Victorian women artists' glass ceiling

Mary Moser and the Italian artist Angelica Kauffman were among the 36 founder members of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. Yet when Johann Zoffany was asked to paint The Academicians of the Royal Academy (1771–72; Royal Collection, London) en groupe, he could not include the two women because he had depicted the artists gathered around a nude male model. So that Moser and Kauffman could be included, Zoffany was forced to add them as portraits hanging on the wall.

Note that nothing much changed for decades - they were the only female members until after WW1 ended!!!

 Johann Zoffany,

The Academicians of the Royal Academy, c1772

Royal Collection, London

Note the two women artists on the right wall

In England the primary centre to study art was the Royal Academy School. For students, being accepted meant at least a three year studentship, studying perspective, elements of drawing and then the Preliminary Painting School. They then went on to life classes.

In April 1859 a petition signed by 38 women was widely circulated and debated, asking for admission.  But the Royal Academy only accepted female students from 1861 on, and even then, only in small numbers. Laura Herford was the very first.

Even if a woman managed to be accepted by this prestigious school, she faced additional problems. Firstly women were excluded from nude life classes "since only an insignificant properation of the female students become professional artists, it has been thought unnecessary and undesirable that in the Ladies' Life School there should be any study of the undraped model". Undesirable perhaps, but unnecessary? Surely nude life classes were a basic requirement for any artist hoping to paint well. The Academy thought otherwise and didn't allow women into the life classes until the very end of the century (1893).

Secondly the requirements for women students to advance were less rigorous than those for men. For example, the Royal Academy examined a male student's drawings of a whole figure, while the female student was only required to submit a drawing of the model's head.

Thirdly women were not allowed to participate in the most important painting competitions.

Did having a young queen on the British throne inspire women artists and liberate their professional efforts? Probably not. Social mobility and intellectual freedom were encouraged in men, but barely tolerated in women, except for the queen. To become a successful artist required physical and mental independence, but married women would not have had the time or energy to move around the community, drawing and painting. And single women were not allowed to.

The Slade School of Art, which admitted women from the 1870s, was less rigid.

The book Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists spanned the 1840s-1910 era and concluded that there were only 20-30 or so women artists at the top level, including Rebecca Solomon (1832-86). But even that relatively small number of talented women artists was amazing. Pre-Raphaelitism was clearly a broader historical movement than art historians had thought. However the very thick glass ceiling facing women artists in Britain suggests why two of the artists Rebecca most indentified with lived and worked in France - Berthe Morisot (1841-95) and Mary Cassatt (1844-1926). All three women shared very similar career paths.

There is some interesting reading in:
Women in the Victorian Art World by Clarissa Campbell Orr, 1995.
And Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists by Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, 1998.