Self Portrait, oil and pencil on card, 1869, 21.9 x 18.1 cm, National Portrait Gallery 5314

I wrote this research paper in the fall semester of 2023 for the seminar with the amazing Sharon Marcus, Odd Women in Victorian England. I accidentally fell in love with this artist, Elizabeth Butler, and I hope you will too. The paper is structured around two artworks of hers: the Roll Call, perhaps her best known work, a painting from 1874; and a book of her watercolors and travel writings from “The Holy Land” published in 1903. I try to navigate Butler’s conflicted affiliations with gender, class, nationality, race/colonialism, and modernity and, with my deep inquiry into primary and secondary materials, I try to resist the common tendency to reduce women artists to paragraphs in ‘women’s history’ anthologies. I think it’s a good example of my ability to fuse discussions of text and image and of my archival research.The original paper is 30 pages, including images and footnotes, and I present two sections of it to you here.

“Where am I? Where are the points of the compass?” Elizabeth Thompson Butler and Artistic Self-Fashioning in the Face of Fluctuating Identity

From the introduction

How strange it seems that I should have been so impregnated, if I may use the word, with the warrior spirit in art, seeing that we had had no soldiers in either my father’s or mother’s family![1]

So wrote Lady Butler (née Elizabeth Southerden Thompson), acknowledging the strangeness she felt was implicit in the relationship between her own female body, war, birthing, and artmaking. A Catholic convert, the “warrior spirit” that underpinned her art was immaculately conceived, without matri- or patrilinear inheritance, and thus, extraneous to (raptured above?) the normative familial structure.

Despite being “Victorian Britain’s greatest war artist,” Elizabeth Butler is not a name that rings bells for many people without a vested interest in battle painting or Victorian history.[2] While she appears in some surveys of women artists, she has hardly the celebrity imposed on some women who have been truly canonized by pop history.[3] Katy Hessel, a leader of this popular women’s art history movement, in her The Story of Art Without Men, bonds with her reader over mutual Butler-ignorance, “Haven’t heard of her? Neither had I.”[4] Butler has, neither, been a part of the resurgence of queer criticism about Victorian gender identity, as a woman who ostensibly adhered to gender norms by presenting as feminine and becoming a wife and mother. She exhibited in at least 69 exhibitions in her lifetime including several monographic shows but, since her death, only one exhibition has been dedicated to her: Lady Butler: Battle Artist in 1987 and 1988.[5] The only full-scale surveys of Butler’s life are the catalog for this exhibition and a 2019 biography published by Catherine Wynne.[6]

Butler, as she articulates in her own words and artworks, was torn between complicated national, class, gender, and colonial affiliations. Pamela Gerrish Nunn notes “her subjects veer apparently arbitrarily from recent history to Napoleonic times.”[7] It seems that, instead, Butler made very deliberate and cognizant choices of subject matter—choices to depict specific times, places, and gender formulations—to construct a more cohesive, authoritative identity in response to her conflicted affiliations...

Elizabeth Southerden Thompson was born in 1846 in Lausanne, Switzerland, to English parents. She was raised alongside her sister Alice Meynell (née Alice Christiana Gertrude Thompson), who would become a poet, essayist, and suffragist, by a father who believed that they should be educated to the standard of boys.[9] Her childhood was incredibly mobile, living between Italy, Switzerland, and England, and, even when her life began to stabilize while beginning professional art training in London, she remained a traveler, living in Florence and visiting Paris at the end of the 1860s.

Her first successful submission to the Royal Academy in 1873 was hung far above eye level, hardly visible, but her second exhibited work a year later, The Roll Call, was hung ‘on the line’—at eye level—and incited an international craze of fame, making her the most talked about artist of the season.[10] Only three paintings exhibited at the RA in the 19th century required any kind of crowd control, and Roll Call was the only one protected with a police officer rather than a brass railing.[11] In 1879, Butler lost out on Royal Academy membership by two votes, the closest any woman got to this exclusively male organization in the 19th century.[12]

After marrying Colonel (later, General the Right Hon.) Sir William Francis Butler in 1877, Lady Butler lived a continuously uprooted life with William between the Cape Colony, Egypt, England, and Ireland.[13] She had seven children in the decade between 1878 and 1887, the first dying in childbirth.[14] Butler continued to travel for pleasure in Italy and in 1891 took a four-week tour of ‘the Holy Land’—an all-encompassing term for Palestine, Syria, and parts of Jordan—after which she published Letters from the Holy Land, a compilation of letters and watercolors she made on this visit. Butler published two more works in similar forms: From Sketchbook and Diary in 1909 and An Autobiography in 1923.

