Archival Silence and Historical Bias

In 1911, the celebrated historical genre painter Henrietta Ward (1832–1924) published a lengthy and now little-known memoir describing the extensive public successes she had enjoyed as a professional artist—exhibiting for decades, becoming the first woman to attend Royal Academy lectures, winning numerous prizes, and earning repeated recognition from Queen Victoria and the royal family.¹ Ward ended her book, however, with a list: a meticulous account of the most valuable drawings, paintings, and photographs she had accrued in the past seventy-nine years, made and gifted by her friends, family members, and pupils—an elite cast that included John Everett Millais and Princess Alice. For Ward, these objects embodied the triumphs and challenges of her long career; they provided, she explained, “a complete link with the past”.² By instinct, Ward had assembled an archive, and she felt its historical weight. 

Fig. 1
Henrietta Mary Ada Ward, Queen Victoria. Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-F02736-0011)

Ward is one of about 320 women represented alongside roughly 4,600 men in the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive, a compendium of more than 100,000 black-and-white photographs of works of British art from public and private collections. Quite clearly, the digitization of this massive record imparts a scholarly treasure to anyone interested in the history of British art, while making copious artworks accessible to those who may never be able to view them in person. At the same time, it gives a particular view of the history it aims to embody by virtue of the way it was formed and the objects it does and does not contain. For instance, although Ward was one of the leading women artists of the nineteenth century, she is represented by only five works. What results is an archival repository that gives a fairly accurate view of the historiography of British art but only a partial glimpse into the complexities, global scope, gender dynamics and racial diversity of the British art world.

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The Paul Mellon Foundation (later Centre) established its Photographic Archive in 1964, aiming to build a resource for the budding field of British art history by assembling a photographic collection of paintings, drawings, sculpture, architecture, and the decorative arts from ca. 1500–2000, as well as images of exhibitions. From an initial focus on objects that were out of the public eye—exhibition loans, auctioned items, and pieces that were privately owned or in country houses—its purview gradually expanded; soon, it came to additionally seek out items in public and museum collections, acquire other photo archives, and incorporate materials that it supplied for individual researchers and the Centre’s growing list of publications. Acquisitions stopped in 2013, and the complete, now-online Archive comprises over 100,000 entries. 

On the one hand, there is a clear levelling impulse here—to provide access to art that is normally behind closed doors—and this bent is furthered by the immense work that researchers have put into identifying, contextualizing, and labelling every possible piece. (This information is now in each item’s digital template, complete with its original photograph.) On the other hand, archives are inevitably built upon a series of implicit and explicit appraisals, and access and representation are rarely one and the same. By virtue of its architects having focused on the types of art embraced by Britain’s most historically elite institutions, and on long-celebrated artists, the Archive offers more of a history of what has been traditionally valued than a heterogeneous or geographically widespread record of what has been made. Significantly, its gatekeepers principally directed their efforts to the eighteenth century, the period that saw the foundation of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts (1768–present): the Archive’s ten most represented artists—all men—were active or born between 1700 and 1800. Five of them were early Academicians, each has more than 1,000 images in the collection and, together, this group comprises nearly one-fifth of the Archive’s holdings.³

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While clearly providing unparalleled access into the oeuvres of these artmakers and the cultural world they worked to build, such depth comes at the expense of myriad other artists who hail from historiographically neglected communities and are absent from, or vastly underrepresented, in the Archive. These dynamics of omission are complex. Importantly, the Archive does include hundreds of women, many of whom made a professional living as artists in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. By having these lesser-known artists appear on the same visual and textual terms as their most fêted contemporaries, the archival interface places them on unusually equal footing. Even so, women constitute only 6% of the artists represented and average still fewer works per person: of the Archive’s 100,000 or so works of art, roughly 97,000 have been catalogued as works by men, and 1,900 as works by women, a number that is barely more than the 1,400 works by entirely unidentified artists.⁴ Only three women have one hundred or more works, compared to approximately 170 men.⁵

This is not wholly a matter of supply, nor of male artists having simply been more productive. Rather, it is at odds with the extensive oeuvres British women have long been able to boast in traditional genres and media, as well as women’s long-documented presence in Britain’s premier exhibition venues with the strictest vetting policies. For instance, from the Royal Academy’s inaugural exhibition in 1769 through to 1830—the era of the Archive’s heftiest holdings—works by women averaged 7% of the works on display at its annual show.⁶ However, of the Archive’s 9,000 holdings from these years, only 2% are by women. Likewise, Margaret Carpenter (1793–1872) and Henrietta Ward, two of the most eminent female painters of the nineteenth century, are only represented by twenty-four and five photos, respectively, of their work. It is difficult to know exactly how these dynamics of representation have factored into the Archive’s use by scholars; but of the fourteen requests for image rights received from 2013 to 2019, all were for works by white male artists.⁷

Fig. 2
Margaret Sarah Carpenter, A Mother And Two Children. Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive (PA-F06266-0005)

Finally, and fundamentally, the Archive’s categories overlook key genres of art that would have cultivated the presence of additional female and non-white creators—those who are most often historically marginalized. There is no explicit category for the decorative arts (they only appear, scattered, under individual artists’ names), nor are there categories for artworks in the non-Academic materials that have long pervaded not only the British Isles, but the British Empire (which covered nearly a quarter of the globe for a significant part of the Archive’s span). This disparity is compounded by the Archive’s stress on named artists. Yet even among named painters and sculptors who worked in Academic media, there are clear omissions: while it would be deeply problematic to impose a British identity on artists such as the Bengali painter Shaikh Zain ud-Din (fl. 1770s), his exquisite depictions of Indian flora and fauna—executed under the auspices of the British East India Company—are certainly part of the history of British art. In short, the Archive’s creators ultimately assumed definitions of “art” and “British” that many would contest today.

Archives, of course, are not monolithic or uniform. They are wide-ranging and eclectic, often highly multidisciplinary, and—inexorably—products of their time. When collecting for the Paul Mellon Centre Photo Archive ceased in 2013, its biases became a permanent part of its composition. Now, they are also part of the riches it has to offer. For there is so much to learn about how art histories have been composed, how silences have formed, how omissions have persisted, and how viewpoints have solidified from a repository that was assembled essentially as the field was established. The Archive preserves a tangible record of what has been valued, and why—while providing access points for challenging and expanding our notion of what, exactly, can and should constitute the history of British art today.

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Footnotes