 My name is Denise Ferris and I'm currently the Head of the School of Art at A&U and I welcome people who are visiting us tonight and of course normally welcome all of my colleagues. Anthea Callan was until June 2014 the Professor of Art, Practice-led Research in the School of Art. First arriving here at the school in 2010 as a visiting professor in painting. She is also Professor Emeritus of Visual Culture at the University of Nottingham. So strictly speaking Professor Callan is not as I previously described her our professor but is in fact and will be our Emeritus Professor. We're not travelling, Anthea lives and works in Limited Spa in the UK and in the South of France, we're on her. Anthea Callan is a scholar and painter. Her expertise in art history, visual culture and the gender politics of visual representation spans the 18th to the 20th centuries. Notably in France and Britain. Her research specialisation in 19th century artists, materials and techniques means she works regularly with museum conservators and curators. As a painter she has a strong personal as well as a professional interest in the 20th century in 20th century modernism and contemporary art. Especially feminist and women's art practice. Anthea Callan trained as a painter and printmaker at Birmingham College of Art and Design now Birmingham City University in the UK. She went on to study and establish a career in art history and visual culture while maintaining her art practice. She is a painter whose primary interest is in a human figure and its form. Studied through drawing and colour using a wide range of mixed media from oils to pastels and inks. Most recently Anthea delivered a lecture in the symbolising death session on the 20th September last weekend at the hearty successful Art and Motelics Symposium organised by Professor Callan Innes the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the School of Art. The insight that Anthea's paper, Death and the Surgeon's Art, left from me was the similarity in the way surgeons and artists may approach an understanding of the body as a subject. Anthea Remart and I wildly paraphrase here, so forgive, prop. The pleuro-sensorial gaze is definitely not the gaze of the flammeur, which is a touch or seeing or knowing kind of gaze. Rather, the pleuro-sensorial gaze is filled with all the senses, taking on other forms of knowledge including touch, smell as well as seeing. Touch, seeing, pleuro-sensorial, multi-sensory is the medical and the artist's gaze. In the audience you can readily imagine why Anthea's association with us with the School of Art and with the practitioners at the School of Art has been so incredibly invaluable. Anthea Callan has studied artistic anatomy as well as formal light drawing of a human figure, and this interest clearly crosses over into her art history work, where she researches the historical use of anatomical study in art as well as artist training in the discipline. Her upcoming book is The Work of Art, Plain Air Painting and Artistic Identity in 19th Century France. I ask you to welcome Anthea in her lecture this evening. What a fantastic welcome. Can you hear me? Is this in the right place? I'm so mic'd up I can't believe it. I'm going to have these attachments all over me. Okay, what I'm talking about today isn't anything to do with art and death, but in fact there are very real parallels because what I'm trying to do with both is to kind of pull back from the intellectual into the actual material of practice. So I was trying to do that in the art and mortality paper called The Surgeon's Art, and in this paper I'm also trying to do that. So to locate very specifically the ideas and arguments within a material, a very material practice. And let's see how it goes. I'm actually starting with a rather delightful quote. I should say I've divided this talk into two parts. Context, which kind of lays out the ideas and arguments, and then a brief case study. Okay, picture. The first context picture. Here's my delightful quote. It's from a theoretician called Jean-Pierre Thénault, or Thénault as we probably say in French. The cours complet de pesage from 1834, page 5. I'm giving you it in English. It's hard for anyone who has never drawn or painted from nature to have a fair idea of the interest the artist experiences when choosing, or rather ardently seizing, a well lit view enriched with happy accidents. He prepares to make the portrait. From the first moment he read his crayons and brushes, he readily sees, he already sees, the enterprise completed according to his desires. With each mark grows a pleasure made all the more intense by the difficulties he suffers, the resistances nature seems to offer to his eagerness, the efforts he redoubles to seize her. His pleasures finally at each favor he obtains. And it's really actually important that the word that Thénault uses for this is the French word jouissance, which actually also means orgasm. Ah, you wouldn't have guessed, would you? So that kind of lays the groundwork for what I want to try and say today. The greater era of French plein air landscape painting that my book that is just complete considers spans the long 19th century, beginning with artists in Rome in the 1780s