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BOOK REVIEW

Shannon Hunter Hurtado, Genteel Mavericks: Professional Women Sculptors in Victorian Britain. Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. 330pp. ISBN 978-3-0343-0756-7

Reviewed by Paula Murphy.

Shannon Hunter Hurtado’s proposed exploration of professional women sculptors in Victorian Britain is, in fact, a study of four among them – Mary Grant, Mary Thornycroft, Susan Durant and Amelia Paton Hill. Some contextualizing references to other female sculptors of the period are also included. Hurtado argues that these four women were renowned in their lifetime simply for being sculptors rather than for their art and suggests that their current obscurity results from that novelty factor, as well as from their lack of institutional recognition in their own day and from the subsequent and lengthy rejection of Victorian art (238). The title of the book derives from the expectation of genteel behavior in Victorian women combined, in the lives of these particular women, with the maverick nature of their choice of profession.

These four independent women did not form themselves into a group to fight their cause. They had no desire to be part of a “pink ghetto” (203) and did not establish an enclave in nineteenth-century London, in the manner of their American counterparts in Rome. Hurtado groups them together to fight their cause in hindsight. Genteel Mavericks is a ghetto of otherness, examining one woman after another under different headings – childhood; domesticity; earnings; publicity and more. To facilitate an overview of the information for comparative purposes, it began to seem as though a chart or spreadsheet would be required, with each woman allocated points for personality and sociability; a Yes or No to marriage or religion; or more perceptively an amount of children or earnings. Much of this information is revealing, such as, for example, the average number of sculptures that each of them produced in a year. But there is something defensive about the approach. Would we or do we ever examine and compare male sculptors under similar headings? These four women, who had professional relationships with their male peers, did not have similar relationships with one another, yet here they are locked in the world of the female sculptor and the contemporary attitudes to their place in the profession.

Leaving the issue of feminist art history aside, this book is rich with information. Hurtado has gleaned material from an extensive range of sources, both primary and secondary. The footnoting (helpfully at the bottom of each page) and bibliography suggest that no relevant document, published or otherwise, has been left unturned. Hurtado’s women were all working in London in the mid- to late-nineteenth century: Mary Grant – firm, impulsive and religious; Susan Durant – confident, lively and humorous; Mary Thornycroft – frank, practical and good-hearted; Amelia Paton Hill – dependable, diligent and curious. All four of them had significant sculptural practices, particularly in the area of portrait sculpture, which was the mainstay for sculptors in the nineteenth century. Busts of family and friends, as well as more official portraits abound and it was perhaps inevitable that their output would include more images of women. Their practice also incorporated memorial work and subject pieces, several of which were for churches. The work of our four sculptors is very much of its time, encompassing the usual traits of Victorian sculpture – a bit staid (Grant), fairly realistic (Thornycroft), occasionally vigorous (Hill), and sometimes sensitive (Durant).

They had varying intellectual abilities, Grant perhaps being the least intellectual among them; they all had some form of religious association, which was more or less influential in their lives; and they all sought, if not always explicitly, to advance the cause of women. They were all fortunate in their social skills. This was particularly important for women who were practicing artists, as hosting or attending dinners and parties were important sources of patronage in an age when women could not be seen to be touting for business. All four are presented as having been relatively happy in their domestic/family circumstances. It is Grant who seems to have been the least contented, usually setting her sights on the wrong or unavailable man and sublimating her lack of success in this regard in religion. Hurtado is coy in her discussion of their sexual relationships, perhaps because of lack of evidence. Curiously the book shows no inquisitiveness about lesbianism – rife in the Roman enclave and not uncommon in the art world in London at the time – or the manner in which it afforded a welcome independence for female artists, but which was often accompanied by social rejection.

Hurtado includes particularly interesting information on the critical reception of the work of these women sculptors, along with an examination of the role of the female sculptor in contemporary literature. The range of publications sourced and discussed is impressive. The literary texts of such disparate authors as John Henry Newman, Louisa May Alcott, Ouida (Louise de la Ramée) and Iota (Kathleen Mannington Kaffyn) among others, include female sculptors in the guise of religious heroines, frustrated students, brave romantics and “amateur mothers” (261). All suggest the importance of courage and self-sufficiency as attributes that enable them to sustain their professional careers, while revealing, in fictional form, the difficulties encountered by women as practicing sculptors. Perhaps inevitably, the dominant motif underscoring much of their role as protagonists in literature at the time is the domestic/professional conflict. The different attitudes of critical writers, male and female, are well analyzed. By comparison with the male sculptors, women received considerably less attention and the female critics, in particular, tended to avoid writing about or even to disparage the work of women sculptors in order not to be thought partisan.

The availability of extant material on these four women, and on women and women’s issues generally in the period in question, has made possible Hurtado’s wholly engaging study. Such would not have been possible with their Irish counterparts, of whom we know little more than their names. Easter Kennedy, Eliza Kirk, Jane Morgan, even Mary Redmond, whose public statue of Fr Mathew (1893) is in the center of Dublin, remain largely elusive as a result of the dearth of information about almost any aspect of their lives, in spite of a thriving business in sculpture in Ireland in the nineteenth century. Easter Kennedy’s Scenes at a Fair in the North of Ireland, shown at the Royal Academy in 1842, was noted as one of the highlights of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in 1851, yet we know little about her. There is no indication, in Hurtado’s book, of an associated world of sculpture in Ireland in the Victorian period, in spite of the fact that Dublin was the second metropolis of the British Empire at the time. Hill exhibited at the Royal Hibernian Academy in the 1868 and 1869 and at the International Exhibition in Dublin in 1865. Durant exhibited at the Dublin Exhibition in 1853 and Thornycroft at both 1853 and 1865 exhibitions. Mary Grant was an assistant in London to Irish sculptor John Henry Foley. A bronze version of Grant’s bust of Charles Stewart Parnell (1892), discussed in its plaster version in Hurtado’s text, is in the collection of Dublin City Gallery, the Hugh Lane.

