Macaulay’s writings on education are inseparable from her broader moral and political philosophy. The same commitment to truth that underpins her historical work, and the same account of human agency developed in her moral philosophy, together ground her understanding of how individuals must be taught. Education, in this sense, is not ancillary to her thought but its practical realization. It is through education that moral truth is made operative in the world, a problem Macaulay ultimately confronts in her Letters on Education (1790), where the formation of individuals, the structure of institutions, and the limits of political authority are brought into sustained tension. Letters, therefore, represent not simply a treatise on education, but the point at which Macaulay’s moral philosophy and historical project converge into a unified account of how virtue is to be cultivated in both individuals and society.
In her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783), Macaulay writes a philosophical treatise, the result of which is a model of human agency that resembles a broadly Platonic or Stoic framework, in which rational judgment must contend with the opposing pressures of appetite and passion. Because reason does not automatically prevail, the cultivation of virtue requires conscious effort. For Macaulay, this makes self-discipline and education essential: only through proper training can individuals learn to regulate their passions and align their actions with rational moral principles. In this way, her doctrine of the will directly informs her educational theory, a connection she develops more fully in the Letters on Education seven years later, where she elaborates the institutional and pedagogical implications of moral necessity.
Education as Moral Philosophy
Letters on Education represent the culmination of Macaulay’s intellectual project. Structured as a series of letters divided into three parts and addressed to a fictional correspondent, Hortensia, the work combines philosophical reflection with practical instruction. The addressee’s name itself is suggestive: derived from the Latin hortus (garden), it evokes cultivation and growth; it also recalls Hortensia, the Roman orator who successfully challenged a tax on wealthy women in 42 BCE. These layered associations, education as cultivation and female intellectual authority, mirror the ambitions of the nearly 500-page text itself, which serves both as a guide to education and as a broader reflection on moral and social life.
This textual and philosophical framing of Letters becomes clearer when placed alongside Macaulay’s historical writing, which had already established the authority from which she could speak on education and political formation. By writing her History, Macaulay, through her own philosophical reasoning, established an authority to speak on the subject of education. The History, which represented her most fully articulated account of England’s past, contributed to what she understood as the principles of truth; these, in turn, supported the advancement of education and virtue.
Education offered one of the most important means by which individuals might overcome the dominance of passion and develop the rational independence necessary for political judgment. When applied to public life, this suggested that properly educated citizens would be better equipped to defend free government and resist tyranny. Yet Macaulay also recognized that institutions themselves shaped the conditions under which reason could develop. A government grounded primarily in power, rather than reason, could not provide the conditions necessary for the improvement of the mind. It was for this reason that she favored a republican form of government, which she believed better supported the cultivation of reason, virtue, and liberty alike [1]. In this sense, her History functioned as part of the educational process: by constructing what she believed to be the most accurate account of England’s past, she actively promoted the spread of truth and moral insight.
In her Letters, developed over several years, Macaulay advocates for a form of private education within the home, one most readily available to the upper classes, while also considering the possibility of a public system supported by progressive taxation. [2] Yet she remains deeply skeptical of contemporary governments, arguing that those with the greatest power also have the greatest capacity for harm. Thus, she maintains that only a domestic setting can reliably supply the conditions necessary for a complete moral education. [3]
This distrust of political authority, however, extends beyond questions of educational administration and informs Macaulay’s broader critique of civilization itself. Central to the Letters on Education is the contrast between civilization and barbarity, a framework that allows her to criticize several aspects of modern civilization, including chattel slavery, the condition of women, and animal cruelty. She also condemned haughty ideas of European superiority by emphasizing that other parts of the world had, at various points in history, outshone Europe.
