- Thanks so much, Gill. It's a real delight for me to be here in chilly Canberra and talking to Jennifer Higgie, who I believe is in a very warm sunny London this morning. Welcome Jennifer. Thanks so much for joining us for this discussion about some of the self-portraits in our current exhibition Shakespeare to Winehouse, which is a fabulous selection of works from the National Portrait Gallery in London that we have here for.
- Thank you so much for having me.
- Another month or so. It's for anyone who doesn't know Jennifer. She's an art historian and a writer. You might be familiar with the Bow Down podcast, which Jennifer hosts. It's a fabulous series of interviews about women artists to whom we should all bow down. It's fabulous. I highly recommend it. And just recently, just last year, she's published a wonderful book called The Mirror and the Palette Rebellion, Revolution and Resilience: 500 Years of Women's self-portraits. And a number of the artists that Jennifer discusses in the book are represented in Shakespeare to Winehouse. And so we're really fortunate for Jennifer to be here and to start sort of telling us a little bit more about some of these intriguing women represented in the exhibition. And there's a very good chance. We might sort of stray off to portraits which aren't in the exhibition, but which Jennifer discusses in her book. So it'll be a fabulous discussion and we've all been really looking forward to talking to Jennifer. So let's go. I thought what a good way to start, Jennifer would be to start with a quote from your book, because if nothing else I believe this exhibition that we have from London is a really fabulous sort of demonstration, I guess, of that idea that a portrait and perhaps particularly a self-portrait is never just an artwork. It's never just a representation of what someone looks like, but a fabulous lens onto all of the other histories that are sort of existing and going on around it. And there's one point in your book where I'll just quote if that's okay. And then I'll sort of hand over to you to sort of take over, if you like, where you say, "a painting will always reveal something about the life of its creator, even if it's the last thing the artist intended. A self-portrait isn't simply a rendering of an artist's external appearance. It's also an invocation of who she is and the time she lives in, how she sees herself, and what she understands about the world. And you use those phrases to introduce discussion of artists, such as Angelica Kauffman, who was one of the first two women admitted to the Royal Academy in 1768. And we are very fortunate that a beautiful self-portrait by Angelica is represented in the exhibition. I'm wondering if you could sort of tell us a little bit about that work and how it is that Angelica's self-portrait, as you say, sort of tells us about the times that she's living in and how she sees herself in the world.
- Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. Angelica Kaufman was a really remarkable artist. She was a child prodigy in Switzerland. She travelled around with her father who was also an artist. And when she came to London, she set up as a professional artist and did very well. She was good friends with Joshua Reynolds. And as you mentioned, she became one of the first two women to be admitted to the Royal Academy, but she was admitted to the Royal Academy not as a full member, but as an associate member. So she and her fellow artists, Mary Moosa, who was a brilliant painter of still lives and flowers. While they were, oh, isn't this amazing, two women have been admitted to the Royal Academy? They weren't allowed to attend meetings or the formal dinners, and they were constantly sidelined. So I think what's wonderful in this, in this self-portrait from the national portrait gallery in London is that, ostensibly, it seems like quite a demure self-portrait. She's gazing at her, she's at work. You know, she's a woman who is skilled, but it's quite modest in a way, but you dig a bit deeper and there are certain signs within the painting that I think are really telling. For example, she's not depicting herself in fashionable garb. She's depicting herself in loose robes that sort of allude to classicism. So she's saying that she knows about the precedence of painting, but also she's in very comfortable clothes. She's depicting herself at work. Now this is a time when women had no political agency, they were barred from the life room, they weren't allowed to be in a room with an naked man. So, she wasn't initially able to get those skill sets that were necessary to become a professional artist. She was constantly patronised and sidelined, but still she's a professional artist. So I see this painting of herself at work as a sort of quiet rebellion in a way, because she's saying, yes, I am sidelined, yes, I have no political agency, but look at me, I'm a woman and I'm at work. And so I think it's a very beautiful and powerful self-portrait in that sense.
- Mm. And even just sort of by the fact that she's painting herself and she painted herself quite frequently, as I understand. She was one of her main subjects, she's making a statement about her lack of access to the training and the facilities and so forth that her male counterparts and that the other. How many men was it that were admitted to the Royal Academy in 1768, compared to just sort of Mary and Angelica?
- Yeah, there were 34 men.
- 34 men.
- But of course the 34 men had full membership, whereas the women didn't. There wasn't a full member of the Royal Academy until Laura Knight in 1936, and so, which is sort of extraordinary really. And women were pounding on the doors of the Royal Academy, not only to be allowed to be members of it, but also to study there, because it was the preeminent art school in London. And, you read the sort of increasingly despairing petitions that groups of women across the ages presented to the Royal Academy. They were begging that they were allowed to study and they were polite and they're fervent, and they're respectful, but they're increasingly desperate. And it wasn't until 1860. It's a rather wonderful story where a young artist called Laura Herford was so incensed by this lack of access to the Royal Academy that she actually applied as a student using only her initials, LH, and she was accepted. And then when this was discovered that LH was actually Laura Herford, they had to let her in, because bizarrely, they discovered that it actually wasn't written into their constitution that women weren't allowed to study there. Everyone had just assumed that that was the case. So anyway, Laura Herford, first female student, that's, yeah. But I think, as you say, one of the reasons I think that so many women did self-portraits from the 16th century on, is that because they weren't allowed to study in the life class. They turned to the subject that was always available, which was themselves. And that's why I called my book, The Mirror and the Palette, because if they had a mirror and a palette, they could, they had access to a subject that they could explore.
