 All right. Well, here we are. Good evening, everybody. I'm Martin Fossel and I'm Senior Research Fellow here at the Four Melons Centre and it's my great pleasure to introduce and host this evening's event. It's the first in this autumn's public lecture series, which I've had the privilege to convene with my various colleagues. As many of you know, the now biannual public lecture course has become an important fixture in our events calendar, allowing scholars to reach a wide audience, including specialists and non-specialists alike for a series of connected themed talks. And as we say on the website, and I'm going to say it again here, no prior art historical knowledge is necessary for you. All we ask is enthusiasm and commitment. Having said that, a series is intended to be a course, and not merely a sequence of one-off lectures. And as the weeks go by, we hope that everyone will accumulate knowledge, share opinions and gain a deeper understanding of the art and the ideas raised by speakers in their various presentations and the collective response both within and beyond the room, because there are, we gathered here together, but there are also lots of people out in the firmament. I wasn't going to know that, who are joining us. I see looking back at the public lecture series, it was launched seven years ago, in the autumn of 2015, with a series of six talks entitled Satire to Spectacle, British Art in the 18th Century. And since then we've ranged far and wide, from medieval to modern, from photography to ceramics. We've explored topics as diverse as art and war, the country house, the artists in the garden, and black artists and political activism, always aiming to promote innovative, high quality and accessible research, the range of perspectives and methodologies by leading scholars in the field. In this present series, we're returned to a theme we explored in the summer of 2020, Georgian provocations, where Mark Hallett and I, then in lockdown, broadcasting farm, our respective domestic bunkers, talked about six iconic works from the 18th century by six major artists. However, this time round, back live at the PMC, we're going to explore some fascinating byways, as well as the highways and interrogate some less well known artists and topics. I should add that in the current context, so we don't scare anyone off, provocation has been adopted in the most positive sense, not to provoke anger, but to stimulate and arise interest and curiosity. Although you are encouraged to debate and discuss freely, the issue is raised and the post questions that you feel are most relevant to you and your own experiences. So just a word, a quick word about the format of the evening, the lecture will begin momentarily, it'll last about 45 minutes, after which we'll open the floor to questions and discussion. We've got a roving mic in the room and a facility to ask questions for those of you attending virtually, moderated by my colleague, Sreer Chatterjee, who's here at the front, and once we've finished and we're all worn out at 7.30, we're going to invite you to join us for a reception, a drinks reception in the ante room, and those of you at home are just going to have to find your own glass and raise a toast. If you've got other plans, of course at 7.30, please feel free to leave, we won't be offended, and we'll all be done by eight o'clock. And so by way of preliminaries, I just have to say a word or two about fire rates, and this is not written by me. There are no fire drills scheduled for the adoration of this event, if the fire alarm sounds, leave your belongings behind and calmly begin to evacuate the building. Your nearest fire exits are on the ground floor, either through throughout the front doors of the center, and assemble outside 28 Bedford Square, and that's to the right as you leave the building, and do not leave the area or attempt to return to the center until you've been advised that it's safe to do so by a member of the Paul Mellon Center staff. And so to the main events, my pleasure to introduce Dr. Paris Spies-Gans. Paris is a historian, and an art historian, whose research focuses upon the history of women, gender, and the politics of artistic expression. In the past, Paris has held very prestigious at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Princeton University, the Getty Research Institute, the Lewis Walpole Library, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Paul Mellon Center. Her first book, A Revolution on Canvas, The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, was published just a few months ago in 2022 by the Paul Mellon Center. And for those of you who haven't had the privilege of seeing it, this is it. Fresh off the pot off the press. It's a very handsome volume. It's got some tremendous research, and I do recommend it to you. It's getting to that time of the year, Christmas present. So, you know, a quick plug, but, you know, get in there first while stocks last. Okay, so I'll say no more other than Paris' talk tonight, which draws upon her research towards this publication, is entitled Establishing a Female Lineage at the Royal Academy's Show, Eliza Trotter, Angelica Kaufman, and the Intrigues of Lady Caroline Lam. Paris. Can everyone hear me? Is this all right? Well, first of all, thank you so much, Martin, and everyone at the PMC for making this event happen and hosting me so kindly. I'm so happy to be here, and thank you to all of you for being here for this talk. To begin, in 1811, a little-known artist named Eliza Trotter exhibited a portrait of a young lady at the Royal Academy's annual show at Somerset House. Born in