Women, Art and Money in England 1880-1914

Event Details

Date:

Friday, 17 March 2017

Time:

1:00 pm - 2:00 pm

Room:

01 - E319

UQ Location:

Forgan Smith Building (St Lucia)

URL:

https://hapi.uq.edu.au/event/session/1864

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Presenter: Dr Maria Quirk

The question of how women artists achieved professional status in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century art world is one that has interested and challenged scholars for many years. Recently, interest in the history of women artists has crossed over from academic circles to mainstream cultural conversations, with television series such as Amanda Vickery’s The Story of Women and Art capturing public interest. In this seminar, I will present a fresh assessment on what professionalism looked like for women painters and illustrators. More important than a Royal Academy education or membership to exhibiting societies was a woman’s ability to sell her work. Commercial ambition and the objective validation of the art market were the clearest means for women to separate their work from that of the amateur artist and achieve professional status. This meant that women had strong incentive to paint in saleable, popular genres, which reinforced prejudices towards women’s ‘naturally’ inferior artistic ability – prejudices that continued far into the twentieth century.