Female Landscape Artists of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Humans have always been interested in painting the natural world. Our ancestors in the Chauvet caves could have painted their selves eating the animal they had hunted like a rudimentary Instagram post of what they had for dinner last night. But instead the Chauvet caves depict the animals themselves, not only what they looked like but also how they interacted with one another in their environment and the artists even try to imitate how they move. I think this says something more about humans trying to understand themselves and their position in the world through art than it does about simply capturing the individual animal species. I thoroughly recommend watching Chauvet: Humanity's First Great Masterpiece on BBC iplayer.

As I sat at my laptop thinking about who to write about, I realised that the landscape artists I immediately thought of were all men. I am very much inspired by the likes of the romantic artists J.M.W. Turner and John Constable. Although there is nothing wrong with me being inspired by the wispy ethereal nature of the future coming along head fast in Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed or comparing my inspiration for my painting of Wymondham Abbey and the cows to something like John Constable's work. However, this outlook of inspiration does feel rather limited.

What about the women? Surely as a woman myself, I should think about where I might be influenced by other female artists from the same centuries. Rather embarrassingly I realised that without Google I could not name any female landscape painters from the top of my head. I think it is ever more important to reflect on our sense of place as artists.

As a female artist I am questioning how I am influenced by so many male artists from the past and not really knowing first hand their female counterparts. Given that so much of the present discourse on the artistic canon seeks to deconstruct patriarchal traditions and put female artists at the centre of discussion. This absolutely needs to happen, as how can I understand or believe in myself if I cannot see, read about or understand what my fore-mothers painted?

A fantastic place to start if you are interested in female artists throughout history is Katy Hessel's book The Story of Art Without Men. She takes you through the centuries from 1500 to the present day looking at all manner of female artists from across the globe. As she admits in her concluding paragraph of the book 'this is just a fraction of the non-male artists who have contributed to this story'. [1] I am about to shine a light on some female artists who are not discussed by Hessel in any great detail. Indeed the majority of female artist examples in her book are portrait painters: the pictorial examples are mostly of people. So I hope my blog post contributes to the discussion around female artists from history in connection with the discourse that is already happening amongst academics.

In my research I found the following artists.

Amelia Long, Lady Farnborough was an artist of landscapes and florals who depicted scenes of Kent and also of France. She mainly used simple washes and also created graphite drawings too. Her father, Sir Abraham Hume was an art collector and he encouraged Amelia to study watercolour with renowned artist Thomas Girtin. I love the elegance of her watercolour washes and also her seemingly effortless juxtaposition of light and shadows developed when painting buildings and trees in her work. Her creations are a real testament to observation of detail in the wider landscapes.

Lady Mary Lowther has a surviving self portrait. She looks like a kind lady with soft features and an elegant, rich floral dress. She married into the Lowther family, wedded to Sir James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale. Her marriage was an unhappy one and she turned to painting the landscapes around Lowther Hall, as it was known, but is now Lowther Castle. She made a pencil and water sketch of Lowther Castle itself in 1810. Later in life she depicted scenes of the Lake District and some of her works are held by the Wordsworth Trust today. Looking at her work she painted the trees with a sense of movement, of wind rushing through cleverly making the viewer focus on human infrastructure like buildings, villages and bridges that are ultimately surrounded by rolling hills, steep mountainous areas and unforgiving expanses of water. A reminder that human life and daily activities are always shadowed by the unpredictable nature of the environment.

Harriett Gouldsmith also painted wonderful landscapes of the British Isles in oils. Oils are not my personal medium of choice but you can see how wonderfully she painted clouds. They really look as though there is movement in the sky with an amazing contrast between blue and yellow hues that create the drama of an early morning landscape. You get a real sense of the sun shining on those landscapes without it actually being present as a ball of light in the paintings themselves. There is nothing subtle about the her creations by comparison with Amelia Long’s works.