Nor did these concerns emerge for the first time in the Letters. Rather, they reflect themes that had already shaped Macaulay’s historical writing from the outset of her career. In the first volume of her History, after setting out her intention to write the history of the English Civil War, she remarks that “general education of the English youth is not adapted to cherish those generous sentiments of independency, which is the only characteristic of a real gentleman.” [4] She argues that the business of public schools is little more than the teaching of grammar, alongside some Greek and Latin. At the same time, the principles embodied in those “once illustrious nations” are themselves neglected. She is particularly troubled that the study of history is little cultivated in schools (whether grammar schools or universities) and that the fundamental principles of the English constitution, through which “our ancestors” established a system of liberty, are absent from the curriculum. [5]
The final stage of education for elite English men, then, is the so-called “tour of Europe,” a residence of two to three years in France or Italy, where students return “prejudiced with a love of slavery, or at least ignorant of the advantages of liberty.” [6] In Macaulay’s view, this experience does not refine judgment but corrupts it. Without proper education in English history, and especially the Civil War, students are left unable to distinguish between forms of government, and therefore cannot understand how their actions relate to the interest and happiness of both individuals and the nation. Instead, they grow “charmed with everything that is foreign, are caught with the gaudy tinsel of a superb court, the frolic levity of unreflecting slaves, and thus deceived by appearances, are riveted in a taste for servitude.” [7] Attuned to the failures of education as early as the first volume of her History (1763), Macaulay’s historical writing itself attempts to correct these deficiencies, a project she later develops more systematically in the Letters. That later work not only expands her critique of existing educational institutions, but situates her own pedagogical programme within a broader intellectual tradition stretching from classical antiquity to modern educational theory.
Pedagogy, Antiquity, and Educational Practice
The positive educational programme set out in the Letters emerged through Macaulay’s critical engagement with both classical and modern authorities. Among modern writers, Macaulay identified François Fénelon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the leading figures in the genre of educational treatises, though her own arguments drew heavily on John Locke. She agreed with Locke that corporal punishment was ineffective and, like Rousseau, maintained that children should be allowed to develop their natural strength rather than being swaddled. Yet despite her admiration for Rousseau’s Émile, she rejected his difference between the sexes. The claim that men and women possessed innate mental distinctions was, in her view, a prejudice; moral excellence was the same for both. As creatures of God, men and women were endowed with equal capacities and an equal obligation to cultivate them in accordance with virtue. On this basis, she advanced a forceful case for the co-education of boys and girls, arguing that it would benefit all: it would produce better mothers and foster friendships between siblings that could encourage benevolent dispositions. [8]
Her educational advice is remarkably practical. She recommends that those who could afford it ought to have their children be taught dancing to acquire grace, or girls to be taught needlework and boys handicrafts. She disapproved of punishments that were intended only to terrorize children (like being told ghost tales). Instead, she thought children should be encouraged to be as independent as possible as a source of confidence. Her recommendations for young children focus on developing physical and emotional strength, while avoiding extremes of insensibility or timidity. She proposes that formal learning up to the age of twelve should include writing, arithmetic, Latin, geography, French, and natural philosophy (physics).
As children mature, much like her own daughter did, she recommended a more robust curriculum. Among her recommended reading are some of her favorites: Plutarch’s Lives, Rollin’s Ancient History in French, and Livy. In English she further recommends Shakespeare, Addison, Steele, Milton, and Pope, with certain reservations. In French she approves of Boileau, Corneille, Racine, Moliere, and Voltaire. She does not recommend learning Greek until 15 and moral philosophy by Cicero, Plutarch, Seneca and Epictetus until 16, but expects students at 18 to be reading Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles, Euripides and Homer in Greek, as well as Caesar and Cicero in Latin. Included in her list of modern philosophies are James Harris’ Philosophical Arrangements and Hermes an inquiry into universal grammar, Lord Monboddo’s On Language, and John Horne Tooke’s Epea pteroenta. She recommended political philosophy by James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and Locke, while deferring Hobbes until nineteen.
