The Work in Theory

RAMM welcomes Professor William Gallois from the University of Exeter to our Research Blog. With two colleagues, William visited the stored collections at the museum to study ‘Morning‘ by local artist Isabel Codrington (1874-1943). Here, he shares his thoughts.

If you would like to see this intriguing painting up close it will be on display at RAMM in 2025. ‘A feast for the eyes’ runs 5 April 2025 – 22 Mar 2026.

Isabel Codrington gifted Morning (1934) to the museum. It is a piece which is sufficiently rich that many will find their own sense of meaning in contemplating the work. Looking at sales of her work at auction (for, like many women painters, she occupies no formal place in Art History), one gains the impression that this piece was one of the bolder, more radical and unconventional pictures she exhibited.

Colour photograph of an oil painting. A woman lays in bed which crumpled white sheets and her arm extending to the floor. Her clothes are strewn on a chair by the bed. In the foreground a table with a torn tablecloth holds the remains of a meal of bread and salad, and a newspaper.

More questions than answers

The painting crosses genres, seeming to pose as many questions as it answers. It proffers wonderful mysteries which relate to the artworks which it references (Caillebotte’s floorboards, a shimmering wall which leads to Turner), a sense of uncertainty relating to its subject and its meanings, as well as the running together of still life with the nude, set within a domestic interior.

Colour photograph of an oil painting depicting two men removing the varnish from a wooden floor — Les raboteurs de parquet (The Floor Scrapers) by Gustave Caillebotte. Oil on canvas, 1876. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Private Collection.

Colour photograph of an oil painting depicting three men removing the varnish from a wooden floor — Les raboteurs de parquet (The Floor Scrapers) by Gustave Caillebotte. Oil on canvas, 1875. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Musée d’Orsay.

Colour photograph of an oil painting by JMW Turner titled The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834. Orange flames rise toward the sky in the centre of the painting with sky above and water below. — The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834 by J. M. W. Turner. Oil on canvas, 1834. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Cleveland Museum of Art

As such, Morning would seem to exemplify a set of claims made by Rebecca Birrell in her wonderful book This Dark Country: Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century (2021). “Queering” readings of neglected forms and creators, Birrell reveals the manner in which “still life remained a medium through which to explore aesthetics and politics, but to this established repertoire they [women artists] added an exploration of the uneasy relationship between the public and private spheres, gender and value, lived experience and aesthetic form.” A “reversal” thereby took place in the representation of “domesticity” in which a site of repression became a locale of liberation through art.

Looking closer

Is this not, we may wonder, that which we see in Isabel Codrington’s great work? Birrell writes that such pictures were expressive of a “new moral universe [of] freedom of thought, hope and a suddenly boundless aspiration,” of a kind we might imagine to be revealed by stockings strewn across a floor, a dinner of bread, tomatoes and cucumber left uncleared and unstored, a ragged table cloth which served its purpose without connoting propriety, a cheap illustrative calendar from a grocer’s which stands in as a form of interior decoration, as well as a dashing green bonnet whose purple feather speaks of a night’s entertainment in which this figure was very much a subject rather than an object.

Close up colour photo of Isabel Codrington's painting 'Morning' showing dark stockings strewn on a wooden floor

Close up colour photo of Isabel Codrington's painting 'Morning' showing a green hat with a purple ostrich feather on the back of a wooden chair

Close up colour photo of Isabel Codrington's painting 'Morning' showing a poster hanging on the wall

Close up colour photo of Isabel Codrington's painting 'Morning' showing bread, tomatoes and cucumber on a table

Close up colour photo of Isabel Codrington's painting 'Morning' showing a ripped table cloth

Even her sleep, in this “room of one’s own,” seems to speak of freedoms defined by an actor who fashions her own world, whom we may imagined is seen here by a lover, by herself, or simply by us.

RAMM has released this image open access. It is available to download on Wikimedia Commons