- And further to that point, Hector's just put on the screen this painting, which is now in the Royal collection. It's a picture by Johan Zoffany of the inaugural members of the Royal Academy. And you can see there on the right hand side of the composition, Mary and Angelica represented as images on the wall, because as you pointed out, Jennifer, they wouldn't have been allowed in this room with sort of semi-naked and naked men.
- I mean, this painting is so inadvertently hilarious, really.
- It is.
- I mean, first of all, Zoffany is commissioned to do a portrait of the Royal Academy missions. And you'd think knowing the rules that women weren't allowed in the life room that he might have chosen a different location for his portrait. No, he decided to have all of the men surrounding one naked man. And then there are these rather glum little portraits up on the wall of Mary Moser and Angelica Kaufman. And I mean, these are extraordinary women who were blazing with life and were blazing with society, but in those little portraits they look sort of dour and a bit dead, really, like portraits of. So, I mean, what an insult! I mean, you can't imagine how infuriating that must have been for them, anyway.
- But you mentioned that idea of having a mirror and a palette and being able, and having yourself as the such an accessible, always available subject. And as you also pointed out, Angelica was hardly the first woman. I mean, the portrait that's in the exhibition is from the 1770s, but 300 years or before that, there are women making self-portraits. And there's a beautiful little image, which is reproduced in your book from the early 15th century, if I remember correctly and it's a woman sort of seated at a table, painting her self-portrait, and you can see her, you can see her face reflected in the mirror and in the portrait that she's painting. So I was wondering if you could sort of elaborate on some of those, some of Angelica's predecessors.
- Hmm, yeah. You know, one of the sort of lies that has been taught with the stories of traditional art history is that women really only came into their own in the 20th century, whereas there are strong documents, documentation, rather, of women painting since the beginning of time. And there's even a theory that a lot of cave painting was done by women, because of the shape of their hands. There have been studies on that, but this rather wonderful little painting, and we're not quite sure who made this painting, it's an illuminated manuscript, is really, it's basically a triple portrait because you've got an illustration of Marcia who was meant to be one of a major painter from classical times. But the painter of this, the artist of this picture has depicted her in mediaeval dress. And she's looking at herself in the mirror and she's also painting herself. So you can see herself in her painting in this painting, in her mirror. And, it's a clear documentation of a woman painting a very long time ago and painting herself. But the first, really the first self-portraits that we know of that are authored were, if we go to 1548, and there's a really radical and wonderful, but seemingly modest little painting by an artist called Catharina van Hemessen. And here she is, and Catharina van Hemessen was born in Antwerp, and her father was quite a successful painter. And this is actually a story that we hear again and again, that because women were barred from training, apprenticeships, academies, you name it, a lot of them, not all of them, but some of them who were to become successful artists were born into a family of artists. And Catharina van Hemessen's father was a well-known artist. And so therefore she immediately had access to a studio and also it's important to stress access to mirrors because mirrors at this time were actually luxury items. They were very, very expensive and very rare, but they were often to be found in artist studios because they were so useful, obviously for the tools of the artist. And so here she depicts herself. It's a rather clumsy little painting. It's quite small. She looks rather startled. She's in her finery. She's painting in velvet, which would've been unusual at the time because normally she would have some kind of smock on. But so she's saying many things in this picture, she's saying, I am a woman of modesty because she's dressed very modestly, but I am also a woman who is respectable. I am dressed in velvet. She's painting a picture of the Virgin because it was very important for women in pre-modern times to stress that they weren't loose women, that they were respectful women because to be an artist was to be a bohemian and could have been perceived as being very, to have what might have been perceived at the time as loose morals. So she's painting a picture of the Virgin to reiterate that she's a religious woman, and up at the top of the painting, you can't quite see it here, but you can see the inscription. She says, "I, Catharina van Hemessen, painted this age 20 in 1548". Now to our 21st-century eyes, this picture looks quite, it's a nice little picture, but it's quite modest and it's a little bit clumsy, but what is radical about this is that it's the first painting we know of by anyone of any gender of an artist painting themselves at an easel. So there were self-portraits by men at the time, although they were quite unusual because most artists at the time are working to commission and they're painting religious subjects or still lives or paintings that would sell. And so it was rare for them to turn their lens on themselves. But Durer, of course, had made his remarkable self-portraits around 1500, but they're very Christlike. He depicts himself as his rather otherworldly creature, Jan van Eyck famously painted himself. It's considered a self-portrait with a turban. But Catharina van Hemessen, this young woman is the first person to depict herself as an artist at an easel, and again, a bit like the Angelica Kaufman self-portrait. I think she's saying, "look at me, I am painting. And isn't this remarkable, I am a woman." And one of the reasons I think that she might have inscribed her painting with "I Catharina van Hemessen painted this", is because the history of art is the history of women being excluded or mis-attributed. And so it's quite, it often happened that if they painted themselves, then after they died, their self-portrait might have been attributed to a male painter. So we know they did this.