She excludes novels and delays the reading of scripture. Novels, she believed, encouraged the premature indulgence of passion. [9] She does not think students should read scripture until 21, after the student has been introduced to metaphysics by Ralph Cudworth, Plato, and Monboddo. She believes reading the scripture too early would lead to skepticism, and it is only after one can appreciate the morality of the ancients that they can understand the moral advances of Christianity. Even here, however, Macaulay’s pedagogical recommendations point beyond questions of curriculum alone. Her repeated return to classical authors reveals that antiquity was not simply a body of texts to be studied, but a moral and political framework through which broader questions of virtue, authority, and social order could be examined.
Women, Antiquity, and Moral Authority
It is within this broader engagement with the ancient world that some of Macaulay’s most distinctive arguments about gender, education, and social life emerge. Macaulay uses antiquity both as a mechanism to defend her text and its reasoning and also as a means by which students ought to be educated. In just her second letter, Macaulay writes that “the instruction of youth, Hortensia, was regarded by the ancients as an important part of the business of government, and many uniform plans of education have been given by Plato and other speculatists, for the forming the children of a state in such a manner as should best conduce to render them serviceable to its glory and prosperity.” [10] While the ancients provided a strong foundation for thinking about education, Macaulay nonetheless finds key elements of their methodology to be lacking.
For example, in modernity, she argues that parents “in the education of their children, have too much followed the stiff and prudish manners of ancient days, in separating the male and female children of a family.” This, she continues, “is well adapted to the absurd unsocial rigour of Grecian manners,” but is ill-suited to European societies, where interaction between the sexes is more common. She attributes this practice to the “absurd notion, that the education of females should be of an opposite kind to that of males.” [11] Indeed, Macaulay believed that equal co-education would foster the recognition that friendship without passion was possible between the sexes, something she saw as necessary in a society in which those sexes must mix freely. Accordingly, the education of daughters should not be confined to the ornamental, just as the education of sons should not neglect the cultivation of grace. [12] Behind this educational programme lay a broader philosophical claim, one grounded in Macaulay’s moral theory and reinforced through her engagement with both classical and modern authorities, that distinctions between the sexes were socially constructed.
Macaulay believed that her contemporaries clung to the prejudice that there were innate mental differences between men and women. Nonetheless, given that “that there can be but one rule of moral excellence for beings made of the same materials, organized after the same manner, and subjected to similar laws of Nature” we must agree either with Pope, who writes that “a perfect women’s but a softer man” or “we must reverse the proposition, and say, that a perfect man is a woman formed after a coarser mold.” [13] Here, Macaulay anticipates key elements of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminism, particularly in rejecting Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s proposition that husband and wife together constitute a single moral individual. [14] Macaulay, however, presses these claims further. She writes that the principles and nature of virtue are never adequately explained to boys and are kept a mystery to girls, who are instead told merely to avoid vices that threaten their personal happiness. As she observes, the “defects of female education have ever been a fruitful topic of declamation for the moralist; but not one of this class of writers have laid down any judicious rules for amendment.” [15] So long as society retains “the absurd notion of a sexual excellence,” she argues, it will obstruct the development of any coherent educational system for either sex. [16]
Macaulay acknowledges that she often writes with warmth in vindication of female nature, yet insists she is not merely an apologist for women. She points to the “surliness of the Greek manners, or the selfishness of Asiatic luxury, a proper remedy to apply to the evil. If we would inspect narrowly into the domestic concerns of ancient and modern Asia, I dare say we should perceive that the first springs of the vast machine of society were set a going by women; and as to the Greeks, though it might be supposed that the peculiarity of their manners would have rendered them indifferent to the sex, yet they were avowedly governed by them. They only transferred that confidence which they ought to have given their wives, to their courtezans, in the same manner as our English husbands do their tenderness and their complaisance.” [17] Here again, Macaulay uses antiquity both to support and to complicate her argument. Even in antiquity, the worlds of Greece and Asia were seen as far away, foreign, even barbaric (especially in a Roman context). It is within these distant and often “othered” worlds that Macaulay locates examples which allow her to demonstrate that she is not simply predisposed to defend the female sex, while at the same time displaying the depth of her knowledge of the ancient societies she insists are essential to educational instruction.
