Women Painters of the World Part 1

Women Painters of the World.

by Walter Shaw Sparrow.

PREFACE

What is genius? Is it not both masculine and feminine? Are not some of its qualities instinct with manhood, while others delight us with the most winning graces of a perfect womanhood? Does not genius make its appeal as a single creative agent with a two-fold s.e.x?

But if genius has its Mirandas and its Regans no less than its infinite types of men, ranging from Prospero and Ferdinand to Caliban and Trinculo, its union of the s.e.xes does not remain always at peace within the sphere of art. Sometimes, in the genius of men, the female characteristics gain mastery over the male qualities; at other times the male attributes of woman's genius win empire and precedence over the female; and whenever these things happen, the works produced in art soon recede from the world's sympathies, losing all their first freshness. They may guide us, perhaps, as finger-posts in history, pointing the way to some movement of interest; but their first popularity as art is never renewed. Style is the man in the genius of men, style is the woman in the genius of the fair. No male artist, however gifted he may be, will ever be able to experience all the emotional life to which women are subject; and no woman of abilities, how much soever she may try, will be able to borrow from men anything so invaluable to art as her own intuition and the prescient tenderness and grace of her nursery-nature. Thus, then, the bis.e.xuality of genius has limits in art, and those limits should be determined by a worker's s.e.x.

As examples in art of complete womanliness, mention may be made of two exquisite portraits by Madame Le Brun, in which, whilst representing her little daughter and herself, the painter discloses the inner essence and the life of maternal love, and discloses them with a caressing playfulness of pa.s.sion unattainable by men, and sometimes unappreciated by men. Here, indeed, we have the poetry of universal motherhood, common to the household hearts of good women the wide world over. Such pictures may not be the highest form of painting, but highest they are in their own realm of human emotion; and they recall to one's memory that truth in which Napoleon the Great ranked the gentler s.e.x as the most potent of all creative artists. "The future destiny of children," said he, "is always the work of mothers."

But some persons may answer: "Yes, but the achievements of women painters have been second-rate. Where is there a woman artist equal to any man among the greatest masters?" Persons who do not think are constantly asking that question. The greatest geniuses were all hustled and moulded into shape by the greatest epochs of ambition in the lives of nations, just as the mountains of Switzerland were thrown up to their towering heights by tremendous forces underground; and, as the Alps do not repeat themselves, here and there, for the pleasure of tourists, so the greatest geniuses do not reappear for the pleasure of critics or of theorists. And this is not all. Why compare the differing genius of women and men? There is room in the garden of art for flowers of every kind and for b.u.t.terflies and birds of every species; and why should anyone complain because a daisy is not a rose, or because nightingales and thrushes, despite their family resemblance, have voices of their own, dissimilar in compa.s.s and in quality?

The present book, then, is a history of woman's garden in the art of painting, and its three hundred pictures show what she has grown in her garden during the last four centuries and a half. The Editor has tried to free his mind of every bias, so that this book, within the limits of 332 pages, might be as varied as the subject. The choice of pictures has not been easy, and a few disappointments have attended the many communications with the owners of copyrights; but only two invited artists have declined to contribute. It is not often that so much willing and generous help has come to an Editor from so many countries; and it is with grat.i.tude that I acknowledge the a.s.sistance received from the contributors of to-day. Seven pictures are reproduced in colour-facsimile, thanks to the courtesy of the following artists and collectors: Mrs. Allingham, Miss Ann Macbeth, Mr. James Orrock, R.I., Mr. W A. Cadbury, Mr. Charles Cheston, Mr.

Klackner, and Mr. Charles Dowdeswell.

The Dedication Page, the Initials Letters, the End Papers, are all designs by Miss Ethel Larcombe, while the t.i.tle Page and the Cover are the work of Mr. David Veazey. The silhouettes by Mlle. Nelly Bodenheim, used as tail-pieces, are published by permission of S. L.

van Loo, Amsterdam.

This volume being the first ill.u.s.trated history of the Women Painters of the World, Her Majesty Queen Alexandra has honoured it by graciously accepting the Dedication; and in this encouraging act is revealed the untiring interest and solicitude with which Her Majesty has ever followed the progress of women's work.