Dublin, Trotter had recently arrived in London and was attempting to make a name for herself as an artist. Hung in the inner room, the painting received, as far as I can tell, absolutely no attention in the press. It's artist exhibited publicly just a few more times through 1814. At another London venue, the British institution for promoting the fine arts. Thereafter, her name disappears from the historical record. And yet, although we know little about the painter and have no contemporary documentation of the image itself, the painting survives. For like many artists of her time, Trotter attached her prospects to the fame of her sitter, an aristocrat and writer named Lady Caroline Lamb, who is the mid-the-first of a series of noted and notorious affairs. Against all historical odds, Trotter's canvas opens a window into a vibrant and colorful world of professional women artists who were active in London at the turn of the 19th century. Today, I want us all to look at this painting as a paragon for the ways we can study the lives and works of women artists, especially when only scattered evidence survives, as is too often the case with women from the past. For such women, the ostensible and completeness of the historical record has led their stories to seem impossibly obscure. So we're going to view Eliza Trotter's painting through a series of these lenses, zooming in and out of the canvas at hand, alongside the careers of several women artists whose stories intersect with Trotter's, hinges that are sometimes oblique, but most often quite direct. Beginning with women's presence at the Royal Academy, in its first several decades, we'll progress to the role of portraiture in British art and for women at the academy in particular, surviving information about Eliza Trotter as remarkably representational of many women artists of her time, her specific portrait of Lamb and its historically loaded visual tropes as used by other artists as well, and Caroline Lamb herself as a historical figure, the woman who chose to put herself repeatedly in the hands of female painters and onto public display. Over the course of the next 45 or so minutes, we'll be looking at a medley of documents, data, and art. So to begin with the broadest note, what information can we find about women in the public art world in the years leading up to Trotter's Soul Academy showing? We have exhibition catalogs to start, lengthy printed records of every artist and work that went on display in London from 1760 onwards. These visually unstimulating registers are often my own departure point for research because they offer an incredible amount of data, artist's names and addresses, entry titles, the types of works an artist made, the types of literary, historical, and other sources with which they engaged, the gender of their sitters, the places they traveled, and the room in which work was displayed. Here we see a catalog from 1781 showing three of the 19 works that women exhibited in the great room that year, a view from Tivoli by an anonymous lady on the left and on the right, a portrait of a lady in the character of a muse by Angelica Kaufman in Cruza appearing to Aeneas from Virgil by Mariah Cosway. Kaufman survived in its original form, Cosway is in a painting by Valentine Green, made that very year and a testament to her quick popularity. Before we move on, I want to mention one consequence of using exhibition catalogs as primary sources. Throughout the years under consideration here, London's exhibition venues assigned one of two labels to exhibiting artists, male or female, and this transcended whether they were anonymous or named. What this means is that when I refer to women artists or female artists, I'm doing so entirely based on the ways in which artist names appeared in these catalogs and not in a reference to or to reinforce any sort of broader gender binaries. So back to our story. London's public shows with these increasingly lengthy catalogs began just a half century before Eliza Trotter journeyed to the capital. In 1760, a group of artists self-named itself the present artists, they had decided to hold the city's first commercial display of art. The female showing wasn't strong, only two works, but it endured and strengthened with the founding of several art societies over the decade. As most of you know quite well, this culminated with the launch of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1768. The Academy aimed to promote an official British school of art by establishing a rigorous training program open only to men and holding selective annual shows. It enforced strict submission criteria to distance itself from London's other societies and seemingly to limit the frequency of women in its shows, banning copies, unframed and craft-like works, such as needle paintings and shell work. But rather than dissuading female artists, these restrictions arguably helped women to establish a mainstream public presence because the works they submitted by requisite had to look like the works made by men. It's long been thought that women simply didn't do this, save one, Angelica Kaufman. Kaufman was one of the Royal Academy's two female founders circled here in red. The other, Mary Moser, is now most often known as a flower painter. These women were active in the Academy's proceedings and London's cultural sphere is more broadly for decades. However, their place in the British art world is typically characterized with referenced as often used canonical painting before us, the portraits of the academicians of the Royal Academy from 1771 to 1772. In this group portrait of the Academy's 34 founding members in a