England – Queer Art History

Two Ladies of the Court in Saint Joan

By Baylee Woodley | March 25, 2024

Artist: Charles Ricketts
Media: Watercolour on board
Date & Location: 1924
Image Source: Picryl

Significance to Queer Art History

Charles Ricketts was a British painter, designer, and publisher. He met his partner Charles Shannon at the City and Guilds Technical Art School in south London in 1882 when they were both teenagers. They moved in together in 1888 and lived with each other for the rest of their lives. They also had sexual and emotional relationships with other men as well as women while living together.

Dear Old Chap… At each meal time they plonk down a plate of strawberries which make me think of you–no, this is not quite accurate. I really think of the strawberries. Only when they are done, I think of thee.”
– Charles Ricketts to Charles Shannon in a letter from Florence

Ricketts and Shannon were both individually practicing artists, but they also created the art magazine, The Dial, as well as Vale Press, together.

Ricketts and Shannon were responsible for the illustration and design of many of Oscar Wilde’s books and had a long-term friendship with Wilde who himself is an often-cited queer icon.

They also counted among their friends Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper. Bradley and Cooper were long-time lovers (living together for about 40 years) and collaborators. They were also (making things a bit more complicated) aunt and niece. Together the women published their writing (some inspired by the poems of Sappho of Lesbos) under the shared pseudonym, Michael Fields. Ricketts and Shannon designed some of their books. The couple also asked Ricketts and Shannon to help them find and furnish “a home for [their] marriage.”

The watercolour Two Ladies of the Court by Ricketts was painted as one of the plates for the book edition of the play Saint Joan by George Bernard Shaw. Itself a scene of intimacy between two women, this watercolour is also for a play about one of the most famous figures from medieval history (Joan of Arc) known for defying binary constructions of gender. It also has a counterpart in a plate in the same book of two “gentlemen ushers of the court.”

These two ushers even have pointy shoes, which have a queer medieval history of their own, but that is for another post x

After the Ricketts and Shannon passed away within six years of each other, their friend, Edmund Dulac, painted them together as two monks in this double portrait.

A painting of two monks in a meadow with a pale blue sky behind them. Both have halos which are gold to match the gold arching frame above them that connects to the frame. They both face the viewer. Their arms touch in the middle suggesting their intimacy.

❦ Resources ❦
Charles Ricketts. Self-Portrait : Taken from the Letters & Journals of Charles Ricketts. Collected and compiled by Thomas Sturge Moore , edited by Cecil Lewis. London: P. Davies, 1939.

Matt Cook. Queer Domesticities : Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Sarah Parker. “Poets and lovers: the two women who were Michael Field.” The Conversation. 31 January 2020. Accessed 25 March 2024.

Statue of Radclyffe Hall

By Baylee Woodley | November 8, 2023

Artist: Una Troubridge
Media: Bronze
Date & Location: c. 1915-1963
Image Source: Queer Britain

Significance to Queer Art History

This is a statue of Radclyffe Hall by her partner of twenty-nine years, Una Troubridge. They met in 1915 and lived together from 1916 until Hall’s death in 1943.

Radcylffe Hall is most well-known for having written A Well of Loneliness, which tells the life story of its protagonist, Stephen Gordon. It has become famous as a foundational lesbian novel and it also offers insight into histories of trans* masculinity and genderfluidity (as does Hall who was known as ‘John’ among friends).

A Well of Loneliness was banned for “obscenity” in 1928 and kept from being republished until 1949 (a ban protested by Virginia Woolf, herself an important figure in queer ‘hirstory’).

Una Troubridge was a sculptor alongside being an author and translator. She also had a daughter named Andrea from her marriage to her previous partner Ernest Troubridge.

Una herself was once the subject of a work of art by an iconic figure in lesbian art history. Romaine Brooks painted a portrait of Una in 1924.

Romaine Brooks, *Una, Lady Troubridge*, 1924, oil on canvas. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

When it came to Una sculpting her partner, she captured Radclyffe Hall standing tall with her arms crossed. Underneath she carved a variation on the poem Nevermore by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been; I am also call’d No-more, Too-late, Farewell.

It is only very recently that this statue has been shown to the public. It was unveiled earlier this year at Queer Britain in London (UK) where it now stands proudly among the rest of their beautiful collection.

In this hand coloured print Margaret Farrell stands in her dressing room as another woman helps her into her bright red breeches for her role as Captain Macheath. Corsets and other miscellaneous objects are strewn about the room and a half-shaved dog barks at her feet. Her brown hair is piled voluminously on her head.

