ABSTRACT
Vera Brittain’s judgment, as she looked back on the inter-war years, was that only a few ‘personalities’ stood out amongst women painters (and musicians). These women, she implied, would be remembered as exceptions to their sex rather than as part of a distinctive contribution from women to the arts. Vera Brittain’s comments highlight what is a central problem for a critical feminist reappraisal of women artists working between the wars: the notoriety of a few women artists as ‘exceptions’ in contrast to the invisibility of the large numbers of women artists working in this period. Vera Brittain named two high achievers in the field of painting. Both were amongst the handful of women elected to the Royal Academy (RA) in the twentieth century and both were created Dames to honour their achievements as artists. Dame Laura Knight and Dame Ethel Walker were also, from 1932, the Honorary Presidents of the two largest women artists’ groups in the country, the Society of Women Artists and the Women’s International Art Club respectively. Each of these women artists’ groups had memberships of 100-150 women artists and organized large annual open exhibitions half the size of the RA Summer Exhibitions.
