Elizabeth Emma Soyer was a child prodigy. Born in London in 1813 as Elizabeth Emma Jones and dying just twenty-nine years later, she produced more than four hundred paintings and countless drawings during her lifetime. Her fleeting career reflects the complexities of being a woman – and a woman artist – in Georgian-era Britain.
Although women were practising art professionally in England in the early nineteenth century – and had been since at least the seventeenth century – the barriers women faced entering the art world were considerable. Founded in 1768, the Royal Academy (RA) was England’s pre-eminent professional society, exhibiting venue and training centre for artists. While not formally excluded from entry, no women were accepted into the RA’s schools until 1860, and women students continued to be barred from studying from the living model – the cornerstone of art education – until the 1890s. Women’s ‘naturally’ mimetic artistic abilities and perceived lack of ‘genius’ rendered them, in the eyes of most, suited only to practising art in an amateur capacity.
Women in the Regency and Georgian periods who wanted to pursue art seriously were largely reliant on family members as the source of education. Soyer – then Jones – commenced her art training with her stepfather, Belgian painter François Simonau, and immediately showed a proficiency for portraiture. With her mother’s urging, Soyer became Simonau’s sole pupil and, in 1823, she exhibited her first work, Portrait of Miss Bennett, at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition at just ten years of age. Soyer started taking portrait commissions soon after, presumably working from her stepfather’s established portrait studio. Her style and use of colour, light and shade were likened to that of seventeenth-century Spanish painter Bartolomé Murillo, particularly in her studies of children. Recently gifted to the NGV by Krystyna Campbell-Pretty AM and Family, The escape, 1837, is a characteristic example of Soyer’s empathetic renderings of child subjects that, in this case, blend realism with allegory.
The escape was painted near the peak of Soyer’s career, when she shifted from working in pencil and charcoal to pursuing more ambitious subjects and portraits in oil. One portrait commission led to her marrying the famed chef Alexis Soyer, who championed his wife’s career. She began exhibiting at the Paris Salon, travelling throughout Europe and Britain with Simonau, now a widower, to promote her work, which was also popularised through engravings. Notably, she often sought out subjects on the margins of English society: child beggars, Jewish emigres and, in her most famous painting, Two children with a book, 1831 (Tate, London), young black sitters.
In 1842, Soyer died due to complications during childbirth. Her career was ‘cut off when her reputation was about to make her fortune’, lamented her obituary in The Gentleman’s Magazine. Despite enjoying the rare combination of advantages that made it possible to practice as woman artist in the nineteenth century – an encouraging family, dedicated teacher, unimpeachable talent and a supportive spouse – she could not escape what was then the greatest threat to women: childbearing. Despite her husband’s efforts to preserve her legacy through an exhibition of her work, Soyer faded into obscurity in the later nineteenth century. The escape now provides audiences insight into the tragedies and triumphs of Soyer’s brief but prolific career.
Dr Maria Quirk is Curator, Collections and Research at the National Gallery of Victoria.