Collecting women’s works: Jopling, the Rothschilds and their circle

de Montfort, P. (2014) Collecting women’s works: Jopling, the Rothschilds and their circle. The Collector and his Circle: New Research in the History of Collecting, London, UK, 1-2 July 2014. (Unpublished)

Abstract

This paper examined the extent to which Louise Jopling’s contact with the Rothschild family absorbed her into a larger circle of British collectors. Who were they? What do her connections tell us about how and why collectors acquired (and sometimes traded in) the work of women artists? It concludes that Jopling chose her subjects with a careful eye to the market that conformed to conventional prejudices about suitable subjects for women artists. Her professional expertise in producing a steady stream of appealing portraits of children, so-called ‘fancy pictures’ of young women and other genre subjects - full of humour and incident - became attractive to middle-class collectors and Rothschilds alike. These subjects were, in the main, for domestic consumption – they were about the private and the personal in ways that contrasted with art on of the more monumental kind on display in the public rooms of grand country houses owned by the Rothschilds at Aston Clinton and elsewhere. Hence, the patronage that Jopling enjoyed from the Rothschilds largely conforms to conventional tropes around the collecting of women’s works in the 19th century.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Status: Unpublished
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: de Montfort, Dr Patricia
• Authors: de Montfort, P.
• Subjects: N Fine Arts > N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR; N Fine Arts > ND Painting; N Fine Arts > NX Arts in general
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts > History of Art

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