The Story of Art Without Men

by Katy Hessel

In October 2015, I walked into an art fair and realised that, out of the thousands of artworks before me, not a single one was by a woman. This sparked a series of questions: could I name twenty women artists off the top of my head? Ten pre-1950? Any pre-1850? The answer was no. Had I essentially been looking at the history of art from a male perspective? The answer was yes.

statistics. A study published in 2019 found that in the collections of eighteen major US art museums, 87 per cent of artworks were by men, and 85 per cent by white artists. Currently, women artists make up just 1 per cent of London’s National Gallery collection.

I do this to break down the stigma around elitism in art – art can be for anyone, and anyone can be part of this conversation – and to showcase artists so often excluded from the history books and courses I studied.

The book takes its title from the so-called introductory ‘bible’ to art history, E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art. It’s a wonderful book but for one flaw: his first edition (1950) included zero women artists and even the sixteenth edition includes only one. I hope this book will create a new guide, to supplement what we already know.

If we aren’t seeing art by a wide range of people, we aren’t really seeing society, history or culture as a whole,

it feels important to remove the clamour of men in order to listen carefully to the significance of other artists to our cultural histories.

To avoid artists only being seen as the wife of, the muse of, the model of, or the acquaintance of, I have situated them within their social and political context, in the time in which they lived. While I have grouped artists within established movements (for the purpose of clarity), I am keenly aware that artists are not the products of categories, but rather individuals with varied lives and careers who spearheaded key changes in styles.

it took until the end of the nineteenth century for women to be allowed to study the nude from life.

During the Victorian age, women, with their ‘smaller’, less ‘creative’ brains, were considered incapable of becoming professional artists and were often restricted to ‘craft’ or ‘design’ (genres not considered ‘fine art’ by the establishment).

In order to get around this, nineteenth-century art dealers were known to scratch out a female artist’s signature and replace it with that of a male contemporary, which explains why many works by women have only just come to light. (No wonder some of them hid self-portraits among their still lifes.)

To be taken seriously as an artist in Renaissance Europe, a liberal arts education was required: the study of literature, mathematics, perspective and, significantly, human anatomy – drawing from art and live models, including nudes. Also key was access to cultural centres, such as Rome, Florence or Venice, to study and experience the splendour of Renaissance art and architecture, or ancient Classical ruins. All of this was, however, off-limits for women.

Caterina de’ Vigri (1413–63), a writer, musician, nun (later known as Saint Catherine of Bologna) and accomplished painter of manuscripts; and Properzia de’ Rossi (1490–1530), a sculptor known for her rebellious pursuits.

Both of these women were able to live as practising artists because they were fortunate enough to be born in Bologna, a place renowned for its progressive attitudes towards women. At the time, Bologna was unique in championing the professions of women. The home of Europe’s oldest university, which had supported female students since the thirteenth century, the city considered women artists as integral to its development.

Praised by scholars, written about by biographers and adored by the locals, they were also supported by patrons of all social classes (from bankers to barbers), creating a varied culture of artistic patronage. (By contrast, in Florence and Naples, commissioning was reserved for select noble families.) Women were also encouraged to sign their work, as well as to paint self-portraits for the purposes of being known and, most importantly, remembered. No wonder scholars have recorded a staggering sixty-eight women artists working in the city between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.

Anguissola’s quiet and intimate self-portraits display her poised manner and gleaming eyes. Often depicting herself playing music or working at the easel with her paints all laid out and her brush at the ready, Anguissola epitomised what a mid-sixteenth-century woman with an education could be. Her success was so impactful that she inspired noble families from across Europe to instil in their daughters similar professional ambitions. Capturing women engaged in intellectual pursuits, she famously portrayed her sisters in the midst of a conversational and characterful game of chess.

Anguissola was capable of great things and in her old age was clearly just as sharp. When she was in her early nineties, she was painted by the much younger artist Anthony van Dyck. Captivated by her intellect, in 1624 Van Dyck portrayed her as both astute and austere, qualities still evident in her piercingly resolute eyes, despite her near-blindness. He recalled that she was still very alert, and had advised him to ‘not raise the light too high, so that the shadows would not accentuate the wrinkles of old age’. Although we will never know what she might have produced given the opportunities of her male counterparts, her paintings show a hunger for experimentation, and highlight the canny ways she found to subvert the limits put on her talents.