THE EDITOR.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SILHOUETTE BY NELLY BODENHEIM, HOLLAND.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: SCHOOL OF BRITISH WATER-COLOUR, CONTEMPORARY AN ENGLISH HEBE.

AFTER THE ORIGINAL DRAWING H.R.H. The Princess Louise, d.u.c.h.ess of Argyll]

Women Painters in Italy since the Fifteenth Century

By Walter Shaw Sparrow

Older than the authenticated history of Greek art is a tradition that connects a girl's name with the discovery of a great craft, the craft of modelling portraits in relief. Kora, known as the virgin of Corinth, and daughter of a potter named Butades, sat one evening with her betrothed in her father's house; a torch burned, a fire of wood bickered in a brasier, throwing on the wall in shadow a clear silhouette of the young man's profile; and Kora, moved by a sudden impulse, took from the hearth a charred piece of wood and outlined the shadow. When the girl's father, Butades, saw the sketch which she had made, he filled in the outline with his potters' clay, forming the first medallion.

It is a pretty, chivalrous tradition, and it recalls to one's memory the fact that the ancient Greeks had really some women artists of note, like Aristarete, daughter and pupil of Nearchus, celebrated for her picture of Aesculapius; or like Anaxandra (about B.C. 228), daughter of the painter Nealces, or like Helena, who painted the battle of Issus, about B.C. 333.

Pa.s.sing from Greece to ancient Rome, we find only one woman painter, Lala by name, and she was a Greek by birth and education. Lala lived and laboured in the first century before the birth of Christ. She went to Rome during the last days of the republic, and won for herself a great reputation by her miniature portraits of ladies.

As the early Christians turned away from all luxury and adornment, the influence of Christ's life was very slow in gaining its benign ascendency in the arts; but among the civilisations which were founded on the ruins of Rome's decline and fall, there were some women who still deserve to be remembered for their patronage of art.

Amalasontha, daughter of Theodoric the Great, Theodelinda, Queen of the Lombards, Hroswitha, in her convent at Gandershein, and Ava, the first German poetess, these ladies, and many others, made colonising names, names that visited distant lands and gave ambition to other women.

Briefly, the Renaissance was heralded by a long, troubled dawn; but it came at last, and its effects on the destinies of women were immediate and far-reaching. In Italy, one by one, the Universities were opened to the fair, that of Bologna leading the way in the 13th century, when Betisia Gozzadini studied there with success, dressed as a boy, like Plato's pupil, Axiothea. And a line of girl graduates connects Betisia Gozzadini with the women lecturers who became so famous at Bologna in the 18th century: Anna Manzolini, Laura Ba.s.si, Clotilde Tambroni, Maria Agnesi, and Maria Dalle-Donne.

It is not easy to explain why the Italian towns and universities gave so much encouragement to the higher aspirations of girls. In poetry, in art, in learning, that encouragement was equally remarkable, and I am tempted to a.s.sign its origin to the martial temper of the Middle Ages, which drew many young men from the universities to take part in the exercises of the tilt-yard or in the perils of the battlefield, leaving the fields of learning in need of zealous labourers. Women, on the other hand, exposed their hearts, but not their lives, to the hazards of duels, tournaments and wars; they lived longer than men, as a rule, and hence it was worth while to encourage publicly those gifts of the female mind and spirit which had long been cultivated privately for the benefit of peaceful nunneries.

Still, whatever the origin of it may have been, the pride taken by the Italians in their gifted women is among the most important facts in the history of their Renaissance. But for that pride, the scores of ladies who became noted in the arts would have remained unknown in their homes, and the story of those times would lack in its social life a counterpart of that radiant chivalry that cast so much tenderness and sanct.i.ty about the Motherhood of Mary and the Infancy of Jesus Christ.

As this chapter is nothing more than a brief introduction to the study of a very important subject, I can say only a few words about the different groups of painters into which the women artists of Italy are divided, beginning with the early nuns, whose art was not so much a craft as a confession of faith.

