Dovecot Studios' history of women artists in Scotland
‘Seen in another light, this is an exhibition that tells the story of Scottish art through artworks that just happen to have been created by women.’
September 11, 2023
In terms of gender, Scotland has historically led the way for more equal access to the arts. In 1848, three years after its founding, Glasgow School of Art became Britain’s first co-educational art school, over twenty years before the ‘groundbreaking’ Slade School of Fine Art in London. (A further 50 would pass before the Royal Academy (RA) would permit women to see life models too.)
Drawing from the Fleming Collection, and loans from the National Galleries and National Trust of Scotland, Scottish Women Artists shows 45 practitioners spanning 250 years. It starts with the firsts; Catherine Read, the first Scottish woman to receive a formal artistic education (in Paris) and a prominent society portrait artist in eighteenth-century Britain, patronised by Queen Charlotte. But only works made after her, rather than by her hand directly, are put on display; a refreshing reversal, to see men following women’s lead.
This exhibition might seem like it’s playing catch-up at a time of increased focus on the institutional exclusion of women. It may even be a little predictable, beginning with the well-used words of Artemisia Gentileschi: ‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’. But here, she’s placed in conversation, or argument – with John Ruskin. His claim that there had not yet been a ‘lady who could paint,’ came nearly two hundred years later in 1858 – and almost two hundred years after that, a powerful few from the conventional arts establishment would probably agree.
Ben Reiss’ superb curation (and captions) speaks of the long legacy of ‘segregation’ in teaching, the role of grants and subsidies in tackling socioeconomic inequality in the post-war period, and the contemporary importance of all-women exhibitions, given the continued effects of this historic neglect. Women like Elizabeth Blackadder, the first elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) are increasingly well-represented; she is currently on display in multiple shows across the capital, including the latter. But there are still only a few on whom attention is focused – and even she was a Dame.
Reckonings must begin at home, and Dovecot Studios is no exception. Reiss acknowledges that, though textile art is ‘coded’ as feminine, the practice has long been professionally run by men; its own world-renowned tapestry studio, the former Edinburgh Tapestry Company, didn’t admit a woman weaver until the 1960s. Here a rug, woven after the well-known Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, remarks not only of the individual’s legacy but of the trust she founded during her lifetime to support the next generation of young artists.
Curated by theme rather than chronologically, more attention can be focused on the women lost in-between, overshadowed by the more privileged, and those picked out in the patriarchy as ‘pioneers’. Even Read’s commissions, of mainly women and children, remained mostly in private, not public, collections. Both artists and subjects, thus kept in the domestic space, are vulnerable to fall into posthumous obscurity.
Artistic communities were vital networks for women – particularly those without formal training, or well-connected families - as places of solidarity and mutual support. Margot Sandeman’s later works depict the importance of personal relationships as much as artistic ones, whilst Joan Eardley crops up in as many captions as artworks (like the ‘self-taught’ and ‘still determined’ Pat Douthwaite, she is better represented elsewhere, including the concurrent WONDER WOMEN, upstairs.)
Marriage bars in art schools forced the likes of Dorothy Johnstone and Jessie M. King to step down from teaching; the former’s output declined as she lost access to art school resources, while the latter was able to seek communities in Europe and south-west Scotland.
Beyond the well-known Glasgow Boys, we get the Glasgow Girls and some subtle curatorial swaps. Indeed, King’s illustrations for lesser-known women writers like Isobel K. C. Steele are placed before any copies of John Keats’ Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818). Frances Macdonald MacNair, born in Staffordshire, revolutionised Glasgow’s Spook School with The Yellow Book, a radical periodical which published women artists, writers, and their illustrations as works of art.
Scottish Women Artists centres on the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and their artists’ travels to colonies from Kirkcudbright to St Ives. We see landscapes of - but little of the arts produced in - rural or small-town Scotland (the subject of, for instance, David Keenan’s literature). Perhaps it perpetuates a voyeuristic view of the landscape from an urban perspective; concluding with Frances Walker’s ambiguous environment, a beautiful, but climate-affected, locale.
The Fleming Collection often boasts its connection to the well-known Bond author, Ian Fleming. But where is the reference to Evelyn Fleming, the pioneering collector of post-Impressionist art, who helped found Scotland’s national collections today?
Barbados-born Alberta Whittle is now boasted at Modern One; ironically, it is there where the Dovecot collaboration tapestry Entanglement currently hangs. Woven into the work (and watercolour) are Scotland’s global and colonial connections. Whittle, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, is curated here alongside an abstract, indigo work by Sekai Machache, who will represent her birthplace, Zimbabwe, at the exhibition in 2024.
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But long before we get to ‘Scottish Identities’, we see hints of how ‘national’ art is often shaped by outsiders. For many, Sussex-born Eardley visually defines the landscapes of rural Aberdeenshire. Phoebe Anna Traquair, still often regarded as Scotland’s first professional woman artist, migrated from Ireland in the late 1800s. She also tackled the false binary between arts and crafts, and the marginalisation of the latter. Others later subvert the conventions of still lifes, nature, and flower paintings, challenging the double marginalisation of ‘appropriate’ domestic lives, and interior scenes, devalued by the arts establishment.
The biggest names are best represented across media and subjects; we get Barns-Graham in abstraction works, textiles, and representational paintings – some of her best. There’s also a deference to the popular; from Rachel Maclean’s Scottish Independence in Wonderland to Maud Sulter’s Zabat series, the exact same works which were selected for Somerset House’s BLACK VENUS.
Later rooms leave London and Paris, to show how artists engaged with other European movements. Some, including from Glasgow’s non-academic New Art School, never needed to travel. Barns-Graham (again) transports us to Spain, with works influenced by American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell – no relation to the Glaswegian town.
Painter and musician Beatrice Huntington draws from Scottish Colourism, and continental avant-garde practices, in her angular portraits. Gwen Hardie and Margaret Hunter, both students of Georg Baselitz in West Berlin, diverge in their expressionistic depictions of biological evolution.
Differences of opinion crop up throughout; in her opening banner for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition in 1987, Sam Ainsley, like Hilma af Klint, used bold red and blue to represent opposing genders, showing an abstract warrior woman liberating herself from the patriarchy. Rooms earlier, we read Dame Ethel Walker’s assertion in 1938: ‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’ It only underscores the plurality of experiences of womanhood – visually represented here in the diverse works on display.
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It’s thrilling to find common motifs, as they crop up over time and space. The playful harlequin appears in many works, whether Whittle’s tapestry or Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s playful depiction of her daughter. The artistic family name is more often associated with her children, the painter Nancy Nicholson, and ‘abstract pioneer’ Ben Nicholson, a contemporary of Barbara Hepworth. But here, we get the sense of the mother’s ability, and hints of intergenerational learning – all with a great sense of humour.
.jpg)
The same goes for curating variations on a theme; Orientalism manifests in minimalist and maximal forms. Blackadder’s ‘Still Life with Japanese Kite’ (1980) highlights how Japanese aesthetics flooded into Scotland through popular reproduction prints and exhibitions. Alison Watt too drew from Japanese kimonos for her Butterfly, a tapestry commission from the Scottish Opera which now hangs in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.
But Ben Reiss’ triumph was in wrangling Bessie MacNicol’s rendering of fellow artist E.A. Hornel from the National Trust for Scotland’s Broughton House & Garden. Her painting, which inverts the gaze from Glasgow Boy to Girl, also hints at the importance of his travels to Japan, in the patterned textile backdrop, and ambiguous thumb-or-geisha-woman in the corner of his palette.
This painting adds yet another layer to the superb From Camera to Canvas, a 2020 exhibition of Hornel’s work at the nearby City Art Centre. As such, it simply reinforces Scottish Women Artists – to tell unspoken histories of art, already and always there.
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception is on view at Dovecot Studios until 6 January 2024.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
All exhibitions were part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
In terms of gender, Scotland has historically led the way for more equal access to the arts. In 1848, three years after its founding, Glasgow School of Art became Britain’s first co-educational art school, over twenty years before the ‘groundbreaking’ Slade School of Fine Art in London. (A further 50 would pass before the Royal Academy (RA) would permit women to see life models too.)
Drawing from the Fleming Collection, and loans from the National Galleries and National Trust of Scotland, Scottish Women Artists shows 45 practitioners spanning 250 years. It starts with the firsts; Catherine Read, the first Scottish woman to receive a formal artistic education (in Paris) and a prominent society portrait artist in eighteenth-century Britain, patronised by Queen Charlotte. But only works made after her, rather than by her hand directly, are put on display; a refreshing reversal, to see men following women’s lead.
This exhibition might seem like it’s playing catch-up at a time of increased focus on the institutional exclusion of women. It may even be a little predictable, beginning with the well-used words of Artemisia Gentileschi: ‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’. But here, she’s placed in conversation, or argument – with John Ruskin. His claim that there had not yet been a ‘lady who could paint,’ came nearly two hundred years later in 1858 – and almost two hundred years after that, a powerful few from the conventional arts establishment would probably agree.
Ben Reiss’ superb curation (and captions) speaks of the long legacy of ‘segregation’ in teaching, the role of grants and subsidies in tackling socioeconomic inequality in the post-war period, and the contemporary importance of all-women exhibitions, given the continued effects of this historic neglect. Women like Elizabeth Blackadder, the first elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) are increasingly well-represented; she is currently on display in multiple shows across the capital, including the latter. But there are still only a few on whom attention is focused – and even she was a Dame.
Reckonings must begin at home, and Dovecot Studios is no exception. Reiss acknowledges that, though textile art is ‘coded’ as feminine, the practice has long been professionally run by men; its own world-renowned tapestry studio, the former Edinburgh Tapestry Company, didn’t admit a woman weaver until the 1960s. Here a rug, woven after the well-known Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, remarks not only of the individual’s legacy but of the trust she founded during her lifetime to support the next generation of young artists.
Curated by theme rather than chronologically, more attention can be focused on the women lost in-between, overshadowed by the more privileged, and those picked out in the patriarchy as ‘pioneers’. Even Read’s commissions, of mainly women and children, remained mostly in private, not public, collections. Both artists and subjects, thus kept in the domestic space, are vulnerable to fall into posthumous obscurity.
Artistic communities were vital networks for women – particularly those without formal training, or well-connected families - as places of solidarity and mutual support. Margot Sandeman’s later works depict the importance of personal relationships as much as artistic ones, whilst Joan Eardley crops up in as many captions as artworks (like the ‘self-taught’ and ‘still determined’ Pat Douthwaite, she is better represented elsewhere, including the concurrent WONDER WOMEN, upstairs.)
