I sometimes wonder how many potentially great women artists have been lost to art history, simply because the training and opportunity to enter into a career as an artist was denied to them by a culture that considered it an “unsuitable” role for women.

Some managed to make their way through the gauntlet and make their mark, however, particularly as society became more affluent towards the end of the 19th Century.

Marie Spartali, later Stillman, was one of the outstanding women artists to come out of the Victorian era, and was a notable painter in the Pre-Raphaelite circle.

Stillman studied with Ford Madox Brown and her work shows his influence as well as that of John Everett Millais, Edward Byrne Jones (particularly in the latter part of her career) and Renaissance painters like Sandro Botticelli.

In addition to being a talented artist, Stillman was physically beautiful in a way particularly in favor with the Pre-Raphaelites (a “stunner”, in their words) and she served as a model for paintings by Brown, Dante Gabriel Rosetti and Byrne Jones., and was the model for Byrne-Jones’ famous painting The Begiuling of Merlin. Stillman also posed for pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cemeron.

I’ve picked out two of Stillman’s paintings to show you here. The image at left, bottom is The Rose From Armida’s Garden; I don’t know where it currently resides.

The image shown at top is Love’s Messenger, perhaps Stillman’s best known work. It is part of the Delaware Art Museum’s wonderful Bancroft Collection of Pre-Raphaelite works and, like the rest of that collection, is on an extended tour of other museums (currently at the Frick Art and Historical Center in Pittsburgh). I’m spoiled, having grown up with easy access to the museum, and I really miss having the Pre-Raphaelites here.

Even among the jewels in the museum’s collection, Love’s Messenger is striking, grabbing your attention from across the room and rewarding you when you approach with wonderful details and a beautiful handling of the paint.

Stillman painted in watercolor, a medium considered “more suitable” for women than oil, and often used opaque watercolor in a detailed manner, imbuing her images with a lustrous texture that makes their surface a visual treat, above and beyond the overall character of the painting. Her subject matter was in keeping with that of the other Pre-Raphaelites and she had a tendency toward a flattened “naive” perspective, as in early Renaissance painting.

I, for one, am glad an artist like Marie Stillman made it through the barriers society put in the way of young women of her time, and was able to train and flower as an artist.

Somewhere between earth and sky, landscape and seascape, mountains and clouds, natural forms and imagined shapes, float the drawings of Hilary Brace.

Her richly toned, detailed charcoal drawings (she calls them “landscapes”) carry suggestions of twisted cloud towers, intimations of tornados and watersopouts, visions of waves and mountains and hints of mysterious tubes and tunnels.

Dark cloud-like forms collide with each other above textured ridges that could be mountains, waves or another layer of clouds. Light breaks through walls and layers, reflects off of some forms and shines translucently through others with angelic luminance.

Arches and domes, caves and breakers, rain, smoke or wisps of mist roil and tumble through her images, always blurring the lines between imagination and reality, natural forms and flights of fancy.

Brace consistently walks that line and refuses to give you solid ground to stand on, forcing your imagination to flap its own wings and make its own choices. The result is almost hypnotic.

Brace works in charcoal, that most plastic of drawing mediums, exploring and composing as the drawing is created. She draws on polyester film, starting with a completely darkened surface and pulling the forms out by subtraction rather than addition.

The drawings are small in scale, more or less postcard size, but their imaginative scope is as large as the sky. (Or is it the land, or the sea?)

Suggestion courtesy of Andrea O. Kaspryk.