Aged twenty-five, she married a former pupil of her father, who not only allowed her to keep her maiden name but raised their eleven children. Running a successful studio (completing a staggering twenty-four public commissions), she quickly advanced to larger narrative paintings and her fame spread. By 1604 she had relocated to Rome, then the greatest place for artistic opportunity, where she became a member of the prestigious Accademia di San Luca and her work was admired by the Pope. Fontana is thought to be one of the first women in Western art to paint female nudes, as seen in her glittering and seductive Venus and Mars, 1595.

‘I Caterina van Hemessen have painted myself / 1548 / Here aged 20’. Like her Italian contemporaries, she intended to be remembered as a woman who worked.

Still-life painting was also considered a suitable genre for upper-class women: it didn’t pose a threat to male artists, who no doubt liked to guard ‘great’ and ‘intellectual’ subjects (mythological, religious), nor did it require a knowledge of human anatomy; moreover the objects were easily accessible from the home. Paintings of flowers and edible goods – dainties that once lived – had moral meanings. They represented vanitas, a word derived from the Bible, to remind the viewer of their own mortality; the fragility and temporality of life; the worthlessness of material goods in the eyes of God.

With its origins in antiquity, still life was popular in the Renaissance, and at the turn of the seventeenth century was deemed a respectable artform. Here, again, we find women artists pushing at the staid limits of the genre, demonstrating their high level of skill and looking to assert their identity as artists. This is particularly evident in their hidden self-portraits in still lifes – perhaps in part to avoid the attribution of their work to men.

In Milan, Fede Galizia (1578–1630), thought to have learned her craft from her miniaturist painter father, began (in childhood) her painstakingly detailed still lifes of cherries, apples, peaches and pears, with her trademark subdued, dark backdrops. Although Galizia never dated her work, her earliest still life, which scholars have described as the ‘first dated still life by an Italian artist’, is thought to be from 1602.

Small, refined and highly collectable, Garzoni’s paintings were so successful that, according to scholars, she sold them for ‘whatever price she wished’.

Born into a cultured family in the Marche region of Italy, from an early age Garzoni learnt music, painting, letter writing and calligraphy. Unlike many female artists of her day, she travelled extensively around Italy, receiving her education in Venice and Rome, and later residing in Florence, where records show she met with Artemisia Gentileschi

Unconstrained by one medium or genre, Garzoni’s output ranges from a calligraphy book featuring a series of capital letters adorned with fruits, poetic writings and letters executed in her exquisite handwriting, to glittering portrait miniatures.

Completed in 1635, this relic-like work, full of meticulous precision and just under six centimetres high, is thought to be the earliest depiction of a Black sitter in a Western European miniature portrait. The prince, shown wearing European court dress to highlight his royal status, had fled to Europe after the murder of his father, the King of Ethiopia (while in Rome, he was thought to have had an affair with a Franciscan nun!). A favourite aspect of this gem of a piece is its back, illustrating the likely friendship between the prince and Garzoni, where the artist’s name is embossed in Amharic script.

Women artists were still rare, although they were less of a curiosity (in part due to the success of their predecessors), and they continued to be held back by societal restrictions and a lack of resources, often resorting to using themselves as models. But while the women of the Renaissance depicted themselves as desirable and educated, I find those associated with the Baroque to be more ‘present’ in their work, often portraying themselves as biblical heroines, and it’s this presence which seems to make them more relatable today.

The eldest daughter in an artistic family, who raised her three brothers following her mother’s death when she was twelve, Gentileschi grew up grinding pigments in her father Orazio’s studio. As a woman, she was banned from wandering freely around the city’s monumental buildings and churches or attending the life class, so she rigorously studied and copied the biblical subjects found in her father’s grand paintings – subjects she later brilliantly tackled herself.

Encouraged by her father, who had given her the distinctively Classical name ‘Artemisia’, Gentileschi signed and dated her first large-scale painting when she was just seventeen.

In 1611, when working in her father’s studio, Gentileschi was raped by Agostino Tassi, an artist friend of her father. Orazio took Tassi to court nearly a year later, primarily because the act had brought dishonour to his family. The traumatic seven-month trial that followed has left as its legacy a 300-page document, now over 400 years old. In it, we can hear the courageous, eloquent and affirming voice of Artemisia herself: ‘He then threw me on to the edge of the bed, pushing me with a hand on my breast, and he put a knee between my thighs to prevent me from closing them. Lifting my clothes, he placed a hand with a handkerchief on my mouth to keep me from screaming.’ Gentileschi was tortured throughout the trial with a ‘sibille’ (ropes tied around her fingers and tightened, an equivalent to a modern-day lie detector – the most abhorrent persecution for an artist); she was also forced to prove her innocence – uttering the famous words ‘è vero, è vero, è vero’ (‘it’s true, it’s true, it’s true’). Despite a guilty verdict, after being protected by the Pope, Tassi avoided punishment, an act that sadly still feels unsurprising today. After the trial ended in 1612, Gentileschi was married off and moved to Florence, where she achieved meteoric recognition (patrons wanted portraits by her and of her – including portraits of her hand). It was in this period that she produced what is probably her best work. Focusing on large-scale full-figure compositions imbued with psychological...