painter's studio, Kaufman and Moser appear only as portraits placed high on the wall, a double-edged acknowledgement that they were part of this group but that their sex prevented them from participating in the Academy's live figure drawing classes featuring nude models. Owing to such institutional barriers, it's largely been assumed that women were essentially barred from London's art institutions more broadly and thus excluded from the professional status open to their male contemporaries. However, this wasn't exactly the case. We now know that this narrative is wrong for several reasons. Most blatantly, both Moser and Kaufman did practice figure drawing, just in non-academic settings. Here, we see an undated drawing by Moser that presents a nude woman seemingly from life and even standing contrapasto. Likewise, even though Kaufman dominantly depicted scenes featuring women from history or literature, she clearly studied from some sort of a portrayal of the nude, whether an ancient statue, plaster cast, other artist drawings, or partially clothed models. Here, we see sketches in a notebook that's now at the DNA. In fact, Kaufman's figure sources remain a subject of fascination among members of the art world for decades. In the 1820s, while writing his treatise on the British art world, the artist John Thomas Smith, by then the keeper of prints and drawings at the British Museum, interviewed one of the Academy's earliest models, a man named Charles Cranmer, about his rumored posing for Kaufman. Cranmer, quote, assured Smith, quote, that he did frequently sit at Kaufman's house, but that he only exposed his arms, shoulders, and legs, and that her father, who was also an artist, was always present, end quote, often attests to such a sitting. A young man reclines on the ground, arms, shoulders, and legs, arms, shoulders, legs, and torso exposed. It's a study of detailed ease, even as the model's midsection remains covered. Smith himself referred to it as, quote, a spirited study of a male academy model. Kaufman remains known as a history and portrait painter. Here, we see a scene from Virgil that she exhibited at the Academy's first show, and a portrait of the feted singer, Sarah Bates, in the character of a muse, which she exhibited during her last year in London. During her 15 years in the British capital, from 1766 through 1781, she was both celebrated and wildly successful. She quickly became a painter to the elite, and her artistic presence extended far past academy walls, into print shops, homes, and the realm of the decorative arts. Owing to her subject choices, and the fact that many of her canvases survive, she has long been held up as a rare example of exceptionality, for being a woman who achieved public success and did so by engaging with the most celebrated of genres, classical and historical works. But she was actually far from alone. Over the course of the Academy's first 62 exhibitions, from 1769 to 1830, the years I study in my book, 606 named women, and as many as 227 anonymous women exhibited 3612 works of art. Here you see four annual trends, the total number of female exhibitors, the number of new women exhibitors, the number of works by women, and their percentage of entries. On average, 35 women, 10 of them new, exhibited 58 pieces per year, or 7% of all entries. Each of these works was evaluated and accepted by an all-male selection committee. Moreover, like Eliza Trotter, marked in red here, if you can see it, the majority of women opted to list their addresses in the Academy's exhibition catalogs. This was a conscious commercial choice, a tactic intended to encourage studio visits and gain commissions. In 1772, her mother explained, by letter to a patron, it was with the hope of attracting studio visits, as it was at the exhibition. And in the catalog, every artist's name and place of a boat was marked. So if anyone had been so minded to do her service, she was easy to be found. When the Bristol-based painter, Rolinda Sharples, debuted at the Academy in 1820, she even listed two addresses, Clifton, her home in Bristol, and Seven Howard Street, Norfolk Street Strand, where she could be found in London during the show. While the Academy's first two decades saw a slow but steady increase in women's presence, you can see that their participation rose rapidly during the French Revolutionary Wars, highlighted in yellow. From 1791 to 1800, 117 women displayed their art on the Academy's walls, who had never exhibited there before. In 1800, their percentage of entries reached a new high, over 9%, with 65 women exhibiting. A larger number of visitors saw these works as well, with attendance soaring to just under 60,000 that same year. For comparison, and this is really important, works by women were recently calculated to average less than 5% of works in American and European museums. Women would have been markedly more present at the Academy two centuries ago than they are in museums today. Women then sustained this higher level of activity through the Napoleonic Wars. From 1801 to 1810 alone, the decade before Eliza Trotter's arrival, 149 women exhibited at the Academy for the first time, an average of 48 women exhibiting 78 works per year. How did female artists secure this regular and regularly growing presence by submitting works that fit British tastes? The majority of women's 3,600 entries were portraits, landscapes, and narrative works. Importantly, they exhibited in most genres and roughly the same proportions as the British male peers. This isn't at all a given. In France in these same years, women mainly exhibited narrative and portrait works. And they're