Caterina Vigri was the earliest of these nuns, and the picture by which she is represented on page 33, "St. Ursula and her Maidens," was painted in the year 1456. Not only is it typical of the young Bolognese school, but, despite the primitiveness of the drawing, it has two qualities in which the swift temperaments of women, so truth-telling in their emotions, commonly manifest themselves in art: the first is a certain naturalness of gesture and of pose; the second is an evident wish to impart life and liveliness to the faces, even although that liveliness and life may not accord with the subject in its higher spiritual significance. It is this natural wish of women to be homely and attractive that so frequently brings their art nearer to the people's sympathies than the work done by men; and if we study the four ill.u.s.trations on pages 34 and 35, representing pictures by the Sienese nuns of Santa Marta, we shall see how motherly in tenderness was the feminine ideal of Christ's infancy. I can gain no information about Barbara Ragnoni and the two other sister nuns, whose names have pa.s.sed into Time's limbo of forgotten things, and whom I have ventured to describe as Sister A. and Sister B. They were true artists, each one having a sweet graciousness of her own, playful, yet devout and reverent, devotional but not austere. In these pictures the maternal instincts are at play; the painters are so happy in their subject that their whole womanhood responds to it, making it a holy experience of their own glad hearts. There is much to admire also in the way in which the figures are grouped and co-ordinated; and how charming is that glympse of country painted by Barbara Ragnoni in her "Adoration of the Shepherds."

These were not the only gifted and gracious nuns in the early history of Italian art. There was Plautilla Nelli, who formed her style on that of Fra Bartolommeo; she became prioress of a convent in Florence, the convent of St. Catherine, and died in 1588, aged sixty-five.

Barbara Longhi of Ravenna, another painter of the same period, was not a nun, but I mention her now in order that attention may be drawn to a painter having a genuine sympathy and style (see page 41).

We pa.s.s on to a little bevy of emigrants, women painters who visited foreign courts where they met with great successes. Sophonisba Anguisciola, born of a n.o.ble family in Cremona, was enriched by Philip II. of Spain; Artemesia Gentileschi came to London with her father and found a patron in Charles I.; Maria La Caffa (17th century), a flower painter, came upon her Maecenas in the Court of Tyrol; it was in German Courts that Isabella del Pozzo (17th century), like Felicita Sartori (18th century), plucked bay leaves and laurels; and Violanta Beatrice Siries, after making for herself a name in Paris, returned home to Florence and painted many famous persons of the 18th century. Then we have Rosalba Carriera, whose career ended in blindness and loss of reason, and whose whole life is a touching story. As a child she made Point of Venice lace; at the age of fourteen or fifteen she painted snuff boxes with flowers and pretty faces; then miniatures of well-known persons kept her brushes busy; but this minute art tried her eyes so seriously that Rosalba adopted pastels instead, and soon became the most famous pastellist of her period. She journeyed pretty well all over the Continent, winning an extraordinary success wherever she went, as well as a place in all the Academies of note, from the Clementina at Bologna to the Royal Academy at Paris. Rosalba Carriera arrived in Paris in April 1720; she kept a diary of her experiences, and students of French history should read it in the edition annotated by Alfred Sensier. But here we are concerned with the art alone of Rosalba Carriera, an art rich in colour, swift and nervous in drawing, full of character, and modelled always with vigour and with ease.

Returning now to an earlier traveller, Sophonisba Anguisciola, we meet with another portraitist of real merit, more self-contained than Rosalba, less impetuous, but fresh, witty, sincere and charming. It is probable that she was born in 1533. After studying for some time at Cremona, under Bernardino Campi, Sophonisba Anguisciola began to make fun of the little girls of the period. Vasari set the greatest store by one of these satirical sketches, representing a boy with a lobster clawed to his finger, and a small girl laughing at his nimbleness. The subject of another skit was an old woman studying the Alphabet, much to the amus.e.m.e.nt of a baby girl.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SCHOOL OF CREMONA, XVI CENTURY THREE SISTERS OF SOPHONISBA ANGUISCIOLA PLAYING AT CHESS. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY HANFSTAENGL AFTER THE PAINTING IN THE RACZYNSKI COLLECTION. VASARI SAW THIS PICTURE AND SAID THAT "THE FIGURES WANTED ONLY VOICE TO BE ALIVE."