Marriage bars in art schools forced the likes of Dorothy Johnstone and Jessie M. King to step down from teaching; the former’s output declined as she lost access to art school resources, while the latter was able to seek communities in Europe and south-west Scotland.
Beyond the well-known Glasgow Boys, we get the Glasgow Girls and some subtle curatorial swaps. Indeed, King’s illustrations for lesser-known women writers like Isobel K. C. Steele are placed before any copies of John Keats’ Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818). Frances Macdonald MacNair, born in Staffordshire, revolutionised Glasgow’s Spook School with The Yellow Book, a radical periodical which published women artists, writers, and their illustrations as works of art.
Scottish Women Artists centres on the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and their artists’ travels to colonies from Kirkcudbright to St Ives. We see landscapes of - but little of the arts produced in - rural or small-town Scotland (the subject of, for instance, David Keenan’s literature). Perhaps it perpetuates a voyeuristic view of the landscape from an urban perspective; concluding with Frances Walker’s ambiguous environment, a beautiful, but climate-affected, locale.
The Fleming Collection often boasts its connection to the well-known Bond author, Ian Fleming. But where is the reference to Evelyn Fleming, the pioneering collector of post-Impressionist art, who helped found Scotland’s national collections today?
Barbados-born Alberta Whittle is now boasted at Modern One; ironically, it is there where the Dovecot collaboration tapestry Entanglement currently hangs. Woven into the work (and watercolour) are Scotland’s global and colonial connections. Whittle, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, is curated here alongside an abstract, indigo work by Sekai Machache, who will represent her birthplace, Zimbabwe, at the exhibition in 2024.
But long before we get to ‘Scottish Identities’, we see hints of how ‘national’ art is often shaped by outsiders. For many, Sussex-born Eardley visually defines the landscapes of rural Aberdeenshire. Phoebe Anna Traquair, still often regarded as Scotland’s first professional woman artist, migrated from Ireland in the late 1800s. She also tackled the false binary between arts and crafts, and the marginalisation of the latter. Others later subvert the conventions of still lifes, nature, and flower paintings, challenging the double marginalisation of ‘appropriate’ domestic lives, and interior scenes, devalued by the arts establishment.
The biggest names are best represented across media and subjects; we get Barns-Graham in abstraction works, textiles, and representational paintings – some of her best. There’s also a deference to the popular; from Rachel Maclean’s Scottish Independence in Wonderland to Maud Sulter’s Zabat series, the exact same works which were selected for Somerset House’s BLACK VENUS.
Later rooms leave London and Paris, to show how artists engaged with other European movements. Some, including from Glasgow’s non-academic New Art School, never needed to travel. Barns-Graham (again) transports us to Spain, with works influenced by American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell – no relation to the Glaswegian town.
Painter and musician Beatrice Huntington draws from Scottish Colourism, and continental avant-garde practices, in her angular portraits. Gwen Hardie and Margaret Hunter, both students of Georg Baselitz in West Berlin, diverge in their expressionistic depictions of biological evolution.
Differences of opinion crop up throughout; in her opening banner for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition in 1987, Sam Ainsley, like Hilma af Klint, used bold red and blue to represent opposing genders, showing an abstract warrior woman liberating herself from the patriarchy. Rooms earlier, we read Dame Ethel Walker’s assertion in 1938: ‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’ It only underscores the plurality of experiences of womanhood – visually represented here in the diverse works on display.
It’s thrilling to find common motifs, as they crop up over time and space. The playful harlequin appears in many works, whether Whittle’s tapestry or Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s playful depiction of her daughter. The artistic family name is more often associated with her children, the painter Nancy Nicholson, and ‘abstract pioneer’ Ben Nicholson, a contemporary of Barbara Hepworth. But here, we get the sense of the mother’s ability, and hints of intergenerational learning – all with a great sense of humour.
The same goes for curating variations on a theme; Orientalism manifests in minimalist and maximal forms. Blackadder’s ‘Still Life with Japanese Kite’ (1980) highlights how Japanese aesthetics flooded into Scotland through popular reproduction prints and exhibitions. Alison Watt too drew from Japanese kimonos for her Butterfly, a tapestry commission from the Scottish Opera which now hangs in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.
But Ben Reiss’ triumph was in wrangling Bessie MacNicol’s rendering of fellow artist E.A. Hornel from the National Trust for Scotland’s Broughton House & Garden. Her painting, which inverts the gaze from Glasgow Boy to Girl, also hints at the importance of his travels to Japan, in the patterned textile backdrop, and ambiguous thumb-or-geisha-woman in the corner of his palette.
This painting adds yet another layer to the superb From Camera to Canvas, a 2020 exhibition of Hornel’s work at the nearby City Art Centre. As such, it simply reinforces Scottish Women Artists – to tell unspoken histories of art, already and always there.
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception is on view at Dovecot Studios until 6 January 2024.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
All exhibitions were part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
In terms of gender, Scotland has historically led the way for more equal access to the arts. In 1848, three years after its founding, Glasgow School of Art became Britain’s first co-educational art school, over twenty years before the ‘groundbreaking’ Slade School of Fine Art in London. (A further 50 would pass before the Royal Academy (RA) would permit women to see life models too.)
Drawing from the Fleming Collection, and loans from the National Galleries and National Trust of Scotland, Scottish Women Artists shows 45 practitioners spanning 250 years. It starts with the firsts; Catherine Read, the first Scottish woman to receive a formal artistic education (in Paris) and a prominent society portrait artist in eighteenth-century Britain, patronised by Queen Charlotte. But only works made after her, rather than by her hand directly, are put on display; a refreshing reversal, to see men following women’s lead.
This exhibition might seem like it’s playing catch-up at a time of increased focus on the institutional exclusion of women. It may even be a little predictable, beginning with the well-used words of Artemisia Gentileschi: ‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’. But here, she’s placed in conversation, or argument – with John Ruskin. His claim that there had not yet been a ‘lady who could paint,’ came nearly two hundred years later in 1858 – and almost two hundred years after that, a powerful few from the conventional arts establishment would probably agree.
Ben Reiss’ superb curation (and captions) speaks of the long legacy of ‘segregation’ in teaching, the role of grants and subsidies in tackling socioeconomic inequality in the post-war period, and the contemporary importance of all-women exhibitions, given the continued effects of this historic neglect. Women like Elizabeth Blackadder, the first elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) are increasingly well-represented; she is currently on display in multiple shows across the capital, including the latter. But there are still only a few on whom attention is focused – and even she was a Dame.
Reckonings must begin at home, and Dovecot Studios is no exception. Reiss acknowledges that, though textile art is ‘coded’ as feminine, the practice has long been professionally run by men; its own world-renowned tapestry studio, the former Edinburgh Tapestry Company, didn’t admit a woman weaver until the 1960s. Here a rug, woven after the well-known Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, remarks not only of the individual’s legacy but of the trust she founded during her lifetime to support the next generation of young artists.
Curated by theme rather than chronologically, more attention can be focused on the women lost in-between, overshadowed by the more privileged, and those picked out in the patriarchy as ‘pioneers’. Even Read’s commissions, of mainly women and children, remained mostly in private, not public, collections. Both artists and subjects, thus kept in the domestic space, are vulnerable to fall into posthumous obscurity.
Artistic communities were vital networks for women – particularly those without formal training, or well-connected families - as places of solidarity and mutual support. Margot Sandeman’s later works depict the importance of personal relationships as much as artistic ones, whilst Joan Eardley crops up in as many captions as artworks (like the ‘self-taught’ and ‘still determined’ Pat Douthwaite, she is better represented elsewhere, including the concurrent WONDER WOMEN, upstairs.)
Marriage bars in art schools forced the likes of Dorothy Johnstone and Jessie M. King to step down from teaching; the former’s output declined as she lost access to art school resources, while the latter was able to seek communities in Europe and south-west Scotland.
Beyond the well-known Glasgow Boys, we get the Glasgow Girls and some subtle curatorial swaps. Indeed, King’s illustrations for lesser-known women writers like Isobel K. C. Steele are placed before any copies of John Keats’ Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818). Frances Macdonald MacNair, born in Staffordshire, revolutionised Glasgow’s Spook School with The Yellow Book, a radical periodical which published women artists, writers, and their illustrations as works of art.
Scottish Women Artists centres on the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and their artists’ travels to colonies from Kirkcudbright to St Ives. We see landscapes of - but little of the arts produced in - rural or small-town Scotland (the subject of, for instance, David Keenan’s literature). Perhaps it perpetuates a voyeuristic view of the landscape from an urban perspective; concluding with Frances Walker’s ambiguous environment, a beautiful, but climate-affected, locale.
The Fleming Collection often boasts its connection to the well-known Bond author, Ian Fleming. But where is the reference to Evelyn Fleming, the pioneering collector of post-Impressionist art, who helped found Scotland’s national collections today?
Barbados-born Alberta Whittle is now boasted at Modern One; ironically, it is there where the Dovecot collaboration tapestry Entanglement currently hangs. Woven into the work (and watercolour) are Scotland’s global and colonial connections. Whittle, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, is curated here alongside an abstract, indigo work by Sekai Machache, who will represent her birthplace, Zimbabwe, at the exhibition in 2024.
But long before we get to ‘Scottish Identities’, we see hints of how ‘national’ art is often shaped by outsiders. For many, Sussex-born Eardley visually defines the landscapes of rural Aberdeenshire. Phoebe Anna Traquair, still often regarded as Scotland’s first professional woman artist, migrated from Ireland in the late 1800s. She also tackled the false binary between arts and crafts, and the marginalisation of the latter. Others later subvert the conventions of still lifes, nature, and flower paintings, challenging the double marginalisation of ‘appropriate’ domestic lives, and interior scenes, devalued by the arts establishment.
The biggest names are best represented across media and subjects; we get Barns-Graham in abstraction works, textiles, and representational paintings – some of her best. There’s also a deference to the popular; from Rachel Maclean’s Scottish Independence in Wonderland to Maud Sulter’s Zabat series, the exact same works which were selected for Somerset House’s BLACK VENUS.
Later rooms leave London and Paris, to show how artists engaged with other European movements. Some, including from Glasgow’s non-academic New Art School, never needed to travel. Barns-Graham (again) transports us to Spain, with works influenced by American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell – no relation to the Glaswegian town.
Painter and musician Beatrice Huntington draws from Scottish Colourism, and continental avant-garde practices, in her angular portraits. Gwen Hardie and Margaret Hunter, both students of Georg Baselitz in West Berlin, diverge in their expressionistic depictions of biological evolution.
