‘Nothing seems to have escaped her’: British Women Travellers as Art Critics and Connoisseurs (1775–1825)

Abstract

This study, based on a corpus of female-authored travel narratives published between the 1770s and the 1820s, aims at documenting how travel narratives facilitated women’s intervention in the artistic field and their involvement in nascent art criticism. It shows that these authors defied gendered expectations when discussing the old masters, history painting, and aesthetic canons. In order to substantiate further the long-investigated idea that travelling women felt empowered by the crossing of many actual and symbolic borders, this work draws on an additional corpus of reviews published in British periodicals and posits that public response to the publication of women’s travel narratives helped assert and shape their authority in the artistic field.