Forbidden Fruit: Why were so many Women Artists Painters of Still Life?

Focusing on British women artists, this course will examine the long and complicated association women artists have had with the domestic subject of still life. Religion, philosophy, aesthetics, politics, gender, freedom of thought and private spheres will all be discussed. From one of the eighteenth century founders of the Royal Academy, Mary Moser, to those women artists who radically reclaimed still life such as Vanessa Bell, Gluck and Ethel Sands in the late nineteenth and twentieth century.