{"id":14088,"date":"2025-07-21T23:33:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-21T23:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/14088\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T23:33:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T23:33:11","slug":"women-old-masters-to-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/14088\/","title":{"rendered":"Women Old Masters to Know"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tA few years after art historian Linda Nochlin famously asked \u201cWhy Have There Been No Great Women Artists?<\/a>\u201din a 1971 ARTnews article, she and fellow professor Ann Sutherland Harris came up with an answer of sorts, in the form of a breakthrough exhibition. They curated an impressive show of 150 artworks by 83 artists, titled \u201cWomen Artists, 1550\u20131950,\u201dthat opened in 1976 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and then traveled to museums in Austin, Pittsburgh, and Brooklyn. It was a major success\u2014its ripple effects are felt to this day.<\/p>\n

\n\tNochlin and Harris weren\u2019t making a judgment call about greatness but showing that women had always been artists, sharing some of what they\u2019d created. Their hope was that this exhibition would be the starting point of an important conversation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cNeither of us believes this .\u00a0.\u00a0. is the last word on the subject. On the contrary, we both look forward to reading the many articles, monographs, and critical responses that we hope this exhibition will generate,\u201d wrote Nochlin and Harris in the scholarly catalog published along with the exhibition. \u201cWe look forward to future developments.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn fits and starts, there have been future developments aplenty. In the last decade alone, women Old Masters have been mined from museum storerooms, archives, private collections, footnotes, and other dusty corners. These discoveries have, in turn, been shared through exhibitions and monographs and fostered a general willingness to look more closely.<\/p>\n

\n\tBelow are 12 women Old Masters who have recently benefited from this tide of rediscovery.<\/p>\n

\tPlautilla Nelli (1524\u20131588)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Plautilla
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Collection of the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Digital image: Wikimedia Commons.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tEarly art historian Giorgio Vasari barely included biographies of women in his famous anthology, Lives of the Artists (1550), but Renaissance artist Plautilla Nelli made it into the second edition. \u201cShe shows that she would have done marvelous things if she had enjoyed, as men do, opportunities for studying, and devoting herself to drawing and representing living and natural objects,\u201d wrote Vasari. \u201c[She] has executed some works with such diligence, that she has caused artists to marvel.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNelli was one of the earliest known women to paint historical compositions, and she did this via one of the few avenues available to women of her time: by becoming a nun. She entered the Florentine convent of Santa Caterina as a teen (eventually becoming its prioress), maybe drawn to it because it encouraged artistry among its sisters. There she created religious paintings and codices, and around 20 works are attributed to her now, some of which are housed in important Florentine venues such as Il Museo di San Marco, the Uffizi\u2019s Prints and Drawings department, and the Palazzo Vecchio.<\/p>\n

\n\tHer crowning achievement was a 7-by-5-meter Last Supper (c. 1568), the first known version of this challenging subject by a woman. After an intensive conservation process supported by the Advancing Women Artists Foundation, the canvas was installed in Santa Maria Novella in Florence in 2019, where visitors can now see it and read the artist\u2019s signature in the upper lefthand corner: Suor Plautilla, orate pro pictora (Sister Plautilla, pray for the paintress). Two years earlier, Nelli was given a solo presentation at Uffizi.<\/p>\n

\tLavinia Fontana (1552\u20131614)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Lavinia
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Collection of the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T\u0101maki. Digital image: Wikimedia Commons. \t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Lavinia Fontana wed an impoverished nobleman in 1577, the couple signed an unusual marriage contract: She wouldn\u2019t have a dowry but she\u2019d support her husband financially, provided they live in her father\u2019s home and Fontana be allowed to keep painting in the family workshop. It was a smart provision: Eventually the Bolognese artist became the first woman painter to work professionally in Europe (outside a convent or court).<\/p>\n

\n\tFontana received 23 prestigious and well-paid altarpiece commissions but is now known mostly for her portraits of Bolognese children and noblewomen. The women of Bologna sought Fontana out, preferring her to other portraitists. \u201cAll the Ladies of the City would compete in wishing to have her close to them,\u201d wrote Fontana\u2019s biographer, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, \u201ctreating her and embracing her with extraordinary demonstrations of love and respect, considering themselves fortunate to have seen her on the street, or to have meetings in the company of the virtuous young woman; the greatest thing they desired would be to have her paint their portraits.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFontana and fellow painter Sofonisba Anguissola were the subject of a two-artist exhibition at Madrid\u2019s Prado Museum in 2019\u201320<\/a>, and earlier this year a painting held in storage at a provincial museum in northern France, Portrait of a Gentleman, His Daughter and a Servant, was finally attributed to Fontana<\/a>. (It had been previously attributed to Flemish painter Pieter Pourbus.)<\/p>\n

