Louise Jopling in the studio

de Montfort, P. (2016) Louise Jopling in the studio. British Women Artists 1760-1960 Sub-Group Meeting, Edinburgh, UK, 26 May 2016. (Unpublished)

Abstract

The London studios occupied by the portrait and genre painter, Louise Jopling (1843-1933), over a thirty year period from the 1880s are unusually well documented for a woman artist of her day. Numerous photographs and black and white line drawings of her studios in Chelsea and Kensington were reproduced in the press thanks to her status as a celebrity artist and social butterfly. They include a remarkable series of images of students at work in the life studio of Jopling’s art school (which ran from c. 1887-1914) as well as solo portrayals of Jopling in contrasting and artfully crafted social guises – from fashionable salon hostess of George Du Maurier’s Punch cartoon, published in 1878, to sober, industrious portrait painter at her easel (as in Austin Chester’s biographical article for the Windsor magazine, published in 1906). This paper examined a selection of these images in close-up, and considered the extent to which they convey visually and contextually overlapping strands of Jopling’s public and private life. Beneath the glossy artifice of these images, the studio functioned as the embodiment of Jopling’s social attitudes and public activism as well as a shop-window for her art.

• Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item
• Status: Unpublished
• Refereed: No
• 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
• College/School: College of Arts > School of Culture and Creative Arts > History of Art