Going Places: Women Artists in Central London in the 1850s and 1860s

This essay takes issue with debates about the flaneur and the flaneuse, as well as discussing on women shoppers and walkers in the 19th century city, to set out a theoretically and historically informed account of middle-class women who criss-crossed London, on foot and by transport, in their practice as artists in the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on recent theories of space, woman's look, and the body the essay examines the figure of the woman artist in the city and the spaces that she inhabited. The research maps the many and diverse locations where women artists lived and worked, bought their materials, went to study art and to network with other women.