ABSTRACT
The diverse range of images of women created by artists who were lesbian in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century was an integral part of the widely differing attitudes towards female homosexuality. Artists could, as one writer put it, give physical expression to emotional desire when ‘the soul is identified with the flesh’. 1 Though lesbianism was not forbidden by law, this was not because it was officially condoned but because legislators were reluctant to accept that it could exist and they feared that discussion would draw attention to it. Generally lesbian relationships were regarded as a last resort when a husband failed to materialise, while a more knowing but equally oppressive view was that it was ‘a passing phase’. Others saw it in terms of Freud’s theory of ‘arrested development’ which could be remedied either by a ‘good man’ or the more fashionable practice of psychoanalysis.
