User:Jmblaze325/Anna Blunden/Bibliography

Anna Blunden, later Anna Blunden Martino, (22 December 1829 – 1915) was an English Pre-Raphaelite artist. She was a known associate of John Ruskin's circle and was one of a number of women artists working and exhibiting during the Victorian age. Her best known work is The Seamstress (1854), a piece inspired by Thomas Hood’s poem The Song of the Shirt. Starting her career with oil painting, Blunden moved to painting landscapes in watercolors and these make up a large proportion of her remaining works. Her work was regularly showcased at the Royal Academy and by the Society of British Artists from 1854 to 1867, as well as by the Birmingham Society of Artists.

Professional Life
From her exhibition record and the works that remain, she started her career in the 1850s as a figure painter. Though, over the course of her career, Blunden transitioned from oil painting and portraiture to watercolor landscapes starting in the 1860s.Her paintings demonstrated a desire to depict modern subjects, for example The Seamstress (1843) and A Scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853). The subject of The Seamstress is overworked needlewomen working in tiny rooms to produce finely sewn clothes for the upper and middle classes. The painting explored the topic of exploitative conditions of women in clothing trades and factories. The Seamstress also provides an insight into the lives of working women during the time. It is unclear whether she lived in Cornwall, but from some of her paintings such as View Near The Lizard it is clear that she spent some time there. Other works by Blunden include Past and Present (exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1858) and A Mother's tale (exhibited by the Society of British Artists in 1855). Though Anna Blunden’s work is very limited, from what we can see from her surviving work, the focus of her art was to shed light on repressed and overseen groups.

Selected Works
Unfortunately, there are very few of Blunden's work that are still around in modern times due to a bombing during the second World War in Exeter that destroyed a large sum of her work. Luckily, historians and art critiques alike are able to see the themes of her work through her surviving pieces. Looking at her surviving pieces, there are two separate era's of Blunden’s work. The era’s are differentiated by her use of oil paints for portraits and human subjects, and the second being predominantly landscapes and watercolor. There is a sub-era of her works during her use of watercolor and landscapes, there seems to be a trend of using points of view from Lizard. These paintings lead people to believe that Blunden spent a significant amount of time her since there are multiple references to this location within her later paintings. Blunden had the great ability to catch an emotion and feeling, and have viewers be able to feel it. This is applicable to all her surviving works in the sense that they can absorb the content of the piece.


 * The Seamstress
 * Uncle Tom's Cabin
 * In Dawn in an Ancient Land
 * Venice Watercolor
 * View Near The Lizard