Butler’s husband and mother died in 1910, and in the last two decades of her life she saw a son ordained as a Catholic priest, a second daughter marry, all three sons serve in World War I, and her dear sister die, all while continuously exhibiting works and drafting her autobiography. She spent time in England during the Irish Civil War but returned to her Irish home for her final years before she died in 1933 at 86 years old.[15]

[1] Elizabeth Butler, An Autobiography by Elizabeth Butler with illustrations from sketches by the author, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), p. 46. From title page: Self Portrait by Elizabeth Southerden (née Thompson) Butler, oil and pencil on card, 1869, 21.9 x 18.1 cm, National Portrait Gallery NPG 5314.
[2] Catherine Wynne, Lady Butler: War Artist and Traveller, 1846-1933, (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2019), p. 1.
[3] The Phaidon coffee table book, Great Women Artists (2019), gives Butler a paragraph (p. 405) and DANGER! Women Artists at Work (2012), a similar tome of brief biographies, affords her a two-page spread (pp. 88-89). In a brief overview of other pop women’s art history books, Butler goes unmentioned in Femmes Artistes (Paris: Alternatives, 2012), Women in Art: …The Great Female Artists from the Middle Ages to the Modern Era (Anif: Edition Fuchs, 2013), Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2017), Women in Art: 50 Fearless Creatives Who Inspired the World (California: Ten Speed Press, 2019), and Women Artists (London: Thames and Hudson, 2019).
[4] Katy Hessel, The Story of Art Without Men, (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023), p. 73. Hessel dedicates 2 pages to Butler’s life and work. Hessel’s Instagram account, @TheGreatWomenArtists, is a key part of her popular, one-note writing/content creation. As of December 2023, the account has 379,000 followers. An article by Hessel on Butler is behind her Substack paywall.
[5] Charlotte Yeldham, Women artists in nineteenth-century France and England, Vol. 1, (New York: Garland, 1984), pp. 152-153, 173, 246. Yeldham’s total of 69 seems to be inadequate given Butler’s prolific exhibitions in the 20th century (noted in Wynne 2019) while Yeldham only notes three exhibitions post-1900. Full exhibition, Lady Butler: Battle Artist (1846-1933): National Army Museum, London, 14th May – 26th September 1987; Durham Light Infantry Museum & Arts Centre, 10th October – 8th November 1987; and Leeds City Art Gallery, 25th November 1987 – 14th February 1988.
[6] Paul Usherwood and Jenny Spencer-Smith, Lady Butler: Battle Artist 1846-1933, exh. cat., (Gloucester: Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1987); Catherine Wynne, Lady Butler: War Artist and Traveller, 1846-1933, (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2019).
[7] Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Canvassing (London: Camden Press, 1986), p. 77.
[8] For Roll Call see Fig 1. For a selection of Holy Land watercolours see Figs 2-5. For a full list of Holy Land illustrations, see Appendix.
[9] June Badeni, “Meynell [née Thompson], Alice Christiana Gertrude,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published in print 2004. Accessed Nov 30 2023; Elizabeth Butler, An Autobiography, p. 5.
[10] For a full discussion of what it meant to be ‘on the line’ at the RA for Butler, see: Joanna Devereux, “‘On the Line’ at the Royal Academy: Elizabeth Butler and Motion,” in The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England: The Education and Careers of Six Professionals, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2016), pp. 81-108.
[11] Joanna Devereux, “‘On the Line’ at the Royal Academy: Elizabeth Butler and Motion,” p. 94; Catherine Wynne, “Elizabeth Butler’s Literary and Artistic Landscapes,” Prose Studies, Vol. 31, Issue 2, 2009, endnote 1; Matthew Lalumia, “Elizabeth Thompson Butler in the 1870s,” Woman’s Art Journal, Spring-Summer, 1983, Vol. 4, No. 1, p. 9. The other two works were David Wilke’s Chelsea Pensioners in 1822 and William Powell Frith’s Derby Day in 1858.
[12] Paul Usherwood, “Butler [née Thompson], Elizabeth Southerden, Lady Butler,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published in print 2004, Accessed Oct 1 2023.
[13] “Latest Intelligence,” Times, Iss. 28966, Jun 12 1877, p. 5.
[14] Paul Usherwood, “Elizabeth Thompson Butler: The Consequences of Marriage,” Woman’s Art Journal, Spring-Summer, 1988, Vol. 9, No. 1, p. 34, note 5.
[15] For an extensive overview of this last section of her life, which is often overlooked in surveys on Butler, see Catherine Wynne, “Wars and Beyond: the Irish years, 1909-33,” in Lady Butler: War Artist and Traveller, 1846-1933, pp. 202-236.

