It is International Workers' Day (or Labour Day) and for a year now we have all witnessed the impact Coronavirus had on the jobs of many of us. Smartworking became a key word since last year, essential workers and healthcare professionals have had a very stressful year while quite a few people were laid off when the places where they worked shut down during the pandemic and went bankrupt.
Many garment workers in Asian countries also lost their jobs when retailers cancelled orders at the factories where they worked.
As a tribute to all these workers let's look today at the paintings of Amy Katherine Browning (1881-1978). The impressionist painter was a friend of Sylvia Pankhurst, a painter herself and a key figure of the suffragette movement and daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).
Browning was born in Bedfordshire in 1881 and displayed a passion for painting from a very young age. At the end of the 1800s, she got a place at the Royal College of Art where she gained a diploma as an art teacher.
Around 1903 she became friends with Pankhurst. A regular exhibitor at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (her work first featured there in 1906), Browning collaborated with Pankhurst in the organisation of The Women's Exhibition in 1909 and 1916. Browning also created illustrations for The Woman's Dreadnought, a feminist newspaper founded by Pankhurst in 1914.
Together the two women campaigned during the First World War, raising money to provide work for all those women in London's East End who were experiencing hardships while their husbands were at the Front.
The artist, who usually signed her paintings as 'A. K. Browning' to avoid gender discrimination, developed an Impressionist style and often painted countryside scenes.
After her husband's death in 1952, she had very little money and her brother-in-law, a managing director of a hat factory in Luton, secured her a commission. Browning therefore focused on depicting the lives of people working in the hat making industry, representing the various stages of the hat making process from block-making to shaping, from sewing to packing.
In some of these paintings, especially the ones showing the sewing stages and the packing, there are more women than men, so through her works Browning provides us with a snapshot about gender roles in the manufacturing industry. It is also worth remembering that, while there have been artists who portrayed milliners at works, Browning's paintings are different as they portray the hat making business when it had become a proper industry.
These scenes offer a different prespective on her work and prove the artist wasn't just interested in poetical landscapes, but also in realistic scenes from industrial settings. While her usual works evoked calm scenes from the English summer, these paintings feature workers intent on their tasks and they become a tribute to them. The paintings are part of The Hat Works collection in Stockport, a museum dedicated to the local hat-making industry. Happy International Workers' Day!
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