For more than a century, the women of Pre-Raphaelitism were remembered mostly as faces on canvas: models, muses and tragic lovers of the male painters. This catalog turns the story around and treats them as artists in their own right, painters, photographers, embroiderers and designers who took up the movement’s ideas from the disadvantaged position Victorian society reserved for women.
Organized by Fundación MAPFRE in collaboration with La Piscine – Musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent in Roubaix, the exhibition brings together some 130 works by more than forty women, lent by 65 public and private collections. Alongside painting and watercolor it gives full weight to photography, textiles, enamel and stained glass, with artists such as Elizabeth Siddal, Joanna Boyce, Julia Margaret Cameron, Evelyn De Morgan, May Morris and Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale, whose The Pale Complexion of True Love (1899), lent by the Musée d’Orsay, became the image of the show.
The catalog reproduces every work on view and opens with an extensive essay by the curator, Pamela Gerrish Nunn, tracing the evolution of the movement and the different routes by which women entered it: ties with male artists, the support of John Ruskin, or simply independent judgment and taste.
A rich and timely book for readers of Victorian art, the Arts and Crafts movement and the history of women artists.
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