Exhibition Review: Brilliant Women at the National Portrait Gallery

by Natalie Bennett

It is something of a surprise that in an exhibition entitled Brilliant Women, focusing on England’s great saloon group of the 18th century, the first painting is of a man, Benjamin Stillingfleet, a botanist and close friend of Elizabeth Montagu, who can be blamed for the title blue stocking, after he came to a gathering wearing blue wool stockings rather than formal white silk. But he seems like a decent sort, as those stockings would suggest. He was a Linnean, and is pictured holding one of the great botanist’s bools, and the table is decorated with grasses reflecting his recent (1759) book on the subject. You can’t see his stockings, but he is wearing what is certainly a very fine white shirt with frilly sleeves.

Beside him is one of the intellectual stars of the Bluestocking Circle, Elizabeth Carter, painted in about 1738 when she was 21 and already a celebrated poet, with Samuel Johnson celebrating her as a rival to Alexander Pope. (Okay, hands up who’s read Pope but not Carter – you can remedy that on Google Books.) She must have had to have been careful with the inkpot, given the lemon silk dress she is wearing.

The circle first met at Montagu’s home in Hill Street, Mayfair, probably often in her dressing room, which had a Robert Adam ceiling and matching carpet, for which there are drawing here, suggesting the privilege that enabled Montagu to be a grand patron. Later as a rich widow, with income from coal mines in Northumberland, she built a mansion on Portman Square, which gave her gatherings a less intimate scale.

A painting of Montagu by Allan Ramsay shows her with a remarkably intelligent, thoughtful gaze – she is here at the head of the gallery, as she would have been at the head of the table.

The visitor then meets a selection of the women she supported – although often obscured by the mists of history. An engraving of Hester Chapone gives little sense of the person. Her letters to Samuel Johnson on a woman’s right to choose her husband made her name in her youth, and with Montagu’s encouragement she published letters on the improvement of the mind, on female education, which Wollstonecraft regarded with approval.

Frances Boscawen, a literary hostess and letter writer, held her salon at her home in South Audley street. Hannah More, initially part of this circle, wrote “To sensibility”, an epistle to Mrs Boscawen, to celebrate her ability to balance reason with feeling.

Next up is Hannah herself, painted by John Pie in 1786: something unbalanced in her eyes suggests the evangelical she would become in the next decade. In the next room is Frances Reynold’s take on More, also displays something of her weakness of character, her lack of backbone that took her in a different direction to most of the proudly independent women here.

By contrast is the strong image of Elizabeth Carter as Minerva, who has laid down her spear in favour of a copy of Plato. (You couldn’t call it great art, but it is still a lovely picture, rediscovered in the researching of this exhibition.) She’s clearly presented as a moral role model for learned and creative professional women.

Nearby is Katherine Read’s portrait of Carter in late middle age. Her strong features have matured rather than aged, and she’s very much the successful, solid Roman matron that she’s painted as, who’s made her place (entirely ahistorically, of course) as an intellectual. At time she was preparing the second edition of her translation of Epicetus.

But times would change – during the loss of America and the uncertainties of the Napoleonic era, a new conservatism gripped British society – the 18th-century version of the backlash, which hit particularly hard at the historian Catherine Macauley and Mary Wollstonecraft. There’s some of the vicious satires so typical of the period here, and an engraving of the larger than life statue of Macauley that in 1777 her doting admirer, the Rev Thomas Wilson, erected in his London church, St Stephen Walbrook. This depiction of a republican woman as a pagan deity in a church caused a huge scandal. That she later eloped with a manual worker half her age — an act so hard to square with the patrician matron leaning regally on her books here — didn’t help.

It is tempting here to engage in a bit of speculative history – had there not been a backlash, or had less arrogant, perhaps women less disdainful of public mores, been the predominant female intellects of the ages – how far might women have advanced in the 19th century?

But leaving Brilliant Women, you pass Paul Rego’s brilliant portrait of Germaine Greer, in its regular place in the gallery, and without the speculation, are able to give thanks today that women can be both brilliant and transgressive and, more or less, get away with it.

---

Brilliant Women continues at the National Portrait Gallery until June 15. Entry free. Online you can listen to a series of related recordings.