User:Vintagelibrarian/Barbara Bodichon

Life
Removing information on art in order to create new section on her art.

Art
Art Background

Benjamin Leigh Smith, Bodichon’s father, made sure all his children (daughters as well as sons) received a broad education, including training in the arts. He took them on tours of the British Isles as well as to Europe, experiences that inspired creativity and fostered artistic talents. Her grandfather, William Smith, who owned several “Old Masters” and was a patron of contemporary artists, took her to meet the painter J.M.W. Turner in his studio when she was a child. (Orr, 169)   She attended The Ladies’ College at Bedford Square, where women had the opportunity to receive formal artistic training, including life classes. She spent most of her time in the drawing studio. (Herstein, p. 20). In 1854, Bodichon’s father sent her to Italy to recover from a series of health challenges. There, she did some painting and met the sculptor Harriet Hosmer. She also visited Mount Vesuvius, which had recently had another eruption. She painted a picture of this site to send to her father. (Burton, p. 78 ). A few years later, at another occasion where Bodichon’s health was precarious, her father took their family to Algeria, where she found new inspiration for her art. There, she met her her future husband, Dr. Eugene Bodichon. Future travels and experiences afforded by this marriage provided inspiration for art subjects and themes. (Burton, p. 92. )  The English Woman’s Journal, founded by Bodichon and colleagues upon her return from Algeria and her honeymoon in North America, included articles on women’s economic needs and potential contributions to society. They “...patiently and persuasively tried to accustom their readers to think of women as artists, engravers, social workers, doctors, sculptors–anything but unhappy, idle dependents upon men’s charity. To cheer the fainting heart, they described the lives of the pioneer women who had taken their courage in their hands and carved new and useful careers for themselves. There were articles on Florence Nightingale [Bodichon’s cousin], Rosa Bonheur, Harriet Hosmer ... Elizabeth Blackwell…and a ‘Gallery of Illustrious Italian Women’...” (Burton, p. 104 .)

Artistic Style and Media

Though she occasionally worked in oils, watercolor was her primary choice of media. Also, she often followed contemporary French artists like Corot, Daubigny and the Barbizon School in frequently working out of doors in “plein air.”  “She was known to work outdoors for as long as twelve hours at a stretch, returning to her studio to work up some of the sketches to finished products.” (Orr, p. 175 ). Hester Burton, in her biography of Bodichon, drew a distinction between the tradition of proper young women in Victorian England drawing a bit as an acceptable and easy way to spend their time before marriage, but Barbara’s works were different. “They belonged not at all to the ‘spare- room school of painting’, but, like herself, were bold and vivid and touched not a little by genius. Later in life, a contemporary critic called her ‘the Rosa Bonheur of landscape’.” (Burton, p. 31 ). In her article analyzing Bodichon’s life and art, Meritxell Simon-Martin, sees some British colonial connections with her work. In describing Bodichon’s Sisters Working in our Fields, she points to the two women who are portrayed in close-up, bent over and working. Though there is little background information about this work, this article goes on to say: "She drew on western pictorial conventions, and reproduced compositional formulae distinct from western landscape painting.  Most notably, Bodichon drew on codes of pictorial intelligibility: the rule of recognition that allowed the strange to be presented within the familiar; that is, to turn land into landscape, into a category of western art intelligible to the English bourgeois consumer.”  (Simon-Martin, p. 591 ).  Simon-Martin goes on to say that Bodichon’s expansion of the world of the woman artist, saying she defended women artists working "en plein air" and legitimized landscape painting as an appropriate artistic theme. "The academic hierarchy privileged historical representations in oil, relegating female artists to household scenes and still-life. Inner settings were partly justified on the grounds of the presumed weak nature and systematic ill-health among middle-class women. These beliefs were used against them painting outdoors, making physical frailty a sign of bourgeois femininity. We have already seen how, inspired by her own sketching outfit and addressed to a like-minded familiar audience, Bodichon drew the new generation of professional women in appropriate outdoor clothing.”  (Simon-Martin, p. 592 ). Havice also points out her typical working attire of large hats, leather boots, glasses and walking sticks, similar to Rosa Bonheu r. (Havice, p. 4 )

