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Thursday 4 December 2008

Women on top

Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings
National Portrait Gallery, until 15 June

Carter’s portrait is hung alongside that of her patron, the formidable Mrs Montagu, Queen of the Blues (although in this study by Allan Ramsay she is exquisite in pink). Her home in Hill Street became the centre of this cultural nexus of poets, novelists, critics, artists and thinkers. Men — Burke, Johnson, Garrick — were also in attendance at these informal soirées where, since conversation, not fashion, reigned supreme, no one was expected to dress in fine silk stockings but could turn up in their plain blue worsteds. But for this brief interlude of about 50 years, from the late 1730s to the late 1780s, it was as if women had seized upon a rare opportunity to play a dominant role in the creative life of the capital.

The painter Richard Samuel captured the moment, rather as if he had taken a Polaroid snapshot, in a rare group study that he exhibited at the Royal Academy annual show in 1779. Nine of these ‘brilliant women’ are depicted as the Nine Muses in classical dress and pose. Carter and Montagu are joined by the singer Elizabeth Linley (who later married the playwright Sheridan), the novelist and journalist Charlotte Lennox (author of The Female Quixote), and Hannah More, a wonderful poet who was bold enough to lampoon her remarkable friends in her skittish poem, ‘Bas Bleu’. Catherine Macaulay, the historian, is also among the group, along with the novelist and playwright Elizabeth Griffith, the poet and biographer Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and the artist Angelica Kauffmann. The NPG owns the portrait but it is usually not on public view. I was very keen to see it, only to find that the women are portrayed with a disappointing blandness. Carter herself declared that she could not tell who was who, but on discovering that the painting had been engraved and circulated in the Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum-Book for 1778 she admits to an excitement to think ‘how our praises will ride about the World in every bodies pocket’.

Such pleasure was to be short-lived. The last of three rooms dedicated to these Brilliant Women has portraits of Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, both of whom were vilified for taking this new-found independence too far by supporting the Republican cause in France and pursuing a private life that was way outside the accepted boundaries of the time. In this room, too, is a small cartoon by Rowlandson from 1815 entitled ‘Breaking Up of the Blue Stocking Club’. The timing is crucial: this was the year of Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo. Rowlandson’s bluestockings are out of control, grotesque harridans brawling over their teapots. By 1823 Hazlitt was objecting, ‘I have an utter aversion to Bluestockings.’ That the term is still regarded as derogatory suggests that we’ve still not recovered.

More articles from: Kate Chisholm | this section

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