Emma Novello in context

Image credit Leeds University Library

Despite the general support of her family, Emma Novello’s decision to pursue a career as an artist transgressed the social conventions of the time. Creative activity outside the domestic sphere was thought to be the province of men and the restricted educational opportunities for women limited their access to the skills and networks necessary to exhibit and sell their work. In defiance of these obstructions, increasing numbers of women did however attempt to train and practice as artists, particularly from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards.

The Society of Female Artists, established in the middle years of the 1850s, represented one of several new initiatives to provide women with institutional support. We know that Novello exhibited with the Society at least once, at their third exhibition in 1859, only weeks before the publication of an open letter to the Royal Academy of Arts in the Athenæum, to which Novello signed her name alongside thirty seven other women, many associated with the Society. Collectively they demanded equal access to the Royal Academy Schools, drawing attention to the rise in art making by women and that one hundred and twenty women had exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition over the previous three years.

Emma Novello’s training and practice as an artist was enabled by her family and their cultural connections, which provided privileged access to successful visual artists like Joseph Severn and his daughter Ann Mary. Music, literature, theatre and art were not just polite attainments or leisurely pastimes for the Novello family; they were embedded in their professional lives and sense of identity through their Italian heritage. Of the seven Novello children who survived into adulthood, only three married and two went on to have children of their own, meaning that Emma’s status as a ‘spinster’ was not unusual in the context of her immediate family. The continued financial success of the music publishing business founded by her father Vincent Novello also enabled his children to pursue their own interests through economic security and access to upper middle-class networks.

Although Emma Novello was afforded educational, social and professional opportunities beyond many women in mid-nineteenth-century Britain, these opportunities were still differentiated from those presented to her brothers and other male contemporaries. That she remained unmarried and without children did not absent her from caring responsibilities, as we have witnessed in relation to her aunt Catherine Collins. She remained economically dependent on her family too, as structural limitations made it very difficult for artist-women to become entirely self-sufficient through their work. 

To conclude, the portrait of Richard Cobden by Emma Novello deserves our attention as a work of art by a woman attempting to make a career in a profession which still maintained barriers to full participation in the mid nineteenth century, which artists like Novello began to dismantle through their own persistence and collective campaigns for equal access to education, exhibitions and patronage. That she was granted permission to portray a radical politician at a pivotal moment in national and international diplomacy reveals her to have been embedded in important European networks, based on familial associations, independent travel and inherited wealth. These advantages would not ultimately insulate her from discrimination, but even as she entered the asylum in which she would spend the final two decades of her life, she declared herself to be an artist and it is as an artist that we meet her today. 

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