Anna Mary Howitt, Mrs Howitt-Watts (15 January 1824 – 23 July 1884) was an English Pre-Raphaelite professional (history) painter, professional writer, women's rights activist and spiritualist. Following a health crisis in 1856, she exhibited rarely as a painter, but continued to work as a professional writer. She became a pioneering drawing medium. It is likely the term "automatic drawing" originated with her. As a member of the married women's property committee she initiated the women's rights movement in the UK.In the preface to Glimpses of a Brighter Land (London, Baillière, Tindall, and Cox, 1871).
Painter, writer and women's rights activist Anna Mary Howitt was born in Nottingham as the eldest child of the Quaker writers and publishers William Howitt (1792–1879) and Mary Botham (1799–1888). She also spent her childhood in Esher. She started to illustrate her mother’s literary work at the age of 10. When her father William Howitt showed her designs of the heads of The Seven Temptations to Henry Sass, the principal of the Sass’s Academy, several other artists, including his successor Francis Stephen Cary were impressed. The family moved to Heidelberg when Anna Mary was a teenager, as they felt Germany offered better educational options. In Germany she met famous writers and painters, including the well-known history painter Wilhelm von Kaulbach who inspired her to become a professional history painter. She also met the Swedish writer Frederika Bremer, because her mother was learning Swedish and Danish to be able to translate the works of Bremer and Hans Christian Andersen. Bremer inspired Anna Mary's activism for the woman's cause. She returned to London with her family when her little brother Claude suffered a knee infection, and her parents did not want to see his leg amputated. Her beloved brother's untimely death in 1844 led to bouts of depression. It was not the first time she lost a brother. In 1828, at the age of four, she lost her two year old brother Charles.
In 1845 she met Barbara Leigh Smith, a landscape painter and women's rights activist, in Hastings. A network of young aspiring professional women artists was formed who tried to establish a 'Sisterhood in art' as an alternative to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. These women included Bessie Rayner Parkes and Eliza Bridell Fox.Elmbridge Hundred biography Retrieved 9 July 2011. In the winter of 1845/1846, Anna Mary tried to persuade Barbara to enter Cary's Art Academy in London, where she was studying alongside the future Pre-Raphaelites William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Thomas Woolner and her artistic sister Eliza 'Tottie' Fox. Howitt mentions Mr. Cary's Academy as 'my drawing academy' and 'the first school for drawing in London in a letter to Leigh Smith: https://www.themorgan.org/literary-historical/441253 This was one of the few places where female artists could receive first-class tuition. Her art teacher and the head of the Sass's art school in Bloomsbury, Francis Stephen Cary, who had seen Anna Mary's illustrations she made as a 10-year old, personally paid for her fees when her parents went bankrupt. Cary even arranged sittings expressly for her. One of these sittings — probably arranged by Cary for Howitt — was for a portrait of the American painter John Banvard. Anna Mary painted this portrait in his apartment rooms in London. The portrait painter and miniaturist Margaret Gillies, who had contributed many portraits to the exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Arts during the 1830s and 1840s, including a portrait of Mary Howitt in 1847, exhibited a portrait of Anna Mary at the Royal Academy in 1849. Gillies was very close to the Howitt family and was an important mentor for Anna Mary.
She illustrated many of her mother's books, including The Children's Year (1847) which chronicles a full year (1845-1846) in the lives of Mary Howitt's two youngest children, Charlton (Herbert) and Margaret (Meggy). Anna Mary also appeared as 'Mary' in this story. In meantime her male fellow students began their studies at the Royal Academy Schools. Being a woman she could not apply for admission and she had to seek other alternatives to gain access to life classes. In 1850, Howitt went unchaperoned with her fellow artist Jane Benham to Munich, where she studied for two years under Wilhelm von Kaulbach. She began to publish articles about this stay in British periodicals Household Words, Ladies' Companion and the Athenaeum In 1853 she published her book An Art-Student in Munich (1853). The book was a success in the UK and in the US.
The New York Times (11 May 1854) wrote this about An Art-Student in Munich: "All that is peculiar to Munich, – its museums, galleries, festivals, and works of art, – or to German life, whether in high or low degree, and still more to the cultivation of the artist, is told in these pages with a beautiful earnestness and a naive simplicity, that have a talismanic effect upon the reader. It is one of those sunny works which leave a luminous trail behind them in the reader's memory."Retrieved 9 July 2011.
