Louise Jopling
Encyclopedia
Early life
Louise Goode was born in Manchester, fifth child of railway contractor T. S. Goode. She married at seventeen to civil servant Frank Romer. The Baroness de Rothschild, a connection of Romer's, encouraged Louise to pursue and develop her art. In the later 1860s she studied in Paris with Charles Joshua ChaplinCharles Joshua Chaplin
Charles Joshua Chaplin was a French painter and engraver. He was born in Les Andelys, Eure, France to an English father and a French mother. Although he spent the whole of his life in France, he only became naturalized in 1886. He died in Paris, France.Chaplin conducted art classes specifically...
and Alfred Stevens
Alfred Stevens (painter)
Alfred Émile Léopold Stevens was a Belgian painter.Alfred Stevens was born in Brussels. He came from a family involved with the visual arts: his older brother Joseph and his son Léopold were painters, while another brother Arthur was an art dealer and critic...
, and first exhibited her work at the Salon. She entered works into the Royal Academy
Royal Academy
The Royal Academy of Arts is an art institution based in Burlington House on Piccadilly, London. The Royal Academy of Arts has a unique position in being an independent, privately funded institution led by eminent artists and architects whose purpose is to promote the creation, enjoyment and...
shows, 1870–73 (as Louise Romer). After Romer's 1872 death, she married watercolourist Joseph Middlemore Jopling in 1874, who in 1888 was best man at Whistler's wedding to Beatrix Godwin.
She achieved fair success in her career: her painting Five O'Clock Tea was sold for ₤400 in 1874. Her Five Sisters of York was shown at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876, and her The Modern Cinderella at the Paris Exposition of 1878. Yet she was not immune to the gender discrimination of her time: in 1883 she sought a portrait commission for 150 guineas
Guinea (British coin)
The guinea is a coin that was minted in the Kingdom of England and later in the Kingdom of Great Britain and the United Kingdom between 1663 and 1813...
, but lost it to Sir John Everett Millais
John Everett Millais
Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, PRA was an English painter and illustrator and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.-Early life:...
, who was paid 1000 guineas for the same project.
She joined the Society of Women Artists
Society of Women Artists
-History :The Society was founded in 1855 as the Society of Female Artists and held its first exhibition two years later. The Society has since held an annual exhibition in London of work by women artists....
(1880) and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters (1891); she became the first woman to be admitted to the Royal Society of British Artists (1901). During the years of her marriage with Jopling, she became the primary earner of the family. "She found this responsibility weighty and stressful, necessitating constant production, regular sales and a continual search for commissions and clients. In 1879, despite her own illness and that of her son Percy, she produced eighteen works."
Social life
Jopling "painted portraits of titled sitters, wealthy financiers and actresses," and to operate in this social milieu she maintained a fashionable lifestyle, with a Chelsea studio designed by William BurgesWilliam Burges (architect)
William Burges was an English architect and designer. Amongst the greatest of the Victorian art-architects, Burges sought in his work an escape from 19th century industrialisation and a return to the values, architectural and social, of an imagined mediaeval England...
. She moved in a social circle that included Lady Colin Campbell
Gertrude Elizabeth Blood
Lady Colin Campbell , born Gertrude Elizabeth Blood, was an Irish-born journalist, author, playwright, and editor. She was married to Lord Colin Campbell, a brother-in-law of Princess Louise, Queen Victoria's fourth daughter.-Biography:Her parents were Edmund Maghlin Blood Lady Colin Campbell (3...
, Kate Greenaway
Kate Greenaway
Catherine Greenaway , known as Kate Greenaway, was an English children's book illustrator and writer, who spent much of her childhood at Rolleston, Nottinghamshire. She studied at what is now the Royal College of Art in London, which at that time had a separate section for women, and was headed by...
, James Tissot
James Tissot
James Jacques Joseph Tissot was a French painter, who spent much of his career in Britain.-Biography:Tissot was born in Nantes, France. In about 1856, he began study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris under Hippolyte Flandrin and Lamothe, and became friendly with Edgar Degas and James Abbott...
, and Edward Burne-Jones
Edward Burne-Jones
Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet was a British artist and designer closely associated with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, who worked closely with William Morris on a wide range of decorative arts as a founding partner in Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, and Company...
. Augustus Dubourg dedicated his 1892 play Angelica to her. In 1887 the society magazine The Lady’s World described her social circle,
One year we have her portrait, magnificently sketched by Millais, adorning the walls of the Grosvenor; next season she figures as the heroine of a ‘society’ novel from the pen of a popular writer. One week we see her salon drawn by Mr. Du Maurier in Punch, with sketches from the life of herself and her friends; the week after she appears under another name as the heroine of one of those quasi-malicious town and country tales which amuse the readers of a society paper…
Over the mantelpiece hangs the portrait, by her old friend Sir John Millais, which made such a sensation at the Grosvenor a year or two ago…Here Mr. James Whistler and Mr. Oscar Wilde are always to be found, discussing the eternal problems of art; while Sir John Millais, Mr. Sargent and Mr. George Boughton are sworn allies of the subject of our sketch. The Ladies Archibald and Walter Campbell rarely miss a party.
It was at an 1883 party at the Jopling's house that Whistler had a famous exchange with Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
. In response to a witticism of Whistler's, Wilde remarked, "How I wish I had said that." Whistler replied, "You will, Oscar, you will."
Like some other women painters (Kate Perugini
Kate Perugini
Kate Perugini was an English painter of the Victorian era and the daughter of Charles Dickens.-Biography:...
and Marie Spartali Stillman
Marie Spartali Stillman
Marie Euphrosyne Spartali, later Stillman , was a British Pre-Raphaelite painter of Greek descent, arguably the greatest female artist of that movement...
are examples), Jopling also served as a model and subject for other artists. Both Millais and James Abbott McNeill Whistler painted portraits of her. Whistler praised Millais' picture as "a great work" and "a superb portrait."
Later life
Joseph Jopling died in 1884; Louise married lawyer George W. Rowe in 1887, but continued to use Jopling's name professionally. She established her own school of painting for women, also in 1887, and wrote several pieces on the subject of art teaching. Her friend Whistler distributed the prizes at her school. She championed the right of female art students to work directly from live models. (The Royal Academy first allowed its female students to observe male models, carefully draped, in 1893.)Louise Jopling was a long-term supporter of the National Union of Women's Suffrage
Women's suffrage
Women's suffrage or woman suffrage is the right of women to vote and to run for office. The expression is also used for the economic and political reform movement aimed at extending these rights to women and without any restrictions or qualifications such as property ownership, payment of tax, or...
, and active in feminist
Feminism
Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...
causes. She served as a vice-president of the Healthy and Artistic Dress Union, a short-lived organization of the first decade of the twentieth century. She published a book of art instruction, and an autobiography, Twenty Years of My Life. She also wrote some poetry.
External links
- Representative works.
- http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/portrait.asp?LinkID=mp07176&rNo=0&role=artJopling's portrait of Samuel SmilesSamuel Smiles-Early life:Born in Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland, the son of Samuel Smiles of Haddington and Janet Wilson of Dalkeith, Smiles was one of eleven surviving children. The family were strict Cameronians, though when Smiles grew up he was not one of them...
.]