History
The School was founded in 1842 with the aim of enabling “young women of the middle class to obtain an honourable and profitable employment” (The Times, 18 June 1862)
Fanny McIan was the School’s Superintendent from 1842–1857 (F. Graeme Chalmers, ‘Fanny McIan and London’s Female School of Design, 1842–57: “My Lords and Gentlemen, Your Obedient and Humble Servant”?’, Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 1995–1996), and novelist Dinah Mulock was among its first students
Its teaching was originally carried out in rooms below the Male School in Somerset House (F. Graeme Chalmers, ‘Fanny McIan and London’s Female School of Design, 1842–57: “My Lords and Gentlemen, Your Obedient and Humble Servant”?’, Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 1995–1996)
In 1852 it moved to Gower Street (Leader, 17 March 1860)
On 29 January 1853 it was advertising in the Leader its classes in elementary drawing, entrance 2s, instruction 3s for a month, 7s for 3 months, 10s for six months, to be paid in advance; the Board of Trade had directed that it open on Monday and Wednesday evening from 6 to 8
In the eight years at Gower Street from 1852 to 1860, it had taught about 700 students, all middle-class girls, and all enabled to find employment and independence (Leader, 17 March 1860)
The Committee of Council on Education has hitherto assisted the school with a yearly grant of £500, but was now leaving the School to support itself
The Leader urged support from private sector for the School to enable it to buy premises near its present location; it needed about £2000
It later had premises somewhere in the Adelphi (The Times, 25 March 1861); however, by this time it also occupied its most famous home, 43 Queen Square
The School was trying to purchase the freehold of this building for £2000 and extend its living accommodation (so evidently it was residential) for a further £1500 (The Times, 14 June 1861)
A Grand Fête and Bazaar was held at the New Rooms, South Kensington, in aid of the Building Fund; the Victoria and Albert Museum’s library holds a copy of the programme, and also a pamphlet listing the articles sold at Miss Gann’s stall at the bazaar
Louisa Gann was Superintendent of the School from 1859 to at least the 1880s
The President in 1861 was Anthony Thorold, Rector of St Giles-in-the-Fields, and other supporters were Rev. E. Bayley and Mr R. Westmacott
The appeal must have been successful, because the extended premises were later described in The Times; the students were also very successful at this point, with exhibitions and royal commissions reported in The Times
Louisa Gann was still Superintendent in February 1887, but by June of that year Louisa James had taken over; Sir Philip Cunliffe-Owen was Vice-President at that time
A Department of Science and Art had been founded in 1853, in the aftermath of the Great Exhibition and along with the establishment of the first museums at South Kensington which later beceme the Science Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Natural History Museum
If the pupils at the Female School of Art in Queen Square were good enough, they were sent for examination at South Kensington, hence the confusion in some biographical sources, which mistakenly locate the school itself in South Kensington
The Building Fund appeal of the 1860s was necessary because Government funding for the school had been withdrawn (in either 1859, according to The Times, or 1860, according to the Lady’s Magazine)
The School had been a subsidiary of the “Department of Practical Art” of the Board of Trade (also according to the Lady’s Magazine) up to that point, but after that, it had to survive on its own
It continued to enjoy a high reputation; in 1890 Charles Middleton-Wake wrote to The Times to complain that the Gilchrist Educational Trust had introduced a new clause excluding students of the Female School of Art from its two-year scholarship of £50 per year, because they were so often successful in winning it (The Times, 1 February 1890)
As an official organisation funded by the Government, eventually it came under the control of the LCC in 1908 as an LCC Trade School for Girls, and was eventually subsumed into what was then the Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design)
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What was reforming about it?
It was a serious art training college, aimed at getting its students into paid employment, not just a way of occupying ladies in a pleasant pastime
In 1866 students were allowed to draw the clothed figure for the first time (F. Graeme Chalmers, ‘Fanny McIan and London’s Female School of Design, 1842–57: “My Lords and Gentlemen, Your Obedient and Humble Servant”?’, Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 16, no. 2, 1995–1996)
Where in Bloomsbury
Originally (from 1842) based in Somerset House, it moved to Gower Street in 1852
By 1861 it had moved to its most famous home, 43 Queen Square
It became part of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in Southampton Row in the early twentieth century; its passing was lamented by The Studio, which commented that “the threads of its traditions have been severed by the loss of the stately old
eighteenth-century houses in Bloomsbury, in which for nearly half a century the
artistic education of London girls was carried on” (The Studio, vol. 45, 1908)
Website of current institution
The successor institution is Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design, part of London’s University of the Arts, at www.csm.arts.ac.uk (opens in new window)
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Books about it
John Cordy Jeaffreson, ‘Female Artists and Art-Schools of England,’ in Art Pictorial and Industrial (1870)
Other contemporary sources are listed in the Bibliography of Patricia Zekreski, Representing Female Artistic Labour, 1848–80: Refining Work for the Middle-Class Woman (2006)
F. Graeme Chalmers, ‘Fanny McIan and London’s Female School of Design, 1842–57: “My Lords and Gentlemen, Your Obedient and Humble Servant”?’, Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 16, no. 2 (1995–1996)
F. Graeme Chalmers, Women in the Nineteenth-Century Art World: Schools of Art and Design for Women in London & Philadelphia (1998)
For illustrations, see the Illustrated London News of 20 June 1868
Archives
Its archives are apparently not held by Central Saint Martin’s; however, the college holds at least one book from the Female School of Art’s lending library
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