This method of using antiquity as both moral lens and evidentiary tool continues to shape the final movement of Letters, where education becomes inseparable from civic and historical judgment. Indeed, while the first part of the Letters ends with reflections on the education of a prince (an awkward topic given her broader disapproval of monarchy), the second part begins with a series of historical reflections on Rome, Athens, and Sparta, tracing the development of education and its relationship to both private and public life.
Generally critical of all the ancient societies for their war-like tendencies and their exaltation of power and glory, Macaulay uses the Roman empire as a point of comparison and teaching for Hortensia about the extremities of virtue and vice, of greatness and meanness, or of felicity and wretchedness. [18] The figure of Cincinnatus, who returns from military command to cultivate his “little farm with his own hands,” represents for her the highest ideal of national character. [19] This example is contrasted with figures such as Curius and Caius Caesar, who misused public spoils for private gain. Yet all these figures were derived from the same stock, and “if we may believe the tale of history, the stock which produced the race of demi-gods, were a handful of desperate adventurers, who had a settlement to seek, and who procured one by seizing and occupying a small spot of unappropriated land in Italy.” [20] Such examples demonstrate that virtue has limits and that political greatness does not guarantee moral integrity.
Macaulay extends this analysis into later Roman history, noting that even the apparent moral refinement of the Augustan age pales in comparison to the corruption that followed: “when we look forward from this stage of their corruption, to the period when Christianity gained a legal establishment under Constantine, we shall find that the manners of the Augustan age were pure, in comparison with the succeeding periods of the empire.” [21] Looking ahead to the establishment of Christianity under Constantine, she argues that earlier periods appear comparatively virtuous, underscoring the instability of moral progress over time.
A central and contested issue on both sides of the Atlantic, Macaulay addresses slavery in her Letters through her engagement with antiquity, using it as a comparative framework to condemn the institution. She condemns the treatment of Spartan helots as comparable to that experienced by enslaved Africans in the West Indies, writing that the Spartans “treated their unfortunate slaves with an equal degree of cruelty, to that which the negro race at present experience in the European settlements in the West-Indies.” [22] Macaulay would almost certainly have read the 1784 Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves by James Ramsay, a friend and student of her husband, and with whom she had corresponded. In such a work, Ramsay, much like Macaulay, argued that “human regulations are in a moral sense binding” only when they can be traced back to the principle that they respect the “general improvement and happiness” of all, and thus “cannot regard the interest of one at the expence of another.” [23]
So too does she condemn those who “tax the Deity with partiality” and “give to their own colour only, the quality of external beauty’ persuading themselves that ‘the swarthy inhabitants of India and Africa, are a degree below them in the scale of intelligent Nature.” [24] While she admits that, in her contemporary world, European states were more advanced in certain forms of government and the arts to Africa or Asia, she does not think this has anything to do with the nature of the people living in either Europe or elsewhere, but rather exist by historical accident, as could be seen by the rise and fall of great empires like that of the Romans. [25] These reflections on empire, civilization, and moral inequality ultimately return Macaulay to a more fundamental philosophical question: what principle allows human beings to form stable moral and political communities at all?
