Stanislawa de Karlowska (1876–1952) was a prolific artist, whose career spanned the first half of the twentieth century. Her Polish name, coupled with her connections to the renowned male-only Camden Town Group, has had the accidental effect of pushing her to the margins of British art history. However, she was far from a peripheral figure in her lifetime.
One of the first artists elected as a member of the London Group in January 1914, she was an active part of London's avant-garde and a determined professional who successfully blended her Polish and British identities.
Karlowska was born in 1876 at Szeliwy, outside Warsaw, in what was then Russian-occupied Poland. She first exhibited in Warsaw as a fourteen-year-old at the progressive Krywult Salon. In 1895, she enrolled at the Académie Julian in Paris, where she could access an art education equivalent to that available to men. Before she returned to Poland in July 1897, her tutor wrote of her 'special aptitude' and 'exceptional organisation'.
Stanislawa Bevan, née de Karlowska
1920
Robert Polhill Bevan (1865–1925) 
Having exhibited paintings in Poznan and in Warsaw while she was in Paris, she perhaps intended to build an artistic career in Poland. However, her plans soon changed. She had met the artist Robert Bevan, eleven years her senior and later a founding member of the Camden Town Group, at the summer wedding of her best friend Janina Flamm. Following a passionate correspondence – in French, the only language they had in common – he appeared unexpectedly in November 1897 to propose.
They married and left for Britain in December, beginning a partnership that, despite its seeming haste, was both long-lasting and crucial for her career.
At first, Karlowska's arrival in Britain meant estrangement from the artistic life that had been available to her in Paris. She spoke no English and had no art-world contacts, aside from her new husband. By early 1901 she had two children and the family had moved to Swiss Cottage in London.
The house's purpose-built studio on the top floor became her base for the next three decades. In 1904 Karlowska joined the Women's International Art Club – a female-only society with an international focus founded in Paris but based in London from 1900 – and exhibited in the UK for the first time. She exhibited Fried Fish Shop (c.1907) with the WIAC in 1911.
It was Bevan's invitation to join Walter Sickert's Fitzroy Street Group that precipitated their entry into London's avant-garde. The couple operated as a team. Despite his outward traditionalism, Bevan shared childcare and domestic duties and gave Karlowska the support, and the space, to work at a time when many women artists gave up painting after marriage. Karlowska, naturally, went along with him to Fitzroy Street and, from this point, her life revolved around the vibrant artistic world of the Café Royal and the clubs, restaurants and studios of bohemian London.
Stanislawa Bevan, née de Karlowska
c.1913
Harold Gilman (1876–1919) 
The Bevans regularly played host to artists such as Spencer Gore, Charles Ginner, Harold Gilman, Jacob Epstein, Percy Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. She became part of discussions around the meaning, purpose and execution of modern art, often as the only woman allowed into the circle.
Karlowska's early paintings – such as Rocks in Anglesey (1900) – have Impressionism's soft brushwork and sensitivity towards light.
Soon, though, she began to experiment with bold composition and strong colour contrasts. One of her most innovative paintings, which she exhibited several times, Polish Interior (c.1909), also shows the importance to her of Poland's culture and folk traditions. It is an exception in her work in that it brings the viewer into a domestic scene and depicts energetic and smiling children.
Unlike many women artists, Karlowska rarely painted her own children. Just as she emphasised her individual artistic identity by never using her married name professionally, so she separated the roles of artist and mother.
Although her landscapes often include people, her figures are stylised and angular, their faces blurred and unreadable. Many of her paintings, while broadly representational and often beautiful, also create an uncomfortable feeling of disorientation. The vertiginous viewpoints and distorted perspective bring the backgrounds forward so that the viewer feels they might topple into the image, unable to get a secure footing.
This sense of distance, of not fully belonging, comes in her pictures of rural England in leitmotifs of gates (usually closed) and fences, which cut across the foreground or midground of the image forming a visual barrier between the viewer and the bucolic centre of the scene. The heart of England can be gazed at but not fully entered.
While Swiss Cottage from around 1913 accurately reflects the reality of the modern London street, down to the signage of the pub and the greengrocer, its key elements – the buildings, the London bus, the vegetables on the stalls and the clothing of the foregrounded figures – form a mosaic of contrasting and highly charged colours on a flattened picture plane.
After the First World War, and following the loss of many of her friends, Karlowska, like others, turned back towards a more representational approach with a sensitive understanding of light and colour.
A Corner of Russell Square, Russell Square from Montague Street, London
1931–1935
Stanislawa de Karlowska (1876–1952) 
Karlowska travelled frequently, often solo, to Paris and across Europe to Poland, establishing a pattern of annual long visits, unbroken except when prevented by wars. Her passion for Polish independence extended to politics. In 1919, during Poland's battle for independence, she is said to have smuggled two pistols across Europe to her family, hiding them in her fur handmuff and hoping that a lone female traveller would not be searched thoroughly by guards!
She painted everywhere she went, so depictions of France, particularly Brittany and Normandy, many locations in England and Poland make up a substantial portion of her work.
Le Lavoir, St Nicholas-du-Pelem, Brittany, France
1931–1932
Stanislawa de Karlowska (1876–1952) 
Public collections hold a small fraction of Karlowska's total output. As well as over a hundred landscapes, she produced more than twenty portraits, always of women. Although she modelled for her husband, for Harold Gilman and for Spencer Gore, she never made a portrait of a man, preferring to paint her female friends and neighbours.
She made at least thirty still-life paintings – including Green Apples (1918–1921) – as well as many woodcuts, such as Granary from 1925. Many of these works are still owned by her surviving family.
Granary
1925, woodcut by Stanislawa de Karlowska (1876–1952) 
Karlowska's exclusion from the three Camden Town Group exhibitions between 1911 and 1913 has dominated twenty-first-century analysis of her career. When Charles Ginner wrote about the deliberate ban on female artists in Studio magazine in 1945, he remembered that the members had wanted to avoid uncomfortable debate about the work of some 'wives or lady friends' who might want to be elected.
However, it would be wrong to assume that the quality of Karlowska's work was under question. She remained friends with the members during the group's existence, she was included in their final show in Brighton in 1913 when exhibiting space was expanded to non-members, and she was among the first to be elected to its successor, the London Group. Bevan, unsurprisingly, was one of those against the exclusion.
At Churchstanton, Somerset
c.1916
Stanislawa de Karlowska (1876–1952) 
While it was undeniably sexist, it seems Karlowska was an unfortunate casualty of a ban meant to target others. Her exclusion did not affect her artistic output or her influence in the art world through other channels: for her first solo exhibition at Adams Gallery in 1935, for example, she sold six works, including Berkeley Square which was acquired by Tate.
It is high time now to reassess her as an artist in her own right who produced a distinctive body of work and played an active role in avant-garde networks in the twentieth century.
Rebecca Lloyd James, art historian
This content was supported by Jerwood Foundation