only partially mirrored that of British women or French men. In other words, British women's activity reflected their own nation's distinctive artistic culture, rather than any collective gender prescriptions. In Spain, we shouldn't be surprised by the predominance of portraiture. It was the genre that British artists felt set them apart from continental rivals and the artistic mode that monopolized London's art market. As women increasingly engaged with Britain's strongest source of artistic pride, their practice didn't go without critique. From the Academy's earliest years, portrait pantresses were satirized, often as a type. Here, we see two prints from 1772 and a watercolor from around 1800. Both prints ridicule female portraitists and extend this mockery to their sitters, who are shown to be lowlife or ridiculous. In contrast, the drawing by Rowlandson on the far right questions the ability of a woman to portray a male subject without sexual dynamics coming into play. But derision aside, all three artists' depictions seem accurate. The satirists mock their practice, but not their ability. I think we can read such images as an implicit tribute to female portraitists' increasing prevalence, as you can see on the graph in blue. Every work that I've placed on this slide was exhibited at the Academy by a woman artist. In the 1770s, women portraitists made their mark at the Academy for the first time. But the real transformation began in the late 1790s, where we see rising numbers that signal both women's growing practice and its positive reinforcement. Remember the selection committee. Most obviously, this speaks to the commercial nature of exhibiting women's ambitions. Portraits were meant for purchase by a sitter or someone in a sitter's circle. But as we'll also see, these portrayals could command multifaceted subtexts and deep art historical currents. Eliza Trotter came to London right in the middle of this remarkable rise. Arriving at some point between 1809 and 1811, she entered a cultural world in which women had long been visible, accepted, and paid members, and took advantage of these dynamics with her debut Academy piece. What was happening at the Academy in 1811? All the new exhibiting societies had begun to crop up in London since the turn of the century. It was still the nation's premier venue and would remain so. That year, 490 artists showed 955 works. 45 of all artists or 9% were women. 13 of them knew, including Trotter. They showed 78 works or 8% of all entries. 39 or 50% of four narrative scenes, two animal depictions, one wax model. The show's 63,899 visitors would have seen 10 works by women in the great room alone, three of which were portraits. And the great room was the most prominent and important space where all artists had access for their works. But we can dissect this data even further. Of the 39 portraits, 10 were clearly full-scale works, like Trotter's portrait of Lamb. Seven were clearly miniature. An additional 14 were very likely miniature. And eight were of an unclear format and size. Of the full-scale works, eight depicted female sitters, two male sitters. Of all portraits depicting a single sitter, i.e. portrait of a man, portrait of a lady, or portrait of a name-sitter. 20 showed women, 10 showed men, and four depicted subjects of an unidentified sex, i.e. portrait. Trotter's piece went on display in the inner room. A new space adjacent to the great room, formerly the secretary's apartment, spearheaded for the 1811 exhibition by none other than JMW Turner. It's been argued that he was responsible for arranging its display that year, which also featured one oil and five watercolors by his hand. The news reported that many of these were, in a new move for the academy, intended for direct sale. Trotter's work accompanied 19 drawings and three other paintings by women in this new space, which was intended for smaller oils, watercolors, and drawings. But Trotter's canvas wasn't exactly small. Now measuring nearly four by five feet, it was originally even larger, five by nearly seven feet, before being cut down in the early 20th century. We don't know what was removed. What remains, however, is a powerful record of Eliza Trotter as an artist and a visual thinker. For as we will see, we can recover both her detail placing of contemporary references to tell a story about her sitter and her wielding of art historical references to rekindle a female painterly lineage and claim a place in it. Most of what we know about Eliza Trotter comes from Walter Strickland's Dictionary of Irish Artists, published more than a century ago in 1913. He provided entries on five members of her family, three women and two men, herself, her sister, her mother, her father, and her maternal grandmother, grandfather. All it seems were artists. According to Strickland, John Trotter, Eliza's father, studied at the Dublin Society. Founded in 1731, the society held a private art school from 1746 and hosted exhibitions from around this time, in which John soon participated. He was most known for his portraits, of which at least these two survive, one of an officer, another of an Irish peer. In 1774, he married Marian Hunter, who had also exhibited at the Dublin Society as early as 1765, at age 13. Her paintings don't survive, but we know that in 1768, she won the first of several premiums for both her portrait and historical pieces. The next year, she won the premium for the best portrait in oil. She exhibited throughout the 1777, three years into her marriage. Her father, Robert Hunter, had been one of the leading Irish portraitists of the time. Her Strickland, and he could have