Differences of opinion crop up throughout; in her opening banner for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition in 1987, Sam Ainsley, like Hilma af Klint, used bold red and blue to represent opposing genders, showing an abstract warrior woman liberating herself from the patriarchy. Rooms earlier, we read Dame Ethel Walker’s assertion in 1938: ‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’ It only underscores the plurality of experiences of womanhood – visually represented here in the diverse works on display.
It’s thrilling to find common motifs, as they crop up over time and space. The playful harlequin appears in many works, whether Whittle’s tapestry or Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s playful depiction of her daughter. The artistic family name is more often associated with her children, the painter Nancy Nicholson, and ‘abstract pioneer’ Ben Nicholson, a contemporary of Barbara Hepworth. But here, we get the sense of the mother’s ability, and hints of intergenerational learning – all with a great sense of humour.
The same goes for curating variations on a theme; Orientalism manifests in minimalist and maximal forms. Blackadder’s ‘Still Life with Japanese Kite’ (1980) highlights how Japanese aesthetics flooded into Scotland through popular reproduction prints and exhibitions. Alison Watt too drew from Japanese kimonos for her Butterfly, a tapestry commission from the Scottish Opera which now hangs in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.
But Ben Reiss’ triumph was in wrangling Bessie MacNicol’s rendering of fellow artist E.A. Hornel from the National Trust for Scotland’s Broughton House & Garden. Her painting, which inverts the gaze from Glasgow Boy to Girl, also hints at the importance of his travels to Japan, in the patterned textile backdrop, and ambiguous thumb-or-geisha-woman in the corner of his palette.
This painting adds yet another layer to the superb From Camera to Canvas, a 2020 exhibition of Hornel’s work at the nearby City Art Centre. As such, it simply reinforces Scottish Women Artists – to tell unspoken histories of art, already and always there.
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception is on view at Dovecot Studios until 6 January 2024.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
All exhibitions were part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
In terms of gender, Scotland has historically led the way for more equal access to the arts. In 1848, three years after its founding, Glasgow School of Art became Britain’s first co-educational art school, over twenty years before the ‘groundbreaking’ Slade School of Fine Art in London. (A further 50 would pass before the Royal Academy (RA) would permit women to see life models too.)
Drawing from the Fleming Collection, and loans from the National Galleries and National Trust of Scotland, Scottish Women Artists shows 45 practitioners spanning 250 years. It starts with the firsts; Catherine Read, the first Scottish woman to receive a formal artistic education (in Paris) and a prominent society portrait artist in eighteenth-century Britain, patronised by Queen Charlotte. But only works made after her, rather than by her hand directly, are put on display; a refreshing reversal, to see men following women’s lead.
This exhibition might seem like it’s playing catch-up at a time of increased focus on the institutional exclusion of women. It may even be a little predictable, beginning with the well-used words of Artemisia Gentileschi: ‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’. But here, she’s placed in conversation, or argument – with John Ruskin. His claim that there had not yet been a ‘lady who could paint,’ came nearly two hundred years later in 1858 – and almost two hundred years after that, a powerful few from the conventional arts establishment would probably agree.
Ben Reiss’ superb curation (and captions) speaks of the long legacy of ‘segregation’ in teaching, the role of grants and subsidies in tackling socioeconomic inequality in the post-war period, and the contemporary importance of all-women exhibitions, given the continued effects of this historic neglect. Women like Elizabeth Blackadder, the first elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) are increasingly well-represented; she is currently on display in multiple shows across the capital, including the latter. But there are still only a few on whom attention is focused – and even she was a Dame.
Reckonings must begin at home, and Dovecot Studios is no exception. Reiss acknowledges that, though textile art is ‘coded’ as feminine, the practice has long been professionally run by men; its own world-renowned tapestry studio, the former Edinburgh Tapestry Company, didn’t admit a woman weaver until the 1960s. Here a rug, woven after the well-known Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, remarks not only of the individual’s legacy but of the trust she founded during her lifetime to support the next generation of young artists.
Curated by theme rather than chronologically, more attention can be focused on the women lost in-between, overshadowed by the more privileged, and those picked out in the patriarchy as ‘pioneers’. Even Read’s commissions, of mainly women and children, remained mostly in private, not public, collections. Both artists and subjects, thus kept in the domestic space, are vulnerable to fall into posthumous obscurity.
Artistic communities were vital networks for women – particularly those without formal training, or well-connected families - as places of solidarity and mutual support. Margot Sandeman’s later works depict the importance of personal relationships as much as artistic ones, whilst Joan Eardley crops up in as many captions as artworks (like the ‘self-taught’ and ‘still determined’ Pat Douthwaite, she is better represented elsewhere, including the concurrent WONDER WOMEN, upstairs.)
Marriage bars in art schools forced the likes of Dorothy Johnstone and Jessie M. King to step down from teaching; the former’s output declined as she lost access to art school resources, while the latter was able to seek communities in Europe and south-west Scotland.
Beyond the well-known Glasgow Boys, we get the Glasgow Girls and some subtle curatorial swaps. Indeed, King’s illustrations for lesser-known women writers like Isobel K. C. Steele are placed before any copies of John Keats’ Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818). Frances Macdonald MacNair, born in Staffordshire, revolutionised Glasgow’s Spook School with The Yellow Book, a radical periodical which published women artists, writers, and their illustrations as works of art.
Scottish Women Artists centres on the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and their artists’ travels to colonies from Kirkcudbright to St Ives. We see landscapes of - but little of the arts produced in - rural or small-town Scotland (the subject of, for instance, David Keenan’s literature). Perhaps it perpetuates a voyeuristic view of the landscape from an urban perspective; concluding with Frances Walker’s ambiguous environment, a beautiful, but climate-affected, locale.
The Fleming Collection often boasts its connection to the well-known Bond author, Ian Fleming. But where is the reference to Evelyn Fleming, the pioneering collector of post-Impressionist art, who helped found Scotland’s national collections today?
Barbados-born Alberta Whittle is now boasted at Modern One; ironically, it is there where the Dovecot collaboration tapestry Entanglement currently hangs. Woven into the work (and watercolour) are Scotland’s global and colonial connections. Whittle, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, is curated here alongside an abstract, indigo work by Sekai Machache, who will represent her birthplace, Zimbabwe, at the exhibition in 2024.
But long before we get to ‘Scottish Identities’, we see hints of how ‘national’ art is often shaped by outsiders. For many, Sussex-born Eardley visually defines the landscapes of rural Aberdeenshire. Phoebe Anna Traquair, still often regarded as Scotland’s first professional woman artist, migrated from Ireland in the late 1800s. She also tackled the false binary between arts and crafts, and the marginalisation of the latter. Others later subvert the conventions of still lifes, nature, and flower paintings, challenging the double marginalisation of ‘appropriate’ domestic lives, and interior scenes, devalued by the arts establishment.
The biggest names are best represented across media and subjects; we get Barns-Graham in abstraction works, textiles, and representational paintings – some of her best. There’s also a deference to the popular; from Rachel Maclean’s Scottish Independence in Wonderland to Maud Sulter’s Zabat series, the exact same works which were selected for Somerset House’s BLACK VENUS.
Later rooms leave London and Paris, to show how artists engaged with other European movements. Some, including from Glasgow’s non-academic New Art School, never needed to travel. Barns-Graham (again) transports us to Spain, with works influenced by American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell – no relation to the Glaswegian town.
Painter and musician Beatrice Huntington draws from Scottish Colourism, and continental avant-garde practices, in her angular portraits. Gwen Hardie and Margaret Hunter, both students of Georg Baselitz in West Berlin, diverge in their expressionistic depictions of biological evolution.
Differences of opinion crop up throughout; in her opening banner for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition in 1987, Sam Ainsley, like Hilma af Klint, used bold red and blue to represent opposing genders, showing an abstract warrior woman liberating herself from the patriarchy. Rooms earlier, we read Dame Ethel Walker’s assertion in 1938: ‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’ It only underscores the plurality of experiences of womanhood – visually represented here in the diverse works on display.
It’s thrilling to find common motifs, as they crop up over time and space. The playful harlequin appears in many works, whether Whittle’s tapestry or Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s playful depiction of her daughter. The artistic family name is more often associated with her children, the painter Nancy Nicholson, and ‘abstract pioneer’ Ben Nicholson, a contemporary of Barbara Hepworth. But here, we get the sense of the mother’s ability, and hints of intergenerational learning – all with a great sense of humour.
The same goes for curating variations on a theme; Orientalism manifests in minimalist and maximal forms. Blackadder’s ‘Still Life with Japanese Kite’ (1980) highlights how Japanese aesthetics flooded into Scotland through popular reproduction prints and exhibitions. Alison Watt too drew from Japanese kimonos for her Butterfly, a tapestry commission from the Scottish Opera which now hangs in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.
But Ben Reiss’ triumph was in wrangling Bessie MacNicol’s rendering of fellow artist E.A. Hornel from the National Trust for Scotland’s Broughton House & Garden. Her painting, which inverts the gaze from Glasgow Boy to Girl, also hints at the importance of his travels to Japan, in the patterned textile backdrop, and ambiguous thumb-or-geisha-woman in the corner of his palette.
This painting adds yet another layer to the superb From Camera to Canvas, a 2020 exhibition of Hornel’s work at the nearby City Art Centre. As such, it simply reinforces Scottish Women Artists – to tell unspoken histories of art, already and always there.
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception is on view at Dovecot Studios until 6 January 2024.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
All exhibitions were part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
In terms of gender, Scotland has historically led the way for more equal access to the arts. In 1848, three years after its founding, Glasgow School of Art became Britain’s first co-educational art school, over twenty years before the ‘groundbreaking’ Slade School of Fine Art in London. (A further 50 would pass before the Royal Academy (RA) would permit women to see life models too.)
Drawing from the Fleming Collection, and loans from the National Galleries and National Trust of Scotland, Scottish Women Artists shows 45 practitioners spanning 250 years. It starts with the firsts; Catherine Read, the first Scottish woman to receive a formal artistic education (in Paris) and a prominent society portrait artist in eighteenth-century Britain, patronised by Queen Charlotte. But only works made after her, rather than by her hand directly, are put on display; a refreshing reversal, to see men following women’s lead.
This exhibition might seem like it’s playing catch-up at a time of increased focus on the institutional exclusion of women. It may even be a little predictable, beginning with the well-used words of Artemisia Gentileschi: ‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’. But here, she’s placed in conversation, or argument – with John Ruskin. His claim that there had not yet been a ‘lady who could paint,’ came nearly two hundred years later in 1858 – and almost two hundred years after that, a powerful few from the conventional arts establishment would probably agree.
