Friendship as Methodology: Women Artists Working in Britain, 1871-1939

This thesis uses friendship as a methodological tool with which to reappraise the work and careers of women artists working in Britain in the decades on either side of the turn of the twentieth century. Not only does this reveal the centrality of friendship to the lives and work of these artists, it also offers a novel research method. Tessellating these artists’ lives and works together to form a fuller understanding of them is one solution to the challenge of researching artists whose extant works or archives are incomplete. This thesis is made up of four case studies, each of which addresses a different mode of relationship between women. Together they offer a fuller picture than currently exists of the true importance of female friendship to the lives of women artists in this period, and the breadth of forms these friendships could take.
These case studies are: the friendship of Annie Swynnerton and Susan Isabel Dacre, focusing on their travels together in Italy between 1874 and 1910; the Alma-Tadema household, focusing on the women who lived or worked there: Laura Alma-Tadema, Anna Alma-Tadema, Ellen Epps Gosse, and Emily Epps Williams; the group of friends who studied at the Slade School of Art between circa 1895-1898, focusing on Gwen John, Edna Waugh (later Lady Clarke Hall), Ursula Tyrwhitt, Ida Nettleship (later John), and Gwen Salmond (later Lady Smith); and the romantic and domestic partnership between Ethel Sands and Anna Hope ‘Nan’ Hudson. Each of these case studies brings together artists with vastly unequal amounts of extant works and archival material, allowing the work that does survive to speak for each member of the group, rehabilitating the stories of those who are difficult to study alone. Each case study also assesses the permeability between professional and personal relationships and physical spaces, elucidating changing norms of respectability, domesticity, and the importance of class in understanding the diversity of relationships between women.