and effectively closing in Paris with the advent of Cubism. Standard practice for all French landscape painters from 1817 onwards, plein air painting became widespread and highly visible. Can you see it clearly enough? Artist plus female muse of course, she's not actually painting, she's in this kind of nice flouncy white dress. She's a sort of both a metaphor and an actual embodied personage accompanying the artist en plein air. This is by a painter called François Français and dates from 1847 I think. And interestingly it's called les artistes contemporains, so it literally means the latest trend. Already common during the 1820s, plein air painting was ubiquitous by the 1840s when the railways began to make travel easier. By the 1850s landscape painting was the most popular of all genre in France, both as exhibits at the Paris Salon and among dealers and collectors. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the radical plein air painting now associated with the impressionists in the 1870s in fact had its origins in the period immediately before the French Revolution of 1789. The work of art, what I'm writing about, explores the continuities and changes in methods and materials of landscape painting over the century and its role in the formation of modern artistic identity. I'm interested in the concept of the work of art. How do particular kinds of painting practice denote different ideas of labour in the material processes of art, rather than just in its imagery and its iconography? Why did this issue become especially important during the 19th century when the modernity of an artwork could be found in artist material practice, the physical processes of painting that became simultaneously the subject, its subject and its object, the work of art? What I want to argue, what I argue in my book is that it's the work of plein air painters and the changes their practices affected that were in the work of plein air painters and the changes their practices affected that the real innovations in painting were generated. In terms of modern artistic identity, truth to the self and the new attention to relations between making and meaning. And since artists always refer as much to each other's work and to past art as to external nature, this is not inevitably a question of progress, but also one of continuity. And I'm showing you this delightful image of Domié's idea of the landscape painter in the mid-1860s. So this is the point I'm making here, that art is as much about other art and other artists as it is about looking outward into nature. Labour in the work of art became, in 19th century France, a key factor for artists, critics and collectors alike. Whether they were for or against the idea of visible mark making or facture, as it's called in French, the aesthetics of finished or unfinished were central in artistic debates and avant-garde practice in the period. In my book I argue that landscape painting in general and plein air oil studies in particular were key drivers of change in artistic practice in the period which culminated, didn't start with, it culminated in impressionism and post-impressionism and the birth of modernism. The concepts of work I address include not just the act of painting, but the materials, tools and methods of making. Facture in the work of art itself, as well as ideas about the work a painter embodied in the appearance and persona, the performance of painting and the painted objects. So I'm trying to bring all those components together. Almost all the work in my book is by men. The main exception being Bert Morisseau. This is a rather monochrome version of this painting, it actually is much more colourful. It's the crap Musee d'Orsay website which is to blame here. But for me this is one of the most sensational portraits ever painted. It's just extraordinary. Anyway, this is Bert Morisseau painted by Manet 1869-17. So the exception that I'm flagging up is Bert Morisseau. The only woman plenair impressionist who is now finally accorded equivalent status to her male colleagues. It would be actually interesting to do a study of sale room prices because I suspect that Morisseau's work still sells more cheaply than your Monet and your, well, Cezanne and whatever. But in terms of scholarly attention it's much more equivalent now. In the book I therefore focus primarily on male agency in 19th century landscape art and the reasons for it. How did modernism come to be defined by the early 20th century as a predominantly masculine domain? In terms of gender the question of modern artistic identity is particularly interesting given that during the later 18th century women artists actually began to gain a serious new eminence. Whether Elizabeth Vigée Lebrun here in a self-portrait with her equipment, whether Vigée Lebrun her portrait dates, the self-portrait dates from 1782. This is actually a variant of the original that she made herself. In France or your Angelica Kaufman in Britain. Despite their educational constraints and lack of access to the new life model many privately trained and sought after women artists flourished in this late 18th century period. However in the 19th century consolidation of bourgeois society and its ideologies of femininity