Ben Reiss’ superb curation (and captions) speaks of the long legacy of ‘segregation’ in teaching, the role of grants and subsidies in tackling socioeconomic inequality in the post-war period, and the contemporary importance of all-women exhibitions, given the continued effects of this historic neglect. Women like Elizabeth Blackadder, the first elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) are increasingly well-represented; she is currently on display in multiple shows across the capital, including the latter. But there are still only a few on whom attention is focused – and even she was a Dame.
Reckonings must begin at home, and Dovecot Studios is no exception. Reiss acknowledges that, though textile art is ‘coded’ as feminine, the practice has long been professionally run by men; its own world-renowned tapestry studio, the former Edinburgh Tapestry Company, didn’t admit a woman weaver until the 1960s. Here a rug, woven after the well-known Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, remarks not only of the individual’s legacy but of the trust she founded during her lifetime to support the next generation of young artists.
Curated by theme rather than chronologically, more attention can be focused on the women lost in-between, overshadowed by the more privileged, and those picked out in the patriarchy as ‘pioneers’. Even Read’s commissions, of mainly women and children, remained mostly in private, not public, collections. Both artists and subjects, thus kept in the domestic space, are vulnerable to fall into posthumous obscurity.
Artistic communities were vital networks for women – particularly those without formal training, or well-connected families - as places of solidarity and mutual support. Margot Sandeman’s later works depict the importance of personal relationships as much as artistic ones, whilst Joan Eardley crops up in as many captions as artworks (like the ‘self-taught’ and ‘still determined’ Pat Douthwaite, she is better represented elsewhere, including the concurrent WONDER WOMEN, upstairs.)
Marriage bars in art schools forced the likes of Dorothy Johnstone and Jessie M. King to step down from teaching; the former’s output declined as she lost access to art school resources, while the latter was able to seek communities in Europe and south-west Scotland.
Beyond the well-known Glasgow Boys, we get the Glasgow Girls and some subtle curatorial swaps. Indeed, King’s illustrations for lesser-known women writers like Isobel K. C. Steele are placed before any copies of John Keats’ Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818). Frances Macdonald MacNair, born in Staffordshire, revolutionised Glasgow’s Spook School with The Yellow Book, a radical periodical which published women artists, writers, and their illustrations as works of art.
Scottish Women Artists centres on the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and their artists’ travels to colonies from Kirkcudbright to St Ives. We see landscapes of - but little of the arts produced in - rural or small-town Scotland (the subject of, for instance, David Keenan’s literature). Perhaps it perpetuates a voyeuristic view of the landscape from an urban perspective; concluding with Frances Walker’s ambiguous environment, a beautiful, but climate-affected, locale.
The Fleming Collection often boasts its connection to the well-known Bond author, Ian Fleming. But where is the reference to Evelyn Fleming, the pioneering collector of post-Impressionist art, who helped found Scotland’s national collections today?
Barbados-born Alberta Whittle is now boasted at Modern One; ironically, it is there where the Dovecot collaboration tapestry Entanglement currently hangs. Woven into the work (and watercolour) are Scotland’s global and colonial connections. Whittle, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, is curated here alongside an abstract, indigo work by Sekai Machache, who will represent her birthplace, Zimbabwe, at the exhibition in 2024.
But long before we get to ‘Scottish Identities’, we see hints of how ‘national’ art is often shaped by outsiders. For many, Sussex-born Eardley visually defines the landscapes of rural Aberdeenshire. Phoebe Anna Traquair, still often regarded as Scotland’s first professional woman artist, migrated from Ireland in the late 1800s. She also tackled the false binary between arts and crafts, and the marginalisation of the latter. Others later subvert the conventions of still lifes, nature, and flower paintings, challenging the double marginalisation of ‘appropriate’ domestic lives, and interior scenes, devalued by the arts establishment.
The biggest names are best represented across media and subjects; we get Barns-Graham in abstraction works, textiles, and representational paintings – some of her best. There’s also a deference to the popular; from Rachel Maclean’s Scottish Independence in Wonderland to Maud Sulter’s Zabat series, the exact same works which were selected for Somerset House’s BLACK VENUS.
Later rooms leave London and Paris, to show how artists engaged with other European movements. Some, including from Glasgow’s non-academic New Art School, never needed to travel. Barns-Graham (again) transports us to Spain, with works influenced by American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell – no relation to the Glaswegian town.
Painter and musician Beatrice Huntington draws from Scottish Colourism, and continental avant-garde practices, in her angular portraits. Gwen Hardie and Margaret Hunter, both students of Georg Baselitz in West Berlin, diverge in their expressionistic depictions of biological evolution.
Differences of opinion crop up throughout; in her opening banner for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition in 1987, Sam Ainsley, like Hilma af Klint, used bold red and blue to represent opposing genders, showing an abstract warrior woman liberating herself from the patriarchy. Rooms earlier, we read Dame Ethel Walker’s assertion in 1938: ‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’ It only underscores the plurality of experiences of womanhood – visually represented here in the diverse works on display.
It’s thrilling to find common motifs, as they crop up over time and space. The playful harlequin appears in many works, whether Whittle’s tapestry or Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s playful depiction of her daughter. The artistic family name is more often associated with her children, the painter Nancy Nicholson, and ‘abstract pioneer’ Ben Nicholson, a contemporary of Barbara Hepworth. But here, we get the sense of the mother’s ability, and hints of intergenerational learning – all with a great sense of humour.
The same goes for curating variations on a theme; Orientalism manifests in minimalist and maximal forms. Blackadder’s ‘Still Life with Japanese Kite’ (1980) highlights how Japanese aesthetics flooded into Scotland through popular reproduction prints and exhibitions. Alison Watt too drew from Japanese kimonos for her Butterfly, a tapestry commission from the Scottish Opera which now hangs in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.
But Ben Reiss’ triumph was in wrangling Bessie MacNicol’s rendering of fellow artist E.A. Hornel from the National Trust for Scotland’s Broughton House & Garden. Her painting, which inverts the gaze from Glasgow Boy to Girl, also hints at the importance of his travels to Japan, in the patterned textile backdrop, and ambiguous thumb-or-geisha-woman in the corner of his palette.
This painting adds yet another layer to the superb From Camera to Canvas, a 2020 exhibition of Hornel’s work at the nearby City Art Centre. As such, it simply reinforces Scottish Women Artists – to tell unspoken histories of art, already and always there.
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception is on view at Dovecot Studios until 6 January 2024.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
All exhibitions were part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
In terms of gender, Scotland has historically led the way for more equal access to the arts. In 1848, three years after its founding, Glasgow School of Art became Britain’s first co-educational art school, over twenty years before the ‘groundbreaking’ Slade School of Fine Art in London. (A further 50 would pass before the Royal Academy (RA) would permit women to see life models too.)
Drawing from the Fleming Collection, and loans from the National Galleries and National Trust of Scotland, Scottish Women Artists shows 45 practitioners spanning 250 years. It starts with the firsts; Catherine Read, the first Scottish woman to receive a formal artistic education (in Paris) and a prominent society portrait artist in eighteenth-century Britain, patronised by Queen Charlotte. But only works made after her, rather than by her hand directly, are put on display; a refreshing reversal, to see men following women’s lead.
This exhibition might seem like it’s playing catch-up at a time of increased focus on the institutional exclusion of women. It may even be a little predictable, beginning with the well-used words of Artemisia Gentileschi: ‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’. But here, she’s placed in conversation, or argument – with John Ruskin. His claim that there had not yet been a ‘lady who could paint,’ came nearly two hundred years later in 1858 – and almost two hundred years after that, a powerful few from the conventional arts establishment would probably agree.
Ben Reiss’ superb curation (and captions) speaks of the long legacy of ‘segregation’ in teaching, the role of grants and subsidies in tackling socioeconomic inequality in the post-war period, and the contemporary importance of all-women exhibitions, given the continued effects of this historic neglect. Women like Elizabeth Blackadder, the first elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) are increasingly well-represented; she is currently on display in multiple shows across the capital, including the latter. But there are still only a few on whom attention is focused – and even she was a Dame.
Reckonings must begin at home, and Dovecot Studios is no exception. Reiss acknowledges that, though textile art is ‘coded’ as feminine, the practice has long been professionally run by men; its own world-renowned tapestry studio, the former Edinburgh Tapestry Company, didn’t admit a woman weaver until the 1960s. Here a rug, woven after the well-known Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, remarks not only of the individual’s legacy but of the trust she founded during her lifetime to support the next generation of young artists.
Curated by theme rather than chronologically, more attention can be focused on the women lost in-between, overshadowed by the more privileged, and those picked out in the patriarchy as ‘pioneers’. Even Read’s commissions, of mainly women and children, remained mostly in private, not public, collections. Both artists and subjects, thus kept in the domestic space, are vulnerable to fall into posthumous obscurity.
Artistic communities were vital networks for women – particularly those without formal training, or well-connected families - as places of solidarity and mutual support. Margot Sandeman’s later works depict the importance of personal relationships as much as artistic ones, whilst Joan Eardley crops up in as many captions as artworks (like the ‘self-taught’ and ‘still determined’ Pat Douthwaite, she is better represented elsewhere, including the concurrent WONDER WOMEN, upstairs.)
Marriage bars in art schools forced the likes of Dorothy Johnstone and Jessie M. King to step down from teaching; the former’s output declined as she lost access to art school resources, while the latter was able to seek communities in Europe and south-west Scotland.
Beyond the well-known Glasgow Boys, we get the Glasgow Girls and some subtle curatorial swaps. Indeed, King’s illustrations for lesser-known women writers like Isobel K. C. Steele are placed before any copies of John Keats’ Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818). Frances Macdonald MacNair, born in Staffordshire, revolutionised Glasgow’s Spook School with The Yellow Book, a radical periodical which published women artists, writers, and their illustrations as works of art.
Scottish Women Artists centres on the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and their artists’ travels to colonies from Kirkcudbright to St Ives. We see landscapes of - but little of the arts produced in - rural or small-town Scotland (the subject of, for instance, David Keenan’s literature). Perhaps it perpetuates a voyeuristic view of the landscape from an urban perspective; concluding with Frances Walker’s ambiguous environment, a beautiful, but climate-affected, locale.