Harriet Green’s watercolour and pencil sketches she made while on tour in Wales are sublime. They remind me a lot of Chinese Shan Shui paintings. Small wonder as the Welsh landscape is full of mountains and water falls. Green's paintings are understated in that they are very pale washes, yet the mountains she depicts appear bold and structural giving a real sense of presence. Harriet as the artist feels very much buried in between these rocky structures and lofty trees. We really understand what she is experiencing and go on her tour with her. Her place and identity on this trip is contained within the ominous landscape that can still land the seasoned mountaineer in trouble today, let alone in 1801! I think one can argue that this is quite remarkable and wonderful that her work survives.

I have thoroughly enjoyed researching these fantastic women who painted in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I think their work will influence me in new ways and make me think about the sense of self in the landscape in a new light. I would like to go out 'en plein air' more as they did and paint sketches with watercolour. Perhaps my own paintings will be seascapes or woodlands or fen lands. All of these will challenge me to think about light through clouds or tree branches and help me to re-focus on the landscapes that matter most to me.

If you are particularly interested, I strongly recommend looking at examples of these artists’ work online through Christies, The Courtauld Institute, the Tate Gallery, Abbott and Holder and Ullswater Heritage Knowledge Bank websites. They can also provide more information about the works and the artists than I have room to give here.

I have often pondered over who we celebrate as artists. It is important to understand, research and come to terms with our collective British history. That can sometimes mean facing challenging discussions head on. But unless we stretch and challenge the artistic cannons we as artists, we as consumers of the arts, cannot fully understand our place, our identities and our history. I think therefore, it goes without saying that many of the artists mentioned in this blog post are undeniably, given the time period in which they lived, undergoing academic research in terms of their connection with the transatlantic slave trade. J.M.W. Turner in particular. You can read more about his connections to slavery on The National Gallery website. [2]

My own research led me to search the register of British slave traders recently made public and demonstrably used on the BBC documentary Finding Britain's Slave Traders with David Olusoga (well worth a watch!). Lady Mary Lowther and Amelia Long, Lady Farnborough married into families that had very direct connections to the transatlantic slave trade. The individuals listed on The Register of British Slave Traders as investing in Atlantic crossings, members of the Lowther and Long families from the 16-1700s, appear beside many other names including Edward Coulston. [3]

Lady Mary Lowther and Lady Farnborough both experienced educations in the arts that most women of the time would never even have thought of. In this way they were privileged members of society who lived in and benefited from the profits of investments in the slave trade made by their family members and the families they married into. Perhaps most strikingly, they both sketched and painted the very buildings and estates that had been built and purchased upon the profits of the transatlantic slave trade: Bromley Hill Place and Lowther Castle. You can read more about Lowther castle and its connections to the slave trade on the Anti Racist Cumbria website. [4] I think this goes to prove that there are many layers of meaning in landscape paintings that are always multifaceted. There is always another person's lived experience that we should explore/ consider/ make us look again and reflect. There is always a bigger picture, a bigger context.

As an artist I don't want to be limited by a single hegemonic view of influence. The canons that I think of when I explore the history of art and who I might be influenced by needs to incorporate all of these discussions; politically, economically, socially, historically and culturally. It is of high importance that this research is undertaken: that we know who, what happened, where and why, that we may make our own decisions about what art we choose to look at and learn from the past. That we may understand contexts in which these historical figures operated, to understand their place and ultimately understand our own place within our own landscapes. Like every opportunity of painting: to keep learning, to keep discovering.

[1] Katy Hessel, The Story of Art Without Men (London: Hutchinson Heinemann Penguin Random House UK, 2022), p. 459.

[2] Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775 - 1851), <https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/joseph-mallord-william-turner> [accessed 14 October 2026].

[3] The Register of British Slave Traders, <https://britishslavetraders.org/individual/sir-john-lowther/>, <https://britishslavetraders.org/individual/colonel-charles-long/> [accessed 14 October 2026].

[4] Kelle Pearce, Black History Month: Cumbria's Connections to Slavery, 13 October 2021, <https://antiracistcumbria.org/black-history-month-cumbrias-connections-to-slavery/> [accessed 14 October 2026].

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