and the growing identification of women with domesticity. Women artists became further restricted for example to appropriate media, feminine pastel and watercolour rather than manly oils. And to lowly subject matter such as children, portraits, flowers and interiors. In France this trend actually came slightly later than in England so that the exclusion of women from the workplace or gendered spheres of life as it came to be called. Despite its inscription in the Napoleonic Code Seville in 1804 in practice did not wholly take effect in France until the Second Empire so that's after the 1848 Revolution. The professionalization of women artists between 1800 and 1850 in France came actually in the context of a lowering of the mean social class of artists of both sexes and a rapid expansion in the overall number of professional artists. So you know if it becomes a common trade women are allowed in basically. It's been argued that the radical independent art movements of the 19th century championed the genres lower down the academic hierarchy which in turn gave women painters greater involvement and prestige. Yet from the outset landscape painting and the theories that underpinned it meant prohibitions for women comparable to those of studying from the nude. In both ideology and practice the new planarism enabled male painters to carve out an almost exclusively masculine territory. Whether amateur or professional women artists required chaperoning and were thus restricted very frequently to work in the home in the garden or in their own private studio. A small number of images before 1850 like this very early Corbe from the mid 1840s include a female artist. But in reality the social constraints on movement imposed by their middle or upper middle class or upper class status ensured women artists marginalization on the terrain of the outdoor male painter. Around 1800 the all but obligatory Italian sojourn for aspiring European artists was impractical for most women while the difficulties entailed in travelling around France itself were problematic as well. In an era of growing female artistic ambition therefore planar was a woman free zone that marked the field as indisputably masculine. It is clear from Domié's caricatures we've had one already but this one is these two this pair which are from the 1840s rather than the 1860s so taking the whole thing back that you know generation earlier almost. Show landscape painters hiking as you can see hiking intrepidly in mountainous terrain looking at I've said here a sympathetic for a sympathetic site. In fact the caption has them saying you know where's the nearest sympathetic tavern where I can get a 12 egg omelet and a pint of you know Guinness whatever. So it's actually you know they're not even looking for a good motif they're looking for a good pub at this point. And the one on the right hand side which is which is captioned looking for a forest in champagne. I mean there are forests in champagne but you know not as many as you'd find in the juror for example. And the colored version of this there's a wonderful tinted version of this which I hadn't got a slide off for you and actually this guy at the back that they're totally wrongly dressed for what they're doing. They're wearing city clothes you know checks and fancy trousers and what they're walking through here is mud and you know they've got sort of muddle over their feet. So it kind of contextualizes that clearly they don't know they're asked from their elbow basically and they're kind of traipsing around the countryside not knowing where to look for a good motif. Okay so you can imagine in this context just how challenging it would have been for women in their crinolines or you know even whatever. Maneuvering up mountains and up and down hills and through the mud. So hence working in gardens is quite a good idea. Also the potential isolation, dangers, physical rigors and endurance associated with work outdoors in all weathers at all times of the day and year permitted male artists to carve out this identity. Akin to their brother colonizers of the new worlds. Rugged adventurers conquering new terrains which you can also read of course is raw female nature. So I think there's a real parallel here with actually colonizing activities that are going on throughout this period as well. Further from around 1850 the swaggering masculinity that Corbe affected and here I'm showing you his meeting with his patron Bruyas from 1854. And the masterly virility of his painting technique stamped this persona onto the landscape again as female nature to be tamed. In ways that only color with its feminine association could hope to modify with the rise of impressionism. Yet even this was vexed. The male appropriation of landscape, of color and of matière, the messy paint materials that had a feminine as well as a manual artisan association. That impressionism was trying to take over for itself that male appropriation. Proved a mixed blessing for women painters like Moriso whose work was in fact consistently stereotyped as feminine. So I mean it's kind of double bind there. Oh I've got a slide of her work. This is a little oil study of the harbour in Nice from 1882. Gorgeous. Of course