The Fleming Collection often boasts its connection to the well-known Bond author, Ian Fleming. But where is the reference to Evelyn Fleming, the pioneering collector of post-Impressionist art, who helped found Scotland’s national collections today?
Barbados-born Alberta Whittle is now boasted at Modern One; ironically, it is there where the Dovecot collaboration tapestry Entanglement currently hangs. Woven into the work (and watercolour) are Scotland’s global and colonial connections. Whittle, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, is curated here alongside an abstract, indigo work by Sekai Machache, who will represent her birthplace, Zimbabwe, at the exhibition in 2024.
But long before we get to ‘Scottish Identities’, we see hints of how ‘national’ art is often shaped by outsiders. For many, Sussex-born Eardley visually defines the landscapes of rural Aberdeenshire. Phoebe Anna Traquair, still often regarded as Scotland’s first professional woman artist, migrated from Ireland in the late 1800s. She also tackled the false binary between arts and crafts, and the marginalisation of the latter. Others later subvert the conventions of still lifes, nature, and flower paintings, challenging the double marginalisation of ‘appropriate’ domestic lives, and interior scenes, devalued by the arts establishment.
The biggest names are best represented across media and subjects; we get Barns-Graham in abstraction works, textiles, and representational paintings – some of her best. There’s also a deference to the popular; from Rachel Maclean’s Scottish Independence in Wonderland to Maud Sulter’s Zabat series, the exact same works which were selected for Somerset House’s BLACK VENUS.
Later rooms leave London and Paris, to show how artists engaged with other European movements. Some, including from Glasgow’s non-academic New Art School, never needed to travel. Barns-Graham (again) transports us to Spain, with works influenced by American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell – no relation to the Glaswegian town.
Painter and musician Beatrice Huntington draws from Scottish Colourism, and continental avant-garde practices, in her angular portraits. Gwen Hardie and Margaret Hunter, both students of Georg Baselitz in West Berlin, diverge in their expressionistic depictions of biological evolution.
Differences of opinion crop up throughout; in her opening banner for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition in 1987, Sam Ainsley, like Hilma af Klint, used bold red and blue to represent opposing genders, showing an abstract warrior woman liberating herself from the patriarchy. Rooms earlier, we read Dame Ethel Walker’s assertion in 1938: ‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’ It only underscores the plurality of experiences of womanhood – visually represented here in the diverse works on display.
It’s thrilling to find common motifs, as they crop up over time and space. The playful harlequin appears in many works, whether Whittle’s tapestry or Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s playful depiction of her daughter. The artistic family name is more often associated with her children, the painter Nancy Nicholson, and ‘abstract pioneer’ Ben Nicholson, a contemporary of Barbara Hepworth. But here, we get the sense of the mother’s ability, and hints of intergenerational learning – all with a great sense of humour.
The same goes for curating variations on a theme; Orientalism manifests in minimalist and maximal forms. Blackadder’s ‘Still Life with Japanese Kite’ (1980) highlights how Japanese aesthetics flooded into Scotland through popular reproduction prints and exhibitions. Alison Watt too drew from Japanese kimonos for her Butterfly, a tapestry commission from the Scottish Opera which now hangs in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.
But Ben Reiss’ triumph was in wrangling Bessie MacNicol’s rendering of fellow artist E.A. Hornel from the National Trust for Scotland’s Broughton House & Garden. Her painting, which inverts the gaze from Glasgow Boy to Girl, also hints at the importance of his travels to Japan, in the patterned textile backdrop, and ambiguous thumb-or-geisha-woman in the corner of his palette.
This painting adds yet another layer to the superb From Camera to Canvas, a 2020 exhibition of Hornel’s work at the nearby City Art Centre. As such, it simply reinforces Scottish Women Artists – to tell unspoken histories of art, already and always there.
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception is on view at Dovecot Studios until 6 January 2024.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
All exhibitions were part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
In terms of gender, Scotland has historically led the way for more equal access to the arts. In 1848, three years after its founding, Glasgow School of Art became Britain’s first co-educational art school, over twenty years before the ‘groundbreaking’ Slade School of Fine Art in London. (A further 50 would pass before the Royal Academy (RA) would permit women to see life models too.)
Drawing from the Fleming Collection, and loans from the National Galleries and National Trust of Scotland, Scottish Women Artists shows 45 practitioners spanning 250 years. It starts with the firsts; Catherine Read, the first Scottish woman to receive a formal artistic education (in Paris) and a prominent society portrait artist in eighteenth-century Britain, patronised by Queen Charlotte. But only works made after her, rather than by her hand directly, are put on display; a refreshing reversal, to see men following women’s lead.
This exhibition might seem like it’s playing catch-up at a time of increased focus on the institutional exclusion of women. It may even be a little predictable, beginning with the well-used words of Artemisia Gentileschi: ‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’. But here, she’s placed in conversation, or argument – with John Ruskin. His claim that there had not yet been a ‘lady who could paint,’ came nearly two hundred years later in 1858 – and almost two hundred years after that, a powerful few from the conventional arts establishment would probably agree.
Ben Reiss’ superb curation (and captions) speaks of the long legacy of ‘segregation’ in teaching, the role of grants and subsidies in tackling socioeconomic inequality in the post-war period, and the contemporary importance of all-women exhibitions, given the continued effects of this historic neglect. Women like Elizabeth Blackadder, the first elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) are increasingly well-represented; she is currently on display in multiple shows across the capital, including the latter. But there are still only a few on whom attention is focused – and even she was a Dame.
Reckonings must begin at home, and Dovecot Studios is no exception. Reiss acknowledges that, though textile art is ‘coded’ as feminine, the practice has long been professionally run by men; its own world-renowned tapestry studio, the former Edinburgh Tapestry Company, didn’t admit a woman weaver until the 1960s. Here a rug, woven after the well-known Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, remarks not only of the individual’s legacy but of the trust she founded during her lifetime to support the next generation of young artists.
Curated by theme rather than chronologically, more attention can be focused on the women lost in-between, overshadowed by the more privileged, and those picked out in the patriarchy as ‘pioneers’. Even Read’s commissions, of mainly women and children, remained mostly in private, not public, collections. Both artists and subjects, thus kept in the domestic space, are vulnerable to fall into posthumous obscurity.
Artistic communities were vital networks for women – particularly those without formal training, or well-connected families - as places of solidarity and mutual support. Margot Sandeman’s later works depict the importance of personal relationships as much as artistic ones, whilst Joan Eardley crops up in as many captions as artworks (like the ‘self-taught’ and ‘still determined’ Pat Douthwaite, she is better represented elsewhere, including the concurrent WONDER WOMEN, upstairs.)
Marriage bars in art schools forced the likes of Dorothy Johnstone and Jessie M. King to step down from teaching; the former’s output declined as she lost access to art school resources, while the latter was able to seek communities in Europe and south-west Scotland.
Beyond the well-known Glasgow Boys, we get the Glasgow Girls and some subtle curatorial swaps. Indeed, King’s illustrations for lesser-known women writers like Isobel K. C. Steele are placed before any copies of John Keats’ Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818). Frances Macdonald MacNair, born in Staffordshire, revolutionised Glasgow’s Spook School with The Yellow Book, a radical periodical which published women artists, writers, and their illustrations as works of art.
Scottish Women Artists centres on the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and their artists’ travels to colonies from Kirkcudbright to St Ives. We see landscapes of - but little of the arts produced in - rural or small-town Scotland (the subject of, for instance, David Keenan’s literature). Perhaps it perpetuates a voyeuristic view of the landscape from an urban perspective; concluding with Frances Walker’s ambiguous environment, a beautiful, but climate-affected, locale.
The Fleming Collection often boasts its connection to the well-known Bond author, Ian Fleming. But where is the reference to Evelyn Fleming, the pioneering collector of post-Impressionist art, who helped found Scotland’s national collections today?
Barbados-born Alberta Whittle is now boasted at Modern One; ironically, it is there where the Dovecot collaboration tapestry Entanglement currently hangs. Woven into the work (and watercolour) are Scotland’s global and colonial connections. Whittle, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, is curated here alongside an abstract, indigo work by Sekai Machache, who will represent her birthplace, Zimbabwe, at the exhibition in 2024.
But long before we get to ‘Scottish Identities’, we see hints of how ‘national’ art is often shaped by outsiders. For many, Sussex-born Eardley visually defines the landscapes of rural Aberdeenshire. Phoebe Anna Traquair, still often regarded as Scotland’s first professional woman artist, migrated from Ireland in the late 1800s. She also tackled the false binary between arts and crafts, and the marginalisation of the latter. Others later subvert the conventions of still lifes, nature, and flower paintings, challenging the double marginalisation of ‘appropriate’ domestic lives, and interior scenes, devalued by the arts establishment.
The biggest names are best represented across media and subjects; we get Barns-Graham in abstraction works, textiles, and representational paintings – some of her best. There’s also a deference to the popular; from Rachel Maclean’s Scottish Independence in Wonderland to Maud Sulter’s Zabat series, the exact same works which were selected for Somerset House’s BLACK VENUS.
Later rooms leave London and Paris, to show how artists engaged with other European movements. Some, including from Glasgow’s non-academic New Art School, never needed to travel. Barns-Graham (again) transports us to Spain, with works influenced by American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell – no relation to the Glaswegian town.
Painter and musician Beatrice Huntington draws from Scottish Colourism, and continental avant-garde practices, in her angular portraits. Gwen Hardie and Margaret Hunter, both students of Georg Baselitz in West Berlin, diverge in their expressionistic depictions of biological evolution.
Differences of opinion crop up throughout; in her opening banner for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition in 1987, Sam Ainsley, like Hilma af Klint, used bold red and blue to represent opposing genders, showing an abstract warrior woman liberating herself from the patriarchy. Rooms earlier, we read Dame Ethel Walker’s assertion in 1938: ‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’ It only underscores the plurality of experiences of womanhood – visually represented here in the diverse works on display.
It’s thrilling to find common motifs, as they crop up over time and space. The playful harlequin appears in many works, whether Whittle’s tapestry or Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s playful depiction of her daughter. The artistic family name is more often associated with her children, the painter Nancy Nicholson, and ‘abstract pioneer’ Ben Nicholson, a contemporary of Barbara Hepworth. But here, we get the sense of the mother’s ability, and hints of intergenerational learning – all with a great sense of humour.
The same goes for curating variations on a theme; Orientalism manifests in minimalist and maximal forms. Blackadder’s ‘Still Life with Japanese Kite’ (1980) highlights how Japanese aesthetics flooded into Scotland through popular reproduction prints and exhibitions. Alison Watt too drew from Japanese kimonos for her Butterfly, a tapestry commission from the Scottish Opera which now hangs in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.