\tClara Peeters (ca. 1587\u20131636)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Clara
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Collection of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany. Digital image: Wikimedia Commons.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tYou could almost miss Clara Peeters if you didn\u2019t know to look for her. At first glance her tablescapes look like conventional northern European still lifes, full of exotic extravagances like Chinese porcelain, sculpted pastries, and coins. Take a closer look at the reflective surfaces, though\u2014a goblet, a candleholder, or (as in the lead image to this article) the pewter lid of a beer stein\u2014and there she is in at least eight miniature self-portraits that she sneaked into her compositions. Some of these cameos are just a suggestion of her presence rendered in a few brushstrokes, but in others (such as the one repeated multiple times in the goblet at the far right of Still Life with Flowers, Gilt Goblets, Coins and Shells, above) we see her holding a painter\u2019s palette. Peeters hid herself but also clearly wanted to be found.<\/p>\n

\n\tLittle is known about this figure who left us with the tiniest traces of herself and barely any surviving written evidence, but we do know she was part of a family of artists active in Antwerp. Her husband, father, grandfather, brother, and nephew were all painters, which likely paved a way for her to work as a professional painter too.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are 39 paintings bearing her signature, with others presumed lost. The Prado has the largest collection of her work, four paintings, and devoted its first-ever monographic exhibition for a woman artist to Peeters in 2016\u201317 (the exhibition was mounted first in Antwerp at the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten).<\/p>\n

\tArtemisia Gentileschi (1593\u20131653)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Artemisia
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: The Royal Collection, England. Digital image: Wikimedia Commons.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tBaroque Italian artist Artemisia Gentileschi<\/a> painted women\u2019s stories differently from how men had always painted them, even at the start of her long career. In one of her first known works, Susanna and the Elders (1610), we don\u2019t see the voyeurism that male artists generally brought to this Old Testament story. The focus is instead on Susanna\u2019s vulnerability and fear. That said, Gentileschi is known for painting powerful heroines both biblical and mythological, introducing agency and complexity to women who otherwise fell flat (if depicted at all).<\/p>\n

\n\tMuch of the early scholarship on Gentileschi, sadly, did that very thing to her\u2014flattening her illustrious career and focusing instead on the rape charges that she brought against her teacher, artist Agostino Tassi. (The trial judge ruled in Gentileschi\u2019s favor; Tassi was sentenced to five years in prison but never served them.)<\/p>\n

\n\tThat approach has since changed; today we know more about this 17th-century superstar whose works were commissioned by patrons like the Medici and King Charles I of England. She was the first woman to be inducted into the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, which allowed her to buy art supplies without a man\u2019s permission, travel alone, and sign contracts. We also now know that she separated from her husband and lived independently in Naples and London, while supporting her two daughters, who also painted.<\/p>\n

\n\tGentileschi has been included in many group shows over the past few decades and had a few solo exhibitions after a 2002 two-artist show at the Metropolitan Museum focused on her and her artist father, Orazio Gentileschi. An exhibition of 40 of her paintings is now on view at the Mus\u00e9e Jacquemart Andr\u00e9 in Paris, and in June the Getty Museum in Los Angeles will show a previously unknown Gentileschi painting, of Hercules, that was damaged in the large 2020 explosion in Beirut<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\tGiovanna Garzoni (1600\u20131670)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Giovanna
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: J. Paul Getty Museum.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen Giovanna Garzoni went to the Florentine court of Grand Duchess Maria Magdalena around 1620, looking for a job, a witness said she had more talents than fingers. Garzoni could sing, play music, do calligraphy, and paint miniatures\u2014the latter becoming her focus over the course of her career.<\/p>\n

\n\tGarzoni painted finely detailed works on a nearly microscopic scale, mostly portraits early on, but as she grew more financially comfortable she focused on what she really enjoyed, botanical still lifes, and by her 40s she was working almost exclusively on them. Still lifes weren\u2019t particularly prized in her day (making them a genre considered suitable for women), but the sense is that this wasn\u2019t a motivating factor in Garzoni\u2019s case. A look at her bowls of fresh fruit specially supplied to her from the Medici gardens or exotic flowers native to Mexico, India, or Japan makes evident her true love of botany.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe painter worked for important patrons across Italy, England, and France, but the majority of her works are still in Medici collections. This made it possible to present a monographic show of her work at Florence\u2019s Pitti Palace in 2020, covering the range of her still lifes and portraits as well as textile work and calligraphy.<\/p>\n