From the body: Discussion of Butler’s self-fashioning through her depiction of the Crimean War
In her brief mention of Butler in the essay “Women Artists after the French Revolution,” Linda Nochlin notes that Butler “may remind us of…another Victorian superwoman of similar upper-middle-class background: Florence Nightingale.”[1] This comparison was not a modern creation; after the success of Roll Call, the British public conflated Elizabeth Butler with Nightingale when a rumor was spread that Butler had been a Red Cross nurse during the Crimean War.[2] Nightingale herself celebrated Butlers work, requesting that Roll Call be brought to her sick bed in 1874.[3] Butler was, of course, 9 years old when the war ended, but by associating herself with the place and time of the Crimean War through depicting it, Butler was fashioning a self, defined by Crimea.

Wynne articulates that “The Crimean War was also a woman’s war,” noting the great female personalities of the place/period: Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, and Mary Seacole.[4] While Seacole and Nightingale were both nurses, even Victoria entered into this medical expression of women’s relationship to Crimea by visiting Crimean soldiers in hospital after the war.[5] As Hichberger articulates, “The Queen regarded the army in Crimea as her own, and was anxious to emphasise her nominal position as its head.”[6] For the Queen, Crimea was a place and time to reinstate her legitimacy via the army, using a hospital of wounded soldiers as a site of ‘canvassing’. This was similar for Nightingale and her Red Cross nurses, as the Crimea was a place where she professionalized (perhaps ‘legitimized’) the career of nursing, with her work in Scutari earning her the title of, as Seacole writes, “the Englishwoman whose name shall never die.”[7] Nightingale’s medical work in the Crimea, like Victoria’s, instated her power and legitimacy. Elizabeth Butler, by depicting Crimea, aligned herself with a place and time period where women were able to escape the restrictive norms of Victorian society and exercise world-renowned authority, and she incorporates the medical mode that these women used to achieve this by painting the Crimean weak and wounded with care in Roll Call. In doing so, Butler calls attention to her own possibility of authority and legitimacy as a female artist in the restrictive English art world.

Perhaps the clearest example of Crimea as a site and time for self-legitimizing comes in the example of Mary Seacole, a Creole woman from Jamaica who set up her own ‘British hotel’ near the Crimean battlefield as a dispensary for medical supplies, general store, and catering service after being denied entry into Nightingale’s band of nurses. Seacole, coming from a lower-middle class, non-professional nursing background (her mother was a “doctress” working with folk medicine who had run a similar lodging house), and as a colonialized subject of mixed Scottish and Afro-Jamaican descent, had much to prove in the way of ‘canvassing.’ Instead of reinstating a pre-existing power, as with the Queen or with already upper-middle-class Nightingale, Seacole had to write her own legacy and did so with the autobiography/travel text, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. She used this feminine literary form as a strategic, potent tool for self-fashioning, but differentiated herself from the average “book-making tourist,” suggesting that Butler’s Letters from the Holy Land can be similarly differentiable from mainstream white, bourgeois, female writing.[8] As Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert argues, Seacole “urged her claim to recognition,” through this book, mirroring Nunn’s thesis about “canvassing,” as Seacole “assumes her place in British society–and history–from which she is initially rejected, by finding in the Crimea a substitute for ‘England.’”[9] One of the precedents for this argument is the fact that Seacole retains “an identity made up of heterogeneous and heteronomous representations of gender, race, and class and often indeed across languages and cultures.”[10] Elizabeth Butler’s identity is so closely aligned with this, as a woman with conflicted affiliations with gender, race (and colonialism), class, language and culture. While it is important to note the structural differences in the lives of Butler and Seacole, as Butler’s ease at associating with Nightingale’s troop contrasts with Seacole’s (likely racially motivated) rejections, they share the preoccupation with Crimea as a substitute for England, as Butler uses its depiction to gain recognition in English society and art history.