Sympathy and Intellectual Legacy
The third part of Macaulay’s Letters on Education is in effect a revised version of A Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth (1783), and it is here that one of the most significant developments in her philosophy becomes visible. As Karen Green has argued, the major difference between the original formulation of her philosophy in the Treatise and the later Letters lies in Macaulay’s increased emphasis on sympathy as a key principle for binding human beings together. [26] As Macaulay put it in a letter to the Monthly Review, “the quality of sympathy is the basis of all human virtue,” suggesting that moral truth, while still objective in principle, required social feeling to become operative in human relationships. [27] This revised emphasis suggests a significant engagement with the moral debates of her age. While her insistence on immutable moral truth remained fundamentally opposed to the sentimental foundations of David Hume’s ethics, her account of sympathy moves closer to the social and relational framework developed by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). There is no direct evidence that Macaulay read Smith, but given how widely she read among contemporary authors and how closely her later arguments parallel his framework, it is likely that she was familiar with his work. Whether or not she engaged with Smith directly, this revised emphasis on sympathy shows Macaulay adapting her moral philosophy to engage more fully with the central debates of the eighteenth century, while still maintaining her commitment to objective and immutable moral truth. In doing so, the Letters not only refine the internal architecture of Macaulay’s moral philosophy but also establish the conceptual framework through which her educational and political arguments would resonate with later generations of reformers and political thinkers.
Reception, Influence, and Educational Legacy
The significance of these philosophical commitments becomes especially visible in the reception of Macaulay’s later work, where her arguments about education, political authority, and sexual equality were taken up, adapted, and contested by subsequent writers. Macaulay’s Letters not only held significance within a male-dominated philosophical world, but her rejection of the treatment of women as an inferior sex has clear affinities with, and likely influenced, the thinking of Mary Wollstonecraft, who reviewed the work. Indeed, Wollstonecraft wrote in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), “coinciding with Mrs. Macaulay, relative to many branches of education, I refer to her valuable work, instead of quoting her sentiments to support my own.” [28] Even before Wollstonecraft, Macaulay had criticized the idea of “female excellence,” as well as Burke’s association of beauty with weakness in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757).
The key difference between Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft concerns the question of public and domestic education. The Letters present strong arguments in favour of tax-funded instruction, as education is listed among “the most important duties of government.” [29] Yet Macaulay does not trust contemporary governments to fulfill this role. Like Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin (the first modern proponent of anarchism), she expresses deep skepticism toward corrupt political institutions. In her view, state-run schooling could never equal that which proceeds from the attentive zeal of an enlightened parent, who would be more willing to make the self-sacrifice “necessary to preserve the pupil from receiving any impression which may be mischievous to his future innocence and peace.” [30]
For this reason, and in contrast to Wollstonecraft, Macaulay’s Letters on Education advocate a system of private, home-based education rather than public schooling. She also makes a more strategic point: because the wealthy and powerful wield the greatest influence within society, they possess the greatest capacity to shape its moral and political direction – and, if improperly educated, to do the greatest harm. It therefore follows, in her view, that particular attention must be given to their domestic education. By improving the formation of those most likely to exercise power, she suggests, one might indirectly improve society as a whole.
Conclusion
As Macaulay’s final major work, Letters on Education stands as the fullest synthesis of her intellectual project. What began in her historical writings as a defense of political liberty, and in her moral philosophy as a defense of immutable truth, reaches its final practical expression in a theory of education directed toward the formation of virtuous individuals and free societies. Education, for Macaulay, was never merely the transmission of knowledge or the refinement of manners. It was the process through which reason might overcome passion, through which sympathy might bind individuals into a moral community, and through which the prejudices of sex, empire, and arbitrary power might be confronted and overcome. Her educational thought therefore represents not a departure from her earlier work, but its culmination: the point at which history, philosophy, and politics converge into a unified account of how virtue must be cultivated if liberty is to endure.
Works Cited
- Withey, Lynne E. “Catharine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism, and Propaganda.” Journal of British Studies 16, no. 1 (1976): 65.
- Green, Karen (ed.), The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay (New York, 2019; online edn, Oxford Academic, 24 Oct. 2019), 162.
- Karen Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment (New York: Routledge, 2020), 184.
- Catharine Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line, vol. I (London, 1763), xiii.
- Ibid., I: xiv.
- Ibid., I: xvi.
- Ibid.
