Out of obscurity: the artist Jane Maria Bowkett (1837-1891)
Date
2009-12-17T19:09:09Z
Authors
Laycock, Kathleen Mary
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Abstract
This thesis assembles a biographical portrait of the understudied Victorian figure painter Jane Maria Bowkett. I place Bowkett in the context of her family and London's nineteenth-century art world, a milieu in which professional identity and commercial success was determined by gender and class. As a professional artist. working for money, Bowkett contravened socially constructed ideals of feminine dependency. Through this study, I establish that little-known artists and commonplace pictures can contribute substantially to the historical record. Bowkett's paintings provide an untapped source of market-dependant work practices as well as a record of the middle classes' preference for particularly British scenes. Women form the subject of Bowkett's narrative genre pictures, which affirm and fracture class distinctions, index social progress, and subvert ideologically coded feminine norms.
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Keywords
women painters, London, England, history