Isa Jobling
Isa Thompson, married Robert Jobling in 1893 after the death of his first wife. A talented artist, Isabella Thompson was born in Newcastle, the daughter of a prosperous ship’s chandler. She probably attended the city's School of Design and studied in Paris. She became, unusually for the time, an independent woman artist living on her own, exhibiting for the first time at the Gateshead Fine Art and Industrial Exhibition in 1883. During the 1880s Isa lived in Cullercoats and Robert Jobling moved to the nearby village of Whitley with his first wife, Annie Chambers (who died in 1892), and their four children. They were both key members of the Cullercoats Colony of artists. Visiting Staithes from 1889, Isa was elected a member of the Staithes Art Club in 1901 joining fellow women artists Hannah Hoyland and Laura Johnson.
Professional life was hard for serious Victorian women artists. Most female artists of the time were wealthy amateurs and the world of the professionals was a very masculine one. A major impetus for the setting up of the Academie Julian in Paris was that so few art schools and academies admitted women. Formal art groups were reluctant to admit them as members. When women artists married, their wifely role was expected to take
preference over their profession and they tended to become mistresses of the flower study. Isa Jobling’s talent was immense and her paintings of working people cannot be bettered by any of the Staithes Group. After her marriage, however, titles such as ‘Flowers of the Fields’, ‘Windfalls’, Knapweed’, ‘Wayside Weeds’, Roses and Lilies’, ‘The Buds of May’,’The Cottagers Garden’,’The Orchard’ etc. together with landscapes make up a
progressively larger proportion of her exhibited pictures. Her work was always priced lower than comparable pictures by Robert, and, in many ways they were comparable, long before they married as well as afterwards. Style and subject had a great many similarities, both having a wonderful spontaneity in their work and a growing sense of realism in their interpretation of their subject which, at the beginning of both their careers, tended towards Victorian sentimentality.
After her first exhibit in Gateshead, Isa had her work shown at the Bewick Club and the Laing Gallery in Newcastle and major national galleries including Royal Society of Artists, Birmingham, the Fine Art Society, the Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, the Walker Gallery, Liverpool, Manchester City Art Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Miniature Society the Royal Scottish Academy and the Yorkshire Union of Artists.
Bibliography:
A Romance with the North East, Robert and Isa Jobling, John Millard, Tyne and Wear Museums, 1992.
The Artists of Northumbria, Marshall Hall, 2nd Edition, Titus Wilson & son Ltd., Kendal, 1982.
Staithes Group Centenary Catalogue, Rosamund Jordan 2003
The Staithes Group, Peter Phillips, Phillips and Sons, Marlow1993
The Yorkshire Union of Artists 1888 - 1922, Dennis Child, Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society Ltd, Leeds 2001
The Dictionary of British Artists 1880 - 1940, J. Johnson & A. Greutzner, Antique Collectors’ Club, Woodbridge 1976
© Rosamund Jordan 2005
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