- And I think it's something that we'll no doubt see throughout the discussion is that the use women painting themselves with their brushes, with the easel, with the palette, like you say, really sort of making a statement. I'm not just an amateur, I'm not just doing this because it's an accomplishment, I'm a professional serious painter.
- Exactly.
- Yeah. And it's one of those things. And this is another thing which I think comes across really beautifully in the exhibition, as well as in your book is the persistence of these motifs and these themes from 400 years worth of portraiture. This need, particularly on the part of women, this sort of strident, really quite strident statement that you can make that sort of quiet rebellion just by portraying yourself, holding the tools of your trade.
- Absolutely, absolutely. And as you say, we see this again and again that women are painting themselves with the tools of their trade to say, "I can work, I can do this", because at this point in time, women were expected to be wives or mothers or nuns. They won't be professional artists. And so the women who did achieve a role as a professional artist, I mean, I can't imagine how phenomenal these women were. And Catharina van Hemessen herself became, she had a remarkable career. She went to Spain and with her husband and then, he was an organist and she was working as a professional artist in the court of Spain. But then we lose sight of her. We don't even know when she died. She went back to Holland and it's possible then she started having children and that put an end to her career or she died. We don't know.
- Hmm, and once again, these are all the sort of having to give away one's career because you've had children or because you've married and you've got a home to run, is another thing which sort of persists throughout the centuries as well. We might sort of talk about that a little bit perhaps when we come to Nora Heysen, a little bit further down the track. But you were mentioning about how amazing these women must have been to have made a living from their art at this time, which I think leads us naturally to artists like Artemisia Gentileschi. Would you like to tell us a little bit more about her?
- Yeah.
- Amazing woman.
- What an extraordinary, extraordinary woman. Yeah, she was born in 1593 in Rome, again, her father was a painter, which is why she had access to training materials, but she was remarkably gifted. I mean she was accomplished paintings by the age of 15 and 16.
- Wow.
- Tragically she was raped by her tutor when she was 17, who was a famous artist called Tasso. Anyway, there's been a lot written about this, so I won't go into it in great depth. But she went to trial and awfully one of the reasons she went to trial wasn't so much that she was raped, but rather that she had her father's property, i.e. her had been damaged and possibly stopped her from becoming a married woman later on because she had been defiled. Anyway, she was tortured during the trial, which went for about a year. But in the end she actually won the trial. And her rapist was banned from Rome as a punishment. But because he was friends with the Pope, he didn't really go. So he didn't really have any punishment at all. She married immediately after her trial was over because she had to reclaim her reputation as a virtuous woman. And you know this terrible, terrible thing that happened to her rather than crushing her, she rose above it. She threw herself into painting and she made an extraordinary series of, it's hard not to see them as revenge paintings where she depicts herself as Judith in the story of Judith and Holofernes, where it depicts the biblical story of this woman who crept into a camp of an invader to seduce the general and then ended up decapitating him. And her versions of this story, they're more violent than Caravaggio's versions of the story. I mean, they're very, very graphic, extraordinary painter, but here she depicts herself as St. Catherine of Alexandria, again, another woman who was spurned and brutalised by male power. In this picture, she depicts herself as St. Catherine, who was an intellectual, who was a Christian, who managed to convert hundreds of people including great intellectuals of the day to Christianity, and who was eventually put to death for her beliefs. But when she bled, she bled milk. And then she was sanctified. And this was bought by the National Gallery in London a few years ago, and then did actually a national tour. And it toured around to prisons and schools and community centres and church halls, has promoted discussions around the role of women in the past, and to discuss the role of mythical women as she depicts herself here. And it was a really remarkable, I think, initiative by the National Gallery, which only has a tiny, tiny percentage of work by women in its collection. And the exhibition that they devoted to Artemisia Gentileschi two years ago, which was absolutely fabulous. That was the first exhibition the National Gallery in London had ever devoted to a woman painter. So, yeah, but she was great when she, during the trial, it came out that she was actually illiterate. After the trial, she not only became one of the great painters of the Baroque, but she also taught herself to read and write. And her letters are really wonderful. She became a great letter writer with friends, such as Galileo, the astronomer, who she was close friends with. And she was an absolute powerhouse and she also had children, all of whom died except for one, a daughter who also trained as a painter, but we know nothing about what she achieved.
- I'm still quite staggered that it's only in very, very recent memory that an institution like the National Gallery in London has done a single artist show about a woman artist. That's extraordinary.
- Yeah. And actually just before the pandemic, I went to Madrid to see another fantastic exhibition at the Prado. And that was an exhibition of two Renaissance women artists, because there were 120 women working as professional artists during the Renaissance, something that I was never taught when I was at art school. And anyways, Sofonisba Anguissola who was the most prolific self-portraitist between Durer and Rembrandt, and also Lavinia Fontana, who, I mean remarkably had 11 children, but still was one of the great artists of the Renaissance, and she was another trail blazer. But the Prado had put on an exhibition of these two remarkable women. And it was only the second time in their 200-year history that they had devoted exhibitions to women. The first was of Clara Peeters, who was a great Netherlandish, still-life painter 16th century, 17th century.
- We've got a couple of images of Sofonisba, I think.
- Yeah, her story is fantastic, Sofonisba Anguissola.
- Wonderful. And there's a wonderful self-portrait actually by Anthony van Dyck in the exhibition. And I understand as a young artist, he sought advice from Sofonisba. Is that correct?
- Yes, that's a really great story. So, I mean, just to give a bit of background to Sofonisba. She was born in 1532 in Cremona to an inter-nobility, but her family was quite poor, but her father, although he wasn't an artist, he was extremely encouraging of his five daughters, three or four of whom became artists, but actually Sofonisba was an absolute powerhouse. She showed great talent from an early age. It's pretty clear now, it's not absolutely verified, but there's a lot of information around the fact that she probably studied with Michelangelo. She went and worked in the court of Philip II and there are great stories of her starting the dancing at his wedding. I think she was a lot of fun, Sofonisba Anguissola. And she married at the age of 40, which was considered scandalously old. And it's most likely that Philip II decided that it was time she married because it was not respectable at all that she wasn't married, but she painted remarkable paintings when she was in Spain. So she married and then her husband died in mysterious circumstances, possibly murdered by Albanian pirates off the coast of Sicily. And she went back to Italy and on the way she fell in love with a much younger sea captain. And without asking permission from her family, she ran off with him and married him. And she was by now well into her forties. And they had a really, really happy marriage actually. And he was greatly supportive of her. Anyway, she ended up in Palermo and she was very, very old and van Dyck came to Palermo, which was in the middle of a plague. And he sought out Sofonisba Anguissola to do her portrait because by now she was famous across Europe. She had painted so many remarkable portraits. She was the first person to paint portraits of her sisters in a domestic setting, playing chess. I think we have an image of that. And, she was also, she inspired people like Lavinia Fontana to become artists. So yeah, this is a wonderful portrait that she painted in 1554. The Italian artist historian Giorgio Vasari, who wrote his famous Lives of the Artist. He praises this in his book of 1568. And so we see here, she's painting her sisters who are laughing, who are having fun, and they're playing chess, which at the time was seen as a very intellectual game and a strategic game. So it wasn't a usual one for women to be playing. And so Sofonisba here again in a very coded portrait is saying, "these are women, they're clever. They can play chess". But anyway, back to van Dyck, So he goes to Palermo, which is in the middle of the plague and seeks out Sofonisba, who by now is half-blind and very old, but still really feisty. And very unusually, he actually wrote a new piece in his diary about meeting her. And he says that he learned more from this very elderly blind woman than he had from all the teachers he'd ever had. And there's a rather lovely report of her backseat painting a bit and telling him how to shade things in and how to under-paint or highlight things. So, she was a great character. I mean, wouldn't it be great if someone like Netflix did a series on, dramatised her life instead of endless stories about women being murdered.
- Exactly. And, for van Dyck, to say that bearing in mind that Rubens was one of his teachers, is quite extraordinary. We've heard endless amounts of about van Dyck and Peter Paul Rubens, van Dyck rather, and Peter Paul Rubens, but not about this woman artist whom he admired.
- Revered.
- So much and travelled to Italy during a plague to go and visit. Yeah, it's quite extraordinary.
- Yeah, great story.
- Yeah, so Mary Beale. First, she considered the UK's or England's first professional woman artist, do you think?
- I think she's considered the second professional women artist. The first one was Joan Carlile and she was a little bit older than Mary Beale, but at one point they were both living in Covent Garden and it's lovely to think that they might have met. I'm sure they must have met, but there's no record of it. But Mary Beale was far more prolific than Joan Carlile and she left behind a much greater body of work. And she's also famous for being the first artist, I think, not just woman in Britain to have written a very brief piece on how to paint. So it's the first record with having written of an artist, giving instruction through writing about how to paint. And she wrote this. It's only about 250 words, and it was about how to paint a peach basically, and what kind of paint to use. And she possibly wrote it for her sons, because her sons trained as artists. And she led a remarkable life, wonderful life. And she lucked out because she married a man who was extremely supportive of his wife and he was something of a chemist and he experimented a lot with pigments and opened a very important pigment shop for painters in London. And he also helped on her studio. And basically Mary was the main breadwinner in the family. Again, she found it hard to get training at the beginning, but she persevered and she came of age sort of just after the Civil War had finished in England. And it actually was a time where, I mean, despite the awful tragedies of many deaths, the Civil War was a time when women who were often left behind when their husbands or fathers went off to war, had to run the house or had to run households or till the fields or do the work that men had been doing. So a bit like after the First World War, after the Civil War in Britain, women actually achieved sort of greater prominence in public life because they were dependent upon to run the country because so many men were dead or fighting. So she sort of bloomed at a moment of rare support for women. But again, she often turned to herself and painted herself and she often painted her family, her husband and her sons. And she did about, I think, hundreds of paintings were left behind. She was extremely prolific and again, she had to reiterate to her public in order to get commissions. She had to make it very clear that she was a woman of honour and virtue. And I think it was some distant relation of hers was a reverend, a vicar. And he wrote recommendation of her in a pamphlet that was publicly read. And so this reiterated that Mary was a most honourable and virtuous woman and also could paint, which meant that she ended up getting lots of commissions because she was deemed respectable. And that's why she also ended up painting quite a lot of religious figures. So like vicars and bishops and people like that. So yeah, she was great.
