The essay first appeared in the Pre-Raphaelite Society Review, Vol. XXXIII (Spring 2025). Reproduced with the permission of the author and editor, it has been reformatted here and now includes links to relevant material on our own website. — Simon Cooke
round 1848, Anna Mary Howitt expressed her dissatisfaction at being excluded from the Royal Academy of Art: ‘How terribly did I long to be a man so as to paint there’, she wrote to her friend Barbara Leigh Smith (later Madame Bodichon) (Cambridge University Library MS). Ladies could indeed attend the public lectures at the R.A, but they were not admitted as students or members until 1860. Victorian society – especially that of the upper and middle-classes – revolved around the concept of gender difference. The ‘public sphere’, that is, the domain of work and paid employment, was a male prerogative, while women were confined to the ‘private sphere’: family and domestic matters. Women were not prohibited to learn how to draw or paint, rather, they were directed towards a ladylike form of accomplishment. Therefore, a female artist was bound to be considered as an amateur. This form of prejudice could also be internalised by women themselves. For example, Louisa Beresford had been tutored by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Ruskin, yet she failed to see herself as a professional watercolourist. In a letter she sent to her cousin, Eleanor Vere Boyle, she complained: ‘these things, or anything I have ever done, cannot be classed as real good things, only as the work of one who could have been an artist if it had been her fate to earn her bread’ (Hare 3, 361).
Despite the institutional and social restrictions they faced, many women expressed an interest in entering a career in the arts, a profession that became increasingly sought after. In 1841, 278 British women were recorded as painters and by 1871, they were 1069 (Nunn 3). Art practice became desirable because it allowed for a certain degree of self-expression and a means to earn a living. However, it remained a daring option: not only was it financially precarious, but women also had to enter a competitive market. Besides, many schools and institutions barred or drastically limited their entry into the artworld. When the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in 1848, it was a strictly male organisation. Some of its original founders decided to integrate women though: Rossetti wished his sister Christina to be part of the Brotherhood, and many Pre-Raphaelites trained their female peers (Fredeman, Correspondence, 1, 66). How did women affiliated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement find alternative methods of achieving professional status then?
Catherine Madox Brown, A Deep Problem: 9 and 6 make - . Oil on canvas. © Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust, licensed under CC0.
Being part of the Pre-Raphaelite network provided women with some valuable output to claim professionalism. It was, obviously, easier when you were born in a family of artists. Lucy and Catherine, the Madox Brown sisters, grew up in the workshop of their father and contributed to household finances: ‘Lucy, Cathy and Nolly selling four pictures for small sums have helped to keep things square’(Madox Ford, Ford Madox Brown 252). In the studio, Lucy and Cathy Madox Brown arranged materials and made copies of their father’s canvasses. Apparently, Lucy started her apprenticeship as a teenager, when she covered for one of her father’s assistants who had ‘failed to do some routine work’(Creathorne 2, 118). She also took care of her father’s affairs by acting as his secretary: ‘I have in my possession hundreds […] of copies of Madox Brown’s carefully studied business letters in the handwriting of his eldest daughter’ recalled her nephew (Madox Ford,’ ‘Younger’ 50). Cathy specialised in portraiture: in 1870, she painted a watercolour showing her father facing his easel, in his garden.
Similarly, Rebecca Solomon worked as an associate for her older brother, Abraham, before entering the studio of John Everett Millais. In turn, she taught her younger brother, Simeon, everything she had learned from Millais. Like Rosa Brett, Solomon remained single and never had any children, preferring to live and work with her brother. She preserved her independent status and focused on her career by refusing to assume the persona of the traditional Victorian matron.
However, artistic couples were not uncommon in the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal’s relationship was intimate, as well as collaborative. William Michael Rossetti described the peculiar lessons his brother gave to Siddal, in exchange of her modelling for him: ‘He gave her some instruction; but of systematic training of the ordinary kind she appeared to me to have scarcely any’(Family Letters, 1, 175). The Pre-Raphaelites valued originality and expression of feeling, rather than technical skill. They did not impose academic exercises on their students:
in the Praeraphaelite environment […] things were estimated differently. The first question which my brother would have put to an aspirant is, ‘Have you an idea in your head?” This would have been followed by other questions, such as: “Is it an idea which can be expressed in the shape of a design? Can you express it with refinement, and with a sentiment of nature, even if not with searching realism?’ [W.M. Rossetti, ‘Rossetti and Siddal,' 279]
By the mid-1850s, the PRB expanded to become more inclusive, considering women as active – if not equal – fellow-artists. Launched by Millais in February 1854, the Folio Club comprised eighteen members, four of them being female: Louisa Beresford, Eleanor Vere Boyle, Anna Mary Howitt and Barbara Leigh Smith. Each month, participants had to make pen and ink sketches on some chosen theme. When those were ready, they were presented to the group for their qualities to be assessed. The purpose of the Folio Club was to create a forum for helpful critique, in a spirit of mutual guidance and support.
