We need to remove the mask of history from female artists

Madrid’s Prado gallery has finally, after 200 years, put on its first show devoted to a female painter, Clara Peeters. We need far more like it, to understand the greatness of women working under heavy patriarchies

One of the most unsettling works of art I have seen for a long time is a small sketch in a school atlas that was identified last year as a self-portrait by the young Charlotte Brontë. Why is it so unsettling? Because of the talent it shows. Could she have been an artist as well as a great writer – and how many other talented women have found their ability to draw trivialised or suppressed through the centuries?

Related: More savage than Caravaggio: the woman who took revenge in oil

Continue reading...