The Bank of England may find itself “in a bind” with its pledge to put a British visual artist on the £20 note due to the relatively low number of women that could qualify, history scholars have warned.
The public were invited to put forward ideas for historical characters after criticism of the selection process in 2013, when Winston Churchill replaced Elizabeth Fry on the £5 note.
A 35,000-name petition was presented to the Bank in protest at the removal of Fry, one of only two women to be honoured since historical figures were introduced in 1970. It prompted a decision by the central bank’s governor, Mark Carney, to put Jane Austen on £10 notes from 2017.
But Prof Lynda Nead, Pevsner chair of history of art at Birkbeck, said it was unlikely that another female face would join the Pride and Prejudice author on the UK’s currency. “Visual arts seem to particularly lag behind when it comes to women, compared with other cultural pursuits like writing,” she said.
No living artists are allowed to be nominated, ruling out women such as Bridget Riley, Vivienne Westwood or Tracey Emin.
Caroline Criado-Perez, the author who ran the campaign to get more women on banknotes in 2013, said she was content that women would be represented on British money by Austen, but hoped banknotes would one day “represent the whole diversity of British society”.
“We argued during the last campaign that name recognition by the British public makes it so much more likely that a man will be chosen,” she said. “So I hope the Bank of England will think of an artist really worth celebrating, regardless of how well known they are.”
Bookmaker Ladbrokes is offering bets on only one woman, sculptor Barbara Hepworth, with low odds of 12/1. The joint favourites are the portraitist and satirist William Hogarth and the film director Richard Attenborough on 4/1, followed by the landscape painter JMW Turner at 5/1.
“They have got themselves into a bit of a bind here,” said Patricia De Montfort, lecturer in art history at the University of Glasgow. “Women visual artists of the past centuries just simply don’t have the visibility of people like Jane Austen. It was easier for women authors, they could publish anonymously or under different names, but it was very hard for women artists to exhibit.”
But Laura MacCulloch, curator at Royal Holloway, University of London, said the selectors would just have to dig a little deeper and they would find very worthy women. “Dame Laura Knight was the first full member of the RA in 1936 since its foundation in 1768; it was a boys club until then,” MacCulloch said. “She was the most famous female artist in Britain until Barbara Hepworth and was the official artist at the war crimes trials in Nuremberg – that really broke the mould.”
Nead said she would like to see a dual profile of the two female founders of the Royal Academy: Mary Moser and Angelica Kauffmann. “Their contribution to the [RA’s] founding really has been marginalised,” she said. “There are beautiful 18th-century profiles of the faces of both women, so there are artistic, intellectual and historical reasons to use them.”
MacCulloch also singled out Kauffmann for special acclaim. “She was a real heavyweight, she didn’t just paint domestic scenes but primarily saw herself as a history painter which was very unusual.”
UCL art historian Natasha Eaton called for the Bank to drop the specification that the person must be dead. “Someone like the black British artist Sonia Boyce would be a departure from what’s expected,” Eaton said, also suggesting contemporary artist Lubaina Himid.
“Himid made a piece about banknotes called ‘Naming the Money’, which took a critical look at capitalism,” Eaton said. “To put her on the banknotes would be a very ironic choice but refreshing.”
De Montfort also said she would find it easier to choose a modern woman. “For me, it would be a modern female artist like Bridget Riley or sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Riley is still alive, but she is just so synonymous with a moment in British art history, it’s so evocative of the 1960s. And it would be interesting to see how they would portray her.”
