BRITISH WOMEN ARTISTS 1750-1950
a British Art Network Research Group
Ailsa Boyd (Independent Researcher)
My research and teaching encompasses Victorian women artists, particularly those grouped as women Pre-Raphaelites, the Glasgow Girls and other Scottish women artists, designers and makers of the late nineteenth century. My current research on Victorian interior design and literature examines how writers decorated the homes in their novels and those they actually lived in. The wider context of the Aesthetic movement and Arts and Crafts includes the work of Rhoda and Agnes Garrett, pioneer interior designers and writers of Suggestions for House Decoration (1877). I catalogued the collection of painter and designer Beatrix Whistler at the Hunterian Art Gallery (University of Glasgow), and published ‘Finding Beatrix Whistler: A Paradigmatic Victorian Woman Artist’, Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History (2005), which interrogated the context of her two more famous artistic husbands, E.W. Godwin and J.McN. Whistler. I am also interested in women collectors, and those who wrote on art and interior design, e.g. Mrs Orrinsmith, Lady Haweis.
Keywords: Interior design; literature;
artist colonies; collectors
household taste; Beatrix Whistler; R. & A. Garrett; Glasgow Girls; Women Pre-Raphaelites; Aesthetic movement; Arts and crafts.
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