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12/3/2008

Brilliant Women

National Portrait Gallery, London

Celebrating Modern Muses - A Revolution in Female Manners

Curated Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz

-The first exhibition to explore the culture, impact and identity of the Bluestockings, and their followers, who forged new links between gender, learning and virtue in 18th-Century Britain

- 50 works including oil portraits, drawings, satires and personal artefacts. Rediscovered portraits as well as well loved masterpieces by Romney, Kauffmann, Ramsay, Vigée-LeBrun and Robert Adam

From Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Germaine Greer, influential women and early feminists have lamented their lack of foremothers. A major new exhibition Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings at the National Portrait Gallery, London, aims to show how a remarkable group of creative and intellectual women in eighteenth-century Britain were celebrated as icons of patriotic pride and came to symbolise the progress of a civilised and commercial nation.

Publicly celebrated in their time, these women, who met together in salons and were known as 'bluestockings', invented a new kind of informal sociability and nurtured a sense of intellectual community among the writers, artists and thinkers who attended their 'conversation parties'. Active in art, literature and even political thought, the bluestockings were not just brilliant - they were exceptional, both for their individual accomplishments and for collectively pushing the boundaries of what women could undertake or achieve.

Initially associated with a specific social group, the term 'bluestocking' came to apply to creative and intellectual women more generally. This is a tribute to the high profile they achieved, and their contribution to the emerging debate on equality between the sexes, in an age when women had few rights and little chance of independence.

With well-known masterpieces by Kauffmann, Romney and Elizabeth Vigée-LeBrun, as well as rediscovered portraits, graphic satires and other personal artefacts, the exhibition considers the way a wider group of 'bluestockings' used portraiture to advance their work and reputations in a period framed by Enlightenment and Revolution. By considering fine art alongside various commemorative items and other popular culture, Brilliant Women explores how the educated woman was, for the first time, celebrated as a figure of national pride.

The exhibition begins by introducing the fashionable Bluestocking Circle. This tight-knit group of metropolitan intellectuals who first began to meet in the 1750s became a model for rational 'Enlightenment' forms of sociability. The Bluestocking salons were held in the London homes of the hostesses Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey and Frances Boscawen. Together the Bluestockings - who included a number of eminent men who believed that women should be allowed to pursue an intellectual life - advanced the status of female education through the creation of social networks, acts of patronage and charity. Participants included scholar and classical translator Elizabeth Carter, critic and writer Samuel Johnson, novelist Fanny Burney, artists Frances Reynolds and her brother Sir Joshua, and writer and dramatist Hannah More.

The second section of the exhibition, Celebrating Modern Muses explores how creative and intellectual women pursued their vocations in the predominantly male worlds of art and literature. A series of stunning portraits reveals how women managed their representation to advance their reputations. Ancient history and mythology were often invoked to justify contemporary behaviour and a positive view of modern female creativity was made by reference to the nine Muses of Classical Antiquity. These sister goddesses, who embodied the arts and sciences, were used in the arts as powerful examples of what women might achieve.

A Revolution in Female Manners focuses on the rise and fall of the republican historian Catharine Macaulay and the early 'feminist' Mary Wollstonecraft. Both held radical beliefs, greeted the French Revolution with enthusiasm and spoke out for women's rights. But their troubled reputations were due less to their uncompromising politics, and more to their rejection of traditional female behaviour, especially in their liberal attitudes, outspoken political opinions and unconventional sexual lives. In a changing moral climate which saw new limits placed on self-expression, the traditionally demarcated roles of the sexes was emphasized once again. Bluestocking ­ once a mark of distinction ­ became a term of abuse.

The scandals surrounding Macaulay and Wollstonecraft are contrasted with the huge success of the evangelical Christian social reformer Hannah More. She did not believe in women's rights. Instead, she promoted the traditional female duties of charity, piety and child-rearing as the foundation of a new model of female activism which dominated the Victorian age.

Despite the fact that 'bluestockings' made a substantial contribution to the creation and definition of national culture their intellectual participation and artistic interventions have largely been forgotten. The exhibition, by combining a historical and biographical approach, reveals the social history and significance of the bluestockings and their culture.

Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings is co-curated by Dr Elizabeth Eger, Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature at King's College, London and Dr Lucy Peltz, 18th Century Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Sandy Nairne, Director of the National Portrait Gallery, London, says: 'These were remarkable, brilliant women and the "bluestockings" are an excellent subject for the National Portrait Gallery to explore.'

Modern Muses, a display of photographs by Bryan Adams, commissioned by BlackBerry, will accompany the exhibition (Room 34). Featuring today's outstanding women from different fields of achievement, including arts, charities and business, pictured at different points in their respective careers, this display has 21 subjects. Photographed over a period of just four days in autumn 2007, these include Annie Lennox, Zaha Hadid, Darcey Bussell and Kanya King.

Charmaine Eggberry, Managing Director and Vice President, Research In Motion, EMEA says: 'We are absolutely delighted to be working with the National Portrait Gallery to highlight and profile some truly extraordinary women. The Modern Muses display celebrates the achievements of inspiring role models in diverse fields including the arts, literature, business and science.'

PUBLICATION

A fully-illustrated book by the curators, Dr Elizabeth Eger and Dr Lucy Peltz, accompanies the exhibition and additionally establishes the legacy of the bluestockings for successive generations of creative and literary women. Priced £18.99, available in hardback only. Published 13 March 2008.

For further press information please contact: Neil Evans, Press Officer, National Portrait Gallery, Tel 020 7312 2452 (not for publication) Email nevans@npg.org.uk

NOTES TO EDITORS AND DEFINITION OF 'BLUESTOCKING'

Bluestocking a scholarly or intellectual woman. [from the blue worsted stockings worn by members of an 18th century literary society]

The term arose through a visit to a Bluestocking gathering from the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet, who was a close friend of Elizabeth Montagu, the literary critic and salon hostess. He famously came to one of her meetings wearing the blue woollen stockings normally worn by working men, instead of more formal white silk. The term 'bluestocking' subsequently became associated with these/such conversation parties, which included many men who offered intellectual support to women.

Stillingfleet was among the first English advocates of the Linnaean system of plant classification. In the portrait featured in the exhibition he is seen holding a volume of Linnaeus's work and a magnifying glass beside a table scattered with grasses, in reference to his recent work, Observations on Grasses (1759).

Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings was made possible through the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council

The BlackBerry and RIM families of related marks, images and symbols are the exclusive properties and trademarks of Research In Motion Limited.

Image: Hannah More by Augustin Edouart, 1827 cut black paper with wash © National Portrait Gallery, London

Press View: Wednesday 12 March 11am-1pm (curators' tour at 11.30am)

National Portrait Gallery
st Martin's Place London

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