The Women Who Inspired London Art by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Women
ISBN: 9781526725264
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2019-01-19T00:00:00+00:00

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Female artists in Britain did an admirable job of documenting the First World War on the home front, which in turn elevated their influence. The government saw value in bearing witness to war with a woman’s eye. In 1918, the short-lived Ministry of Information commissioned two works from Flora Marguerite Lion, giving her special access to factories in Leeds and Bradford to paint women doing wartime work.

Lion was a painter who studied at St John’s Wood Art School and the Royal Academy. Her landscape training served her well in the cavernous factory environments. She was 35 years old at the time of the commissions, and had achieved prominence as a society portrait painter. She drew on both genres in her factory paintings, depicting the anonymous women as often weary but never bowed – a tribute to the more than a million female workers who kept the British munitions industry going during the war.

Other notable British artists who looked at the war with a woman’s eye include Olive Mudie-Cooke, Anna Airy, Clare Atwood, Norah Neilson Gray and Victoria Monkhouse.

Olive Mudie-Cooke was just 26 years old in 1916 when she joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) with her sister, Phyllis. They travelled to France together. Mudie-Cooke was one of the few women with access to the Front due to her skills as an ambulance driver. Shortly after the end of conflict she was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to depict the British Red Cross providing aid to soldiers in France.

Mudie-Cooke worked primarily in watercolours with a fluid, sometimes murky technique. Her subjects show great humanity. In one painting, medics comfort an injured peasant; in another, an aide lights a cigarette for a soldier in the dim interior of an ambulance. Mudie-Cooke’s war experiences might have coloured her perspective as an artist for many years to come had she not died in her thirties.

London-born Anna Airy also received a commission from the Imperial War Museum in 1918. Airy trained at the Slade School at the same time as future war artist William Orpen and his contemporaries. The museum’s commissioning committee hedged its bets with Airy – they built a right of refusal and non-payment into her contract, but ended up purchasing four large factory scenes from her.

Airy must have welcomed that income at a time when many London artists were still struggling. The war’s effect on the art market had been widely recognised – on 15 May 1916, Her Majesty Queen Mary attended an exhibition of female artists at the Georgian Gallery of Waring and Gillow. The Sporting Times noted that the queen, ‘showed her practical interest and sympathy in women artists who have been badly hit by the war.’ The queen acquired a number of works when touring the exhibition, displaying a deep interest in the women’s points of view. One of her purchases was a painting called The Golden Plum Tree by Airy.

Other female artists found work through international sponsors. Clare Atwood was born in London and studied at the Westminster School of Art and the Slade.

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