Old mistresses. Women, Art and Ideology

[…] An example from the development of the stratification in the fine arts themselves, the history of flower painting, provides the necessary link between sex and status. It shows how the presence of women in large numbers in a particular kind of art changed its status and the way it was seen. Flower painting originated as a branch of still-life painting all over Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, becoming a major genre in Holland during the seventeenth century and continuing to attract a substantial number of practitioners well into the twentieth century. A few women were involved in flower painting from the beginning, for example Fede Galizia (1578-1630), Clara Peeters (1594-post 1657) and Louise Moillon (1610-96). Flowers were used as metaphors richly resonant with meaning, and were symbolic of morality, appearing as allegories of vanity and the cycles of human life, birth, blossom, death and decay.

The still-life by Maria van Oosterwijk (1630-93) is a most comprehensive example of the gtenre of vanitas or ‘vanity’ painting and contains symbols which, in the language of still-life compositions, express a moral on the transience of worldly things, the vanity of earthly pleasure, the brevity of life. Oosterwijk’s Vanitas points to the ambivalence of the genre which ostensibly warns against preoccupations with earthly things while using the illusionism of oil paint to celebrate and reproduce material possessions. Each object is accurately and sensitively reproduced, as a reminder perhaps that the very strength of worldly pleasure, possessions and consumption depends upon its evanescence. Oosterwijk included an enormous range of examples from the three groups of objects commonly used to convey this moral. The professional life is represented by the pen and ink. Worldly wealth is symbolized by the account book and coins. Frivolous pastimes are present in the flute lying on the music and a glass of aquavita. All the accompanying flowers, animals and insects contribute to the theme; the anemone, for example, is associated with sorrow and death and the knapsack stands for the journey of life.

Yet despite the complicated icnographic programmes of many flower paintings, one twentieth-century commentator wrote: ‘Flower painting demands no genius of a mental or spiritual kind, but only the genius of taking pains and supreme craftsmanship’ (M.H.Grant, Flower Painting Through Four Centuries, 1952, p.21). The explanation for Grant’s blindness can be found within his own text: In all three hundred known years of their production, the total practitioners of flowers down to 1880 is less than 700 and of these by no means all are florists pur-sang, that is to say unassociated with various forms of still-life. Whilst only a very small proportion are artists of the highest or even high merit. Actually, more than 200 of these are of late eighteenth and nineteenth century and at least half of them are women. (p.21) By the late eighteenth century flower painting had become a common genre for women artists. The characterization of flower painting as petty, painstaking, pretty, requiring only dedication and dexterity is related to the sex of a large portion of its practitioners, for as the following comment by the late nineteenth-century writer Léon Legrange shows, the social definition of femininity affects the evaluation of what women do to the extent that the artists and their subjects become virtually synonymous: ‘Let women occupy themselves with those kinds of art they have always preferred…the paintings of flowers, those prodigies of grace and freshness which alone can compete with the grace and freshness of women themselves’ (‘Du rang des femmes dans l’art’, Gazzete des Beaux-Arts, 1860). One can hardly imagine a serious art historian attempting to explain Michelangelo’s David by equating is lithe, athletic vigour with the temperament and physique of the artist himself. The historical process by which women came to specialize in certain kinds of art and the symbolism of still-life and flower painting have been obscured by the tendency to identify women with nature. Paintings of flowers and the women who painted them became mere reflections of each other. Fused into the prevailing notion of femininity, the painting becomes solely an extension of womanliness and the artist becomes a woman only fulfilling her nature. This effectively removes the paintings and the artists from the field of the fine arts. Descriptions of flower paintings by the nineteenth-century critics and modern art historians employ exactly the same terms that are used to justify the secondary status accorded to crafts, which are similarly described as manually dexterous, decorative and intellectually undemanding. […]