Women artists in the Queen's House

Jacqueline Bishop (born 1971) is an artist, a writer, poet and scholar, based in Jamaica and the USA. Her practice is focussed on Black female agency. Royal Museums Greenwich has recently acquired one of her ceramic works, The Keeper of All The Secrets (2023), which takes the form of a traditional British tea service. 

It explores the significance of the Caribbean 'market woman', a role that both Bishop’s grandmother and great-grandmother undertook in Jamaica. The tea service is adorned with the artist’s collages of Caribbean market women intertwined with local flowers and plants.  

Since the time of enslavement the market woman has been central to the community as a healer and a trader, preserving and transmitting cultural knowledge – but her role has been critically overlooked.

Victoria Lane, Senior Curator of Art and Identity

Supported by Cockayne Grants for the Arts, a Donor Advised Fund, held at The Prism Charitable Trust.

Alberta Whittle (born 1980) is a Barbadian-Scottish artist, researcher and curator. As an artist, she works across different media and has produced films, prints, sculpture and performance. Her practice recognizes and explores the legacies of colonialism and anti-Blackness and the harm they do today, but also seeks to create spaces for conversation, collective care and healing around these issues.  

In 2022, Royal Museums Greenwich commissioned Whittle to design a tapestry installation for the Queen’s House, in collaboration with Dovecot Studios. The resulting work, titled Feeling Blue, is a celebration of African-Caribbean culture. It references Blues music, Barbadian Chattel House architecture and spiritual resistance within the African diaspora, such as the Akan symbol of Sankofa, seen in the heart-shaped details in the gate structure. 

It also explores environmental exploitation and what Whittle calls 'the accumulated grief of empire' through language, colour and its construction and display.

Maya Wassell Smith, Assistant Curator of Art 

Tania Kovats (born 1966) is a renowned British artist whose practice and research encompasses sculpture, installation, drawing and writing. Her work explores our experience and understanding of landscape through our relationship to water, increasingly with a focus on environmental issues around our oceans.  

Sea Mark (2014) is a large seascape made from handmade ceramic tiles glazed with cobalt blue painted brush strokes. It immerses the viewer in the broken motion of the surfaces of the sea, receding into a remote horizon. In 2022 Kovats spoke of her inspiration for the ongoing Sea Mark series, suggesting that "at this time in our collective history, our island status is more important than ever in how we see ourselves." 

Kovats exhibits internationally, publishes regularly and her work is held in several major collections. She is currently Professor of Teaching and Research at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design.

Victoria Lane, Senior Curator of Art and Identity 

This paper-cut picture commemorates Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson and is made from blue paper with small pieces of red and white paper attached with glue. 

It was almost certainly made by a woman. Making silhouettes and paper-cuts was extremely popular as a creative endeavour among middle and upper-class women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.  

Some women paper-cutters became well-known, but most were only celebrated among their friends. Paper-cutting was a social activity that women practised together, trading materials and techniques, and often exchanging finished pieces as gifts. 

There is some evidence that the artist of this piece was connected to the novelist Lady Sydney Morgan (née Owenson), but we don’t know whether she made it or whether it was made by a friend and presented to her. Like many of the objects in our decorative art collections, the work of this creative and skilful woman is not recognised by having her name recorded.

Maya Wassell Smith, Assistant Curator of Art

Rosemary Rutherford (1912–1972) created this watercolour portrait while working as a volunteer nurse in the temporary naval hospital established at Cholmondeley Castle, Cheshire, during the Second World War. 

The hospital specialised in treating people experiencing mental health difficulties. The carpenter’s careworn expression is a reminder of the psychological impact of conflict. 

Having trained as an artist at the Slade School before the war, Rutherford received money from the War Artists’ Advisory Committee to produce artworks depicting her fellow medical staff and their patients. She worked at several different naval hospitals and her evocative drawings record many aspects of wartime life, from air raids to surgical operations, as well as moments of relaxation and light relief.

Katherine Gazzard, Curator of Art 

Sculptor Kathleen Scott (1878–1947) shows an informal side of George VI in this bronze bust, depicting the King without any royal regalia in a V-neck jumper and open-necked shirt. The work exemplifies the humanity and vulnerability that she often brought to her sculptures of male subjects. 

After studying in London and Paris, Scott created sculptural models to guide pioneering plastic surgeon Harold Gillies when he operated on servicemen injured in the First World War. After the war, she enjoyed a successful career producing portrait busts and public memorials. Yet her reputation is also bound up with her experience of personal tragedy. Among her most well-known sculptures is a tribute to her first husband, Robert Falcon Scott, who perished in the Antarctic in March 1912.

Katherine Gazzard, Curator of Art 

Christy Symington (born 1962) is Head of Sculpture at The Art Academy London. From 1996 Symington studied traditional figure sculpture and life drawing in Paris and then studied in New York, returning to London for postgraduate study at Byam Shaw School of Art (now Central Saint Martins). Her work champions the achievements of overlooked historical figures. 

Made in 2006, Olaudah Equiano – African, slave, author, abolitionist tells the story of the 18th-century abolitionist's life and legacy. Born into what is now south-eastern Nigeria, Equiano was sold into slavery around the age of 11. He documented his experiences in his autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, one of the first books in Europe by a Black African writer. 

His role as an abolitionist is referenced in the chains and shackles that wind around the back of the sculpture. Details of the ‘Brookes’ slave ship diagram – an image that represents how enslaved people were crammed into ships that crossed the Middle Passage – can be seen around the sides of the work. The shape that forms the back of Equiano's shoulders implies the continent of Africa.

Now at Marlborough House

Artemisia (1593– 1654 or after) would have known the Queen’s House well, having, it is believed, helped her father Orazio Gentileschi complete the paintings which originally adorned the ceiling of the Great Hall. 

These paintings, made up of a large central circular canvas flanked by eight smaller canvases, were intended to celebrate the flourishing of the arts under the reign of King Charles I and Henrietta Maria. All 26 figures depicted in the ceiling, except possibly one, are female – particularly apt for a queen’s residence. 

The paintings were removed in the early eighteenth century for installation in Marlborough House on Pall Mall in Westminster, which Sarah Churchill, Queen Anne’s ‘favourite’, was having built at the time. They remain there today, but were cut down from their original size to fit their new setting. 

At least one other painting by Artemisia, illustrating the story of Tarquin and Lucretia, now lost, hung at Greenwich during Henrietta Maria’s time – if not in the Queen’s House itself, then certainly within the broader Greenwich Palace complex.

Vittoria Cervini, Assistant Curator of Art