Going Places: Women Artists in Central London in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Middle-class women's experience of urban space has become the focus of a number of recent studies. Re-mapping the sexual geographies of the British capital, this essay shifts attention away from masculine strollers, feminine streetwalkers and leisured women, to focus on women artists who lived and worked in central London in the 1850s and 1860s. Wanting to succeed, or at least participate, in their chosen profession, women artists strategically positioned themselves at the centre of the nation's art world. And in pursuing this profession, they moved in and across central London, going to study and research, buy materials, visit exhibitions, and network with colleagues. The essay considers the re-organisation of domestic space and creation of a 'counter-tactics' of the habitat; the artistic neighbourhood of Fitzrovia; walking and wandering in the urban environment to sample its transitory delights and unexpected pleasures; a 'spatiality of dissent' with the founding of a women's centre; and a raft of images of middle-class women walkers and travellers in relation to the visual mapping of London during a period of expansion, change and colliding representation. Drawing on the writings of Elizabeth Grosz and Beatriz Colomina, the essay concludes with a discussion of the relations between city space and corporeality, visuality and obscenity centred on an analysis of Emily Mary Osborn's painting, Nameless and Friendless, which portrays a woman artist in an art dealer's shop in London's West End.