Ethel Walker and the ‘Old Masters’

This research, produced as part of the Women and the Arts Forum, explores how the early twentieth-century artist Dame Ethel Walker (1861–1951) strategically engaged with the legacy of the ‘Old Masters’ to assert her place within the British art establishment.

The article, published in Tate Papers (Spring 2025), was prompted by previously unexamined correspondence from Walker to Charles John Holmes, then Director of the National Gallery, preserved in the National Gallery Archive. In these candid and witty letters from 1921, Walker lobbied for her allegorical works to be acquired by the national collection, appealing directly to Holmes’s influence and asserting her value as an artist worthy of institutional recognition. Discussed here for the first time, these materials offer new insight into how Walker navigated the male-dominated networks of artistic authority and fashioned a professional identity in dialogue with canonical art history.

Walker’s work, including her large-scale ‘decorations’, were in-part shaped by an admiration for painters represented in the National Gallery collection. By drawing on their example, she sought to position herself within the national canon – an ambition realised through acquisitions by the Tate Gallery (then part of the National Gallery) and her eventual election to the Royal Academy.

This research highlights the entwined institutional histories of Tate, the National Gallery and a major British woman artist, and forms part of a wider strand of work led by the Forum’s researcher, Jon King, examining how twentieth-century women artists have responded to and reinterpreted the Old Master tradition.

Read the full article on Tate Papers