been wrong, Marianne and John Daughters and M Trotter and Eliza. About this Miss M Trotter, we only know that she exhibited four narrative scenes and one group portrait at the Royal Academy from 1809 through 1815, listing the academy itself as her address. We've slightly more information about Eliza, who made a name for herself in Dublin before moving to London. She began exhibiting in 1800, and by 1804 had been tasked with a public commission for the Harp Society, painting the walls of its reception room in a bar relief, illustrating the revival, progress, and improvement of the harp. Her portraits of the society's harper, Patrick Quinn, and Secretary John Bernard Trotter, who may have been a relation we don't know, were engraved the first for the monthly pantheon in 1809, as we see here. I haven't managed to trace the other. That same year, she followed her parents in exhibiting the Dublin Society, showing six portraits, all as yet untraced. Soon thereafter, Trotter moved to London. In 1811, she exhibited her portrait of a young lady at the Royal Academy, listing her address as 11 Barton Street, Westminster. That same year, she sent a portrait back to the Dublin Society for display at its show. From 1811 to 14, still in London, she showed four narrative works at the British Institution, which didn't place portraits in its contemporary shows. A scene of the philosopher John Howard's tomb, a literary prison scene from the French Revolution, an image of a peasant at breakfast with his family, and a passage from Lord Byron's reputation clinching poem, The Jower. None as yet have been identified today. By 1813, she had moved to a new address, Beaver Lane Hammersmith. Thus ends the written record on Trotter. The obscurity around Trotter's life and work is not an anomaly for women artists of the time, nor is her trajectory. Rather, we gained by exhibiting in London while advertising her full address, she joined the majority of her peers in inviting potential customers to visit her workspace with commercial gain in mind. By initially acquiring housing in Westminster, she had placed herself in a central locale for established artist homes and studios. Second, her subject choices revealed that she clearly engaged with the political, cultural, and literary currents of the time, and created works tailored to the institutions at hand. Third, she came from a family and with both men and women were pursuing artistry at a high level and seemingly supporting one another in doing so. I'm going to spend some time on this third point because false notions of what such a family context has meant for women artists have wrongly inflected the study of their careers and work for decades. To come from an artistic family was the most common way in which women became artists in Britain. Nearly three quarters of women who exhibited in London from 1760 to 1830 were the daughters, sisters, nieces, or other relatives of men and women who also practiced art, including both of the Academy's female founders, Moser and Kaufman. Many of you may recognize this as a common trope for women artists across time, that they must have been born to artist fathers or gained artist husbands in order to secure success as artists. This argument comes from the famous and pioneering essay by the feminist art historian Linda Nocklin written in 1971, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Very influentially, Nocklin wrote that owing to women's exclusion from the institutions of artistic education until the late 19th century, the few female artists to forge successful careers beforehand, quote, almost without exception, had to have artist husbands and fathers or fathers. While this trope seems to apply to women in Britain, it doesn't to women in France, but that's another story. It's much more complicated than Nocklin intimated. In Britain, women from artistic families regularly pursued artistic training for its explicitly professional value and with explicitly commercial goals. So did most of London's male exhibitors, as Martin Mayrone has recently shown. This family context was much more of an advantage than a handicap and certainly shouldn't be seen as delegitimizing for the female practitioners to whom it applies, nor as a reason to consider them automatically imagers. We don't know exactly how Trotter was taught or raised, but we do have records of other fathers and mothers who taught art quite successfully to their daughters. For instance, from 1789 to 1791, a young Mariah Spillsbury received very directive lessons from her father, Jonathan, a painter and printmaker. As a childhood friend later recalled, Jonathan taught his daughter from a book of skeletons and pieces from antique statues. Apparently focused on helping her gain a command of anatomy, Jonathan, quote, made Mariah draw outlines rapidly of all that had any grace or beauty, allowing her to shade them only slightly. And she acquired early such a facility in sketching graceful figures that a few years afterward, it became as easy to her to sketch from her imagination as to most people to write, end quote. These lessons also had a commercial bent. As the friend Marion Caroline Hamilton added, Jonathan, quote, wished to make Mariah earn her bread if necessary in later life as an artist, end quote. The family returned to London in 1791, and Mariah Spillsbury debuted at the academy the following year. She exhibited in London for the next 17 years, gaining patrons as high up as the Prince Regent, before moving to Dublin and continuing her career there, where she continued to send paintings back to the Prince Regent. Rylinda Sharples' upbringing may have resembled