Seacole is also analogous to Butler’s queered interpretation of motherhood, her ‘impregnation with the warrior spirit,’ in the way that she embodies the figure of “Mother Seacole” to Crimean soldiers. Seacole harps on the ways that she embodies a surrogate English mother for Crimean soldiers away from home, giving them delicious comfort food and tending to them with care. She was a physically strong and headstrong woman, using her text to emphasize the way she has overcome a Ulyssean struggle to gain fame and help men, and thus could be described as having a “warrior spirit.” She notes having no female friends and that women just don’t understand her.[11] Despite this, at no point does she stress a personal masculine identity, instead differentiating herself from women who dress or act masculine.[12] She sublimates her strength into an identity as divine mother figure in male homosocial environments, desiring to be “useful to [her] sons” as “only women know how to soothe and bless.”[13] This mirrors Butler's previously discussed merging of the maternal, caring lens with images of soldiers and war, presenting simultaneously masculine and feminine identity. Seacole as an example of a woman ‘canvassing’ for herself and her complicated maternal identity using Crimea as a site is exactly mappable onto Butler’s artmaking and identity-making.

A significant difference between Butler and these Crimean-identified women—Victoria, Nightingale, and Seacole—is a temporal one: each woman two to four decades older than Butler. Seacole’s work about the Crimean War, very comparable with Butler’s, sees Crimea in retrospect but is only published one year after the end of the war, while Roll Call is painted 18 years later. Butler attempted to recreate lived experience of the war, interviewing soldiers (notably not nurses), but never could claim physical, personal experience of the war. Nevertheless, Butler self-identifies as the steward of the legacy of the war, highlighting a conversation with her family,

I had long been turning “The Roll Call” in my mind. My father shook his head; the Crimea was “forgotten.” My mother rather shivered at the idea of snow. It was no use; they saw I was bent on that subject.[14]

In this exchange, her parents become emblematic of the British public who have “forgotten” Crimea, while Butler is the valiant, obsessed archivist “bent on” recovering its deserving of depiction. She emphasizes not only the veteran interviews but the immense effort to dig up accurate Crimean uniforms in a “dingy little pawnshop in a hideous Chelsea slum.”[15] Most importantly, Butler is self-consciously affiliating herself with military history, but a military history that was still in living memory (despite being “forgotten”). By doing so, Butler constructs a more legitimized, longstanding identity: a daughter of the legacy of powerful and famous Crimean women and a mother of a rebirth of interest in Crimean subject matter. If critics think she was a Red Cross nurse, they cannot harp on (as some did) her youth and inexperience. If women in the place/time of Crimea were afforded so much authority and name recognition for being industrious, Butler could be too. If everyone had forgotten about these poor, injured soldiers, the person “bent on” recovering their dignity would be a saint...

[1] Linda Nochlin, “Women Artists After the French Revolution,” in Women Artists: The Linda Nochlin Reader, ed. Maura Reilly, p. 107.
[2] Elizabeth Butler, An Autobiography, p. 47.
[3] Monadnock, “A FAMOUS PAINTING. ‘THE ROLL-CALL AFTER BATTLE’,” p. 9.
[4] Catherine Wynne, Lady Butler: War Artist and Traveller, 1846-1933, p. 63.
[5] Joan W. M. Hichberger, Images of the Army: The Military in British Art 1815-1914, p. 77.
[6] Joan W. M. Hichberger, Images of the Army: The Military in British Art 1815-1914, p. 77.
[7] Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, ed. Sara Salih, (London, New York: Penguin, 2005), p. 82.
[8] Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures, p. 76.
[9] Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Mrs Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures in Many Lands and the Consciousness of Transit,” in Black Victorians/Black Victoriana, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 71, 74.
[10] T. de Lauretis, “Introduction: Feminist Studies/Critical Studies,” in Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 9. Cited in Paravisini-Gebert, “Mrs Seacole’s Wonderful Adventures in Many Lands and the Consciousness of Transit,” p. 73.
[11] Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures, p. 51, 81.
[12] Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures, pp. 25-26.
[13] Mary Seacole, The Wonderful Adventures, pp. 71, 70. See also: “a woman’s voice and a woman’s care have brought to their minds recollections of those happy English homes…” (p. 112). Even a blinded, dying man can see Seacole’s divine femininity, “Ha! this is surely a woman’s hand.” (p. 88)
[14] Elizabeth Butler, An Autobiography, p. 101. Emphasis original.
[15] Elizabeth Butler, An Autobiography, p. 102. This Chelsea visit is another instance of her identification with the working as “I enjoyed it far more than I should have enjoyed the same length of time at a West End milliner’s.”

The Roll Call, oil on canvas, 1874, 93.3 x 183.5 cm, Royal Collection RCIN 405915

“The Cenaculum.” Site of the House of the Last Supper, watercolor reproduced in print, 3rd illustration from Letters from the Holy Land published in 1903, plate 14 x 10 cm