Venue: Banstead Community Hall, Park Road, Banstead, SM7 3AJ
Lecture starts at 10.30 a.m.
Women have worked as artists for hundreds of years, often struggling against societal expectations and institutional barriers. From the Stuart courts to the First World War, this lecture follows women artists in Britain on their journeys to becoming professionals. Determined to succeed and refusing to be boxed in, they daringly painted what were usually thought to be subjects for male artists: history pieces, battle scenes and the nude. These artists championed equal access to art training and academy membership, breaking boundaries and overcoming many obstacles to establish what it meant to be a woman in the art world. Besides well-known artists such as Angelica Kauffman and Rosa Bonheur, we will meet lesser-known artists who were highly successful in their day, but have since been forgotten.
Dr Amy Lim is an art historian and curator, specialising in British fine and decorative arts from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. She is curator of the Faringdon Collection at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, and the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, and a Departmental Tutor at Oxford Lifelong Learning. She has curated and contributed to numerous exhibitions, including British Baroque: Power and Illusion (Tate, 2020), Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520-1920 (Tate, 2024) and Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk (Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury and the Stanley Spencer Gallery, 2025-6). Amy has degrees in History, and Literature & Arts from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and has published articles and essays on a variety of art-related topics from gothic garden monuments to female patronage.