the identities under review here are also explicitly classed as well as gendered. The work of painter was in fact rarely working class as such. Although many of the artists involved in what became called the petit maître of landscape painter, the small masters, never mind the big masters like Corbe, the small masters of landscape painting were often from humble or artisanal beginnings. The career of artist itself was only in the process of professionalizing during the late 18th and early 19th centuries having previously been a craft practice associated with skilled manual labour involving as it did dirty hands and traditional craft skills. Indeed for the emerging professional artist distinguishing the cerebral from the physical was one of the key ideological functions of the Paris Academy. Which taught and regulated the fine arts and its highest genre, history painting, where the idea was preeminent and the mark of the maker, the sign of hand crafting, was orbited faced. Yet with the rise of republicanism and democracy in France, many artists sought to reclaim, celebrate and identify with that very craft and the guild heritage from which their immediate forebears in the academy had sought to distance themselves. So for example in 1873 the proto-impressionists established their anonymous cooperative exhibiting society based on the charter of a baker's union in Pizarro's home village of Pontoise. So this was symptomatic of the new democratizing tendency and its associated artisanal traditions. The quest of a craft identity however was also more vexed for women than for men in the 19th century. It was a double-edged sword, on the one hand it was a label deployed to sideline women's achievement as actual crafts professionals, for example in weaving, pottery and needlework within creative sectors where a sexual division of labour reigned. On the other hand for the woman painter the label was a means to downgrade her status as a fine artist. In a period when ladies' artistic accomplishments were burgeoning and highly valued among the middle classes, so in other words as amateurs, to the ambitious professional woman, therefore the craft label smacked of amateurism rather than skill. The masculine artist worker identities elaborated in my book involved a complex play then across the boundaries of class that for women artists further troubled already compromised their already compromised position as aspiring art professionals. This was an era when ladies did not work and the term working women at least in 1848 after the revolution of 1848 in Paris was synonymous with loose morals and prostitution. So to be called a working woman meant you know you were street walker. The unconventional life of realist and animal landscape painter Rosa Bonner demonstrates the difficulties faced by ambitious women artists at mid-century. In order to prepare for her monumental paintings of animals this is 16 feet long this painting by 8 feet high. In order to prepare for works like this which dates from 1855 in fact she visited horse traders and slaughterhouses in Paris to undertake the relevant anatomical study. To do this she had to gain special dispensation from the French police to wear trousers and a smock in public. In other words she had to adopt a male persona in order to engage in the research necessary for her practice. And I think it may be significant too that actually her work is more appreciated outside France because I mean it's so verile this work it's extraordinary. But they loved it in Britain and they loved it in the States. This is in the Met in New York whereas in France they were probably just a bit... Why didn't she put a skirt on? By the 1860s some women ventured outdoors to paint and on their teacher Camille Coro's advice Bette Morisseau and her sister Edma who gave up painting when she married which was the more frequent course than Bette Morisseau's case. They executed studies together on plein air which really can be dated to the first expeditions to the mid 1860s. Morisseau also painted landscapes viewed from indoors and in gardens. Gardens of course are like a private extension of the domestic space they are effectively landscaped domestic spaces. But Morisseau was exemplary in continuing throughout her life to make plein air oil studies and watercolours whether in the Parisian suburbs or on holidays in England Normandy and the Côte d'Azur. Okay so now I'm going to take you now into the laundry. Having laid a kind of framework for thinking about Morisseau and thinking about landscape painting and plein air painting. I'm now going to just do a brief case study around the idea of laundry and laundresses. In the form of naturalist genre painting laundry and laundresses had been a popular eroticised subject with semi-clad working women kneeling and leaning forwards in their labours and generally dealing with intimate apparel. From as early as Chardin and Hubert Robert in the 18th century through to the more sceptical mid 19th century realists like Jean-François Mille or Camille Pizarro himself, one of the impressionists. Landscapists like Corot and Dubigny here, Dubigny, locate laundering you have to look really hard, locate laundering on rural river banks, yet at times they're