- Catharine Macaulay, “Selections from Letters on Education, with Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (1790),” in Catharine Macaulay: Political Writings, ed. M. Skjönsberg, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 176.
- But she by no means intends to deny the reading of novels for entertainment. Her position is simply that they do not, in general, provide a solid moral foundation.
- Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay, Letters on Education; With Observations on Religious and Metaphysical Subjects (London, England: C. Dilly, 1790), 192.
- Ibid., 201.
- Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 185.
- Macaulay, Letters on Education, 212.
- Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 188.
- Macaulay, Letters on Education, 214.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 218.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 233.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 245.
- Macaulay, Letters on Education, 251.
- James Ramsay, An Essay of the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (London: James Phillips, 1784); James Ramsay to Catharine Macaulay, June 3, 1771, and July 7, 1774 in Green, Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, 2.
- Macaulay, Letters on Education, 257.
- Macaulay was attacked by some critics for her Letters. The Monthly Review recognized the merit of Macaulay as a writer but presented many criticisms of her book. The critic argued that most of her comments were impractical and optimistic. He wrote that, “on the whole, we are of opinion, that Mrs. Macaulay Graham excels more in the character of an historian, than in that of the philosopher. The present work [Letters on Education] will, we apprehend, add little to the wreathe of honour which already graces the brow of this literary heroine” (Anon., “Review of Letters on Education”, The Monthly Review, v. 3, 1790, 309). Macaulay responded to such criticism with four main points: 1) that the reviewer was ill-prepared to assess her writing; 2) that he misconstrued the meaning of her text; 3) the review was not chivalrous and that the chivalry that did exist was little more than irony and 4) the Monthly Review practiced favoritism in its reviewing. She demanded that she receive either a new review or the publication of her letter to the editor about the review. She got neither.
- Green, Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment, 153, 183.
- Green, The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay, 292.
- Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London, 1792), 236.
- Macaulay, Letters on Education, 274.
- Ibid., 20.
Cover Art
Text from Tate Modern:
This small oil painting by Maria Spilsbury depicts an educational scene. At the centre of a cottage interior, a young woman wearing white addresses a group of twelve children, her right hand raised. She and her two companions’ elegant clothing indicates their higher social status, and their carriage can be seen waiting outside. A young boy kneeling on the floor reading a book and a young girl teaching another child to read seem to belong to this group too. The rest of the children, shepherded together by an older woman standing in the doorway, are all simply but neatly dressed in their Sunday best. Some listen eagerly, while others are less attentive; one child is shown crying. Behind the doorway, another child stands alone facing the wall, presumably after misbehaving. To the left, another woman sits with two children, distracted as the young boy reaches for her hat and handkerchief.
The Schoolmistress was made in London in around 1803. It is filled with Christian symbolism, indicating that this is a scene about the religious instruction of children, perhaps at a Sunday School. The book read by the boy on the floor is identifiable as the popular Christian allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678). The heading on the left-hand page of the book reads ‘…ly War’, perhaps alluding to Bunyan’s 1682 novel The Holy War,in which faith triumphs over evil – here shown as part of the same volume as The Pilgrim’s Progress. A church is visible outside, while the vines around the window likely relate to the Biblical analogy of Christians as the branches of a vine, bearing fruit by abiding in Christ (Yeldham 2010, p.62). The moral virtue of the woman teaching is suggested by her white dress, while the light falling on the centre of the scene likely symbolises the enlightenment that Christian faith brings.
Spilsbury was herself a devout evangelical Christian. She grew up in the Moravian faith, which emphasised the importance of children as a religious ideal for adults, who were encouraged to have ‘child-like’ faith and to be ‘children of god’. The belief in the spiritual innocence of children also led to great care over their education and protection against the perceived spiritual dangers of the world around them. These beliefs clearly inflect the subject and symbolism of The Schoolmistress,and Spilsbury frequently returned to educational themes throughout her career, for example in Going to School, engraved in 1802 (private collection).