The story of the four women might have been enriched by more comparative analysis with the male sculptors of the period – did the women do more or fewer child portraits than their confrères; how did their patrons/patronage compare? Did the men suffer from similar domestic catastrophes in the studio? Hurtado recounts, in her own words, a story from Hamo Thornycroft’s journal about how, when a toddler, he “picked up a hammer and chisel in imitation of his mother and struck off the finger of a figure she was carving, causing her to burst into tears” (96). This anecdote appears to confirm the professional woman in her domestic environment. Yet families of sculptors were legion in the nineteenth century, and such incidents must surely have happened to the master in the studio as much as to the mistress. It would also have been of interest to see more comparative analysis of the patrons of the four women.

There might be an interesting analogy with the life and career of the better-known French sculptor Camille Claudel in relation to that of Mary Thornycroft. If Claudel was often presented in the context of her brother Paul and her lover Rodin, Thornycroft was at times “overshadowed by the successes of the father, husband and son” and obituary notices identified her as “the daughter, the wife and the mother of sculptors” (59). Some of Hill’s work was attributed to her husband, who was a painter and did not sculpt (64 f.). Mary Grant’s family “implored her to desist from attempting anything so eccentric” as becoming a sculptor (35). Susan Durant, who was the least troubled by opposition to her career choice, nonetheless had a complex family life. She developed a relationship with Baron Henry de Triqueti, a Paris-based sculptor, with whom she had studied and served as assistant, and they had a son together. Intent on pursuing her career and remaining a spinster, however, she did not openly acknowledge the child (50), who lived with her friend Dr Elizabeth Blackwell. Durant, who was described as the child’s “French foster mother” (107), died in 1873, just three years after the boy was born. Triqueti, who was married and had several other children, died the following year. Henry Paul Harvey, as the boy was ultimately known, was orphaned at a young age.

Curiosity about the fate of Durant’s son uncovered the information that Triqueti’s daughter Blanche Lee Childe raised the youth until her death in 1886, when, then in his mid-teens, his care passed to Irish dramatist Lady Gregory. Gregory, who had a house in London, but whose base was at Coole Park in County Galway in the west of Ireland, was beginning to immerse herself in the Irish Celtic Revival at the time. Harvey, who went on to have a successful career both in the civil service and as a writer of reference books, married Gregory’s niece in 1896. He was familiar with many figures in the world of letters, including Henry James, with whom he was occasionally in correspondence. In a publication of James’s letters (The Letters of Henry James, Volume IV: 1895-1916, Leon Edel, ed., Harvard University Press, 1984, p. 398), Harvey is described, in a footnote, as the child of a French painter and an English governess (!), rather reducing the status of Durant, whose recognition in her profession was such that she was in a position to afford servants of her own and who was favored by commissions from Queen Victoria. Such was the fate of the woman sculptor who dedicated herself to her work.

The text is well punctuated with illustrations and it is particularly useful to have these images gathered in one place. Unfortunately, however, the images are poor in quality and deficient in information. The captions rarely include location. Take, for example, Hurtado’s early mention of Hill’s monument to David Livingstone (1876), which is accompanied by an illustration, the caption for which does not inform us of the whereabouts of the work. To know that this “landmark in the women’s movement” (284) is on Prince’s Street, Edinburgh, we must make our way to the list of illustrations at the beginning of the book. Subsequent discussion of the Livingstone statue, encountered more than a hundred pages later in the text, is unaccompanied by a figure number, which would serve the purpose of returning us to the image. The figure numbers in the index are equally unhelpful, not being assigned to particular works. All of which leaves the reader rummaging back through the pages, first to find the Livingstone image and then back further again to find all the relevant information. Ultimately I found it preferable to annotate the book, at least adding locational details to the captions.

The book retains some of the hallmarks of its origins in a PhD thesis (University of Manitoba, 2002), such as regular introductory pointers, telling us what will be explored and what will be ascertained, and occasional summaries to confirm the findings. Such details are usually intended to help the examiner remain focused. I admit that there were moments when I felt that I was sitting in judgment on a thesis rather than reviewing a book. So, would I be awarding the PhD? Well, yes I would, and with distinction if that were permitted. Despite these stylistic shortcomings and other inadequacies regarding its images this book must be read by anyone who purports to be interested in Victorian sculpture or in women artists generally. Hurtado is to be congratulated for a text that is illuminating in so many ways. Her concentrated research is revealing, as she intended, of the difficulties encountered and ultimately surmounted by women in the practice of their profession.

Paula Murphy is a senior lecturer in Art History in the School of Art History and Cultural Policy at University College Dublin. Her research focuses on sculpture and her book Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture, Native Genius Reaffirmed was published by Yale University Press in 2010. She is currently completing volume three – Sculpture 1600–2000 – in the Royal Irish Academy’s Art and Architecture of Ireland project.