Department: Tate Britain Curatorial
Hosts: Carol Jacobi - Curator British Art, 1850–1915, and Amy Concannon, Manton Senior Curator, Historic British Art
Victoria’s research specialism of historic women artists led her to explore Tate’s collection from a range of angles, resulting in findings which informed Tate Britain’s 2024 exhibition Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920.
A painting by Emma Soyer (née Jones), Two Children With a Book 1831, is the first work by the artist to be held in a public collection. Victoria created a database of her research findings on Soyer, about whom little was previously known. This holds significant benefits for Tate in terms of interpretation and acquisition.
Some outcomes from Victoria’s research helped Tate to communicate with its audiences. A written piece about hair was linked to The Rossettis exhibition at Tate Britain (2023) and Victoria prepared a biography on Soyer for inclusion on Tate’s website.
Victoria also shared some of her findings through a guided tour of selected works by women artists at Tate Britain including Soyer’s Two Children with a Book 1831 and Henrietta Rae‘s Psyche before the Throne of Venus 1894.
Victoria’s research led her to increasingly focus on the challenges faced by 19th-century women artists and strategies they used to navigate them. The discovery of a largely unresearched archival source of a catalogue for an 1897 exhibition of women artists curated by Henrietta Rae culminated in Victoria’s academic paper, Women’s work? A second paper, Making a name for herself, discusses the impact on the careers of married women artists foregoing their maiden names for their husband’s surnames.
Victoria Munn in the Tate Britain galleries during her Fellowship in 2023.
Biography
Victoria Munn is an art historian based in Aotearoa New Zealand. Based at the University of Auckland, she has recently submitted her PhD in art history, titled Gold, Fox, Jet, Snow: Hair colour and dyes in early modern Europe.
As well as her research as an early modernist, Victoria is conducting research on New Zealand women artists, and the way in which archival material such as letters can inform new scholarship on historical women artists.