- Yeah, and once again, you have in this self-portrait by Mary, which is in NPG London's collection, she's again, that's a portrait of her sons, I think in that she's holding in her hand. So once again, an artist, a woman artist sort of reasserting her professionalism, I suppose, or using a tool of her trade to reassert her legitimacy as an artist, I suppose, you could say.
- Yeah, absolutely.
- You mentioned the effects of the Civil War, the English Civil War and what that meant for women's work generally and sort of women's access to all sorts of professions and things that they wouldn't ordinarily get to do. That's of course another thing which sort of persists and there's some works in the exhibition. Well, one portrait in particular by an artist named Doris Zinkeisen, which I mean, she was someone who, she volunteered as a nurse during World War I, and then during World War II, she volunteered as a nurse again. And then towards the end of the war, she was part of a group of artists who were sort of contracted by Sir Kenneth Clark. And they were sent to Europe. She was based in Brussels to observe, there she's to observe the activities of the British Red Cross and the Order of St. John in Europe. So she's a woman who was among other things, she was there to document the liberation of the Bergen Bellson concentration camp when it was liberated by the allies in 1945. And in London prior to that, she and her sister, Anna Zinkeisen, who was an amazing artist too, were very much engaged in war work not just in the volunteer nursing, but sort of documenting the activities of doctors and medical hospitals and repatriation facilities and so forth. So it's, I guess, a really, really wonderful demonstration of several, a few centuries after Mary Beale's experience that women are still sort of making use of these kind of traumatic events in history to create opportunities for themselves. This beautiful portrait by Doris Zinkeisen, which is in the exhibition is painted in 1929 and was exhibited at the Royal Academy in the summer exhibition in 1929. She and her sister both were very much kind of society portraitists. And, Doris Zinkeisen, among other things, was she was someone who was involved in costume design and design for the theatre. So she moved in these quite sort of luminous circle. She knew Lawrence Olivier and Ralph Richardson and Mark Howard. And for that reason, she and her sister were talked about in the social pages as these kind of cocktail-sipping kind of society ladies and bright young things. And indeed when she came to Sydney in 1929, which is where she painted this work, she rigged up a backdrop in her hotel room in Sydney and painted this portrait. To a considerable degree, it was largely created in Sydney. She's written about in the social pages in Australian newspapers, as you know, this delightful Mrs. Graham Johnson, she was never referred to by her artist's name, of course. So very much this sort of construction of women artists as almost sort of dilettantes, if you know what I mean, like painting portraits of people who were their social equals, because that was an appropriate thing for them to do. But when you sort of really get down to the nitty gritty of both Doris and her sister, they're creating these incredibly, incredibly gritty, incredibly sort of strident work. So this is Anna Zinkeisen, and this is another self-portrait. This is from 1944. And once again, she's the way she's got. She's sort of brandishing those brushes in her hand It's just really I think, this is such a wonderful sort of strident portrait. She's got that real kind of Rosie-the-Riveter sort of attitude happening, but yeah, just really fantastic. I'm just sort of wondering if you would from your experience of writing the book and your research, if you wanted to sort of comment a little bit further on that sort of notion that portraiture was something that was appropriate for women artists to do, it was something, for example, that didn't sort of compromise their reputation, or there's also that factor, I suppose. And I think this must play into the sort of historical construction of women artists. A great deal is that portraiture itself in the hierarchy of artistic genres was towards the bottom of the latter. So, Thomas Lawrence, for example, referred to portrait painting as this dry-mill horse business, something that didn't require any kind of creativity or intellect. They were the sort of things that you could just churn out. And I think that comes into play with a lot of women artists. This idea that it was okay to paint portraits, that was a way that you could still retain your sort of femininity and your delicacy and not compromise your reputation. And I'm wondering if you can think of other examples from your research and your experience of that kind of phenomenon in action.
- Yeah, I mean, God, what an ignorant comment that was, wasn't it? One about diminishing, what a portrait can be? Because I think it's important to remember too, that portraits and self-portraits have infinite amounts of functions in a way. A portrait can be propaganda. It can be a calling card to show say, this is how well I can paint myself. I can paint you equally well. It can be an exploration of a psychological reality. Or it can be a portrait of, or an illusion to cultural exclusion. Or it can be coded in an allegorical sense, or it can be photographic. It's this is what I look like and here I am now. So I think there are so many things a portrait can be that it's almost, you have to go on a case by case basis on what is the function and role of each of these pictures that we're looking at. As you said, an artist can once be glamorous and be in the society pages, but can also be responding to the horrors of World War II or representing a woman as a powerful maker of things in the midst of a global war where women's strength, moral and physical was depended on. You've got someone like Nora Heysen who was a fantastic painter, who was the first woman to win the Archibald Prize in Australia. And, she became Australia's first female war artist, and she travelled extensively for years, making really amazing records of nurses and doctors and soldiers on the field. She travelled a lot around the Pacific. She became quite ill, actually. She travelled so hard, was exposed to a lot of illness. And in this self-portrait from 1932, she depicts herself in her father's studio. And what I love about this self-portrait is, she's got some of her references on the wall, artists that she loved like Vermeer, but she's in a brown velvet jacket and again, talking, thinking about coded self-portraits. She bought that brown velvet jacket that she's in from the proceeds of an exhibition that she just had. So again, she's looking glamorous, but at the same time she's wearing a jacket that she has paid for through her own skills, this is a very beautiful self-portrait, but then 10 years later when she's in the midst of World War II and travelling around, she's not doing self-portrait so much as turning her gaze onto the suffering and the bravery of the servicemen and women that she encountered on her journeys around the war. So, also you think of someone like Lee Miller, a brilliant photographer who was also.