Trotter's even more. She was trained by both of her parents, James and Ellen Sharples, alongside her brothers. She copied her family's works, studied anatomy books, including that pictured here, read Roman histories, and gradually came to paint narrative compositions as well as family friends. In 1811, Ellen happily reflected that her daughter had not only felt the weight of these lessons, but combined them with a genuine passion for making art. It is very delightful to me, she wrote, to see her always cheerful and happy, ardently engaged in various intellectual pursuits, particularly that of painting, for which she has decided taste. Exercising it as a profession, she views as attended with every kind of advantage. End quote. Elsewhere in her journal, which is an incredible document of 100 manuscript pages, Ellen articulated that she had been particularly motivated to see the value of practicing art commercially, after witnessing the fluctuations of fortune in greater havoc wreaked by the French Revolutionary Wars. Whether or not for similar reasons, Trotter too seems to have hoped to exercise art as a profession. As mentioned, her debut piece in London featured the high profile and well connected aristocrat, Lady Caroline Lamb. Lamb was the daughter of an Anglo-Irish pier and the niece of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. In 1805, age 19, she had married a politician, the Honorable William Lamb, later by Count Melbourne, and ultimately Prime Minister, from 1834 to 1941. By 1811, Caroline Lamb was, what do we see? Lamb appears calm, reclined, with her head tilted onto her right hand. She's outside in a hazy, wooded enclosure, opening to a distant shoreline. Her details are intentionally blurred. We don't know exactly where Lamb rests and can only assume that the red object before her is a flower. The subject nonetheless would have been clear, at least to those in Lamb's circle. For Trotter painted Lamb at the time of her largely known affair with her Godfrey Webster, Fifth Baronette. This was the first of many intrigues. Soon, Lamb would become even more notorious for an affair with Lord Byron, followed by a dalliance with the Duke of Wellington in the days after Waterloo. Trotter met her first paramour, Webster, in April 1810. The affair quickly began, deepened, and gained notice. By July of that year, Lamb had already been chastised by relatives and confessed to her husband. Although she repeatedly assured her family members that the affair was over, it continued through the fall of 1811. Sometimes in secret, sometimes quite publicly, and it created growing rifts in her family and social circles. Ample details survive in letters between Lamb and many of her relatives, including George Anna Spencer, as well as Lamb's castigating mother-in-law, Lady Melbourne. In one letter from July 1810, Lady Melbourne of all people, Lamb wrote to Lady Melbourne of all people, claiming that she was ending the affair and describing two of Webster's most recent gifts, a small bull terrier named Pepio, and a bracelet. Sir Godfrey, she wrote, gave me a bracelet at Argyle Street with his hair, and just before I went, I desired him to put it on, which he did behind one of the doors. The next morning, I made a jeweler come and riveted it so that it could not come off without breaking the chain. She resumed her letter to her mother-in-law the next day, describing first the beautiful little Pepio playing and running about me, but then quickly worried that the dog was going mad. He'd almost bitten her son and began foaming at the mouth. She asked her mother-in-law, till Sir Godfrey returns, you shall take care of his presence for me, and then return them. God bless you, my dearest Lady Melbourne. Pray do not name the person to William, her husband, or say anything about it and write to me immediately. As the affair nevertheless continued, Lamb was accused of a frontry even more than adultery, and was temporarily banned from gatherings by Lady Holland, Sir Godfrey's mother, by July 1811. As tempers magnified and flared, the affair finally fizzled in fall of that year. We don't know how Lamb first encountered the artist Eliza Trotter. We can only guess it was through Irish connections, or what led to her sitting for a portrait that would be placed on display at the Academy and then remain in her own collection until her death. We also don't know what might have led Lamb to trust the seemingly unknown artist with her image and story. We do know, however, that Lamb was certainly aware of a long tradition in which women and men appeared at the Academy, and then remained, sorry, appeared at the Academy through female artist hands. Her husband, her cousin, the Duchess of Devonshire, had featured in a painting by Mariah Cosway in 1782, hung in the Academy's great room during Cosway's second year exhibiting. The work is still at Chatsworth House. So had Lamb's husband, William Lamb, and his brother George. As Cosway's young backers, George too appeared in the great room in 1787. Both paintings remained in Lady Melbourne's collection until her death. Both were sold at Christie's in 1993 for 5,000 and 6,000 pounds. William again appeared at the Academy in 1807 in a portrait by Eliza and Pei, now lost. Like Cosway before her, and in line with British artists at the time, Trotter too enhanced her portrait with narrative elements. Painting Lamb nearly a year into her relationship with Webster, she embedded references to the affair, including the gifts Lamb had described to her mother-in-law, the dog named Pepio and the bracelet, which appears as a collar around Pepio's neck. When it appeared