Sophonisba Anguisciola or Angussola, Painter 1533(?)-1626]

That Sophonisba Anguisciola was very young when she first attracted notice from the great, is proved by the fact that she sent a likeness of herself--a likeness now at Vienna--to Pope Julius III., who died in 1555. It was in her twenty-seventh year that she made her way, with ten attendants, to the Spanish Court, there to paint a history in admired portraits of the great age of the _auto-da-fe_: a history which _tempus edax_ has devoured, leaving us only those works which Sophonisba turned out in her native country, far away from the dark tragedies of the Escorial. Philip the Second married his protegee to a wealthy Sicilian n.o.ble, Don Fabrizio de Moncada, giving her a huge dowry of 12,000 ducats, a pension of 1,400 scudi, and a dress loaded with pearls, besides other presents.

Sophonisba retired with her husband to Palermo, where she soon became a widow. Then Philip and his Queen wished her to return to Madrid; but the artist pleaded an excuse, the excuse of homesickness, and set sail for Italy. The captain of the galley of war, Orazio Lomellini, was a handsome man of good family, a native of Genoa; his gallantry had suffered a sea-change, was altogether breezy, sailor-like, delightful; and Sophonisba not only fell in love with him, she took him at a leap-year advantage, and soon changed her "weeds" for a bridal dress.

When Van Dyck met her at Genoa (1622), and painted several members of her husband's family, Sophonisba was upwards of eighty-seven years old, and quite blind; but the blithe old lady still went on painting so well in her familiar conversations that Van Dyck said he had learnt more from her talk than from his other teachers. Had Steele an inkling of this magnificent compliment when he said that to love the Lady Elizabeth Hastings was a liberal education? Addison may have heard of it in Italy, and in turning over his thoughts before Master Richard, may have dropped it generously. But, however this may be, Stirling gives too much point to Van Dyck's words; for he says boldly, in _The Annals of the Artists of Spain_, that my painter's portraits are little inferior to those by t.i.tian. "Of this evidence is afforded," says he, "by that beautiful portrait of her, which is now no mean gem of the galleries and libraries of Althorp."

Perhaps one may defy critics to name a single latter-day "realist"

among the fair who has attained to Artemisia Gentileschi's masterful and singular ruthlessness, as in the several pictures of Judith that she painted. One of these pictures will be found on page 45. It is the least relentless of the series, but it shows clearly enough the grip of Artemisia's hand in tragedy. Curiously, the suave Guido was Artemisia's first teacher, but she learnt more from Domenichino, and more still from the years she pa.s.sed at Naples, then known as "the sink of all iniquity." But Artemisia Gentileschi is sometimes kind in her work, and gentle; she does not always remind us of that Artemisia who fought so well at Salamis, causing Xerxes to cry: "Behold! the men behave like women, and the women like men!" In her excellent portraits, and in pictures like the "Mary Magdalene," on page 31, she blends some graciousness of thought with vigour and variety of technique.

Lavinia Fontana and Elisabetta Sirani were the ablest women painters whose travels did not extend beyond Italy. The first was a member of the old Roman Academy, and Pope Gregory XIII. made her his portraitist in ordinary. She was born of good family in Bologna, anno 1552. It was her father that shaped the laggard talents of Lodovico Carracci, and from him came the girl's first lessons in drawing. Lavinia spent most of her life in Rome, where, for close on two generations, she held society by the austere truth of her portraiture. Ladies of high rank vied with one another to become her sitters, and a long red line of cardinals sat to her. Pope Paul the Fifth was among Lavinia's models; very high prices were paid readily for her work, and not a few n.o.blemen wished to marry her; but the artist remained true to the young Count of Imola, Giovanni Paolo Zappi, a good, kind, simple-hearted fellow, an aristocratic Barnaby Rudge. Him she married, and it was her ill-hap to see his simplicity repeat itself in one of their two sons, a lad who kept the Pope's antechamber merry.