- Amazing.
- Yeah, it's, a woman might be glamorous and she might be in the society pages, but she might also be extremely brave and very perceptive.
- I can't help thinking of that. Nora Heysen's brown velvet jacket. I'm pretty sure that's the jacket she's wearing in this wonderful self-portrait that she did that's in our collection painted in 1934 just after she had been set up in a studio in London by herself. And it's just the most extraordinary little work and it is quite little, so when this work is installed at eye level, it really is as if you're looking at Nora sort of face-to-face, eye to eye. Our former director, Andrew Sayers used to say that this is a small painting, but it's monumental. And I love that sort of sense that this is unlike the other self-portraits that she did. In this, in the early 1930s, when she was in her early twenties, it's quite extraordinary that she was so accomplished at such a young age. She hasn't tried to portray herself as the artist, so that the palette and the references and the bottles of terps and the ease and so forth that you see in some of those other self-portraits from the early 1930s are completely absent from this one. She's just, she's not trying to convince anyone but herself now that she's in London, she's by herself, she's kind of looking herself in the eye. And so scrutinising herself rather than sort of presenting this kind of artist persona to an external audience or an external viewer.
- She had, I mean, she had a tough time in London during that trip. She was criticised by her, she was studying, even though she was so accomplished, she sort of went back to art school when she was here in London. And she was criticised by her teachers for not being sort of modern enough for not sort of like the modernist line, because she was never particularly interested in modernism. She saw friends of her father who was, of course, a famous painter of gum trees and landscapes, Hans Heysen. And they were very dismissive of her talent. She found London cold and she felt alienated. She was depressed about her work. So she'd had a very tough time here. And you can see this picture that it was a moment of great introspection and sort of analysing her place in the world, maybe. And she had to summon faith in herself, which is a very hard thing often to do it for an artist.
- Yeah, and she said that actually sort of later in life, she recalled that whenever she was starting out in a new place, she would paint a self-portrait as a way of creating herself and sort of marking out her territory, she said, and that is very much, I think, very significant at this sort of point of her life, because as you mentioned, her father, Hans Heysen was this celebrated Australian landscape painter. And even though he was very supportive of Nora and supportive of her becoming an artist and obviously very proud of her and encouraging. So she didn't have the same sort of barriers necessarily that other women of her generation might have experienced in wanting to pursue painting as a profession. I guess, having such a famous dad who was also an artist presented different sort of challenges in a way. So this is her really kind of staking out her own territory. He can have the gum trees and I'll have the faces and the figures. But yeah, I think probably in my top 10 favourites in our collection, it's absolutely wonderful. And she's such an extraordinary story. I think we could do a whole programme, talk for hours just about Nora Heysen and her portraiture. But as you say, she was one of those women, like the Zinkeisen sisters who demonstrated incredible sort of bravery and selflessness in her war art work, or her role as an official war artist. And you mentioned when we were talking about that briefly, you mentioned Leonora Carrington and Lee Miller, who of course were on the pretty much the very sort of pointy end of what was happening in France and Spain in the 1930s. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about Leonora?
- Leonora Carrington. She's born into a very wealthy upper-class English family who were very conservative and wanted her to tow the line and wanted to present it to the king and queen and basically live like a society woman and marry well and have babies, but she had other thoughts. When she was only 18, she met the surrealist Max Ernst at a dinner party in Highgate in London. And she ran away with him and they lived in the south of France where she painted some remarkable self-portraits, which were, she always associated with horses. She loved horses and her self-portrait, you can see the idea of there's a rocking horse on the wall, which perhaps she was identifying with as a young woman, as an animal that couldn't move, or at least couldn't be free of its shackles. But out of the window, we see a beautiful white horse galloping into the landscape, which essentially, which is what she did when she ran away from London and from high society to live with a surrealist in the south of France, who was a good 30 years older than her, and in front of her, there's a hyena. Animals are extremely important to Leonora Carrington. She always said that she preferred animals to humans. And in front of her is a female hyena who's coming towards her, and the hyena is lactating. Leonora is in her white jodhpurs. So she could ride the horse, she could escape. She's got her wild hair. Her hair is sort of lifting as if there's a wind, even though she's inside. So she's very much sort of identifying with the freedom of being outside and the natural world. And in the wonderful portrait that we see of that Lee Miller took of her and Lee Miller of course, was a Vogue model, a photographer, amused to many of the surrealists, such as Man Ray, for example. And when Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst living in the countryside in the south of France in the late 1930s, a lot of their friends came to visit them. And so Lee Miller came to stay with them and she took this wonderful portrait of Leonora Carrington who looks much older than her years actually. She's only sort of in her teens, early twenties here but