Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 - Tate Britain

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Thu 16 May 2024 - Wed 13 Nov 2024

Louise Jopling - a Manchester-born artist at Tate Britain

Paintings by a Manchester-born artist are being brought back into the light and onto the wall of the Tate Britain gallery.

Louise Jopling (1843 - 1933) had work exhibited at the Royal Academy during her lifetime and founded her own art school for women, in 1887. In 1901, she became one of the first women admitted to the Royal Society of British Artists.



In the 1880’s she lived in Chelsea and hosted ‘salon gatherings’. Oscar Wilde was a regular visitor and on one occasion, as Jopling recorded in her autobiography, arrived with ‘a snake twisted around his neck’.

She was born Louise Goode in Moss Side, in 1843, the daughter of Thomas Smith "T.S." Goode, who was a railway contractor. He and his wife Francesa had nine children. When Louise was 17-years-old she married civil servant Frank Romer. He became private secretary to Baron de Rothschild, in France. Although the marriage eventually ended in a Judicial Separation, this move across the channel proved to be a catalyst for Jopling’s artistic development. Baroness de Rothschild saw some of her pencil sketches and encouraged her to undertake formal art training in Paris.

After exhibiting at the Paris Salon, she pushed through prejudices against female artists to exhibit at the Royal Academy Philadelphia International Exhibition and the Grosvenor Gallery amongst others. One of her motivations for setting up her own art school was to give women the chance to have the opportunity to paint from life models. This was something which had been open to her at the studio of the Anglo-French artist and engraver Charles Joshua Chaplin. Unusually for the time, Chaplin conducted art classes specifically for women.

In 1872, after Frank Romer’s death, she married fellow painter Joseph Middleton. In Kensington, they regularly called on Sir John Everett Millais - a founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He became a godfather to their son Lindsay. Millais also painted Jopling in 1879, as did James Abbott McNeill Whistler in 1877.

Tate Britain has acquired a self-portrait by Jopling in 1875. It is called Through the Looking Glass and was completed when Jopling was pregnant with Lindsay. In the portrait, she is wearing a dress and a hat of light blue. She gazes intently at the viewer, palette in hand as if she were her own muse.

Louise Jopling is included in the exhibition Now You See Us Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920 at Tate Britain, until 3 October 2024.

The oil painting, A Modern Cinderella depicts a woman with one arm outstretched, removing her gown at the end of a session. There is a loose shoe in the foreground and a glimpse of Jopling’s easel in the mirror’s reflection, as well as a clock striking 12. The model's naked shoulder did not go unnoticed at the time, with one picture dealer’s wife reportedly saying that she could never hang such a thing in her house. The painting was also shown in Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1878,



Now You See Us includes over 150 works and follows women on their journeys to becoming professional artists. From Tudor times to the First World War, artists such as Mary Beale, Angelica Kauffman, Elizabeth Butler and Laura Knight paved a new artistic path for generations of women.

Other artists exhibited include Julia Margaret Cameron, Gwen John and Artemisia Gentileschi, who created major works in London at the court of Charles I, including the recently rediscovered Susanna and the Elders 1638-40, on loan from the Royal Collection.

Tickets available here.

Portrait of Louise Jopling (1843-1933), by Herbert Rose Barraud (1845-1896) - commons wikimedia.

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