so discreetly placed that the laboring figures are almost impossible to see. Urban realists, do you want me to show you where they are? Sometimes you get more of a red accent to kind of locate them, kind of coroesque red accent, but not always. Urban realists on the other hand confronted this women's labour directly in the claustrophobic confines of Parisian basements which Gordon's going to be looking in detail at very shortly. Dugas highly skilled ironers, a really interesting example, very immediate direct cropped, close confrontational images of ironers, but I should emphasise the work that these women are doing, it's the highly skilled end of the trade. This isn't the mmm in the river, this is proper, right at the top of the hierarchy, if you like, of the laundry trades. So the scale and cropping of figures like those of Dugas within these compositions make the brutal reality of their labour unavoidable. However Caillebotte's Riverside composition, here Laundry drying at Petit Genèveilier and it's actually opposite Argente on the Seine, just kind of west of Paris. Caillebotte's Riverside composition reveals Laundry as a suburban hard labour, bloody hell, look at that. Despite the sunny gaiety of the setting, the hundreds of identical whites, what are they, linen, shirts, chef's whites, shows the enforced, oh no, hang on, that's the wrong line, signal an enterprise on an industrial scale, this is industrial laundry here. Although what we have in fact is the washboats here moored to the side of the Seine, at which this laundry was executed and then hung to dry on the bank. No buxom Laundry's is here to humanise or eroticise the drudgery. Within the enclosed confines of Manet's Argente garden, his Laundry's shows the enforced intimacy of domestic service. In hanging Laundry, however, Bert Morisseau draws back. Her elevated viewpoint reveals an almost rural landscape. We have here a sense of not just I think distance though, I think we have the painter taking greater control of what she sees. Almost a rural landscape, yet the distant chimneys of Paris factories counterpoint the very material reality and the immediate foreground of the manual drudgery entailed in women's labour in the Laundry trades. And I think this is Poissy, again a suburb of Paris where she frequently stayed. So although herself distanced from domestic work by her class and her profession, she nevertheless draws a parallel between this women's labour and her own as a painter. And this is where I'm trying to argue the way in which the artist, and I've talked in the book about the Manet and the Kaibot in this context as well, but differently. The way in which she's using as a metaphor the women's labour for the labour that she's doing. The small scale and lively immediacy of Morisseau's study suggests that it was rapidly executed probably in a single sitting. High key in palette, it was painted on a canvas primed off-white, which plays a crucial role both in the picture's overall luminosity and as highlights amongst the applied colours. Such broken touches of colour and a sketchy facture, the handling, were all associated with capturing the effect with directness, spontaneity and truth to the artist's personal sensations in front of nature, but also to their work as artists in rendering it. So what Kaibot represents is a more impersonal view of anonymous women's physical labour. There are no figures where Manet used a posed figure in painting his laundry. It points up in contrast the non-figurative element of Kaibot's approach, anti-narrative in his choice of subject matter. Here the energetic movement he represents of the wind in drying linen would not exist in duration. Each second the scene would change. So what Kaibot in the 1890s shows us of women's labour, unlike his own large-scale figure paintings of skilled male artisans in the 1870s, this monumental, the painting is actually more or less the same size, in fact I think the laundry drawing might be even slightly bigger than this. The kind of monumentality he gives to the male body, he just effaces the woman worker in the laundry trades. This is the floor scrapers from 1875. What we have instead, sorry I'm going to go back to that one, what we have instead in this Kaibot laundry drawing is only the traces of hard manual labour, the clean linen. These traces are simultaneously records of the painters and the laundresses' work. These traces are rendered visible in solid, heavy, crusty paint build-up, layered over time. A record not just of the paint application and the artist's work, but it's just like the washer women's time-consuming work made visible stretching out along the line. Kaibot's marks represent the linen built up over time and his repeated rhythmic strokes across the canvas echo the laundresses' wooden bats beating the linen in flaying the dirt out. So in his act of painting the marks both mimic and represent the work of mass washing, yet without the female presence crucial to the intimacy of Moriso's painting. In Moriso's hanging laundry the women's work explicitly retains its association with domestic drudgery and with the mark of its woman-maker. Her labour as an artist mirrors the labours of the women she represents. Thank you.