English Pre-Raphaelite artist Anna Blunden, later Anna Blunden Martino, worked as a governess but quit to attend art school after reading the first volume of John Ruskin’s seminal Modern Painters (1843). She became a devotee of Ruskin, who was a critic of the new industrial capitalism and inspired Victorians as diverse as Cardinal Henry Edward Manning and Oscar Wilde. Blunden echoed Ruskin’s opinions about the dehumanizing effects of modern urbanism in this painting, which dramatizes the plight of workers who came to London seeking employment but found the pollution and poverty of the early Industrial Revolution. She depicts a young fair-skinned seamstress, hands folded in prayer during a break from work on a long-sleeve white shirt, gazing out a window into a smoggy sky. Factory chimneys rise from the cityscape in the distance. At the time, she was living in City Road, Finsbury, and the view of the London skyline seen through the window was probably painted from her lodgings. This was the first painting Blunden exhibited publicly at the Society of British Artists in 1854, where it was accompanied by a quotation from Thomas Hood’s poem “The Song of the Shirt” (published in “Punch” at Christmas 1843) that gives voice to a “weary and worn” seamstress as she longs for her youth in the countryside: For only one short hour To feel as I used to feel, Before I knew the woes of want, And the walk that costs a meal! In 1867, Blunden went to study in Italy, settling in Rome until 1872. In April that year, she heard that her youngest sister, Emily, who had married an Italian called Martino and gone to live with him in Birmingham, had died in childbirth. She returned to England and, flouting the Table of Affinities, married Martino herself. Her later life was spent in Birmingham, where her husband established the Martino Steel & Metal Company and she exhibited for many years with the Birmingham Society of Artists.

“The Song of the Shirt” (aka “For Only One Short Hour”) by Anna Elizabeth Blunden (English) - Oil on canvas / 1854 - Yale Center for British Art (New Haven, Connecticut) #womeninart #ArtText #art #womanartist #femaleartist #AnnaElizabethBlunden #AnnaBlunden #womensart #YCBA #YaleCenterforBritishArt

#WilliamHogarth (1697-1764)
Portrait of #WilliamCavendish, Duke of Devonshire (1720-1764), Prime Minister of Great Britain, who was #BornOnThisDay
1741
#YCBA
#LordCavendish

This Lewis painting depicts a young woman in idealized traditional regional dress standing on a balcony above a sandy Mediterranean coast. Her colorful attire with hues of green, orange, and purple, contrasts with the neutral tones of the building and balustrade. It is minute details like the specked face blended with the heavy gouache of the folk costume that stand out. In July 1840, Lewis left Britain for a decade, traveling through the Mediterranean and finally settling in Cairo, where English novelist Thackeray described him as living “a dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life.” Lewis’s stay in the East inspired a shift in his style towards a meticulous handling and a luminous, high-toned palette mixed with copious amounts of gouache, already seen in this watercolor from his visit to Athens on his way to Cairo. This trip inspired a shift in his style away from an emphasis on heavy tone and dramatic effect towards a meticulous handling and a luminous, high-toned palette mixed with copious amounts of gouache. A Greek Girl Standing on a Balcony exemplifies this new approach, which won him considerable acclaim when he returned to England. In 1852, Lewis was hailed as watercolor’s greatest living exponent with The Art Journal calling his style “the ne plus ultra of finish in water-color art.”

A Greek Girl Standing on a Balcony by John Frederick Lewis (British) - Watercolor and gouache over graphite on paper / 1840 - Yale Center for British Art (New Haven, Connecticut) #womeninart #art #painting #JohnFrederickLewis #ycba #yale #artwork #womensart #greek #britishartist #lewis #watercolor