she looks fierce and sort of something wonderfully ancient and powerful. And she always wore wonderful clothes, which were quite flamboyant. And there's another great photo by Lee Miller of Leonora Carrington cooking. And she's in a sort of long-flowing silk dress. And, she's looking fiercely and independently out at the camera. But just soon after this, the World War II happened in 1939. Of course, Max Ernst was interned, Leonora tried to free him, but she couldn't succeed. She ended up fleeing to Spain where she had a nervous breakdown and was actually put into a sanatorium and had a dreadful time there. And she wrote about this at length. Her parents bizarrely sent her nanny to rescue her in a battleship, but Leonora escaped from her nanny at a toilet window. And she then married out of convenience a Mexican diplomat, who also was, he wrote a lot about bull fights and they fled to New York where Max Ernst Ted had escaped to as well. But by then he had married Peggy Guggenheim. Leonora Carrington then stayed for a while in New York. But then she ended up moving to Mexico where she spent the rest of her very long life, where she became an amazing artist and writer. She was also instrumental in the feminist movement in Mexico. And she became lauded as sort of a great Mexican artist. Yeah, her life is really full of adventure and intrigue and bravery and creativity. She never really saw her family again. She cut herself off from them and she really became her own woman very rapidly and very powerfully. And of course, Leonora Carrington was part of a large group of really extraordinary artists living in Mexico City at the time postwar. And of course, one of the most famous is Frida Kahlo, who was one of the most prolific self-portraitists in the 20th century. And Frida had suffered a terrible accident on a bus when she was in her late teens. She'd also had polio when she was young. This accident almost killed her. And she spent the next few decades before she essentially died of her injuries, only a few, when she was in her late forties. She painted this self-portrait with the portrait of Dr. Farrell as a thank-you to one of her doctors and surgeons, Dr. Farrell, who had operated on her and helped alleviate some of the terrible pain that she was in. And she's depicting herself basically as a homage to her doctor, but she's in her wheelchair. You know, she's unable to walk. She's essentially holding her own body together with the help of her doctor, and she's raw and unflinching in her depiction of the pain that she was constantly in, but also in the solace of the imagination and in the solace that her creativity gave her because basically it helped her hold herself together during her decades of extreme pain. But Frida Kahlo was also, you read about her, she also had an incredible zest for life. She loved jokes. She loved watching Mark's brothers movies. She loved singing. She loved dressing up. She loved holding dinner parties. So she always managed to rise above the terrible misfortune that life had flung at her.
- Rita Angus, a woman from New Zealand who also has a remarkable self-portrait tradition. What can you tell us about her?
- Yeah, Rita Angus is a fantastic artist and she painted many, many self-portraits, right from when she was young as an art student in Christchurch to later in the fifties where she painted this self-portrait, which is called Rutu. And in this painting, Rita Angus is sort of exploring her place in the world. And also in New Zealand as a woman of Scottish descent, she was very aware that she was part of sort of colonial culture in New Zealand, but she was also deeply fascinated and admiring and reverential of Maori culture as well, and more broadly Polynesian culture. And so here, it's sort of a fusion of different cultures in this one painting, which she's trying to sort of forge her way in the world and work out what her place is in the world. So she depicts herself against a lush landscape with palm trees. There are references to Christianity in the fish on her collar. She has a halo around her head, which could also be seen as the hot Sun of the Southern Hemisphere. She was a white woman, but she depicts herself as brown-skinned. She's holding a flower, which could be a reference to the Virgin Mary holding lilies, or it could be a reference to a woman in New Zealand who is enthralled to the local flora and fauna. But I think too, it's important not to be too reductive about self-portraits. They don't necessarily have a single meaning. And, Rita Angus was a very complicated woman. She suffered a lot from mental health issues later in her life. She was a passionate and extremely hard-working artist who spent a lot of her time in isolation. And so this is a very sort of coded self-portrait and the ultimate meaning of which only she would know. But we can read things into it. The title Rutu, it's almost as if she's trying to rewrite her own name into possibly indigenous languages or as an alter ego.
- And I think from reading your book, I remember rightly she made a lot of work, but didn't necessarily sell much of it. Is that true?
- Yeah, she really didn't like letting go of her paintings and she did become much better known towards the end of her life. But after she died, they found so much work in her studio. She was deeply attached to her paintings and she just didn't want to let them go because in a sense they were her family. And so getting rid of them would've been like getting rid of a member of her family.
- Yeah, and I guess a bit like Frida Kahlo too, in that sort of health struggles and so forth was something that she sort of sought to overcome or worked through through her creativity, through her painting.
- And I'm sure many artists says definitely a therapeutic aspect to painting and to being an artist, because it's a way of having a conversation with the world, without someone telling you to be quiet or diminishing your power, or telling you what to do. When painting her self-portrait, she is powerful and empowered.
- Yeah, and in light of that, would you like to tell us a bit about Paula Modersohn-Becker?
