BRILLIANT WOMEN: 18th CENTURY BLUESTOCKINGS

13 March-15 June 2008, Admission free, Porter Gallery

Sponsored by BlackBerry®

Spring Season 2008 sponsored by Herbert Smith


Catharine Macaulayby Robert Edge Pine, c.1775

- The first exhibition to explore the culture, impact and identity of the Bluestockings, and their followers, who forged new links between gender, learning and virtue in 18th-Century Britain

- 50 works including oil portraits, drawings, satires and personal artefacts. Rediscovered portraits as well as well loved masterpieces by Romney, Kauffmann, Ramsay, Vigée-LeBrun and Robert Adam

From Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Germaine Greer, influential women and early feminists have lamented their lack of foremothers. A major new exhibition Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings at the National Portrait Gallery, London, aims to show how a remarkable group of creative and intellectual women in eighteenth-century Britain were celebrated as icons of patriotic pride and came to symbolise the progress of a civilised and commercial nation. Read more