The Pre-Raphaelite circle proved to be profitable in terms of connections, but it was in public and private art schools that women looked for more thorough training in figure drawing, light and shade and perspective. Tessa Mackenzie made an index of such institutions in Art Schools of London, detailing their modes of admission, fees, schedules, methods of teaching and working conditions. Government schools of design represented the cheapest option. Founded in 1842, the Female School of Art welcomed students who provided good references from previous masters. In a separate class, women learned to draw from the draped human model, but the focus was on industrial design and applied – not fine – arts (Mackenzie 36). When Henry Cole implemented a national educational system in 1857, more advanced and technical classes for women were set. This course enabled Helen Allingham to enrol at the Royal Academy Schools in 1867, but Georgiana Burne-Jones claimed that she had not learned anything from it (Burne-Jones, 1, 142).
More prestigious was Cary’s Academy [previously the male-only Sass's], where one could stay at from two to three years. Pupils were taught to copy from antiquities and plaster casts. As well as sketching in the British Museum and the National Gallery, this is where Anna Blunden started her education, and Joanna Boyce took classes there in 1849. When Boyce went back to her studies in 1852, she enrolled at Leigh’s Academy. Admission was more flexible, tuition fees were less expensive, and learning was less formal. Boyce attended class three days a week. In her diary, she carefully recorded the fees she had already paid for, for a dozen lessons (Bradbury 1, 95).
The opening of the Slade School of Art in 1871 embodied a real progress in access to learning. It was modelled on the Parisian system of ateliers and founded as a rival to the Royal Academy. Its headmaster, Edward Poynter, was deeply aware of the lack of institutional training for women, notably in the field of anatomy: ‘There is unfortunately a difficulty which has always stood in the way of female students acquiring thorough knowledge of the figure which is essential to the production of a work of high class.’ Women attended almost the same course as their fellow-students: ‘I have always been anxious to institute a class where the half-draped model might be studied […] in all the classes, except of course those of the study of the nude model, the male and female students should work together’ (Poynter 111). Aged nineteen only, Evelyn Pickering [later De Morgan] became one the first Slade pupils to be awarded a scholarship. During her studies, she was granted several prizes, such as medals for painting from the antique, and certificates of drawing and composition. These skills enabled her to acquire serious mastery of the human body and to handle the highest genre of art – history painting – inspired from Greek and Latin mythology.
For those who could afford it, studying abroad was a good way to further one’s artistic education and to be exposed to Western cultural heritage. In her travel guide Studying Art Abroad, Abigail May Alcott enquired about European cities suitable to learn art: London seemed to have been the best place to study watercolour, while Paris would appeal to oil painters. Rome, in her opinion, was the ideal city to learn sculpture. As the Mecca of the arts, Paris attracted many foreigners, on account of its numerous, prestigious private workshops supervised by famous masters. Joanna Boyce considered studying under Rosa Bonheur, but her fiancé deterred her from doing so. She then spent six months in the studio of Thomas Couture, alongside Édouard Manet. Around 1888, Maria Cassavetti worked with Auguste Rodin. Her marble version of L’Amour irresistible took up the non finito technique favoured by Rodin’s practitioners: the block of stone surrounding the figure was deliberately left rough-hewn, with the visible traces of Cassavetti’s tools on it.
Nineteenth-century Britain saw the emergence of many professional bodies sanctioning art practice and dictating taste. To achieve reputation, attract patrons and make sales, it was essential to show work in public. Despite the fact that women were being exhibited next to their male colleagues, reviews treated their work in separate columns. The Royal Academy still dominated the cultural landscape. Women did not become members until 1922, when Annie Robinson was elected associate. They could submit pictures to exhibitions anonymously. Once they got accepted, they tended to be less favoured by the hanging committee, or their work would remain unpurchased. Elgiva by Joanna Boyce did not find any buyer after it was showed at the Royal Academy in 1855, but it was acclaimed unanimously. According to Madox Brown, it was ‘the best head of all the rooms’ (Surtees 138). Ruskin appreciated ‘the dignity of all the treatment – the beautiful imagination of faint but pure colour’(Cook 14, 31).