An Actress at her Toilet or Miss Brazen just Breecht

By Baylee Woodley | March 7, 2023

Artist: John Collet
Media: Paper and coloured inks (hand-coloured)
Date & Location: London, 1779, currently at the British Museum (not on display)
Image Source: Wiki Images (Creative Commons License)

Significance to Queer Art History

This print is part of the long hirstory of genderfluidity in performance. From Shakespearean plays at The Globe theatre to the stages of Tang Dynasty China and from eighteenth-century opera houses to contemporary clubs, the art of what we now call ‘drag’ has been thriving and entertaining through time and across geographies as a crucial part of the performing arts. In response to all of the recent anti-drag and transphobic legislation we are seeing as I write this entry (particularly in the United States), you can expect a lot more on this long (very long, very fabulous) hirstory in the coming months.

This particular print shows the actor Margaret Kennedy who performed at Covent Garden and Vauxhall Gardens in eighteenth-century London. Another print (below) from 1778 shows Kennedy in full, flamboyant costume as Captain Macheath in The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay.

A black etching on thick, textured yellowed paper of Margaret Farrell in her costume as Captain Macheath. She wears a feathered captains hat, long captains coat with buttons running up either side, and breeches. — John Bew, *Portrait of the actress Margaret kennedy, in character in Gay’s ‘Beggar’s Opera’*, 1778. Etching. British Museum, London.

In the role of Captain Macheath, Kennedy plays a ‘breeches part,’ which Beth Friedman-Romell describes as “an eighteenth-century stage staple.” Friedman-Romell explores how these (often satirical) roles could be a queer invitation for audiences who “willingly and pleasurably gave themselves over to the illusion.” She draws on a verse about another eighteenth-century actor who played ‘breeches parts,’ Peg Woffington, to show that this potential for queer desire was recognized at the time.
That excellent Peg
Who showed such a leg
When lately she dressed in men’s clothes—
A creature uncommon
Who’s both man and woman
And chief of the belles and the beaux!

The genderfluidity of these actors and their characters is itself a source of desire-sparking power. The caption under the 1778 etching of Kennedy even reads “how happy I could be with either” suggesting both audience desires and perhaps the desires of the actor whose embodiments spanned the spectrum of gender.

Ula Lukszo Klein recognizes the potential for both lesbian and trans* experiences in these performances. She writes that the “authors and audiences acknowledged and enjoyed the possibility of same-sex desires or transgender or gender-fluid embodiments” as she finds these roles to be sites of “heterosexual and homosexual desires, as well as transgender and nonbinary embodiments.”

These roles are also important to the legacy of drag since they—like contemporary drag—could challenge the expectations, desires, and biases of their audiences through playing with gendered performance. As described by Helen Brooks, actors like Kennedy and Woffington “drew attention to masculinity’s status as something achievable—displayed, worn, and ultimately performed through gesture, clothing, posture, and vocal presentation.” Even in the display of the legs of afab actors, these roles required a subversion of gendered constraints on the body.

Resource(s)*

*Disclaimer: Many of these sources use the term ‘cross-dressing’, but I would invite trans* interpretations as well as the use of the term ‘drag’ to bring these historical moments into contemporary queer discourse and to recognize through the terms we use the resonances that these hirstories have with contemporary queer communities ♡

Beth Friedman-Romell. “Breaking the Code: Toward a Reception Theory of Theatrical Cross-Dressing in Eighteenth-Century London.” Theatre journal (Washington, D.C.) 47, no. 4 (1995): 459–479.

Helen Brooks, Actresses, Gender, and the Eighteenth-Century Stage: Playing Women. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Hui-ling Chou. “Striking Their Own Poses: The History of Cross-Dressing on the Chinese Stage.” TDR : Drama review 41, no. 2 (1997): 130–152.

Lorna Koski. “Cross-Dressing With Shakespeare.” WWD, December 31, 2013, 10. Gale Academic OneFile (accessed March 7, 2023)

Ula Lukszo Klein. Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021.

A memorial brass of two women standing side by side looking into each other's eyes. It is mounted on a grey stone wall. The woman on the left is smaller with her hair down. The woman on the right taller with her hair up. Both wear long gowns that brush the ground. The inscription is underneath the figures.

