Franny Moyle Read Online Free PDF

Constance was making inroads elsewhere.
    She began a collection of blue and white china, which was de rigueur for anyone pretending to Aesthetic credentials. She alsocontinued to explore her own artistic talents, and now it was to ceramics that she turned.
    If not before, certainly by, early 1882 Constance was taking pottery classes, probably either at the pottery studio at the South Kensington Museum or at the Minton art pottery studio in Kensington Gore. Both locations were close to the Royal Albert Hall, a place that Constance found herself passing regularly as she trudged from Lancaster Gate, across Hyde Park and into South Kensington. Her correspondence mentions her tendency to bump into friends there, including on one occasion Oscar, whom she saw there ‘for about a second’ one day. 10
    â€˜Had two lessons in terracotta painting and I’m at present in a hopeless state of despair over it,’ Constance reported in March 1882, ‘but I’m going to have a private lesson on Friday. There’s no use in joining a class unless you know something about it first, and I of course have been working all wrong.’ 11
    In the late 1870s female amateur potters working in these South Kensington studios made their contribution to what became known as the Arts and Crafts movement, a revival of craft skills that went hand in hand with the so-called Aesthetic movement. By 1878 these potteries had established a commercial outlet via Howell & James, in Regent Street, and that year they staged an exhibition that ‘contained upwards of one thousand original works, mostly by ladies, and was frequented during its two months duration by nearly 10,000 visitors’. 12
    A year after the first mention of ceramics in her letters, Constance was working towards a contribution for another similar show and had high ambitions. ‘I want to paint two plates for the Amateur Exhibition on the 21st in Regent Street and to sell them, if possible for 30 shillings a piece,’ she revealed in a letter. ‘They cost me 10 shillings without paint, but I’m afraid I cannot do them well enough and then they will not accept them.’ 13
    Constance’s plates were essays in ‘barboline’ painting, a technique, as she herself explained, of ‘painting under glaze on pottery with a thin kind of clay called slip mixed with the colours to make themopaque like oil. Consequently it can be painted boldly, unlike the ordinary enamel china painting, and is fired and glazed afterwards. You paint it on the bisque ware.’ 14
    It is also evident that Constance was working away at her fine art skills. She had enrolled in the St John’s Wood School of Art, based in Elm Tree Road, not far from Lord’s cricket ground. Founded in 1878, this was an art school where women could study those drawing skills and take the life classes that would, among other things, prepare them for entry into the Royal Academy Schools – an institution that had admitted its first female student in 1860.
    Art classes were becoming increasingly popular in the 1880s. For those young women like Constance who instinctively felt the need to do something with their lives, periodicals such as The Girl’s Own Paper explained the potential appeal of what might lead to a career, if not as an artist, then most certainly as a tutor.
    Between true artistic geniuses and those destined to be viewers of works of art rather than creators of art was ‘a powerful and energetic middle class’, explained the paper, ‘who … are yet gifted with a vein of talent, more or less generous, which would well repay cultivation, and which would fill the lives of those who possess it with healthy interests and sufficiently lucrative employment’. 15
    The St John’s Wood School, under the tutelage of a Mr Calderon, cost its pupils 15 guineas a year or 10 guineas for two terms. Girls had to buy their own equipment, but models were