For most of history, women have been prevented from learning to draw from real human bodies – the practice known as life drawing. Many persisted in spite of restrictions, finding ways to draw bodies in secret or turning to their own bodies for instruction. Drawing, the most fundamental medium of art, provides a window into the intimate, raw and evolving practices of women as they sought a full artistic education in pursuit of careers as artists.
In Britain, arts education was significantly formalised with the founding of the Royal Academy (RA) in 1768. Two of the founding members were women – Angelica Kauffmann RA and Mary Moser RA – although there would be no more female academicians for over a century afterwards. Both were able to study from the nude, against the odds. Kauffmann is known to have privately hired nude models with the approval, and sometimes supervision, of her father, making the arrangement more proper. Less is known about exactly how Moser studied nudes, but one of her drawings survives.
This work is truly remarkable: an unflinching, full-frontal nude that takes its subject seriously. The muscles of the figure's arms and legs are carefully defined, and her face is so detailed that it might be a portrait or purposeful likeness. The figure's pose – with one arm raised, holding something that hasn't been clearly drawn – suggests that this is a study for a larger composition, but its level of finish is exceptional, making it more than just a study. Could it even have been a self-portrait? The mystery of this work, probably finished before 1800, is magnetic.
By the late nineteenth century, women were finally allowed into the life room at the RA and at art schools around the UK. The first to allow male and female students equal access was the Slade School of Art, which opened in 1871, but others soon followed suit. RA students like Minnie Jane Hardman were taught classical drawing methods, focused on careful lines and shading, with both living bodies and antique statues as a guide.
Study of a Standing Female Nude, Seen from Behind
1883–1889
Minnie Jane Hardman (1862–1952) 
This drawing by Hardman, though, feels especially poignant. With her head seemingly resting on a mirror, she takes a position of despair. While this was probably a pose that was set by an instructor, it foreshadows Hardman's struggles after leaving art school to continue her career. Like many women, she was overburdened by domestic responsibilities and never succeeded professionally, despite her clear talent.
One star student at the Slade who did continue to make art after her marriage, despite significant struggles, was Edna Clarke Hall. She wrote in her autobiography about draping herself nude on her mother's bed and sketching her body in the vanity mirror in various poses, as studies for a large composition she did of the Rape of the Sabines (it was destroyed in the Blitz).
This much later work shows how much Edna Clarke Hall has evolved from her schoolgirl style, which was similar in its classical neatness to Hardman's. Here, using pencil and red chalk, she draws a kneeling nude figure who seems to be in motion, her strong abdominal muscles flexing as she moves. The model may have been her sons' nanny, who she became very close to. The intimacy and trust inherent in the relationship between model and artist is fundamental to the power of these drawings.
While nudes continued to be an important part of an artist's preparatory work, in the twentieth century they also joined the evolution of British art toward more avant-garde, experimental ways of representing the human figure. Women drew nudes in highly stylised ways, no longer using them only as tools to learn about anatomy and the figure.
As the twentieth century progressed, artists also made drawings of nude figures that were portraits. In other words, not just studies of bodies, but specific representations of the likeness and interior self of one individual. Claudette Johnson's drawing of a nude woman has a strength and potency that goes far beyond just a study of a nude body: the figure in the drawing looks directly out at us, the viewers, confronting our voyeurism of her body. With her hand on her hip, her posture communicates a sense of confidence and self-possession.
Even today, there is an element of confrontation and radicalism in women's drawings of the nude that lingers after centuries of restrictions and repression of their desire to make art. These drawings are intimate, but they have a strength of purpose that gives them an enduring power.
Eliza Goodpasture, Commissioning Editor – Drawings at Art UK
This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation
