Women landscape artists celebrated at Lady Lever Art Gallery

A spotlight is being shone on the work of female landscape artists at the Lady Lever Art Gallery this summer.

Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists features around 40 works by painters including Vanessa Bell, Dame Ethel Walker and Ingrid Pollard.

There are also works by Harriet Gouldsmith, hailed as the first professional woman landscape painter, Elizabeth Forbes, Constance Mary Pott, Prunella Clough, Winifred Nicholson, Elizabeth Blackadder, Helen Allingham, Barbara Bodichon, John Moores' junior prize winner Sheila Fell, and war artists Mary Kessell and Katerina Wilczynski.

And the exhibition features a trio of newly-acquired works by pioneering early 19th Century mountaineer, archaeologist and artist Elizabeth Campbell, painted two centuries ago and now seen in a public art collection for the first time.

Another View, presented chronologically, consider how artists have used their practice to explore the issues of their day, asking questions about class, sex, politics, and more through their depictions of landscape.

And it examines the term ‘lady amateur’ which was used to describe many female artists, before exploring how women pushed for greater recognition as artists, particularly in the 19th Century.

Many works on show come from the Walker Art Gallery collection, accompanied by key loans from galleries including the Atkinson at Southport, the Whitworth in Manchester and the V&A, and include paintings, etchings and drawings.

Above: a gallery of images from the exhibition including Bedouins by the Dead Sea by Lady Caroline Gray-Hill (1843-1924) who split her time between Birkenhead and the Middle East c. National Museums Liverpool.

The exhibition was the brainchild of Jessie Petheram, previously National Museums Liverpool's Assistant Curator of Fine Art with a particular interest in both landscape and the organisation's large prints and drawings collection.

It was through these that she discovered the albums of Anne Holt - sister of Liverpool shipowner and collector George Holt of Sudley House - who captured her travels in pencil and watercolour, including sketching enslaved people on plantations in the pre-Civil War US.

Holt's work in turn sparked her interest in exploring more of NML's collection to uncover other landscape works drawn and painted by women artists.

It was also Petheram who was responsible for NML acquiring seven artworks by Elizabeth Campbell, dating from the early 1820s when the intrepid adventurer travelled on the Continent, and several of which have now been included in the exhibition.

Above: Mont Blanc from Above Coligny,1818 by Elizabeth Campbell

Melissa Gustin, Curator of British Art at National Museums Liverpool, said: “Far from just painting pretty watercolours, this exhibition shows how women landscape painters used their art to express their individual gazes, representing multiple viewpoints along the way.

“They explored and interrogated the landscape around them, developing important networks and experimenting with new mediums and techniques in the process.

"We’re looking forward to sharing their stories and celebrating their work, which has perhaps been overlooked historically within the narrative of British landscape painting.” 

Another View: Landscapes by Women Artists is at the Lady Lever Art Gallery from April 20 to August 18.