Just like the RA, the conservative British Institution boasted standards of excellence, taste and elegance. It privileged ‘high art,’ discarding portraits, watercolours and architectural designs. Since these were techniques practiced by many women, their participation was relatively low. In 1854, Howitt experienced rejection from the BI. She then directed herself towards the Free Exhibition. This organisation, where Rossetti and Madox Brown also made their debut, was an alternative space set against the discriminatory principles of the RA, as long as the works shown were not copies, and that they had not been on display in other galleries of London. The Society of British Artists generated increasing opportunities for women too. They could be honorary members and exhibit without having to pay the 10% charge on sales. Drawn from Thomas Hood’s poem ‘The Song of the Shirt,’ Blunden’s For Only One Short Hour attracted notice at the SBA in 1854. Its engraved reproduction in The Illustrated London News, designed to pay for a funerary monument dedicated to the poet, was an indicator of its success.
Set up around 1855, the Society of Female Artists aimed at promoting art created by women, offering them a forum to exhibit and sell their work, even for non-members. Barbara Leigh Smith participated in its inception and showed fifty-nine artworks there from 1858 to 1886. The Art Journal, which was relatively sympathetic to women, had supported the first SFA show in 1857: ‘It will be, we understand, of a high order and manifest a truth which is becoming every day less questionable – that in the Fine Arts women are capable of great achievements’ (496). However, critics deplored the absence of household names, such as Jane Benham, Emily Mary Osborn and Rebecca Solomon, and condemned the quality of the artworks on display (Spectator, 165)
The second generation of female Pre-Raphaelites benefitted from the creation of more liberal, avant-garde exhibiting bodies. The Dudley Gallery applied an equal-gendered policy, specialising in watercolour and thus competing with the more traditionalist Old Watercolour Society. In 1875, Lucy Madox Brown showed Margaret Roper Rescuing the Head of Her Father at the Dudley and then at Manchester, before it was sold for £250, quite a large sum for a work in that medium. As to Marie Spartali, she became a frequent exhibitor at the Grosvenor Gallery from 1877 to 1887. Even if it was accused of being elitist (participants were selected by invitation only by its founders, Sir Coutts and Lady Blanche Lindsay), the Grosvenor appealed to Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes because it positioned itself outside the mainstream. Its preference was for elegant, sensuous pictures that had a decorative feel.
Pre-Raphaelite women encompassed a group of artists that was even more shattered than the male circle, but they were active participants in the movement, guaranteeing its stability, length and legacy. The Pre-Raphaelites did not treat their ‘sisters’ as a segregated group, but they kept conforming to certain Victorian norms. This caused some to express contradictory judgments about women’s claims to professionalism: Ruskin asserted that ‘no woman has ever been a great painter yet’ (qtd. in Surtees, Sublime, 116) to Blunden, yet he called Siddal a ‘genius’ (qtd. in Cook 36, 204). Therefore, the female Pre-Raphaelites endured a double type of marginalisation from the art establishment, on account of their gender and their choice of style.
Nevertheless, Pre-Raphaelite women lived at a moment that witnessed many changes on the art scene, in terms of social mobility, access to learning and acceptance of their status. More and more of them did not necessarily come from artists’ families. Some, like Rosa Brett, were almost self-taught. The campaign against the Royal Academy launched by Blunden, Osborn, Leigh Smith, Solomon and their Victorian fellow-artists enabled them to study at the RA from 1860 onwards, where a life-class finally opened to women in 1893. By that time, women also looked for recognition outside of London: Emma Sandys established her reputation through her connections in Norwich, while Kate Bunce became a decisive founder of the Birmingham Society of Artists.
The second and third generations of female Pre-Raphaelites had career opportunities that their predecessors were not able to obtain. Evelyn Pickering, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale and Marianne Preindelsberger were no doubt the most successful of them. Preindelsberger won a medal at the Chicago World Fair in 1893, Fortescue-Brickdale used the money she had won from a prize during her studies at the RA to make her exhibition debut and Pickering enjoyed a few solo shows.
In recent years, there has been a surge of publications and exhibitions about these women ‘united by their mutual interest in Pre-Raphaelitism’ and their wish to create an alternative, collaborative structure of their own (Wilkes 10). So, even though the concept ‘sisterhood’ is a retrospective one, it can be reevaluated by going beyond the bio-monographical approach, exploring professional female networks – solidarity, collaborative partnerships, competition – within Victorian artistic institutions instead. Such research still needs to be developed.
Related Material
- [A Review of] Pre-Raphaelite Sisters at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 17 October 2019 – 26 January 2020
- Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists
- Victorian Art Institutions: A Contemporary Survey of Academies, Schools, and Galleries (see especially the National Art Training-Schools of South Kensington)
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Created 4 March 2026