Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Fabrics of Enchantment’: Artist Travellers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Europe
- 2 Opening Young Minds to Art and Knowledge: Art Training in Mid-Nineteenth-Century London and Paris
- 3 From ‘a Nibble’ to ‘Golden Guineas’: The British Art Market, 1850–61
- 4 Paint and Painting: The Virtues and Trials of Practices Exchanged by Word of Mouth
- 5 Joanna Mary Boyce: In Her Own Time
- 6 Joanna Mary Boyce: Beyond Pre-Raphaelitism
- 7 A Critical Career: Joanna Mary Boyce’s Art Writings
- 8 George Price Boyce: A Unique Vision
- 9 George Price Boyce: Art Collector
- 10 Henry Tanworth Wells: Miniaturist and Portrait Painter of Distinction
- General Bibliography
- Index
5 - Joanna Mary Boyce: In Her Own Time
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 May 2024
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Fabrics of Enchantment’: Artist Travellers in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Europe
- 2 Opening Young Minds to Art and Knowledge: Art Training in Mid-Nineteenth-Century London and Paris
- 3 From ‘a Nibble’ to ‘Golden Guineas’: The British Art Market, 1850–61
- 4 Paint and Painting: The Virtues and Trials of Practices Exchanged by Word of Mouth
- 5 Joanna Mary Boyce: In Her Own Time
- 6 Joanna Mary Boyce: Beyond Pre-Raphaelitism
- 7 A Critical Career: Joanna Mary Boyce’s Art Writings
- 8 George Price Boyce: A Unique Vision
- 9 George Price Boyce: Art Collector
- 10 Henry Tanworth Wells: Miniaturist and Portrait Painter of Distinction
- General Bibliography
- Index
Summary
HAD SHE LIVED A longer life, Joanna Mary Boyce (later Wells) would have made a notable mark on the fine art of her time – not just because of her talent, nor because of her connection with some of the most notable mid-Victorian artists, but because the time was right. Born in 1831, she grew up into a period dominated by the ‘woman question’, and, while all three of the painters to whom this book is dedicated operated in this matrix of social, political and economic challenge, debate and change in relation to women's professional roles, it was she for whom this moment was meant. This was the point at which a talented, capable and articulate middle-class woman could break through and come to the fore, claiming her just reward. So, resisting the temptation provoked by her untimely death to ponder on what Boyce might have been, this essay examines what she was – a woman of her time (Figure 10.1).
Perhaps it goes without saying that middle-class women's lives in mid-nineteenth-century Britain were shaped by their families, and specifically by the ambitions of their parents, the company their parents kept and the opportunities for experience that were allowed in their journey from infancy to adulthood. In imagining Boyce as a child, one amongst five children in a financially comfortable household, we see her father George John Boyce, fond and encouraging, who was glad to help her talents develop, but who died when she was only twenty-one; and her mother Anne Boyce (née Price), whose grand-daughter wrote of her ‘emotional and uncontrolled nature’ and whom the family's latter-day biographer, Sue Bradbury, describes as ‘of an emotionally demanding disposition’. A good marriage was perhaps the chief point on which the parents’ aims for their two daughters would have agreed.
Marriage was one of the most prominent topics in the emerging discourse on the position of women: referred to as the ‘woman question’, this was fairly established by the end of the 1840s as a huge contemporary issue. No family of financially comfortable, literate, sociable Londoners such as the Boyces could have failed to notice this matter as it shifted from an element of radical conversation to a central plank of modernity.
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- Victorian Artists and their World 1844-1861As reflected in the papers of Joanna and George Boyce and Henry Wells, pp. 167 - 190Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2024