Is it telling that I was always more interested in the amateurs? When I think about the literary depictions of artists I liked best, they tend to share certain qualities: frustrated effort, a willfulness about vocation that verges on delusion, persistence despite the indifference of others and the uncertainty of the rewards.
The blueprint for this preference is the shy, thwarted Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. Lily fears the judgement of Mr. Ramsay that would inevitably flow from his looking at her picture, but is also floored with melancholy when she considers how it will most likely (as was a common fate for women artists) be “rolled up and stuffed under a sofa.” Painting for Lily is at once pleasurable, a “dancing rhythmical movement” that Woolf describes in tactile detail and a battle with “an ancient formidable enemy.” Lily’s inner life is consumed by this ambivalence, but it isn’t clear whether she is actually a talented painter, and it seems certain that she is right to think her work won’t ever be displayed.
Woolf treats this psychic drama seriously and with great generosity and tenderness. What matters isn’t the quality of Lily’s work but the quality of her devotion. I have tried in the past to use my knowledge of British art to visualize Lily’s picture, to gather together the various ekphrastic fragment Woolf inserts into the narrative and construct an equivalent. I remain unconvinced by the easy comparisons between Lily and Woolf’s artist sister Vanessa Bell, who was much more professionalized (and privileged) than Lily. (Only a few years after To the Lighthouse was published, Woolf wrote a forward to an exhibition catalogue for a solo show of Bell’s work in a gallery on Bond Street. She was an artist of reputation, Woolf writes, who was argued about at dinner parties. This isn’t Lily’s trajectory.)
Lily is probably another disciple of British Post-Impressionism, but this isn’t what Woolf finds interesting about her painting. The meaning is largely in the emotion and intelligence Lily brings to bear upon her work, the process, the insistent intertwining of her creativity and her becoming. Lily’s status as an amateur makes this struggle all the more poignant. Her striving is never about securing acclaim or proving that her sacrifices have been worthwhile (she is unmarried, unmarriageable, in part because of her unwillingness to deprioritize her creative pursuits). Her painting is more about subtle internal relationships between herself and, as she refers to it in the triumphant final passages of the novel, her vision.
Art makes her happy, it puts her in a curious and purposeful relationship to the world, and that’s enough.
I have always liked the humble yet doggedly workmanlike image of artistic personhood Lily embodies. Her shame about her work being seen yet her drive to keep making it resonated with me. I remained slightly embarrassed by the idea of writing fiction myself and felt comforted by Lily’s discomfort.
It was also true that I wanted Hannah, the fictional artist who is the protagonist of my debut novel, Venus, Vanishing, to begin as a self-taught amateur with little hope of achieving any commercial or critical success. When I began to write the novel in earnest, other amateur artists from fiction joined Lily in my mind.
There was the romantic, impulsive Slade student Dora in Iris Murdoch’s novel 1958 The Bell, who gives up her studies for (a disastrous) marriage. Initially her art doesn’t factor in much to the novel, except as a shorthand for her flightiness and dreaminess, her naivety. That is until we join Dora in the familiar rooms of the National Gallery where she finds “something real and something perfect” in a Gainsborough painting.
At the end of the novel, after the usual chaotic machinations of a Murdoch novel have resolved themselves, and motivated by this revelatory encounter, Dora returns to her painting, even though she is aware of her “very meagre talent.” Art makes her happy, it puts her in a curious and purposeful relationship to the world, and that’s enough. The amateur is freed from the pressures of exhibition and sale, but that might just as easily breed bitterness as happiness.
In Elizabeth Jane Howard’s 1950 debut novel The Beautiful Visit, her young protagonist becomes the lady’s companion of an ageing fantasist, Mrs Borders, who fills the hours and every wall and drawer of her house with watercolors. This amateur is a spectre of wasted time, energy and imagination. Her watercolors of ‘sunsets, flowers, churches, buildings, the sea and bits of the room’ are abundant, repetitive and, as the protagonist states simply, “bad,” though “there was something almost lovable in her assurance of their quality.”
But her opinion about Mrs. Border’s benignity soon changes. Howard has fun making the excess and redundancy of Mrs. Border’s work slightly uncanny, terrifying. Hung on every available surface of the room, “their already impressive number […] multiplied” by the reflective glass in which they’re framed, the watercolors contribute to a profound sense of claustrophobia, and underscore the extent to which the unnamed narrator is trapped inside her employer’s mind as much as her house.
What if more of Lily’s life had granted her this ecstatic feeling of agency, this satisfaction, this gratitude, this accomplishment? Perhaps, I thought, I could write my way into this experience to honor Lily and all her amateur literary sisters.
There are other amateurs, especially in novels from the century before. Jane Eyre paints watercolors and tells Mr. Rochester that she derives happiness from doing so. Edna Pontellier in The Awakening paints (in “an unprofessional way”) and though she is said to have “natural aptitude” with the brushes, she is at once frustrated by her lack of skill and immune to praise about her efforts.
All these amateurs are women, which is no coincidence. Even if aspiring women artists were fortunate enough to apprentice with an artist (male) relative, or later to enter an art school, they were (up until the mid-twentieth century at least) rarely encouraged to professionalize. If they tried to make a name for themselves, they risked marginalization and exclusion from galleries, prurient interest from the press, ridicule from the public. Women weren’t considered capable of true creativity: they were imitative, derivative; painting was a pastime—it wasn’t a path to greatness. “Women can’t write, women can’t paint,” as Charles Tansley insists to Lily in To the Lighthouse. Lily’s anxieties aren’t fantasies of persecution: they are grounded in the harsh realities of having artistic aspirations as a woman in the early twentieth century when your desires were expected to orient around domesticity and family.
I could have gone to fiction to find examples of fictional professional women artists. But it was perhaps inevitable, as an art historian, that I would return to my research to find the true lodestar for Venus, Vanishing. The German artist Lotte Laserstein (1898-1993) painted startling images of self-possession, desire and creative authority in the early decades of the twentieth century in Berlin, frequently inserting herself into her intimate, everyday and queerly erotic nudes. A favorite of mine is a self-portrait from 1929, I and my Model.
Laserstein shows herself at work, gazing out at the spectator, her model peering thoughtfully over her shoulder, a collaborative force in the artwork rather than its passive object. Laserstein radiates a defiance and intensity of self-belief that I realized I could never find amongst my beloved amateurs. I wanted Hannah’s genealogy to originate here instead—in Laserstein’s impassive yet challenging expression. When I look at this painting, the same phrase always floats into view. Lily, triumphant at last, in the final line of To the Lighthouse. “Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.” What if more of Lily’s life had granted her this ecstatic feeling of agency, this satisfaction, this gratitude, this accomplishment? Perhaps, I thought, I could write my way into this experience to honor Lily and all her amateur literary sisters.
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Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell is available from Henry Holt and Co.