Rebecca Fortnum is an artist, writer and academic. She has been Professor of Fine Art at Middlesex University, the Royal College of Art, The Glasgow School of Art and Central St Martins, UAL where she is currently Associate Dean of Research. Her books include Contemporary British Women Artists: In Their Own Word, On Not Knowing: How Artists Think and A Companion to Contemporary Drawing. She has exhibited paintings at theFreud Museum London, the V&A’s Museum of Childhood and Compton Verney. In 2019 she was Visiting Research Fellow in the Creative Arts at Merton College, Oxford, where she developed her project, A Mind Weighted with Unpublished Matter, published as a book by Slimvolume in 2020. This work explored the politics of the gaze in a series called Prosopopoeia (a rhetorical term describing a communication via another person or thing, sometimes seen as a way of animating the dead) painted from historical sculptural portraiture, particularly from 19th Century France, drawing on notions of ‘absorption’ in the representation of women.
Fortnum was the 2021-22 Senior Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute, where she researched her exhibition, Les Praticiennes, which showed at the Institute in 2023. The project emerged from her ongoing interest in the women sculptors in turn-of-the-century Paris. The paintings depict sculptural works by women who were associated with Auguste Rodin’s studio. Rodin devoted significant time to training women to sculpt, and sometimes went on to employ them in his studio as an assistant or praticienne. The painting here has its source in a bust by Emilie Jenny Weyl (1855-1934) of a young girl, which is held in the Louvre collection.