Paintings of Margaret Sarah Carpenter (1793-1872)

What can be said about Mrs. Margaret Carpenter? Is she not to be placed among those quiet, unpretentious portrait- painters whose thoughts are so wrapped up in their determination to be true that they never think of striving after exhibition-room effects? Margaret Carpenter gives us the character of her sitters, and not technical displays of her own cleverness. — Sparrow, p. 60

Over more than fifty years Carpenter produced some 1100 pictures, 263 exhibited in her lifetime. Of those the 156 shown at the Royal Academy are more than for almost any other nineteenth-century woman artist, and her sitters' account book (a copy of which is in the National Portrait Gallery, London) of over 600 individuals reads like a who's who of early Victorian England. — Richard J. Smith

The ranks of the Royal Academy are, and always have been, open to women, and why Mrs. Carpenter was never able to write R.A. after her name is a mystery to me, for she far surpassed in merit most of her contemporary portrait-painters. — W. P. Frith, pp. 302-03

Paintings

Bibliography

Frith, W.P. My Autobiography and Reminiscences. 2 Vols. Vol. 2. New York, Harper, 1888. HathiTrust, from a copy in the University of California Library. Web. 19 October 2024.

Hajdamach, Jonathan. "Margaret Sarah Carpenter: a forgotten talent." Art UK. Web. 19 October 2024.

Smith, Richard J. "Carpenter [née Geddes], Margaret Sarah (1793–1872), portrait and genre painter." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Online ed. Web. 19 October 2024.

Sparrow, Walter Shaw, ed. Women Painters of the World: from the time of Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the present day. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905. HathiTrust, from a copy in the University of Michigan. Web. 19 October 2024.

Created 21 October 2024