Emma Novello’s artistic practice

Emma Novello’s practice as an artist was most visible in public during the decade between 1859 and 1869. In February 1859 she presented a ‘Copy of an Old Dutch Painting’ at the third exhibition of the Society of Female Artists at No. 7 Haymarket in London. In April 1859 Emma Novello signed a petition calling for the Royal Academy of Arts to admit women into its schools, which was sent to all 40 Academicians and published in the Athenæum journal on 30 April 1859.

Later that year she exhibited a copy after a work by Thomas Gainsborough at the British Institution, with the Daily News reporting that she had ‘imitated the painter’s handling very closely’. Following their annual exhibition of paintings by old masters, the British Institution allowed artists to make copies of works on display for the purpose of study and Novello took this opportunity on more than one occasion.

As a result of the lack of professional training opportunities, the practice of copying works of art by old masters on display in public galleries and temporary exhibitions became an important autodidactic mechanism for artist-women during this period. Like the majority of artists, Novello had begun her artistic education by drawing from plaster casts taken from canonical antique statuary, so understood this process as a way to improve her technique. She continued to make copies of paintings into middle age, including from two seventeenth-century portraits: of the Belgian merchant and art collector Cornelis van der Geest by Anthony van Dyck in the collection of the National Gallery and of the actor Michel Baron attributed to Claude Lefebvre in the collection of Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Mary Cowden Clarke, Emma’s older sister, dedicated a poem to her in 1859, which articulated her belief that part of their late brother Edward’s artistic talent had transferred to Emma following his death at a young age:

My sister Emma, most of all art thou  
Associate in my thought with him we lost;  
Dear Edward! whose bright promis’d path was cross’d  
By Death's cold shadow: I remember how  
‘Twas you were always his companion most  
Preferr’d, while at the easel he'd endow  
With colour'd life the paintings we have now—  
Surviv’d to form his glory and our boast. 
‘Twas you who imbibed our brother’s taste for Art— 
Adopting it, for his sake, as your own— 
When at his side, you sat, and, studious grown,  
Laid by the idler and the merrier part 
You played so long as mirth beguiled his hours, 
To gain a kindred portion of his powers. 

Emma remained unmarried and made several solo trips to Europe. In 1864 she stayed at the Palazzo Poli in Rome, spending time with Eleanor Severn, the artist Ann Mary Newton (née Severn) and their father Joseph Severn, also an artist who had produced a portrait of Emma the previous year. Joseph Severn and the poet John Keats had often visited the Novellos in London to hear recitals of music by Mozart and Haydn by Emma’s father Vincent Novello.  

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