\tMichaelina Wautier\u00a0(1604\u201389)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Michaelina
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Digital image: Wikimedia Commons.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tAt a time when many women artists painted still lifes and portraits, Brussels-based artist Michaelina Wautier was an outlier: She created history paintings. Granted, she also painted portraits, genre scenes, and a few religious works. But few women of the 17th century were working on 9-by-12 foot canvases the likes of Wautier\u2019s Bacchanal (c. 1656), a mythological painting in the collection of Austrian Archduke Leopold Wilhelm (one of four paintings by her that he owned). Adding to the self-assurance and skill required to create this monumental work, the artist inserted a self-portrait in the form of a maenad on the far right of the composition, looking confidently out at the viewer.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are at least 32 known paintings by Wautier, who was well known in her lifetime but then became an obscure name, with many of her works attributed to men. There have been efforts to study her over the past few decades, culminating in a major solo exhibition that will open in September at Vienna\u2019s Kunsthistorisches Museum and then travel to the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 2026.<\/p>\n

\tJudith Leyster (1609\u20131660)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Judith
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Collection of the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm. Digital image: Wikimedia Commons.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tSomeone took a closer look at the monogram on a \u201cFrans Hals\u201d painting in the late 19th century and realized that a combination of the letters J and L plus a shooting star just didn\u2019t make sense. This sparked the rediscovery of Dutch Golden Age painter Judith Leyster<\/a> (whose last name means \u201cleading star\u201d) and the rightful reattribution of more than 30 jolly genre scenes, portraits, and still lifes to her.<\/p>\n

\n\tLeyster shared the loose brushwork of contemporaries like Hals but set herself apart by using a \u2018worm\u2019s-eye view\u201d that added interest by casting her sitters from below, and by employing dramatic lamp lighting, one of her contributions to Dutch art. Her figures smoke, play games, drink, and make music\u2014some just being merry and others communicating messages about virtue and vice.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 2022 the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, acquired a Leyster painting of a smiling boy impishly using an upside-down hat as a bowl for grapes. Once owned by LACMA and American television star Red Skelton, the painting now hangs in one of the museum\u2019s European galleries.<\/p>\n

\tLouise Moillon (1610\u20131696)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Louise
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tLouise Moillon\u2019s still lifes were subdued, unlike the Dutch ones she was exposed to through the Protestant painters from southern Netherlands that she mixed with in the Saint-Germain-des-Pr\u00e9s quarter of Paris. Moillon meticulously painted produce, but with a humility that was more about reverence for the fruits of the earth than a grand demonstration of wealth and exotic specimens.<\/p>\n

\n\tMoillon was born into a family of artists\u2014her painter father, Nicolas, died when she was young, but then her mother, Marie, married the successful still-life painter Fran\u00e7ois Garnier, who likely trained her. A contract drawn up when Garnier and Marie wed shows that Moillon and Garnier were to share proceeds from painting sales, meaning she was already showing artistic promise at the tender age of 10. A posthumous inventory of Marie\u2019s belongings from 1630 listed around 14 still life paintings that Moillon had created under her own name by the time she was 20 years old. Most of her signed paintings are dated between 1629 and 1637 (her pre-marriage years), and by 1639 Charles I of England owned five of her fruit still lifes.<\/p>\n

\n\tLast year Getty Publications in collaboration with Lund Humphries released the first English-language scholarly monography devoted to Moillon.<\/p>\n

\tRachel Ruysch (1664\u20131750)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Rachel
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Detroit Institute of Arts.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tRachel Ruysch\u2019s still lifes look realistic but are anything but. The artist assembled impossible bouquets of flowers that bloomed during different seasons, some alive and some preserved by her botanist father. Ruysch grew up in Amsterdam around her father\u2019s plants and collection of curiosities, with access to rare botanicals from distant places at the Hortus Botanicus garden where her father taught. These verdant specimens became part of the roughly 250 meticulously rendered works Ruysch created in her lifetime, a painted universe where flowers that would never cross paths elsewhere flowered alongside lizards and insects.<\/p>\n

\n\tRuysch was one of the most famous Dutch painters of the early 17th century, and her work was sought out by patrons across Europe such as Johann Wilhelm II (the elector palatine in D\u00fcsseldorf) and the Florentine Medicis. In her lifetime some of her paintings sold for more than Rembrandt commanded during his, but after her death her fame faded.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first major monographic exhibition<\/a> of her work, Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art, recently opened at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio after showing at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich; it will later travel to Boston\u2019s Museum of Fine Arts.<\/p>\n

