A Room of Her Own at the Clark

  

 

 

A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists In Britain, 1875-1945
Clark Museum of Art lower level

Williamstown, Ma

Through September 14, 2025.

 

It’s no secret that women have historically gotten short shrift in art galleries. This is especially the case for women married to a renowned artist. Revisionist art historians now believe that numerous masterpieces attributed to men were actually done by wives and daughters. There is no doubt whatsoever that many female artists were limited in subjects to domestic scenes that struck many critics of the day as treacle. That’s because social norms restricted women to sentimental subjects (flowers, children, domestic duties) lest their “delicate natures” be ruined.

 

At first glance, there’s not much radical or shocking material in the Clark exhibit. The real radical act was the very act of painting, drawing, or sculpting. In the period between 1875-1945 British women weren’t supposes to do that. The exhibition title A Room of Her Own takes its cue from a 1929 essay from Virginia Woolf that argued that women needed personal physical space in which to unleash their creativity. Of course, female writers had long known about discrimination. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was originally released with her husband’s name on the cover, Mary Ann Evans published as George Eliot, the Bronte sisters as Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, Elizabeth Gaskell was Cotton Mather Mills, Louise May Alcott was A M Barnard, and Amandine Lucie Aurore Dupin became George Sand. Even today that practice endures. Or did you think Joanne Rowling wanted to be known as J.K. or Robert Galbraith?

 

One of the painters shown is Vanessa Bell,  sister of Virginia Woolf. Here’s Bell’s modernist  painting of her sister. Here also is Anna’s self-portrait, gripping her brushes.Another quietly subversive painting is Nina Hammnett’s, Portrait of a Woman (1917) showing a woman deep in study. Vanessa Bell also worked in ceramics and did a series on admirable women. There are ten plates on display (of 48 ) that once belonged to Kenneth Clark. Duncan Grant and Clark’s wife, Lady Jane Clark, helped  paint them. 

 

Vanessa Bell of Virginia Woolf

 

Nina Hammnett Portrait of a Woman

Anna Alma-Tadema

One of the more striking works on display is Wilfred Knight’s The Deluge. It’s a depiction of the Biblical flood with six figures leaning forward to imbue the canvass with drama. In the late 19^th century the Pre-Raphaelites were in vogue. Although Lawrence Alma-Tadema was considered a realist, he influenced them, as did his wife Alma with The Garden Studio, which became her room of her own. Mary Lowndes did a take on Pre-Raphaelite William Holman Hunt in The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple. Evelyn De Morgan took a more gloomy look on her 1915 painting The Field of the Slain, her protest against the bloodshed of World War One. Marie Spartali Stillman’s Love’s Messenger (1885), though, is a classic Pre-Raphaelite work. 

Knight The Deluge

De Morgan Field of the Slain

Stillman, Love's Messenger

We get more war images when Britain entered the Second World War. Dame Laura Knight did Take Off in 1943 showing a crew preparing for a bombing mission in Germany. This Stirling Mk III bomber was shortly after decommissioned.  She also did Balloon Site, Coventry in which women are in charge and using their muscles on an equal basis with men. 

 

Knight, Take-Off

 

Balloon Site, Coventry

My three favorites, though, are Annie Louisa Swynnerton’s The Sense of Sight (1895) , an angel’s stunned look at the visible world, Swynnerton’s Mater Triumphalis (1892), a very rare nude done by a female artist, and Elizabeth Adela Armstrong’s Will o’ the Wisp (1900). Okay, so I like the Pre-Raphaelites, so sue me!

A Sense of Sight

Mater Triumphalis 

 

 

 

 

Will of the Wisp

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rob Weir