Shortly after her return in London she also published her serialized novella The Sisters in Art (1852) in The Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art. Her idea of a sisterhood of women artists was formalised in a story of three women artists who create a supportive community and join forces to open an art academy for women. Howitt and her art sisters were in fact uniting in private evening drawing classes, held in the library of Eliza Fox's father (the prominent Unitarian minister William Johnson Fox) to draw from the undraped model. Howitt at this stage in life, was subjected to two influences, "connected on the one hand with the social and publishing circles of her parents, the hard-working pillars of the London literary establishment, and on the other hand with a group of forward-looking, feminist women of her own age."Orlando Project introduction. Retrieved 9 July 2011. The younger group of her associates consisted of the later Langham Place feminists, notably her close friend the artist Barbara Leigh Smith. Howitt and Leigh Smith also became more part of the Pre-Raphaelite circle by joining The Folio Sketching club.
Howitt made her exhibition debut at the National Institution of Fine Arts in 1854 with Margaret returning from the fountain or Gretchen at the fountain, a painting inspired by Goethe's Faust. She had begun painting this picture after she ended her engagement with her fellow artist Edward La Trobe Bateman in the summer of 1853. This was shortly after she received a letter by her father William, who was staying with Bateman in Australia, indicating that Bateman was 'unreliable' and not suitable as her future husband. Anna Mary acted upon this letter and chose as subject Margaret who was tortured by self-accusation after she had been seduced by Faust. She painted it in outdoor sunlight and according to her friend and fellow artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti "it was a most difficult task, and a very good picture". This painting was first refused by the board of the British Institution, a decision which outraged Rossetti. It is likely that Rossetti advised Howitt to exhibit this painting in the National Institution at the Portland Gallery, where he had exhibited his Ecce Ancilla Domini! in 1850. This venue was more accessible to women artists who suffered discrimination by other art venues. In a letter Rossetti addressed to Ford Madox Brown, dated 30 March 1854, he reported the success of Howitt's painting of Margaret. Rossetti had heard from his brother and art critic William Michael Rossetti that the painting had been "kicking up quite a great row", indicating that it had been "much noticed and admired".
Although her exhibition debut was generally praised in the British periodical press it also received patronising criticism. William Michael Rossetti wrote the most favorable review in The Spectator on 18 March. Although he indicated some "executive deficiencies", he called her work "the most remarkable contribution… and noticeable alike for delicate depth of feeling and for conscientious study." He welcomed her as a Pre-Raphaelite artist by highlighting her "unmistakable adherence to the English Preraphaelite practice, evidenced in the unconventional simplicity of the figure, the rendering of broad out-door sunshine, and the affectionate care bestowed upon the accessories." William Michael concluded that "It would be difficult to recall a first picture of more assured promise." This concluding view was shared by the art critic of The Art Journal who stated in the review, written on 1 April, that Miss Howitt not only "produced a picture that would do honour to maturer age and larger experience," but the art critic also foresaw a promising career, as it was "safe to auger her future eminence in Art and professional distinction!" The most mixed and patronising review appeared in the influential London journal The Athenaeum on the same day as Rossetti's review in The Spectator. It was probably written by the primary fine arts reviewer of the Athenaeum during the mid-nineteenth century, Frank Stone. Stone had previously singled out the Pre-Raphaelite Brethern, most notably Millais, Hunt and Rossetti, for a personal attack and publicly ridiculed their works in the early 1850s. In spite that he saw "head and heart work in this little poem of a picture", he went right to the core that she was an aspiring female history painter who according to Stone showed "more heart than women usually show to the sorrows of their own sex, and painted by a hand with the firm delicacy of a man’s execution." In short he questioned implicitly if the painting was executed by Howitt herself. In his conclusion he indicated the immense popularity of Howitt's painting by stating that her "able and promising picture was immediately sold, – and might have been sold many times over on the day of the private view." This review gave Howitt a blow. She confessed in a letter to Barbara Leigh Smith that she turned scared of using her favourite colour green.