\tRosalba Carriera (1673\u20131757)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Rosalba
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Art Institute of Chicago.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThey called her the Queen of Pastel. Highbrow travelers visiting Venice knew to find Rosalba Carriera at the house on the Grand Canal next door to the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni (today the home of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection) for graceful miniature or pastel portraits that were easily transportable keepsakes. Fueled by this steady flow of visitors, Carriera\u2019s fame spread across Italy, France, England, and Germany, where Frederick Augustus II of Saxony was her greatest collector. Amassing more than 150 of her pastel works, Augustus II created a designated Kabinett der Rosalba gallery in his palace in Dresden.<\/p>\n

\n\tCarriera made jewel-like miniature likenesses, sometimes on ivory and inserted into the lids of tobacco snuff boxes, and later in her career worked in pastel\u2014keeping personal recipes for mixing colors and expertly making her own pastel sticks. Rare for her time, she set up her own workshop without a man overseeing business transactions. Helping her there were female students, including her sisters Giovanna and Angela.<\/p>\n

\n\tCarriera has been included in a few museum group shows recently, and in honor of the 350th anniversary of her birth, in 2023, the Gem\u00e4ldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden (which holds the largest collection of her work) hosted a solo exhibition of 73 of her pastels.<\/p>\n

\tAd\u00e9la\u00efde Labille-Guiard (1749\u20131803)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Ad\u00e9la\u00efde
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tThe most apt portrayal we have of Ad\u00e9la\u00efde Labille-Guiard is the full-length one she painted of herself and exhibited at the 1785 Paris Salon. In Self-Portrait with Two Pupils (1785) she sits at an easel (in an impossibly clean silk dress), instructing two of her students, Marie Gabrielle Capet and Marguerite Carreaux de Rosemond. By 1783, the year she was admitted to the Royal Academy, Labille-Guiard was teaching nine women students, and in this painting she made her case that more women should have access to studying art. (The Royal Academy had recently capped female enrollment at four.)<\/p>\n

\n\tActive in the time leading up to the French Revolution (which, sadly, slowed her down in her prime and led to the destruction of some of her work), Labille-Guiard created pastels and oil paintings, many of them portraits, including depictions of members of the extended royal family. One such pastel work, Portrait of Madame Charles Mitoire with Her Children<\/a> (1783), broke records at Christie\u2019s in 2021 when it was acquired by the Getty Museum. Labille-Guiard is also more accessible now thanks to a recent general-audience biography of her by Bridget Quinn, Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry, and Revolution in the Life of Ad\u00e9la\u00efde Labille-Guiard (2024).<\/p>\n

\tGesina ter Borch (1631\u20131690)<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\"Gesina
\n\t\t\t\t\tImage Credit: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\n\tDutch Golden Age artist Gesina ter Borch has long been classified as an amateur, even though she took her work quite seriously. She was born into an artistic family but never had a formal apprenticeship, nor did she join a guild, publicly show her works, or sell a piece. Her artist father, Gerard ter Borch, trained her brothers intensively, but she started her artistic studies relatively late, and when she did, her dad gave her less guidance.<\/p>\n

\n\tStill, Ter Borch created a variety of works\u2014self-portraits, watercolors, a copy of a Persian miniature painting, and three large illustrated book projects (held at the Rijksmuseum<\/a> in Amsterdam since 1886). Many of her works incorporated hand-lettered texts such as poems and song lyrics, the pairing of text and image being a special interest of hers.<\/p>\n

\n\tLast year the only known oil painting to have been done entirely by Gesina ter Borch was acquired by the Rijksmuseum for 3 million Euros (aided by the Women of the Rijksmuseum Fund). Portrait in Memory of Moses ter Borch (1667\u201369) is a posthumous portrait of the artist\u2019s younger brother, Moses, who was in the Dutch Navy and died during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Around the same time, Lund Humphries and Getty Publications released an English-language monograph for her as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few years after art historian Linda Nochlin famously asked \u201cWhy Have There Been No Great Women Artists?\u201din…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14089,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[9439,9440,6225,6485,6486,9441,1120,96,9442,9443,9444,9445,9446,9447,9448,9449,9450,9451,56,54,55,9452],"class_list":{"0":"post-14088","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-adu00e9lau00efde-labille-guiard","9":"tag-artemisia-gentileschi","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-artsanddesign","13":"tag-clara-peeters","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-gesina-ter-borch","17":"tag-giovanna-garzoni","18":"tag-judith-leyster","19":"tag-lavinia-fontana","20":"tag-louise-moillon","21":"tag-michaelina-wautier","22":"tag-old-masters","23":"tag-plautilla-nelli","24":"tag-rachel-ruysch","25":"tag-rosalba-carriera","26":"tag-uk","27":"tag-united-kingdom","28":"tag-unitedkingdom","29":"tag-women-artists"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14088\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}