ABSTRACT
Ruskin's influence lasted throughout the period which concerned itself with the 'woman question' which, arising in the 1840s, formed an inevitable back drop to his involvement with numerous female artists and artistic women (we shall return to the difference between these terms). The issue of women as artists, emerging in the 1850s, was a conspicuous and enduring part of that larger 'woman question' of the appropriate place of action for women in Victorian society: the public sphere then exclusively occupied by men, or the domestic sphere to which women were traditionally confined. This was one of the principal challenges to men prominent in Victorian culture. In 1857 the Society of Female Artists became the first such association ever in Britain; in 1861 the first female student was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools, amidst much controversy;1 from the late 1860s female artists were nominated for admittance to the ranks of the Royal Academy for the first time since its founding;2 in 1876 Ellen Clayton's two-volume English Female Artists was published in London; and in 1890 the state, in the form of the Chantrey Fund, first purchased a work of art by a contemporary female artist (Anna Lea Merritt's Love Locked Out, still in the Tate Gallery).