when it went on display in April 1811, it had been exactly a year since the couple met. While it seems unlikely that Lamb would have informed Trotter about the genesis of these objects, their presence is unmistakable and so far undisputed. Upon closer look, Lamb places her hand on the dog affectionately, who looks at her nether region suggestively. Perhaps the painting was originally a gift for Webster, or perhaps Lamb hoped it would serve as a relic of the affair. But this wasn't all. Beyond contemporary clues, Trotter allegories Lamb's story through a reference to Angelica Kaufman's a Turkish lady reclining, gazing at a miniature from 1773. This was one of numerous works by Kaufman in which she placed aristocratic women in foreign settings, including what was considered, at the time, fashionable and exoticized Turkish attire. The Turkish theme is certainly appropriative and colonialist to a 21st century audience. But for Kaufman, Angela Rosenthal has argued, it would have most directly signaled a portrait's erotic narrative nature. Trotter's painting unmistakably quotes Kaufman's, even while issuing the explicitly Turkish elements and doubling the portrait size. She places Lamb in the identical pose, the raised right arm supporting her head, the recumbent figure across legs, and the left foot just emerging from under the hemline. She replicates Kaufman's color scheme, presenting Lamb in a white dress with a central gold accent, incorporating a teal blue scarf for tonal balance, and framing Lamb's head with a deep dark crimson that opens to the hazy green space behind. While Lamb dawns in an umpire rather than a circus dress, we see the same detailed folds of fabric between her legs. Through Kaufman's work, we also learn that Lamb is meant to be sitting on a natural version of the Turkish floor pillow. There's actually only one major difference, Lamb's gaze. While Kaufman's subject appears at the object in her hand, Lamb looks out, addressing her painter, academy audiences, and now us, with an almost dead pan invitation to return her calm and only potentially welcoming stare. Yet the rapport between the works runs deeper. For an addition to the visual homage, Trotter also quotes Kaufman's story. In her left hand, Kaufman's subject holds a miniature, which a contemporary engraving reveals was assumed to depict a love interest. Trotter replaced the miniature with gifts from Lamb's paramour. In so doing, she instilled a narrative into her portrait while placing herself in dialogue with the most celebrated female artists, quietly bringing Kaufman back to the academy walls through her own canvas and brush. As mentioned, the painting stayed in Lamb's collection until her death. It then remained in the family home of Brockett Hall until it was sold in 1923. By using Kaufman as her model, Trotter displayed her knowledge of female practitioners and their works, infused this tradition into her art, and revivify this past example of female painterly achievement on the academy's own walls. We can only wonder how many of the hundreds of unidentified works also labeled portrait of a lady might like Trotter's have depicted much, much more. Yet that very same year, at least one other painting did. Marianne Flaxman's portrait of Miss Porten also presented a young female subject, Eleanor Porten, in an intellectual spatial narrative. It's smaller than Trotter's, measuring just over three and a half by four feet. This phenomenal digital image cleaner and clearer than that of my book owes to the fact that it came up for auction at Christie's last December and sold for its low estimate, 50,000 pounds. When placed in dialogue with Trotter's Lamb, Flaxman canvas highlights the remarkable ways in which the very possibilities for the public portrayal of women were evolving at this very moment. In 1811, Eleanor Porten was 16 years old and an emerging romantic poet. She would publish her first work, The Veils, in 1815. She had written it four years earlier, at age 15, the time of Flaxman's portrayal. Flaxman preferred to exhibit narrative scenes, and this is one of only four portraits she showed publicly. Mirroring Trotter, she embedded visual references, these Greco-Roman throughout the composition, from the similarly umpire dress to the pattern laurel leaves. In the process, she altered their conventional connotations, infusing a portrayal of a pier with references to stress the learning of both the artist and sitter. In particular, by placing Porten on a Grecian couch, Flaxman played with a visual trope that associated lounging on such class-sized furniture with female sexuality and political power, often called the Venus on the sofa. While Coffman's and Trotter's compositions belong in this lineage and embrace its associations, Flaxman's defies or adjusts such stereotypes. Porten doesn't lie on her Grecian couch, but sits on it, using it as a support for her writing. Needless to say, it's improbable that this would have been her actual work pose. Other classical references abound, including the conspicuous phase on which Flaxman painted a relief of the sacrifice of the bulls. Flaxman, in fact, utilized the entire canvas to foreground a narrative of erudition, while advertising her own ability to render the minute and erudite. Her work, however, was hung in the undesirable antique academy, and, like Trotter's, received no critical notice. We still know much more about Flaxman than we do Trotter. Her family's archive in the British Library, in fact, is so robust that it's worth a brief detour, for we gain further hints into what opportunities an artistic upbringing might have helped to open for women at the