But Ben Reiss’ triumph was in wrangling Bessie MacNicol’s rendering of fellow artist E.A. Hornel from the National Trust for Scotland’s Broughton House & Garden. Her painting, which inverts the gaze from Glasgow Boy to Girl, also hints at the importance of his travels to Japan, in the patterned textile backdrop, and ambiguous thumb-or-geisha-woman in the corner of his palette.
This painting adds yet another layer to the superb From Camera to Canvas, a 2020 exhibition of Hornel’s work at the nearby City Art Centre. As such, it simply reinforces Scottish Women Artists – to tell unspoken histories of art, already and always there.
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception is on view at Dovecot Studios until 6 January 2024.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
All exhibitions were part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
In terms of gender, Scotland has historically led the way for more equal access to the arts. In 1848, three years after its founding, Glasgow School of Art became Britain’s first co-educational art school, over twenty years before the ‘groundbreaking’ Slade School of Fine Art in London. (A further 50 would pass before the Royal Academy (RA) would permit women to see life models too.)
Drawing from the Fleming Collection, and loans from the National Galleries and National Trust of Scotland, Scottish Women Artists shows 45 practitioners spanning 250 years. It starts with the firsts; Catherine Read, the first Scottish woman to receive a formal artistic education (in Paris) and a prominent society portrait artist in eighteenth-century Britain, patronised by Queen Charlotte. But only works made after her, rather than by her hand directly, are put on display; a refreshing reversal, to see men following women’s lead.
This exhibition might seem like it’s playing catch-up at a time of increased focus on the institutional exclusion of women. It may even be a little predictable, beginning with the well-used words of Artemisia Gentileschi: ‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’. But here, she’s placed in conversation, or argument – with John Ruskin. His claim that there had not yet been a ‘lady who could paint,’ came nearly two hundred years later in 1858 – and almost two hundred years after that, a powerful few from the conventional arts establishment would probably agree.
Ben Reiss’ superb curation (and captions) speaks of the long legacy of ‘segregation’ in teaching, the role of grants and subsidies in tackling socioeconomic inequality in the post-war period, and the contemporary importance of all-women exhibitions, given the continued effects of this historic neglect. Women like Elizabeth Blackadder, the first elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) are increasingly well-represented; she is currently on display in multiple shows across the capital, including the latter. But there are still only a few on whom attention is focused – and even she was a Dame.
Reckonings must begin at home, and Dovecot Studios is no exception. Reiss acknowledges that, though textile art is ‘coded’ as feminine, the practice has long been professionally run by men; its own world-renowned tapestry studio, the former Edinburgh Tapestry Company, didn’t admit a woman weaver until the 1960s. Here a rug, woven after the well-known Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, remarks not only of the individual’s legacy but of the trust she founded during her lifetime to support the next generation of young artists.
Curated by theme rather than chronologically, more attention can be focused on the women lost in-between, overshadowed by the more privileged, and those picked out in the patriarchy as ‘pioneers’. Even Read’s commissions, of mainly women and children, remained mostly in private, not public, collections. Both artists and subjects, thus kept in the domestic space, are vulnerable to fall into posthumous obscurity.
Artistic communities were vital networks for women – particularly those without formal training, or well-connected families - as places of solidarity and mutual support. Margot Sandeman’s later works depict the importance of personal relationships as much as artistic ones, whilst Joan Eardley crops up in as many captions as artworks (like the ‘self-taught’ and ‘still determined’ Pat Douthwaite, she is better represented elsewhere, including the concurrent WONDER WOMEN, upstairs.)
Marriage bars in art schools forced the likes of Dorothy Johnstone and Jessie M. King to step down from teaching; the former’s output declined as she lost access to art school resources, while the latter was able to seek communities in Europe and south-west Scotland.
Beyond the well-known Glasgow Boys, we get the Glasgow Girls and some subtle curatorial swaps. Indeed, King’s illustrations for lesser-known women writers like Isobel K. C. Steele are placed before any copies of John Keats’ Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818). Frances Macdonald MacNair, born in Staffordshire, revolutionised Glasgow’s Spook School with The Yellow Book, a radical periodical which published women artists, writers, and their illustrations as works of art.
Scottish Women Artists centres on the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and their artists’ travels to colonies from Kirkcudbright to St Ives. We see landscapes of - but little of the arts produced in - rural or small-town Scotland (the subject of, for instance, David Keenan’s literature). Perhaps it perpetuates a voyeuristic view of the landscape from an urban perspective; concluding with Frances Walker’s ambiguous environment, a beautiful, but climate-affected, locale.
The Fleming Collection often boasts its connection to the well-known Bond author, Ian Fleming. But where is the reference to Evelyn Fleming, the pioneering collector of post-Impressionist art, who helped found Scotland’s national collections today?
Barbados-born Alberta Whittle is now boasted at Modern One; ironically, it is there where the Dovecot collaboration tapestry Entanglement currently hangs. Woven into the work (and watercolour) are Scotland’s global and colonial connections. Whittle, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, is curated here alongside an abstract, indigo work by Sekai Machache, who will represent her birthplace, Zimbabwe, at the exhibition in 2024.
But long before we get to ‘Scottish Identities’, we see hints of how ‘national’ art is often shaped by outsiders. For many, Sussex-born Eardley visually defines the landscapes of rural Aberdeenshire. Phoebe Anna Traquair, still often regarded as Scotland’s first professional woman artist, migrated from Ireland in the late 1800s. She also tackled the false binary between arts and crafts, and the marginalisation of the latter. Others later subvert the conventions of still lifes, nature, and flower paintings, challenging the double marginalisation of ‘appropriate’ domestic lives, and interior scenes, devalued by the arts establishment.
The biggest names are best represented across media and subjects; we get Barns-Graham in abstraction works, textiles, and representational paintings – some of her best. There’s also a deference to the popular; from Rachel Maclean’s Scottish Independence in Wonderland to Maud Sulter’s Zabat series, the exact same works which were selected for Somerset House’s BLACK VENUS.
Later rooms leave London and Paris, to show how artists engaged with other European movements. Some, including from Glasgow’s non-academic New Art School, never needed to travel. Barns-Graham (again) transports us to Spain, with works influenced by American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell – no relation to the Glaswegian town.
Painter and musician Beatrice Huntington draws from Scottish Colourism, and continental avant-garde practices, in her angular portraits. Gwen Hardie and Margaret Hunter, both students of Georg Baselitz in West Berlin, diverge in their expressionistic depictions of biological evolution.
Differences of opinion crop up throughout; in her opening banner for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition in 1987, Sam Ainsley, like Hilma af Klint, used bold red and blue to represent opposing genders, showing an abstract warrior woman liberating herself from the patriarchy. Rooms earlier, we read Dame Ethel Walker’s assertion in 1938: ‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’ It only underscores the plurality of experiences of womanhood – visually represented here in the diverse works on display.
It’s thrilling to find common motifs, as they crop up over time and space. The playful harlequin appears in many works, whether Whittle’s tapestry or Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s playful depiction of her daughter. The artistic family name is more often associated with her children, the painter Nancy Nicholson, and ‘abstract pioneer’ Ben Nicholson, a contemporary of Barbara Hepworth. But here, we get the sense of the mother’s ability, and hints of intergenerational learning – all with a great sense of humour.
The same goes for curating variations on a theme; Orientalism manifests in minimalist and maximal forms. Blackadder’s ‘Still Life with Japanese Kite’ (1980) highlights how Japanese aesthetics flooded into Scotland through popular reproduction prints and exhibitions. Alison Watt too drew from Japanese kimonos for her Butterfly, a tapestry commission from the Scottish Opera which now hangs in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.
But Ben Reiss’ triumph was in wrangling Bessie MacNicol’s rendering of fellow artist E.A. Hornel from the National Trust for Scotland’s Broughton House & Garden. Her painting, which inverts the gaze from Glasgow Boy to Girl, also hints at the importance of his travels to Japan, in the patterned textile backdrop, and ambiguous thumb-or-geisha-woman in the corner of his palette.
This painting adds yet another layer to the superb From Camera to Canvas, a 2020 exhibition of Hornel’s work at the nearby City Art Centre. As such, it simply reinforces Scottish Women Artists – to tell unspoken histories of art, already and always there.
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception is on view at Dovecot Studios until 6 January 2024.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
All exhibitions were part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
In terms of gender, Scotland has historically led the way for more equal access to the arts. In 1848, three years after its founding, Glasgow School of Art became Britain’s first co-educational art school, over twenty years before the ‘groundbreaking’ Slade School of Fine Art in London. (A further 50 would pass before the Royal Academy (RA) would permit women to see life models too.)
Drawing from the Fleming Collection, and loans from the National Galleries and National Trust of Scotland, Scottish Women Artists shows 45 practitioners spanning 250 years. It starts with the firsts; Catherine Read, the first Scottish woman to receive a formal artistic education (in Paris) and a prominent society portrait artist in eighteenth-century Britain, patronised by Queen Charlotte. But only works made after her, rather than by her hand directly, are put on display; a refreshing reversal, to see men following women’s lead.
This exhibition might seem like it’s playing catch-up at a time of increased focus on the institutional exclusion of women. It may even be a little predictable, beginning with the well-used words of Artemisia Gentileschi: ‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’. But here, she’s placed in conversation, or argument – with John Ruskin. His claim that there had not yet been a ‘lady who could paint,’ came nearly two hundred years later in 1858 – and almost two hundred years after that, a powerful few from the conventional arts establishment would probably agree.
Ben Reiss’ superb curation (and captions) speaks of the long legacy of ‘segregation’ in teaching, the role of grants and subsidies in tackling socioeconomic inequality in the post-war period, and the contemporary importance of all-women exhibitions, given the continued effects of this historic neglect. Women like Elizabeth Blackadder, the first elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) are increasingly well-represented; she is currently on display in multiple shows across the capital, including the latter. But there are still only a few on whom attention is focused – and even she was a Dame.
Reckonings must begin at home, and Dovecot Studios is no exception. Reiss acknowledges that, though textile art is ‘coded’ as feminine, the practice has long been professionally run by men; its own world-renowned tapestry studio, the former Edinburgh Tapestry Company, didn’t admit a woman weaver until the 1960s. Here a rug, woven after the well-known Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, remarks not only of the individual’s legacy but of the trust she founded during her lifetime to support the next generation of young artists.
