'Pilgrims of the picturesque': the amateur woman artist and British colonialism, circa 1750-1860

© 1996 Dr. Caroline JordanUntil recent feminist revisions of art history, British and British colonial amateur women artists have been almost totally ignored. Although biographical information is available about them, there is no general study which analyses their collective position and role in British and colonial societies. This is the broad aim of the thesis. It examines the construction of the subject of the British, middle-class, amateur, woman artist from the late eighteenth-century, her art training and employment opportunities, and her role in establishing amateur artistic culture in the colonies of Australia and India. It is an interdisciplinary study because amateur women artists typically produced hybrid, non-canonical, visual works that cross over into the fields of science and literature. The thesis explores the way amateur women’s various leisure and work practices were linked, discursively and practically, using an interdisciplinary approach which draws on feminism, postcolonialism and Foucault’s analysis of discursive practices. These approaches to historical study have in common an analysis of power in relation to the subject. Here, the power dynamics of class, race and gender are analysed in relation to the subject of the amateur woman artist. The thesis traces a key development in the ideological construction of the amateur woman artist to the 1790s in Britain, using the evidence of female conduct and other manuals. These promoted a rational, religious, domestic and maternal model of femininity, influenced by Evangelical religious ideas and gendered concepts of nature. ‘Feminine’ leisure pursuits, such as drawing, were redefined as self-disciplinary practices which would help achieve a desirable type of modern, middle-class, female subjectivity. This discourse extended into the construction of ‘feminine’ artistic genres in commercially available drawing-manuals and was practically reinforced by the conventions of amateur women’s private art training. The thesis revises definitions of the amateur woman artist, particularly the conventional split made between the amateur of the ‘female’ private sphere and the professional of the ‘male’ public sphere. These categories overlapped in middle-class women’s artistic employment. Moreover, their status was different in the nineteenth-century. While amateurs are now devalued relative to their professional counterparts, amateurism was then a mark of class superiority. The stigma attached to professional status for women, and the structural obstacles put in the way of their achieving it, meant that amateur and professional women artists trained, worked and presented themselves in similar ways. In the so-called ‘private’ sphere, it can be seen that women’s domestic, amateur, art production served the community rather than the self and therefore belonged as much to the public as to the private sphere. The thesis examines questions of white, middle-class women’s agency in raced, classed and gendered systems of colonial power. In Australia and India, male and female amateurs were central in founding artistic cultures, which were an instrument of class hegemony. Gendered hierarchies are evident within these class-based amateur cultures. In reading women’s representations of colonial lands and other races, the thesis argues that their conventional adoption of the picturesque mode of description, ostensibly a protest against ‘male’ violence and ‘progress’, was ambivalent and, ultimately, compliant with it