“A talented and decorative group” : a re-examination of London’s women artists, c. 1900-1914

Abstract

Alicia Foster’s article “Gwen John’s Self-Portrait: Art, Identity and Women Students at the Slade School,” published in 2000, used the expression “a talented and decorative group” to describe common attitudes towards women artists in late nineteenth and early twentieth century London. The pejorative attribution implied strongly a status less significant to that of their male counterparts and it is this widely held view which I challenge in this dissertation. To do so I have examined women’s art education in particular at the Slade School of Fine Art, and the role of its graduates within a selection of London’s exhibition groups, societies and publications. This dissertation also reconstructs the role of the Women’s International Art Club (WIAC), hitherto entirely overlooked in art historical study of the era, and it is the arrival of this organization in London in 1900 that sets the first of my chronological parameters. The closing date of 1914 was chosen as it marks the broad cultural rupture associated with the outbreak of the Great War. This dissertation demonstrates that women artists inhabited, and contributed to, the capital’s vibrant art scene, and that they were influential, high-profile, and widely critiqued in the opening decades of the twentieth century. This study, therefore recalibrates our understanding of the role, output and reception of women artists in London between 1900-1914.