In Search of Women at the National Gallery

Pilkington Lecture - Department of Art History and Cultural Practices, University of Manchester

Supported by the Pilkington Visiting Professorship in Art History, The University of Manchester'

In Search of Women at the National Gallery

Dr Susanna Avery-Quash, Senior Research Lead, National Gallery

Abstract

Looking for works by women artists in the National Gallery can be hard, if not frustrating, work. There are comparatively few of them, not withstanding recent successful efforts to acquire new prime examples, including Artemesia Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria in 2018 and Eva Gonzalè’s The Full-Length Mirror, purchased during our Bicentenary in 2024, which depicts her sister Jeanne who was also an artist. However, the influence of women on the National Gallery’s collection stretches well beyond their contribution as painters. Over the past decade, the Gallery has engaged in systematic research to investigate women’s additional roles as sitters and subject-matter, donors and patrons, and employees, whether staff, artists in residence or trustees. Findings have been shared with broad audiences through displays and exhibitions, lectures, conferences, publications, and films, often through our ‘Women and the Arts Forum’. This lecture will give an overview of the Gallery’s diverse outputs in this field, with a focus on the speaker’s ongoing investigations into the institution’s women benefactors and female workforce. The talk will seek to crystallise what efforts need to be made to enact such endeavours in a public institution.

Biography

Dr Susanna Avery-Quash, Senior Research Lead at the National Gallery, has spent her career at the Gallery in its Curatorial and Research departments. Currently, she looks after research partnerships, networks and initiatives, which includes developing research and related outputs for its themes, ‘Buying, Collecting and Display’ and ‘Art and Religion’, and for its ‘Women and the Arts Forum’. Of relevance to her talk today, she has published on major 19th-century women writers on the arts including Elizabeth Eastlake, Anna Jameson, Maria Callcott and Mary Merrifield as well as on female benefactors of the National Gallery. With Prof. Hilary Fraser, she co-supervised the doctoral thesis of Dr Maria Alambritis concerning women writers on the old masters, and the three of them went on to co-organise a conference at the National Gallery on English-speaking women as disseminators of knowledge about Old Master paintings and historic painting techniques during the Victorian era (2017) and thereafter to edit a related special issue for Birkbeck, University of London’s journal, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (2019). Susanna featured in a recent film about women framers at the National Gallery (2025) and her review of the exhibition about the female Jewish art dealer Berthe Weill appeared in The Burlington Magazine’s January 2026 issue. Her article, ‘Two Hundred Years of Women Benefactors at the National Gallery, 1824-2024’ is available via the National Gallery’s website.

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