Courtauld Exhibition Rewrites British Landscape, Putting Women Artists Back in the Picture

A rainbow hangs over a narrow Cumbrian valley in a small watercolour now on the wall at London’s Courtauld Gallery. A churchyard nestles below the hills, washed in damp northern light that would not look out of place in a textbook on British Romanticism.

The scene, painted in 1849, is the Lake District as generations of viewers have been taught to see it. But the artist is not J.M.W. Turner or John Constable. It is Fanny Blake, a 19th-century painter few visitors are likely to recognize.

Blake’s A Rainbow over Patterdale Churchyard, Cumbria, jointly acquired in 2025 by the Samuel Courtauld Trust and the Wordsworth Trust, is one of 24 works in a new Courtauld exhibition that asks a simple question with far-reaching consequences: Who, exactly, drew Britain into view?

A century of overlooked landscapes

The show, A View of One’s Own: Landscapes by British Women Artists, 1760–1860, opened Jan. 28 at Somerset House and runs through May 20. Curated by Rachel Sloan, associate curator of works on paper at the Courtauld, it brings together drawings and watercolors by 10 British women who worked in landscape during the late 18th and early 19th centuries — a period usually told through an almost entirely male cast.

In art-historical shorthand, British landscape in those years belongs to Gainsborough, Turner, Constable, John Sell Cotman and their peers. Museum walls and survey texts reinforce that story. Discussion of the period, as one recent preview put it, tends to produce “mostly men’s names.”

The Courtauld show sets out to demonstrate that women were far from absent. Instead, curators argue, their work remained in family albums, was labeled as amateur accomplishment, or was attributed to male relatives and colleagues.

Exhibition texts describe the featured artists as working in a “heavily male-dominated era in the arts,” noting that many of their landscapes have never been published. The accompanying catalogue, edited by Sloan with essays by art historians Susan Owens and Paris A. Spies-Gans, states that the project aims to “set right” the long neglect of these artists and to present “a splendid group of landscapes in various media.”

Paper, not oil — but aimed at the canon

Those media are all on paper. The exhibition is hung in the Courtauld’s Butler Drawings Gallery and focuses on drawings and watercolors rather than the oil paintings that dominate public ideas of the canon. But the curatorial argument is squarely aimed at that canon.

The 10 artists span a century and a spectrum of social backgrounds, from aristocratic women drawing on tour to Quaker diarists sketching closer to home. Sloan has assembled work by Harriet Lister and Lady Mary Lowther, among the first artists to depict the Lake District; Mary Russell Mitford, better known as a writer; Mary Smirke, daughter of painter Robert Smirke; Eliza Gore; Elizabeth Susan Percy; Richenda Gurney; Blake; Amelia Long, Lady Farnborough; and Elizabeth Batty.

Collectively, they complicate the idea that British landscape was a male invention. Several of Lister’s and Lowther’s views show the Lake District at the moment when domestic tourism and the “picturesque tour” were becoming fashionable. They predate, or run alongside, more famous male treatments of the same scenery and suggest that women were active contributors to the visual identity of what became Wordsworth country.

Travel, publishing, and misattribution

Abroad, Amelia Long and Elizabeth Batty push against assumptions about who traveled and who recorded what they saw. Long is presented as one of the first British artists to travel to France after the Napoleonic Wars, sketching ruined abbeys and riverside towns soon after the end of decades of conflict.

Batty traveled to Italy in 1817 and made a series of landscape drawings that were engraved and published in 1820 for a British audience eager for images of Rome and the Campagna. For many years, a group of 44 Italian views was attributed to her son; recent research has reassigned them to Batty, and several are now entering the Courtauld’s collection.

Her case illustrates, in concrete terms, how women’s work has been folded into male careers. Attribution within families and collections, often made without clear documentation, tended to favor sons, husbands and male colleagues, a pattern that scholars have been unpacking in recent decades.

The blurry boundary of “amateur”

The show also foregrounds the ambiguous status of “amateur” practice. Many of the women in A View of One’s Own were described in their own time as accomplished amateurs — a label that implied social status and propriety as much as artistic skill. Drawing and watercolor were central parts of upper- and middle-class female education in Britain; copying landscapes or sketching on supervised walks were considered suitable pursuits.

Yet the works on display, some destined for publication or public exhibition, suggest ambitions that go beyond private pastime. Catalogue texts note that several of the artists sought formal recognition and showed in public venues, even as the main institutions of professional training remained largely closed to women.

The Royal Academy’s own history forms part of the exhibition’s backdrop. When the academy was founded in London in 1768, two women — Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser — were among its members. None followed them until 1936, when painter Laura Knight was elected an academician.

During those 168 years, women could not enroll as full students at the academy or attend its life drawing classes, which were considered inappropriate for them. Still, as the Courtauld show argues, women continued to train privately, exhibit in other venues and circulate their work through prints and books, particularly in the genre of landscape watercolor.

A small show with big implications

The Courtauld has framed the exhibition as part of a broader effort to expand its collections and narratives around underrepresented artists. Institutional material describes landscapes by women as a “growing area” of its holdings. Several works in the show, including Blake’s Lake District scene and a group of Batty’s Italian drawings, have been acquired or promised as gifts in recent years.

The display also fits within a wider trend among museums and galleries to revisit the historical record on women artists. In 2024, Tate Britain staged Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520–1920, a major exhibition that traced women’s efforts to achieve professional status over 400 years. The National Portrait Gallery’s Pre-Raphaelite Sisters, which closed in 2020, reexamined the Pre-Raphaelite movement through 12 women who had long been cast mainly as muses and models.

Internationally, large surveys such as Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800, which opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2023, have made similar arguments at a continental scale.

Compared with those blockbusters, A View of One’s Own is modest in size. Its 24 works occupy a single room and require close looking. But within that small space, the implications are substantial.

By focusing on a single country, a single genre and a single medium, the Courtauld is testing what happens when a familiar chapter of art history is retold with different protagonists. If the Lake District was not only Turner’s, and if images of Italy and postwar France circulated under the wrong names, long-standing assumptions about who authored Britain’s visual culture begin to shift.

For now, the change is most visible in pencil and watercolor, on fragile sheets of paper. As the Courtauld prepares to open two new contemporary galleries in 2029 with the help of a £10 million gift, the question raised by this quiet drawings exhibition is whether that recalibration will stay confined to one small room — or spread across the institution’s story of art, past and present.