The Artist’s Household: On Gender and the Division of Artistic and Domestic Labour in Nineteenth Century London

The concepts of social reproduction and immaterial labour, normally deployed in accounts of art since the 1960s, can and should also be deployed in the examination of earlier periods of art practice. Using census data and other primary sources which document the households of (primarily) London artists in the 1870s and 1880s, the article explores the intimate spatial relationship of art work and family life within these households; the social and entrepreneurial labour which was taken on by the family members or servants of artists; and the distribution of responsibility for routine family and domestic labour in these households. Women’s exclusion from professional art practice appears to be entrenched in the division of household labour, and the conclusion invokes the relationship between the household structures and the wider economic context of capitalism (specifically, the dealer-critic system that formed in the second half of the nineteenth century) as significant in accounting for women’s history as artists.