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- Title
'More Beautiful than Words & Pencil Can Express': Barbara Bodichon's Artistic Career at the Interface of her Epistolary and Visual Self Projections.
- Authors
Simon‐Martin, Meritxell
- Abstract
This article analyses the artistic career of mid-Victorian feminist Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon through her personal correspondence and artwork. Reading letter writing and painting as performative autobiographical acts of self-formation, it argues that Bodichon’s letters and paintings unfold the making of a female artist through a hybrid mode of self-representation. Bodichon projected an articulation of her artistic becoming in her letters and paintings – a verbal/visual representation constitutive of her self. She forged her artistic identity through epistolary and visual narratives within norms of cultural intelligibility. In turn, she individuated her self-image as a female artist determined by the distinct features of these two mediums. Hence, Bodichon’s articulated artistic identity emerges as a hybrid, in the form of a multiple, fragmented and unresolved self. The article concludes that her letters and paintings are valuable, though not unproblematic, sources of knowledge about Bodichon’s artistic career. For they provide a partial, yet insightful, understanding of her artistic fashioning.
- Subjects
UNITED Kingdom; BODICHON, Barbara Leigh Smith, 1827-1891; ARTISTS' correspondence; SUFFRAGISTS; WOMEN'S suffrage; WATERCOLORISTS; WOMEN artists -- History; BRITISH history sources; VICTORIAN Period, Great Britain, 1837-1901; NINETEENTH century
- Publication
Gender & History, 2012, Vol 24, Issue 3, p581
- ISSN
0953-5233
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1468-0424.2012.01710.x