Peek around an elaborate wood screen and into a lush garden. It’s a watercolor by Anna Alma-Tadema, painted when she was nineteen and her family (her father, Dutch painter Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and her stepmother, British artistLaura Theresa Alma-Tadema) was renovating a home in London’s St John’s Wood. Sir Lawrence’s studio was in the back garden, and Anna used its loggia as a makeshift workspace of her own; there she captured this and other slices of her family’s domestic life and collections.
Later, Anna got a proper studio in the main house. This dedicated workspace was very important to her, explains Alexis Goodin, curator of A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875–1945, on view this summer at the Clark Art Institute. “Her production completely shifted. We see her stop with the wonderfully detailed interiors and move to landscapes and portraits of family and friends.” This later period is represented by a 1902 watercolor Girl in a Bonnet with her Head on a Blue Pillow (Maisie). “This watercolor is exquisite. When you see it in person, it just glows,” Goodin says.
“[Anna] was an amazing practitioner of a very tricky medium. Watercolor had long been considered polite or appropriate for amateurs or upper-class women. But contemporary press reviews highlight her incredible skill. As a professional artist, she took these old traditional notions and turned watercolor into a tour de force.”
After the 1912 death of her father, Anna moved out of the home and lost her studio space, at which time she stopped creating art. There could have been other reasons for this, but her artistic trajectory demonstrates how important it was to have physical space and financial support to be creative, Goodin says. That idea is borrowed from Virginia Woolf ’s contemporaneous essay “A Room of One’s Own,” and sets up the framework for this exhibition, which features twenty-five women artists working in a range of mediums in the late Victorian era through World War II.
The artists’ works are divided to represent four physical spaces—home, art school, studio, and exhibition sites—to demonstrate the ways women, successfully or not, negotiated these arenas to advance their artistic and societal aspirations.
In the “Home” section, ten ceramic plates are on view from a commission of forty-eight featuring portraits of famous women painted by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. “It’s a great history lesson on women who were artistic or women of letters, shown on plates—the most humble object in the home,” Goodin says. Bell and Grant “turned something utilitarian into this ‘wow’ moment for what women have done in the past and perhaps what they might do in the future.” In the “Art School” room, an embroidery by May Morris represents her teaching ethic and desire to elevate needlework to a fine art. In the “Studio” section is a painting by Winifred Knights, The Deluge, that recalls a competition for a scholarship to the British School at Rome.
Knights was ill in the lead-up to the contest and submitted her work incomplete. She still won (she was the first woman to receive the decorative painting prize), which entitled her to three years of school and studio space and enabled her to travel around Italy to study art and meet other artists. The show highlights these and other works borrowed or recently acquired by the Clark Art Institute. “The Clark is actively adding to its permanent collection the work of artists who have been underrepresented. We needed to change our collecting trajectory to tell more stories and enrich our collection with works of art that haven’t been on the radar of previous collectors or our founders,” Goodin says.
The show is perfectly timed to showcase this new collecting emphasis beyond the museum’s famed French impressionist holdings and to celebrate women artists and their activism whether in artistic, political, or social realms.
Several other summer exhibitions further demonstrate the Clark’s expanded scope: Berenice Abbott’s Modern Lens ( July 12 to October 5) showcases the pioneering American photographer’s early work in Man Ray’s studio in 1920s Paris; in Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time ( July 19 to October 13), viewers will observe the Japanese American artist’s work in a variety of times and mediums; and in Ground/work 2025 (to October 12, 2026), the Clark takes advantage of its 140-acre campus to feature specially commissioned works by six international contemporary artists.
—Katy Kiick Condon
A Room of Her Own: Women Artist-Activists in Britain, 1875–1945 • Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts • to September 14 • clarkart.edu