Curated by theme rather than chronologically, more attention can be focused on the women lost in-between, overshadowed by the more privileged, and those picked out in the patriarchy as ‘pioneers’. Even Read’s commissions, of mainly women and children, remained mostly in private, not public, collections. Both artists and subjects, thus kept in the domestic space, are vulnerable to fall into posthumous obscurity.
Artistic communities were vital networks for women – particularly those without formal training, or well-connected families - as places of solidarity and mutual support. Margot Sandeman’s later works depict the importance of personal relationships as much as artistic ones, whilst Joan Eardley crops up in as many captions as artworks (like the ‘self-taught’ and ‘still determined’ Pat Douthwaite, she is better represented elsewhere, including the concurrent WONDER WOMEN, upstairs.)
Marriage bars in art schools forced the likes of Dorothy Johnstone and Jessie M. King to step down from teaching; the former’s output declined as she lost access to art school resources, while the latter was able to seek communities in Europe and south-west Scotland.
Beyond the well-known Glasgow Boys, we get the Glasgow Girls and some subtle curatorial swaps. Indeed, King’s illustrations for lesser-known women writers like Isobel K. C. Steele are placed before any copies of John Keats’ Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818). Frances Macdonald MacNair, born in Staffordshire, revolutionised Glasgow’s Spook School with The Yellow Book, a radical periodical which published women artists, writers, and their illustrations as works of art.
Scottish Women Artists centres on the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and their artists’ travels to colonies from Kirkcudbright to St Ives. We see landscapes of - but little of the arts produced in - rural or small-town Scotland (the subject of, for instance, David Keenan’s literature). Perhaps it perpetuates a voyeuristic view of the landscape from an urban perspective; concluding with Frances Walker’s ambiguous environment, a beautiful, but climate-affected, locale.
The Fleming Collection often boasts its connection to the well-known Bond author, Ian Fleming. But where is the reference to Evelyn Fleming, the pioneering collector of post-Impressionist art, who helped found Scotland’s national collections today?
Barbados-born Alberta Whittle is now boasted at Modern One; ironically, it is there where the Dovecot collaboration tapestry Entanglement currently hangs. Woven into the work (and watercolour) are Scotland’s global and colonial connections. Whittle, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, is curated here alongside an abstract, indigo work by Sekai Machache, who will represent her birthplace, Zimbabwe, at the exhibition in 2024.
But long before we get to ‘Scottish Identities’, we see hints of how ‘national’ art is often shaped by outsiders. For many, Sussex-born Eardley visually defines the landscapes of rural Aberdeenshire. Phoebe Anna Traquair, still often regarded as Scotland’s first professional woman artist, migrated from Ireland in the late 1800s. She also tackled the false binary between arts and crafts, and the marginalisation of the latter. Others later subvert the conventions of still lifes, nature, and flower paintings, challenging the double marginalisation of ‘appropriate’ domestic lives, and interior scenes, devalued by the arts establishment.
The biggest names are best represented across media and subjects; we get Barns-Graham in abstraction works, textiles, and representational paintings – some of her best. There’s also a deference to the popular; from Rachel Maclean’s Scottish Independence in Wonderland to Maud Sulter’s Zabat series, the exact same works which were selected for Somerset House’s BLACK VENUS.
Later rooms leave London and Paris, to show how artists engaged with other European movements. Some, including from Glasgow’s non-academic New Art School, never needed to travel. Barns-Graham (again) transports us to Spain, with works influenced by American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell – no relation to the Glaswegian town.
Painter and musician Beatrice Huntington draws from Scottish Colourism, and continental avant-garde practices, in her angular portraits. Gwen Hardie and Margaret Hunter, both students of Georg Baselitz in West Berlin, diverge in their expressionistic depictions of biological evolution.
Differences of opinion crop up throughout; in her opening banner for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition in 1987, Sam Ainsley, like Hilma af Klint, used bold red and blue to represent opposing genders, showing an abstract warrior woman liberating herself from the patriarchy. Rooms earlier, we read Dame Ethel Walker’s assertion in 1938: ‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’ It only underscores the plurality of experiences of womanhood – visually represented here in the diverse works on display.
It’s thrilling to find common motifs, as they crop up over time and space. The playful harlequin appears in many works, whether Whittle’s tapestry or Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s playful depiction of her daughter. The artistic family name is more often associated with her children, the painter Nancy Nicholson, and ‘abstract pioneer’ Ben Nicholson, a contemporary of Barbara Hepworth. But here, we get the sense of the mother’s ability, and hints of intergenerational learning – all with a great sense of humour.
The same goes for curating variations on a theme; Orientalism manifests in minimalist and maximal forms. Blackadder’s ‘Still Life with Japanese Kite’ (1980) highlights how Japanese aesthetics flooded into Scotland through popular reproduction prints and exhibitions. Alison Watt too drew from Japanese kimonos for her Butterfly, a tapestry commission from the Scottish Opera which now hangs in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.
But Ben Reiss’ triumph was in wrangling Bessie MacNicol’s rendering of fellow artist E.A. Hornel from the National Trust for Scotland’s Broughton House & Garden. Her painting, which inverts the gaze from Glasgow Boy to Girl, also hints at the importance of his travels to Japan, in the patterned textile backdrop, and ambiguous thumb-or-geisha-woman in the corner of his palette.
This painting adds yet another layer to the superb From Camera to Canvas, a 2020 exhibition of Hornel’s work at the nearby City Art Centre. As such, it simply reinforces Scottish Women Artists – to tell unspoken histories of art, already and always there.
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception is on view at Dovecot Studios until 6 January 2024.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
All exhibitions were part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
In terms of gender, Scotland has historically led the way for more equal access to the arts. In 1848, three years after its founding, Glasgow School of Art became Britain’s first co-educational art school, over twenty years before the ‘groundbreaking’ Slade School of Fine Art in London. (A further 50 would pass before the Royal Academy (RA) would permit women to see life models too.)
Drawing from the Fleming Collection, and loans from the National Galleries and National Trust of Scotland, Scottish Women Artists shows 45 practitioners spanning 250 years. It starts with the firsts; Catherine Read, the first Scottish woman to receive a formal artistic education (in Paris) and a prominent society portrait artist in eighteenth-century Britain, patronised by Queen Charlotte. But only works made after her, rather than by her hand directly, are put on display; a refreshing reversal, to see men following women’s lead.
This exhibition might seem like it’s playing catch-up at a time of increased focus on the institutional exclusion of women. It may even be a little predictable, beginning with the well-used words of Artemisia Gentileschi: ‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’. But here, she’s placed in conversation, or argument – with John Ruskin. His claim that there had not yet been a ‘lady who could paint,’ came nearly two hundred years later in 1858 – and almost two hundred years after that, a powerful few from the conventional arts establishment would probably agree.
Ben Reiss’ superb curation (and captions) speaks of the long legacy of ‘segregation’ in teaching, the role of grants and subsidies in tackling socioeconomic inequality in the post-war period, and the contemporary importance of all-women exhibitions, given the continued effects of this historic neglect. Women like Elizabeth Blackadder, the first elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) are increasingly well-represented; she is currently on display in multiple shows across the capital, including the latter. But there are still only a few on whom attention is focused – and even she was a Dame.
Reckonings must begin at home, and Dovecot Studios is no exception. Reiss acknowledges that, though textile art is ‘coded’ as feminine, the practice has long been professionally run by men; its own world-renowned tapestry studio, the former Edinburgh Tapestry Company, didn’t admit a woman weaver until the 1960s. Here a rug, woven after the well-known Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, remarks not only of the individual’s legacy but of the trust she founded during her lifetime to support the next generation of young artists.
Curated by theme rather than chronologically, more attention can be focused on the women lost in-between, overshadowed by the more privileged, and those picked out in the patriarchy as ‘pioneers’. Even Read’s commissions, of mainly women and children, remained mostly in private, not public, collections. Both artists and subjects, thus kept in the domestic space, are vulnerable to fall into posthumous obscurity.
Artistic communities were vital networks for women – particularly those without formal training, or well-connected families - as places of solidarity and mutual support. Margot Sandeman’s later works depict the importance of personal relationships as much as artistic ones, whilst Joan Eardley crops up in as many captions as artworks (like the ‘self-taught’ and ‘still determined’ Pat Douthwaite, she is better represented elsewhere, including the concurrent WONDER WOMEN, upstairs.)
Marriage bars in art schools forced the likes of Dorothy Johnstone and Jessie M. King to step down from teaching; the former’s output declined as she lost access to art school resources, while the latter was able to seek communities in Europe and south-west Scotland.
Beyond the well-known Glasgow Boys, we get the Glasgow Girls and some subtle curatorial swaps. Indeed, King’s illustrations for lesser-known women writers like Isobel K. C. Steele are placed before any copies of John Keats’ Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818). Frances Macdonald MacNair, born in Staffordshire, revolutionised Glasgow’s Spook School with The Yellow Book, a radical periodical which published women artists, writers, and their illustrations as works of art.
Scottish Women Artists centres on the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and their artists’ travels to colonies from Kirkcudbright to St Ives. We see landscapes of - but little of the arts produced in - rural or small-town Scotland (the subject of, for instance, David Keenan’s literature). Perhaps it perpetuates a voyeuristic view of the landscape from an urban perspective; concluding with Frances Walker’s ambiguous environment, a beautiful, but climate-affected, locale.
The Fleming Collection often boasts its connection to the well-known Bond author, Ian Fleming. But where is the reference to Evelyn Fleming, the pioneering collector of post-Impressionist art, who helped found Scotland’s national collections today?
Barbados-born Alberta Whittle is now boasted at Modern One; ironically, it is there where the Dovecot collaboration tapestry Entanglement currently hangs. Woven into the work (and watercolour) are Scotland’s global and colonial connections. Whittle, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, is curated here alongside an abstract, indigo work by Sekai Machache, who will represent her birthplace, Zimbabwe, at the exhibition in 2024.
But long before we get to ‘Scottish Identities’, we see hints of how ‘national’ art is often shaped by outsiders. For many, Sussex-born Eardley visually defines the landscapes of rural Aberdeenshire. Phoebe Anna Traquair, still often regarded as Scotland’s first professional woman artist, migrated from Ireland in the late 1800s. She also tackled the false binary between arts and crafts, and the marginalisation of the latter. Others later subvert the conventions of still lifes, nature, and flower paintings, challenging the double marginalisation of ‘appropriate’ domestic lives, and interior scenes, devalued by the arts establishment.
