Goodwood celebrates its women artists

The talk will be at Goodwood House on Tuesday, March 19 at 6.30pm with tickets available on https://www.goodwood.com/visit-eat-stay/goodwood-house/women-artists-at-goodwood/ There will be a welcome by The Duchess of Richmond and a champagne and canapé reception in the state apartments. The Goodwood Collection has works by 18th-century female artists including Angelica Kauffman, Anne Damer and Katherine Read as well as pictures by contemporary artist Holly Frean.

Focusing predominantly on women artists of the 18th century, Clementine will explore the limits facing female artists of the period, but she will also show that there were more female artists who were recognised and lauded in their day than we might expect.

Kauffman, Damer and Read all exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, and Kauffman was a founding member. Clementine offers the evening as an opportunity to hear about these women artists and their works at Goodwood and also to see some of their pictures. Highlights include Angelica Kauffman’s portrait of Mary, Duchess of Richmond and Katherine Read’s pastel work of Lady Louisa Lennox, which are not usually on public display.

Clementine became curator at Goodwood in October 2022: “I have been here a year and a bit and I love it. It is an absolutely an amazing place to work, and the Duke is a fantastic boss because he is so invested in history which makes my job infinitely interesting. I just think that to talk about history is really important and this aligns with my particular interests. My passion is talking about history and spreading the joy of it, and to talk about the art is one of the things that I really wanted to do at Goodwood. Goodwood is so well known for sport and its great sporting heritage and obviously that's a hugely important part of it, but we have also got such an amazing art collection and such an amazing history. I don't think we talk about that enough and I am on a mission to change that! It is a brilliant history. We have got the royal link with Charles II but we have got so many wonderful stories and we have an annual exhibition. I am trying to make more of that. This year's exhibition will run from May to October.

“In our collection we have four female artists represented and for a collection of its size that's quite a lot, just under two per cent. In the National Gallery it is just under one per cent. There were obviously fewer women artists than male but what I've actually found while researching this is that there are actually more than you would expect. But there were significant limits. The largest was that women at the time could not paint the male nude. It was not deemed respectable for them to do that. It was not thought right that women should engage in that. And it did matter because at that time there was a tier in art, the top tier in art, which was about history painting and it was considered that to paint history you needed to have a command of the male figurative nude. If you could not paint that, you could not participate in the top tier and so a lot of women were portraiture artists which was ranked the lowest form of art, the least intellectual.”

But as Clementine will argue their achievements were significant.