Connection with Political and Social Activism

Over the years, Bodichon became equally famous for her art work as her leadership in the women’s movement. When Ellen Clayton published English Female Painters (1876), Bodichon was the the first name listed in the section on landscape painters. (Orr, p. 167)   Clayton wrote: “She has portrayed Nature through the poetical medium of an imaginative spirit, and not from a narrow, artificial, or conventional point of view.” (Orr, p. 167 ) Clarissa Orr stated: “This seems especially apt; she was as imaginative in envisioning a full life for women, as she was in her response to nature. Nor, in my view, did she experience any sense of disjunction between her self as artist and her self as feminist activist, despite the fact that the only two biographies fail to give an adequate account of her career as an artist. Yet this is clearly how she identified herself. When she married in 1857 she gave her profession as artist on her marriage certificate.”  (Orr, p. 167 )  The interconnectedness of Bodichon’s art and her feminist activism is evident throughout her career. “The constant sense of Barbara’s social/political and aesthetic concerns being intertwined is confirmed by the study of her sketchbooks, which simultaneously served as diary and commonplace book. In her 1850 notebook, for example, she drew a sketch of Wordsworth’s grave.”  (Orr, p. 172 ). In her biography, Hester Burton writes “In 1849 even drawing and women’s rights were subjects not wholly without connection. At that time the college studio was practically the only place in England where women could receive first-class instruction in drawing. They were not admitted to the Academy School, and found the greatest difficulty in exhibiting their works.” (Burton, p. 30 )  Despite her identification as both an artist and feminist, there were signs that she, like many female artists of the time, lacked confidence in her standing among her peers, especially male artists. As part of a discussion of her inclusion in a group called Pre-Raphaelites, John Crabbe stated:  "W.M. Rossetti referred to the imposing cliff-top view called Ventnor Isle of Wight…as being ‘full of real Pre-Raphaelitism’, yet from time to time the praise accorded by other critics was leavened with remarks about her “unfinished’ style.  In truth, she was variable, both painstaking and what she called ‘dashy’ and her awareness of this, together with lingering doubts about the quality of her draughtmanship, probably explains an inclination to append the word ‘sketch’ to the titles of pictures that pose no problem for the modern eye.  There is no problem, either, in sensing in her work the eager love of nature that Dante Gabriel Rossetti famously described as motivating her scenic quests, undertaken ‘in the sacred name of pigment.’ "  (Crabbe, Dictionary, p. 285 ). Her frequent inclusions of rocky terrain, vegetation and nature aligns her with this group of artists and their style.

In 1857, Bodichon was one of the founding members of the Society of Female Artists, whose primary aim was to help women artists to obtain opportunities for exhibition. (Orr, p. 178 ). Eventually, this Society would exhibit sixty of her pictures between 1858 and 1881. (Crabbe, Artist Divided, p.313 ). Eventually, after a much publicized petition called “Address to Royal Academicians,” signed by 38 women artists and delivered to the Royal Academy in 1860, women were admitted to their schools. Bodichon was one of the signers of that petition. (Yeldham, p. 95 ) However, even before that victory for women artists, Bodichon had two of her Welsh scenes accepted by the Royal Academy for an 1850 exhibition.

Exhibitions
Throughout her life, Bodichon produced about 250 paintings over the course of 30 years. (Orr, p. 175 ) However, even before that victory for women artists, Bodichon had two of her Welsh scenes accepted by the Royal Academy for an 1850 exhibition. Eventually, she would have a total of twelve paintings accepted by the Royal Academy over seven appearances. The Royal Society of British Artists, the Dudley Gallery, Gamberts French Galler y, and shows in Birmingham, Liverpool and Washington DC would also include her works over the years. (Crabbe, Artist Divided, p. 313 .)

Works

Landscape with Rainbow

View of Snowdon with a Stormy Sky

Wildflowers