Women had historically been discouraged from the nude as a genre, and
even after it became acceptable for women to attend Art School drawing
from a live model, rather than plastercasts, was considered
inappropriate. A measure of the degree to which men felt threatened by
the idea of women painting a nude is demonstrated by the hostile
reaction provoked by Laura Knights iconic Self Portrait (1913), now in
the collection of The National Portrait Gallery, which the Times critic
of the day summed up as ‘something dangerously near to vulgarity’:

Somehow, women painting women hardly ever infuses into her work the
higher charm of the eternal feminine’. This painting is obviously but
an exercise, and as such it might quite appropriately have stayed in
the artist’s studio. It repels, not by any special inconvenance ‚Äì for
it is harmless enough with an element of sensuous attraction – but by
dullness and something dangerously near to vulgarity.
Claude Phillips, The Daily Telegraph, 17 April 1914

Even favourable press reviews of the time used very condescending
language: Mrs Knights has …proved that she has masculine genius and
feminine courage. Herbert Thomas, Mrs Knights Triumph, The Cornish
Telegraph, 26 March 1914, p3.

In Freeman’s studies there is an honesty of purpose that might
typically be absent from a nude painted by a man. As Alfred Lys Baldry
observed in Contemporary Figures Painters, The Studio 1925, this
plain matter of fact’ approach to the nudes‚Äì the frank fidelity of the
woman artist’ – , shared none of the characteristics of the idealized
rendering of the female nude as seen by a male painter

The source of the above quotes is an article by Pamela Gerrish Nunn,
Self Portrait by Laura Knight, The British Art Journal, volume VIII No. 2
p 53

Barbara Constance Freeman was born on 29 November 1906 in Ealing, near
London. She attended the Tiffin Girls’ School in Kingston upon Thames
in Surrey and later studied at the Kingston School of Art.
She illustrated many books, including The Treasure Hunters
by Enid Blyton, and many collections of fairy tales, both traditional
tales by Grimm and Andersen and modern stories. Some of her earliest
illustrations are found in The Cuckoo Book (1942), a book of fairy
tales by Edith Mary Bell. She also contributed to comics, including
Playhour, and to annuals, such as, Blackie’s Children’s Annual 1934.

By the 1960s she had begun writing and illustrating her own books for
children and young adults. Some have a touch of fantasy: in Two-thumb
Thomas the eponymous hero is raised by school cats; in Broom-Adelaide,
a fox rides a flying broomstick. Some, including Lucinda and The Name
on the Glass, are set in the past, while in others, such as A Book by
Georgina and The Other Face, the lives of the main characters are
interwoven with history.

Her artwork is both clean-cut and
winsome: an unmistakable style. Some of her illustrations are still in
print as posters and art prints.


We are grateful to David Buckman for assistance.