time. In 1770, the sculptor John Flaxman commenced his illustrious exhibiting and teaching career at the academy. In 1786, he was joined by his half-sister, Mary Ann. Over the course of the next 33 years, Mary Ann Flaxman showed narrative paintings, drawings, and portraits at Somerset House, including subjects taken from Shakespeare, Francis Burney, Ossian, and Sir Walter Scott. In 1803, she contributed several images to William Haley's triumphs of temper, engraved by none other than William Blake. They appeared in all subsequent editions of the work. Sketchbooks from her travels in the British Library include cloth figure studies, nature studies, cityscapes, the backs in front of nude statues, and a reclining nude. Her family encouraged her this entire time, especially John. Their sister-in-law, Maria Denman, later recalled, quote, Mary knew well that my brother wished her to pursue her professional studies, not only as an employment, but as a means of her future livelihood, urging her to it by letter. A drawing by Mary Ann Flaxman reveals the interconnected nature that could suffuse such a familial artistic exchange. Dated December 29th, 1803, it depicts a group of men and women sitting around a table sketching. Maria Denman, John Varley, Varley's future sister, Lon Matilda Lowry, later hemming, herself the daughter of the artist Wilson Lowry, Varley's sisters, Hannah Varley and Elizabeth Mulready, and her husband, John Varley's pupil, William Mulready. All present, except for Hannah Varley, exhibited their art. The setting is intimate and informal, with each member of the group intently at work, plainly dressed in unposed, male and female heads bent in interspersed, absorbed unison. The striking naturalness of this drawing suggests that such gatherings may not have been uncommon for artists and their brothers, sisters, husbands, and wives. Her portrait of Eleanor Porton, in fact, fit into this milieu. The Portons and the Flaxmans were family friends, and John also portrayed the writer, absorbed by pen and paper, at only 12 years of age. When Mary Ann exhibited her oil portrait in 1811, this marked Porton's first and only appearance at the academy. Caroline Lamb, however, appeared at Summer House at least three more times in the hands of women. In two portraits by a woman named Liza Jones in 1822, and in a miniature by Emma Kendrick in 1817. Here, we do have some evidence of her direct relationships with the artists. Further hints and final hints into her interactions with Trotter. Although Eliza Jones exhibited in London for decades, from 1807 to 1852, her exhibited images of Lamb are not known to survive, nor does much information about her life or practice. However, a rare presentation copy of Lamb's best known written work, The Gothic Versus from Glenn Arvin, includes an inscription by Lamb and a portrait of her attributed to Jones. It was recently acquired by the Princeton Libraries. We know much more about Emma Kendrick, who exhibited regularly at the academy from 1811 through 1840. Both her brother and father were exhibiting sculptors. She showed 84 works, most of the miniature portraits, a genre in which she excelled in rose to prominence, seeing several of her paintings reproduced in print. In 1818, she became court miniature painter to Princess Elizabeth, and in 1831, miniature painter to King William V, the fourth. In 1830, she would publish a book on miniature painting, citing advice called from artist ranging from Rembrandt to Benjamin West. The latter imparted directly to her. Kendrick's reputation was rising when she crossed paths with Lamb, it seems, in late 1813, about a year after Lamb had ended another tempestuous affair, this one with the poet Lord Byron. By early 1814, Lamb had succeeded at having Kendrick seek thoroughly copy a portrait of Byron in the possession of the publisher John Murray. In a series of letters, Lamb entreated Murray to allow Kendrick to replicate the work while attesting to Kendrick's speed, skill, and dependability. In December, 1813, she implored, quote, I will send one to you who will do it quickly and secretly. And in January, 1814, quote, permit a little woman who will perhaps call to take a little miniature. She will do it in three hours. End quote. She later added, quote, do not refuse to let Ms. Kate to take the likeness. She is one you may depend on, as she would not displease me for the world and I die for it. End quote. Kendrick completed the portrait by April, 1814, placed in a gold locket inscribed in Latin, faithful to my blonde, I can't live without you. And do not trust Byron. A direct reversal of Byron's motto, which was trust Byron, Kendrick exhibited this admittedly awkward portrait of Lamb at the academy three years later. Had they maintained a relationship? Had Lamb commissioned the portrait as an implicit recognition of Kendrick's role in the Locket Affair? Or was Kendrick's portrait a means of keeping and shaping Lamb's image in the public eye? These are some of the many questions that remain to be answered. For a single work and a series of works can only tell us so much. I'd like to think, though, that one thing is clear. Eliza Trotter's portrait of Caroline Lamb was deeply embedded in the cultural occurrence and gender politics of its time. From the perceived strictures and liberties of women's private lives to women's increasing and increasingly palpable presence in London, as skilled, dynamic and professional artists. While their stories too often seem buried or nebulous today, these women built careers by living, working and thriving in the public eye, continually forging a lineage of their own. Thank you.