Showcase of women’s artwork opens at Wirral gallery

Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists is on display until August 18.

Part of the ‘Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists’ exhibition at the Lady Lever Gallery (Image: Craig Manning / Newsquest)Featuring work by artists such as Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), Ingrid Pollard (b. 1953) and Dame Ethel Walker (1861-1951), the showcase considers how artists have used their practice to explore the issues of their day, asking questions about class, gender, politics, and more through their depictions of landscape.

Poster advertising the ‘Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists’ exhibition at Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight (Image: Craig Manning / Newsquest)In concentrating on work by women, the exhibition aims to interrogates the term “lady amateur,” which was often used in contrast to the “professional” artist title usually reserved for males, before exploring how women pushed for greater recognition as artists, particularly in the 19th century.

During a launch event at the Lady Lever on Thursday, Jessie Petheram, the exhibition’s co-curator, told the Globe: “Landscape art is so important in British art and art generally and I knew that women had been painting and drawing landscapes, had seen it all over collections and in my reading, but I had never seen an exhibition that brought all of that together, so that’s what I wanted to do with it.

“The exhibition draws on National Museums Liverpool’s fine art collections, which just shows how much opportunity there was to bring these landscapes together; there are a few loan pieces in the exhibition too.

“In the intervening years, it has just been even more clear to me how much this work matters to people. There has so much conversation about who gets to experience the landscape, who gets to walk and paint and do those sorts of things.

“The Lady Lever is a great exhibition space for this, because it’s not as big as The Walker in Liverpool, for example, so you can give a really focused view and I think it looks great. So visitors to the exhibition can give a bit more time and attention to it.”  

Samples of artwork on ‘Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists’ exhibition at Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight (Image: Craig Manning / Newsquest)Dr Melissa Gustin, curator of British Art at National Museums Liverpool, said: “One of the things that working on this show has shown me is how important women artists have been to The Walker, as was, back since the very day it was opened.

“Some of these acquisitions date to the very early 20th Century, they were collected when they were contemporary art bought from the exhibitions directly from the artists.

“So, not only is it about the real presence of women artists; in the collection, in art history, Liverpool has always been a home for contemporary women’s art and this show is one way of exploring that from 1800 to about 1987.”

Jessie Petheram, the ‘Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists’ exhibition’s co-curator and Dr Melissa Gustin, curator of British Art at National Museums Liverpool, at the Lady Lever Gallery (Image: Craig Manning / Newsquest)Presented chronologically, the paintings provide an insight into the lives and travels of the artists, many of whom travelled internationally.

They worked outdoors, or “en plein air,” as well as in studios. Their work documents the way they viewed and responded to the natural environment and social world surrounding them.

Poster advertising the ‘Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists’ exhibition at Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight (Image: Craig Manning / Newsquest)A painting by Harriet Gouldsmith (1787-1863), hailed as the first professional woman landscape painter, features, as does work by Dame Ethel Walker, who was only the second woman to receive a damehood for her services to the arts.

These artworks show how women began to embrace “messier” oil paints, previously reserved for male landscape painters while women worked with watercolours.

The exhibition charts the development of women’s landscape painting as women began to train in professional schools and their work became more commonplace in exhibitions. Elizabeth Forbes’ (1859-1912) painting, Blackberry Gathering, places women within the landscape itself. Forbes founded an art colony in Cornwall, exhibiting and selling work to major exhibitions internationally.

Sample of artwork on display in ‘Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists’ exhibition ay at Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight (Image: Craig Manning / Newsquest)Another View aims to show how, in the 20th century, artists used landscape to explore and critique the modern world through art.

Their work reflects developments in art, politics and social issues. A painting by Vanessa Bell, for instance, captures a quiet moment in France between the wars, while paintings by former war artists Mary Kessell (1914-1977) and Katerina Wilczynski (1894-1978) present more abstract views of the landscape.

Sample of artwork on display in ‘Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists’ exhibition ay at Lady Lever Gallery in Port Sunlight (Image: Craig Manning / Newsquest)

Visitors will also encounter the muted abstracts of Prunella Clough (1919-1999), alongside cropped landscape views by Winifred Nicholson (1893-1981). Meanwhile, works by Sheila Fell (1931-1979) and Ingrid Pollard interrogate the landscape of the Lake District in relation to themes of race and class. For both women, art could explore the impact of industry, capitalism and tourism as subjects within the landscape.  Another View also considers how landscapes presented opportunities for experimental art making, including etching and print making.

The artists represented used a wide range of innovative media. Etchings by Anna Airy (1882-1964) and Constance Mary Pott (1862-1957) are among those featured.

Entry to the exhibition is free. For more details go to liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/anotherview.

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