Pride and Prejudice: Eighteenth-century Women Sculptors and their Material Practices

Abstract

Since the 1970s, women artists have been a central focus of art-historical research. Female sculptors, however, and especially those who are not American, remain almost as underrepresented in current scholarship as they do in the artists’ dictionaries of their day. In 1830, for example, the only woman sculp- tor to be included in Allan Cunningham’s Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters and Sculptors was Anne Darner (1748-1828) (Figure 19), just as some three centuries earlier, Properzia de’ Rossi (c.l490-c.l530) appeared as the sole representative of her sex in Giorgio Vasari’s Vite (1550-68). Nevertheless, Cunningham was dimly aware that Darner followed in the footsteps of a number of other (albeit, in his view, less illustrious) sculptresses as his inclusion of the following quotation from Horace Walpole demonstrates: ‘Mrs Darner . . . has chosen a walk more difficult and far more uncommon than painting. The annals of statuary record few artists of the fair sex, and not one that I recollect of any celebrity.’²

The Graces smiling wait on her command, And ease the labour of their mistress’ hand. From her skill’d touch, immortal gods improve. And senseless blocks are starting into love. The dullest clods of earth a soul acquire, And frigid marble breathes celestial fire; Her chisel wond’rous more than Orpheus lute, Can soften rocks, and deify a brute.

‘On the Sculpture of the Honourable Mrs. A. Damer’ (1785)¹