Brass of Agnes Oxenbridge and Elizabeth Etchingham

By Baylee Woodley | May 6, 2021

Artist: Unknown (London Workshop F)
Media: Brass
Date & Location: c. 1480, Etchingham Parish, Sussex
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

Significance to Queer Art History

Etchingham Parish and The Brass of Agnes Oxenbridge and Elizabeth Etchingham is where this art historian dreams of making a lesbian pilgrimage. This brass is a memorial commemorating two women who were buried together with an inscription requesting God’s mercy for them both. Elizabeth appears on the left with her hair down and she is smaller than Agnes. This is likely representative of her being both unwed and young when she died in 1452 in her mid-twenties. Agnes is shown on the right and (although she too seems to have remained unwed) she is shown as a more mature woman likely because she was in her fifties when she died in 1480. Bennett finds evidence for both women remaining unwed in the lack of head coverings, lack of records (both marriage records and records of their lives as was often the case with single women), and lack of any mention of husbands on the memorial (Bennett, 133). She also describes how this brass was designed in the style of contemporary memorial brasses for married couples, but with additional intimacy. Unlike the contemporaneous brasses, which often show couples looking straight ahead, Agnes and Elizabeth face each other and look into each other’s eyes (Bennett, 134).

There also seems to have been no qualms about the relationship between these two women. It was unusual that Agnes be buried with Elizabeth instead of in the Oxenbridge mausoleum, but both families must have agreed for it to have happened and in turn chosen to commission such an intimate memorial (Bennett, 133). The initial request for the site of burial, as Bennett suggests, most likely came from the lost will of Agnes herself.

This brass is also interesting for the notable attempts to fit it into cis-heteronormative expectations of history. Bennett writes “some have described the brass as a memorial to two children [despite them both living into adulthood]; others have imagined they were looking at two entirely separate brasses [despite the inscription referring to them both and their being connected]; and still others have fiddled with genealogies to minimize any direct relationship between the two women (Bennett, 131).” She attributed these manipulations to homophobic anxieties, which result in “bad history” and argues for the place of Elizabeth and Agnes in the “histories that modern… queers rightly seek from the past (Bennett, 136 and 141).”

Resource(s)

Judith M. Bennett, “Remembering Elizabeth Etchingham and Agnes Oxenbridge,” in The Lesbian Premodern, edited by Noreen Giffney, Michelle M. Sauer, and Diane Watt. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

The bottom half of a parchment page from a manuscript. In the right corner there is a small ink drawing of Christ leaning down from the cross to embrace a layman.

Sponsa Christi (Brides of Christ)

By Baylee Woodley | January 31, 2021

Artist: Unknown
(From a late thirteenth-century copy of William of Waddington’s Manuel des pechiez/Manual of the Sins)
Media: Manuscript Illumination (ink and pigment on parchment)
Date & Location: c. 1280, England
Where can I see this artwork?: Princeton Library, Special Collections, Taylor MS. 1, folio 44 recto (this whole manuscript has also been digitized for online viewing)

Significance to Queer Art History

Both men and women wrote passionately about their visionary experiences of Christ in the late medieval period. These accounts, and visualizations like this one in Taylor MS. 1, invite considerations about gay and lesbian relationships. What does it mean for a layman (non-clergy man) to fantasize an erotic embrace with Christ? Might we find pleasure in looking at this medieval image of two men embracing?

It also invites questions of gender fluidity. The union of a human soul with Christ was often allegorized as a bride-groom relationship. In cases of AMAB (assigned-male-at-birth) or masculine devotees, though, this results in a feminization. They become ‘the bride’ of Christ. Similarly, Christ’s body (and especially his wound) is often imbued with multiple genders. The wound might be also a vulva or a breast in the writings of the medieval mystic, and indeed is sometimes represented as giving birth to a personification of the Church.

A diamond painted red with a black, bleeding slit down the middle and a bleeding heart sideways in the center. There are four angels on each flat side of the diamond. — Bibliotheque nationale de France, c. 1369 (searching for more detailed citation)

He [Christ] tenderly placed his right hand on her neck, and drew her towards the wound in his side. “Drink, daughter, from my side,” he said, “and by that draught your soul shall become enraptured with such delight that your very body, which for my sake you have denied, shall be inundated with its overflowing goodness.” Drawn close in this way to the outlet of the Fountain of Life, she fashioned her lips upon that sacred wound, and still more eagerly the mouth of her soul, and there she slaked her thirst.
vision of Catherine of Siena (1347–1380)

Resource(s)

Karma Lochrie. “Situating Female Same-Sex Love in the Middle Ages.” The Cambridge Companion to Lesbian Literature, Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 79-92.

Robert Mills. “Hanging with Christ.” Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. 177-199.