- Yeah, Paula Modersohn-Becker, this extremely interesting self-portrait, which is Self-portrait at Sixth Wedding Anniversary in 1906, is not what it appears to be. Firstly, it's one of the first self-portraits which are naked or semi-naked that we know of by a woman in the West. She depicts herself as if she's pregnant, but actually she's not pregnant. She has just left her husband at this point. Her husband was an artist and they lived together in the German artist colony at Worpswede. She had run away to Paris where she joined her friends, Rilke the poet and his wife, Clara Westhoff, who is Paula's best friend, who was a sculptor who studied with Rodin. And in this painting, Paula Modersohn-Becker is actually celebrating her newfound freedom. Her married name was Paula Modersohn-Becker, but this painting, she actually signed PM, Paula Modersohn. She reverts back to her maiden name because she wanted to be alone. She wanted to be painting in Paris. She didn't want to have children with her husband and she didn't want to be in a married state. She was an absolutely brilliant painter. Around this time she's making paintings that rival those of Picasso, I think, and Matisse. They're powerful, they're original. They're enthralled to the past while looking forward. But very sadly she found it too tough to be in Paris financially. She was begging everyone we know for money, she knew, for money, rather. She wrote, she was a wonderful letter writer. And I really recommend that anyone who's interested in her reads her letters because she wrote fantastically wonderfully, lively, vivid impassioned letters to her friends and her family. So very sadly within a year, she had to move back to Worpswede because she just couldn't survive on her own. It was too tough. And very sadly she died 18 days after giving birth to her daughter, Matilda, who was her first child. She only had two exhibitions during her lifetime. The first one was widely panned, the second one was ignored. She only sold a few paintings in her lifetime. She left behind hundreds and hundreds of really extraordinary paintings. And she's on the cover of my book, her self-portrait. And because also she was broke, because she didn't have access, all the usual stories, she painted so many self-portraits and they're all absolutely amazing pictures. And even though she had a rather tragic life, I think it's important not to look at her life through the lens of sort of misery because actually she blazed with life and she was a lot of fun as well. And she, a woman who really lived her life to the full.
- And we mentioned that both Rita Angus and Paula ending their lives with lots and lots of work still in their possession. I wonder if you want to sort of comment on how if their works have entered public collections and that sort of time lag, I guess, between the creation of these, like you say, incredibly lively and fresh and powerful works, and why it took art history so long, I suppose, to actually start embracing their work?
- Yeah, I mean, Paula Modersohn-Becker now is in major collections. There's a museum dedicated to her in Germany. The painting on the cover of my book is owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And as to why women have been excluded from art history, that's a very long conversation. But essentially, art history reflects or the way traditional art history was written reflects the way history, traditional histories were written, which was, it reflects a patriarchal power structure. It was a story of men about men and mainly white men about white men. But of course, the 20th century and the 21st century, there's been a lot of very important revisionism happening with feminist art historians, such as Griselda Pollock, Rozsika Parker, Germaine Greer, Linda Nochlin, a lot of brilliant women exploring the role of women and why they were excluded and also casting light on the achievements of so many of these women. There have been great initiatives now, such as just across from the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery of Australia's Know My Name Initiative, which was not only two amazing exhibitions, but implemented also gender equity plan. And a lot of museums across the world are implementing gender equity plans and looking at their collections, looking at the emissions, proactively buying art work by women artists. And they're being written into art history in a way that should have happened a long time ago. I mean, remarkably, Giorgio Vasari was talking about, he talked about 13 women artists in his Lives of the Artists, but in two of the main 20th-century art history books by, for example, by Gombrich, no women are mentioned at all. I remember in the art history books I learned when I was at art school. And women were entirely written out of history until the 20th century. So, it's exciting, I think, that finally women are being discussed and included in the narrative, and it's that bloody.
- And hopefully we'll no longer have that situation. I mean, so many of the artists that we've discussed this evening, people like Nora Heysen, I'm thinking of Australia here, Grace Cossington Smith, all women artists who didn't really get sort of major retrospective or major kind of state or public gallery recognition until they were elderly ladies. I mean, we know that Nora Heysen had very successful exhibitions just before, actually the success of her exhibitions in the early 1930s enabled her to go to London to study. But apart from that, she was sort of like, I'll say, an elderly lady before she got a survey or a retrospective exhibition in Australia. And Cossington Smith, of course, was the same. So hopefully that situation's been reversed. And we can, I thought we might finish this afternoon or this evening's discussion with this wonderful self-portrait by Alice Neel, fabulous American painter who's also the painter who brings your book to a close.
- Yeah, absolutely. Alice Neel was born in 1900. So her life sort of spanned the 20th century. She led a very turbulent life. She didn't achieve fame really until she was well into her seventies. She spent decades painting, painting the people who, her neighbours. She lived in quite poor areas in New York. She painted people on the street, her neighbours, mothers, artists, people from the queer community, pregnant women, children. She was an incredibly passionate and perceptive portrait artist, but she very, very rarely painted herself. She painted a few sort of sketchy pictures when she was very young, but then never really turned her lens on herself until she was 80. And she's painted this picture, took her five years to paint, she kept revising it. She's painting herself in the chair that she often put her sitters into in her studio. And as you can see, she paints herself naked. You know, she's 80 years old. There's absolutely no shame about her ageing, sagging body. She depicts herself holding her paint brush full of power, full of energy, unabashed. This is my body, I live in it, it's great. And so I think it's a wonderfully empowering and empowered self-portrait. I love it.
- Well, thanks so much for your time, Jennifer, and for your insights and your knowledge. It's been absolutely wonderful to have you in the National Portrait Gallery via Zoom this evening, and to hear about your wonderful research and your fabulous book. So thank you so much.
- Oh, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. And congratulations on your brilliant show.
- Thank you.