Her work also corresponds to the rise in evangelical activity at the turn of the nineteenth century. The French Revolution, the ongoing wars between Britain and a supposedly atheistic France, the recurring uprisings in Catholic Ireland, and the conspicuous consumption of fashionable society all contributed to the perception of a Christian (specifically Protestant) battle against irreligion and materialism in Britain. This prompted a renewed emphasis on the religious education of the young and poor, with numerous initiatives begun for this purpose, including the Sunday School movement. Spilsbury’s depiction of women in nurturing roles in paintings like The Schoolmistress reflects the importance attributed to women as moral and spiritual guides at the time, and their prominent positions in charity schools and Sunday Schools from the 1780s onwards (Yeldham 2010, pp.98–9). The strong evangelical undercurrent in Spilsbury’s work also suggests she regarded her art as a ‘tool’ for conveying moral and religious messages to viewers. Her work contributed to the emerging tradition of Protestant art in Britain during these years.
In 2023, a previously unknown larger version of this painting came to light (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven). The composition is very similar, but the Christian symbolism in the Yale version is more explicit. On the back wall, for instance, a tablet with the Ten Commandments hangs alongside a framed print after one of Spilsbury’s own Christian-themed pictures: Blessed are the Meek, for They Shall Inherit the Earth,engraved and published in 1795 (Libson and Yarker 2023, p.41).
The existence of the Yale version raises questions about the history and purpose of the painting held by Tate. It remains uncertain which version was painted first. Pentimenti (changes under the paint surface) throughout the Yale version have led to the suggestion that it was the artist’s first attempt (‘Maria Spilsbury: A Sunday School’, Sotheby’s, 7 July 2023, https://www.sothebys.com/en/buy/auction/2023/old-master-19th-century-paintings-day-auction-part-ii/a-sunday-school, accessed 19 Feb 2024). However, when examined with infrared light, Tate’s picture shows free sketching and scribbling underneath the paint surface too. This may suggest that Spilsbury was working out the design directly onto the canvas – if it were a copy, the underdrawing would likely be more careful and precise. Spilsbury may have been working on both versions simultaneously or Tate’s picture could be a highly finished preliminary study.
The Schoolmistress has been associated with several pictures exhibited by Spilsbury at the Royal Academy in London in 1803–4. The art historian Charlotte Yeldham identified it with Sunday Evening: A Young Lady Teaching Village Children to Sing,exhibited in 1804, but this seems unlikely as none of the figures appear to be singing and it has traditionally been titled The Schoolmistress (Yeldham 2010, p.71). However, the more ambitious scale and explicit religious narrative of the Yale version suggests this was the exhibited picture rather than Tate’s version. It is more likely that Spilsbury painted Tate’s smaller picture as a reduced version of the subject, perhaps with reproduction in print in mind, or as an advertisement of her talents to potential clients visiting her studio. This is supported by the fact that the painting was not sold by Spilsbury and remained with her family after her death.
The painting was presented to Tate in 1937 but was not displayed for over eighty years. This likely reflects the relative obscurity that Spilsbury fell into as well as a reduced appetite for moralising and sentimental subjects. However, Spilsbury has received greater scholarly attention in recent years. Art historian Paris Spies-Gans has demonstrated that she was one of many women artists who forged a professional career in eighteenth-century London, exhibiting regularly, gaining success through print, attracting prestigious clients, drawing praise from her peers, and supporting her family through her income (Spies-Gans 2022, pp.141 and 247).
Further reading
Charlotte Yeldham, Maria Spilsbury (1776–1820): Artist and Evangelical,Farnham 2010, pp.68–72, reproduced p.71.
Paris A. Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830, New Haven and London 2022, pp.141–4 and 247.
Lowell Libson and Jonny Yarker Ltd, Recent Acquisitions 2024, London 2023, pp.38–43.