Good morning,

Highly specific theme today. I hope you enjoy it.

We start in the National Portrait Gallery. I took a turn around the NPG last Sunday, and found a painting that a suffragette slashed thrice for women's rights. They have fixed it extremely well by the way, and here is the story of the "hatchet fiend" Anne Hunt:

Hunt got in with a cleaver despite galleries being on heightened alert after a series of militant incidents in museums, including the slashing of the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery by Mary Richardson in March 1914. Women were, at one point, banned from major museums.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/jan/29/hatchet-fiend-suffragette-celebrated-by-national-portrait-gallery-london-anne-hunt

You might notice that the guard in the above story thought that Anne Hunt was American because she was standing very close to the art. WELL. Here's more on that topic; some classic Hairpin – a story about being in a gallery, wanting to touch the art, and actually touching the art. This is a terrific piece of writing about responding to art and also about being high:

Have you ever touched an outdoor plaster wall? You know, that smooth-pebbled texture? If you’re curious about what touching a Monet is like, it has that same pleasant roughness, a kind of glossy scrape on your thumb. But have you ever touched an outdoor plaster wall while gazing at a beautiful sunset that is somehow made of the plaster wall, and the guy who built the plaster wall has been dead for a hundred years but somehow he’s hanging out with you because you and he and God are all touching his wall?

https://www.thehairpin.com/2012/01/when-to-touch-a-painting/

Finally, if you are my age or maybe a bit younger, and your mum was/is like mine, it's likely that you had a copy of Great Housewives of Art lying around. Let's reminisce about our favourites, this was mine:

Happy weekend, Fem Fri does not endorse literal violence to "the text",

A xx.