVV: The relationship between some painters and their female models is quite problematic. How would you characterise it? Idealist? Misogynistic? Realistic? Stereotypical?

E.P: I consider women models to be equivalent in importance to artists as collaborators in the creation of works of art. Relationships between any two people can be problematic; I am not sure that relationships between painters and models have a special status in this respect. Certainly it would be impossible to generalise by using the terms you are suggesting. Indeed, it is a stereotype to describe the relationship between Victorian artists and their models as ‘misogynistic’ (for example). Take these different cases: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris; Julia Margaret Cameron and Alfred Tennyson; John Singer Sargent and Ellen Terry; Ford Madox Brown and Emma Hill; John Everett Millais and John Ruskin; Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Laura Epps Alma-Tadema. Any of those relationships may have been problematic; all of them were also inspirational and productive.

LCdVV: Can you tell us more about the role of women in the production and reception of Victorian art? Suzanne Fagence Cooper, for instance, asserts it was definitely ‘not passive’.

I agree with Suzanne. I believe that female models were co-creators of the works of art in which they appeared, and thoroughly active agents in the production of such works. Women were also important actors in the art world as critics (Elizabeth Eastlake, Anna Jameson, Emilia Dilke, Alice Meynell, and many others), as art theorists (George Eliot, Vernon Lee), as patrons (too many to list), and no doubt in a variety of other roles.

LCdVV: Please mention some fundamental names of female artists, models and patrons.

E.P: I have mentioned several of the more familiar names already. There are many more whose work as artists, models, and patrons deserves attention but who have been lost from view. Among my favourite artists of the period are Laura Epps Alma-Tadema, Sophie Anderson, Kate Bunce, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, Christiana Herringham, Mabel Nicholson, Annie Swynnerton, Marianne Stokes, Phoebe Traquair, Ethel Walker, Henrietta Ward. I suspect that, had she lived beyond the age of 30, Joanna Boyce Wells would have been among the great artists of the nineteenth century (that is, among all artists, male or female).

LCdVV: Were there any recent groundbreaking exhibitions on the topic?

E.P: I have referred above to the exhibition of 1998, Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists, and it is disappointing that there have been no equivalently revelatory exhibitions in this area in the seventeen years since then. There have been some smaller ventures – for example, the interesting show on Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale in Liverpool (2012, curated by Pamela Gerrish Nunn), the exhibition on Evelyn De Morgan at Blackwell, the Arts and Crafts house in the Lake District, this summer (2015), and the online exhibition curated by my colleague Katie Tyreman Herrington, Three Graces: Victorian Women, Visual Art, and Exchange (on Aglaia Coronio, Maria Zambaco, and Marie Spartali Stillman. It would be good to see a more ambitious exhibition.

LCdVV: Do you think there is still research to do? How could scholars improve the situation?

E.P: Yes, emphatically: everything is still to be done. Although I have been critical of the work of the first generation of feminist scholars, for writings that could sometimes lack nuance and sophistication, they had two virtues: they worked hard and believed wholeheartedly in their cause. The scholars of today would do well to follow their example in these two crucial respects.