The biggest names are best represented across media and subjects; we get Barns-Graham in abstraction works, textiles, and representational paintings – some of her best. There’s also a deference to the popular; from Rachel Maclean’s Scottish Independence in Wonderland to Maud Sulter’s Zabat series, the exact same works which were selected for Somerset House’s BLACK VENUS.
Later rooms leave London and Paris, to show how artists engaged with other European movements. Some, including from Glasgow’s non-academic New Art School, never needed to travel. Barns-Graham (again) transports us to Spain, with works influenced by American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell – no relation to the Glaswegian town.
Painter and musician Beatrice Huntington draws from Scottish Colourism, and continental avant-garde practices, in her angular portraits. Gwen Hardie and Margaret Hunter, both students of Georg Baselitz in West Berlin, diverge in their expressionistic depictions of biological evolution.
Differences of opinion crop up throughout; in her opening banner for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition in 1987, Sam Ainsley, like Hilma af Klint, used bold red and blue to represent opposing genders, showing an abstract warrior woman liberating herself from the patriarchy. Rooms earlier, we read Dame Ethel Walker’s assertion in 1938: ‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’ It only underscores the plurality of experiences of womanhood – visually represented here in the diverse works on display.
It’s thrilling to find common motifs, as they crop up over time and space. The playful harlequin appears in many works, whether Whittle’s tapestry or Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s playful depiction of her daughter. The artistic family name is more often associated with her children, the painter Nancy Nicholson, and ‘abstract pioneer’ Ben Nicholson, a contemporary of Barbara Hepworth. But here, we get the sense of the mother’s ability, and hints of intergenerational learning – all with a great sense of humour.
The same goes for curating variations on a theme; Orientalism manifests in minimalist and maximal forms. Blackadder’s ‘Still Life with Japanese Kite’ (1980) highlights how Japanese aesthetics flooded into Scotland through popular reproduction prints and exhibitions. Alison Watt too drew from Japanese kimonos for her Butterfly, a tapestry commission from the Scottish Opera which now hangs in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.
But Ben Reiss’ triumph was in wrangling Bessie MacNicol’s rendering of fellow artist E.A. Hornel from the National Trust for Scotland’s Broughton House & Garden. Her painting, which inverts the gaze from Glasgow Boy to Girl, also hints at the importance of his travels to Japan, in the patterned textile backdrop, and ambiguous thumb-or-geisha-woman in the corner of his palette.
This painting adds yet another layer to the superb From Camera to Canvas, a 2020 exhibition of Hornel’s work at the nearby City Art Centre. As such, it simply reinforces Scottish Women Artists – to tell unspoken histories of art, already and always there.
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception is on view at Dovecot Studios until 6 January 2024.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
All exhibitions were part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
In terms of gender, Scotland has historically led the way for more equal access to the arts. In 1848, three years after its founding, Glasgow School of Art became Britain’s first co-educational art school, over twenty years before the ‘groundbreaking’ Slade School of Fine Art in London. (A further 50 would pass before the Royal Academy (RA) would permit women to see life models too.)
Drawing from the Fleming Collection, and loans from the National Galleries and National Trust of Scotland, Scottish Women Artists shows 45 practitioners spanning 250 years. It starts with the firsts; Catherine Read, the first Scottish woman to receive a formal artistic education (in Paris) and a prominent society portrait artist in eighteenth-century Britain, patronised by Queen Charlotte. But only works made after her, rather than by her hand directly, are put on display; a refreshing reversal, to see men following women’s lead.
This exhibition might seem like it’s playing catch-up at a time of increased focus on the institutional exclusion of women. It may even be a little predictable, beginning with the well-used words of Artemisia Gentileschi: ‘I’ll show you what a woman can do’. But here, she’s placed in conversation, or argument – with John Ruskin. His claim that there had not yet been a ‘lady who could paint,’ came nearly two hundred years later in 1858 – and almost two hundred years after that, a powerful few from the conventional arts establishment would probably agree.
Ben Reiss’ superb curation (and captions) speaks of the long legacy of ‘segregation’ in teaching, the role of grants and subsidies in tackling socioeconomic inequality in the post-war period, and the contemporary importance of all-women exhibitions, given the continued effects of this historic neglect. Women like Elizabeth Blackadder, the first elected to both the Royal Academy and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) are increasingly well-represented; she is currently on display in multiple shows across the capital, including the latter. But there are still only a few on whom attention is focused – and even she was a Dame.
Reckonings must begin at home, and Dovecot Studios is no exception. Reiss acknowledges that, though textile art is ‘coded’ as feminine, the practice has long been professionally run by men; its own world-renowned tapestry studio, the former Edinburgh Tapestry Company, didn’t admit a woman weaver until the 1960s. Here a rug, woven after the well-known Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, remarks not only of the individual’s legacy but of the trust she founded during her lifetime to support the next generation of young artists.
Curated by theme rather than chronologically, more attention can be focused on the women lost in-between, overshadowed by the more privileged, and those picked out in the patriarchy as ‘pioneers’. Even Read’s commissions, of mainly women and children, remained mostly in private, not public, collections. Both artists and subjects, thus kept in the domestic space, are vulnerable to fall into posthumous obscurity.
Artistic communities were vital networks for women – particularly those without formal training, or well-connected families - as places of solidarity and mutual support. Margot Sandeman’s later works depict the importance of personal relationships as much as artistic ones, whilst Joan Eardley crops up in as many captions as artworks (like the ‘self-taught’ and ‘still determined’ Pat Douthwaite, she is better represented elsewhere, including the concurrent WONDER WOMEN, upstairs.)
Marriage bars in art schools forced the likes of Dorothy Johnstone and Jessie M. King to step down from teaching; the former’s output declined as she lost access to art school resources, while the latter was able to seek communities in Europe and south-west Scotland.
Beyond the well-known Glasgow Boys, we get the Glasgow Girls and some subtle curatorial swaps. Indeed, King’s illustrations for lesser-known women writers like Isobel K. C. Steele are placed before any copies of John Keats’ Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1818). Frances Macdonald MacNair, born in Staffordshire, revolutionised Glasgow’s Spook School with The Yellow Book, a radical periodical which published women artists, writers, and their illustrations as works of art.
Scottish Women Artists centres on the cities of Glasgow and Edinburgh, and their artists’ travels to colonies from Kirkcudbright to St Ives. We see landscapes of - but little of the arts produced in - rural or small-town Scotland (the subject of, for instance, David Keenan’s literature). Perhaps it perpetuates a voyeuristic view of the landscape from an urban perspective; concluding with Frances Walker’s ambiguous environment, a beautiful, but climate-affected, locale.
The Fleming Collection often boasts its connection to the well-known Bond author, Ian Fleming. But where is the reference to Evelyn Fleming, the pioneering collector of post-Impressionist art, who helped found Scotland’s national collections today?
Barbados-born Alberta Whittle is now boasted at Modern One; ironically, it is there where the Dovecot collaboration tapestry Entanglement currently hangs. Woven into the work (and watercolour) are Scotland’s global and colonial connections. Whittle, who represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale, is curated here alongside an abstract, indigo work by Sekai Machache, who will represent her birthplace, Zimbabwe, at the exhibition in 2024.
But long before we get to ‘Scottish Identities’, we see hints of how ‘national’ art is often shaped by outsiders. For many, Sussex-born Eardley visually defines the landscapes of rural Aberdeenshire. Phoebe Anna Traquair, still often regarded as Scotland’s first professional woman artist, migrated from Ireland in the late 1800s. She also tackled the false binary between arts and crafts, and the marginalisation of the latter. Others later subvert the conventions of still lifes, nature, and flower paintings, challenging the double marginalisation of ‘appropriate’ domestic lives, and interior scenes, devalued by the arts establishment.
The biggest names are best represented across media and subjects; we get Barns-Graham in abstraction works, textiles, and representational paintings – some of her best. There’s also a deference to the popular; from Rachel Maclean’s Scottish Independence in Wonderland to Maud Sulter’s Zabat series, the exact same works which were selected for Somerset House’s BLACK VENUS.
Later rooms leave London and Paris, to show how artists engaged with other European movements. Some, including from Glasgow’s non-academic New Art School, never needed to travel. Barns-Graham (again) transports us to Spain, with works influenced by American Abstract Expressionist Robert Motherwell – no relation to the Glaswegian town.
Painter and musician Beatrice Huntington draws from Scottish Colourism, and continental avant-garde practices, in her angular portraits. Gwen Hardie and Margaret Hunter, both students of Georg Baselitz in West Berlin, diverge in their expressionistic depictions of biological evolution.
Differences of opinion crop up throughout; in her opening banner for the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art exhibition in 1987, Sam Ainsley, like Hilma af Klint, used bold red and blue to represent opposing genders, showing an abstract warrior woman liberating herself from the patriarchy. Rooms earlier, we read Dame Ethel Walker’s assertion in 1938: ‘There is no such thing as a woman artist. There are only two kinds of artist – bad and good.’ It only underscores the plurality of experiences of womanhood – visually represented here in the diverse works on display.
It’s thrilling to find common motifs, as they crop up over time and space. The playful harlequin appears in many works, whether Whittle’s tapestry or Mabel Pryde Nicholson’s playful depiction of her daughter. The artistic family name is more often associated with her children, the painter Nancy Nicholson, and ‘abstract pioneer’ Ben Nicholson, a contemporary of Barbara Hepworth. But here, we get the sense of the mother’s ability, and hints of intergenerational learning – all with a great sense of humour.
The same goes for curating variations on a theme; Orientalism manifests in minimalist and maximal forms. Blackadder’s ‘Still Life with Japanese Kite’ (1980) highlights how Japanese aesthetics flooded into Scotland through popular reproduction prints and exhibitions. Alison Watt too drew from Japanese kimonos for her Butterfly, a tapestry commission from the Scottish Opera which now hangs in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal.
But Ben Reiss’ triumph was in wrangling Bessie MacNicol’s rendering of fellow artist E.A. Hornel from the National Trust for Scotland’s Broughton House & Garden. Her painting, which inverts the gaze from Glasgow Boy to Girl, also hints at the importance of his travels to Japan, in the patterned textile backdrop, and ambiguous thumb-or-geisha-woman in the corner of his palette.
This painting adds yet another layer to the superb From Camera to Canvas, a 2020 exhibition of Hornel’s work at the nearby City Art Centre. As such, it simply reinforces Scottish Women Artists – to tell unspoken histories of art, already and always there.
Scottish Women Artists: 250 Years of Challenging Perception is on view at Dovecot Studios until 6 January 2024.
Make sure to collect your Yamos on the gowithYamo app when you visit!
All exhibitions were part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.