My artist's style, though modelled to some extent on that of the Carracci, has a distinction of its own. Even the arid Kugler gives Lavinia his rare good word, reckoning her a better artist than her father, and adding: "Her work is clever and bold, and in portraiture, especially, she has left good things."

Does Elisabetta Sirani take precedence of Lady Waterford? Perhaps they may be regarded as two equal queens in the world of woman's art, each with a beautiful artistic intellect. Even at the age of nineteen, as old Bartsch admits, Elisabetta etched exquisite plates; and, before she was twenty-three, her paintings were sought after by all the patron-critics of her country. Yet her male rivals hinted that she was dishonest, that she did not paint her own pictures, but had "ghosts"

to win fame and fortune for her--especially her father, a poor "ghost," afflicted with inherited gout. Elisabetta happily soon turned the sneer against her rivals. This she did by working before an audience of distinguished persons, like Cosimo, Crown Prince of Tuscany, who on May 13th, 1664, stood by whilst she painted a likeness of his uncle, the Prince Leopold.

Malvasia gives in his spirited monograph a list of 150 pictures by Elisabetta Sirani; and Lanzi deemed it marvellous that one who died so young should yet have brought to completion so many hopeful efforts of real genius. The brilliant girl painted with great rapidity. One of her finest achievements--the "Baptism of Christ"--is a very large picture, and the story of its conception is noteworthy. Elisabetta was little more than twenty at the time, and the clergy who had been sent to order the work for the Church of the Certosini at Bologna, looked on whilst she, radiant with inspiration, made her first impulsive sketch in pen-and-ink. The beholders were enchanted, and the huge picture, differing little in essentials from the sketch, was painted almost as rapidly as Dumas repeopled the distant past. In brief, Elisabetta Sirani, like all women of genius, worked under an intuitive rather than technical guidance; and in her art, consequently, as in Lady Waterford's, we find those blemishes and beauties which belong to a native habit of spontaneous workmans.h.i.+p.

As to her private life, it is full of heroic virtues. The n.o.ble girl kept the whole family: her mother, who was stricken with paralysis; her father, who suffered intolerably from the gout; and her two sisters, whom she educated with a large cla.s.s of girl art-students.

Then Cupid came, saw, and was overcome, and Elisabetta, by way of celebrating this unkind victory, painted the little G.o.d in the act of crowning his victor. But the pity of it all was this: the girl had so many taut strings to her bow that the frail bow could not but break.

Elisabetta's health gave way, a painful disease of the stomach a.s.sailed her; and yet to the last day but one of her short life--i.e., August 27th, 1665--she remained true to her colours, and was one of art's truest soldiers. "The best way not to feel pain is not to think of it," said she, and then went slowly back to her studio.

The present book contains adequate examples of the work of Elisabetta Sirani, of Lavinia Fontana Zappi, of Artemisia Gentileschi, of Sophonisba Anguisciola, of Rosalba Carriera; and there is a good drawing by Diana Ghisi, the painter-engraver, an excellent copy by Maria Tibaldi Subleyras, and two characteristic pictures by Agnese Dolci, sister of Carlo Dolci and his equal in talent. These painters and the early nuns, Caterina Vigri and the three sisters of Santa Marta, Siena, are enough to represent the old Italian schools; while three characteristic pictures by Elisa Koch, Juana Romani, and Rosina Gutti, unite the present with the far-distant past, a past separated from the present day by four hundred and fifty years.

WALTER SHAW SPARROW.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BOLOGNESE SCHOOL, XVII CENTURY "MARY MAGDALENE." AFTER THE PAINTING IN THE PITTI GALLERY FLORENCE. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDERSON, ROME Artemisia Lomi, called Artemisia Gentileschi, Painter 1590-1642]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BOLOGNESE SCHOOL, XV CENTURY SAINT URSULA AND HER MAIDENS. FROM A PHOTOGRAPH BY ALINARI AFTER THE ORIGINAL PICTURE IN THE ROYAL ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS, VENICE Santa Caterina Vigri di Bologna, Painter 1413-1463]