Much of Gentileschi’s work deals with women seeking to avenge themselves, yet there is not an instance where they appear as the victim.

Gentileschi has become a feminist idol in part due to her exceptionally strong sense of self-worth. We know from her letters that she was a firm believer in treating and paying women fairly. A frugal businesswoman, in one letter she demands higher fees for multi-figure compositions, and, in another, she asserts to a Sicilian collector, Don Antonio Ruffo: ‘You will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman.’

Due to misattribution, it took centuries, and a scandal, in fact, for her talent to be rediscovered. In 1893, following a court case, it was revealed that Carousing Couple, 1630, ascribed to Frans Hals (and bought by the Louvre as such), was in fact signed with the initials JL, accompanied by a star. Since then, many more paintings have come to light, more proof of Leyster’s leading-star status.

Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), born in The Hague, stunned art lovers with her highly sophisticated depictions of flora and fauna. Painting until she was well into her eighties, Ruysch achieved international fame and financial success on a par with male painters of the day, selling her work for up to 750 guilders (nearly twice as much as Rembrandt during his lifetime). Her paintings are still preserved in major museums across the globe. However, she has often been left out of art history books.

(‘Rococo’ comes from the French word rocaille, referencing the grottoes encrusted with shells found in Versailles.)

Although Moser’s and Kauffman’s senior positions appeared to show women entering new spaces, nothing changed for decades – a century even. It took until 1860 for the next female artist to be admitted to the Royal Academy (Laura Herford got in by submitting drawings using only her initials, L. H.); and until the 1890s for women to be allowed to study from the nude. The first official female Royal Academician was elected in 1936: Laura Knight; and, to date in 2022, only 9.35 per cent of Royal Academicians have been women. Like most such institutions, the Royal Academy still has a lot of work to do. But back to the eighteenth century – this time in France.

Vigée Le Brun was for the most part self-taught. Highly ambitious – by fifteen she was her family’s sole earner – within a few years, she was married off to a high-society (albeit gambling) art dealer. Not only did he introduce her to the Parisian cultural elite, but his job meant she could access, copy and study the most important paintings of the day. Commended by patrons for her soft textures and desirable portraits, which made her sitters appear slightly more attractive than in reality, in 1778 Vigée Le Brun caught the attention of Marie Antoinette. Striking up a close friendship with her royal patron, Le Brun went on to immortalise her in around thirty portraits, with the pair remaining close until the Queen’s arrest.

At the time the portrait was painted, Benoist failed to document the sitter’s name, but after extensive research for a groundbreaking exhibition, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse, curated by Denise Murrell in 2019, the sitter was identified as Madeleine, a servant who had been brought to Paris from the Antilles by the artist’s brother-in-law. Originally Portrait d’une négresse, the work was rightfully renamed Portrait of Madeleine. Prior to Murrell’s research, others had criticised the lack of attention to the identity of the sitter, a contentious issue throughout much of art history, which has seen Black sitters’ identities stripped. Murrell adds, ‘Although the model is portrayed as emblematic of liberty, she can be assumed to have had little or no ability to influence the manner of her portrait’; confirming that Black people were regularly utilised as symbols rather than individuals, as Murrell notes, ‘which would have been the case if they had been European’.

Art historians have overlooked quilting as a key medium for far too long. No doubt in part as a hangover from the academies who dismissed embroidery as ‘craft’. Quiltmaking is important, not only artistically, but as a political tool, and as a medium which women have historically dominated.

Shown off at local and mainstream agricultural fairs (where quilters often won prizes), quilts were made for many purposes: practical, educational, political, decorative. For warmth, wedding gifts, to raise money and awareness for abolitionist and feminist causes

But it was her stone bust of a local abolitionist which earned her enough money to travel to Europe – a decision made in part to escape the racial prejudice of America. She later told The New York Times in 1878: ‘The land of liberty had no room for a coloured sculptor.’

Marrying and then divorcing (on the grounds, it was rumoured, that her husband’s painting was not up to standard), Ōi returned to her father’s studio, and no doubt got straight back to work.

Following the death of her father, Ōi’s life fell into obscurity – not even her death was recorded. Perhaps she was always dependent on him, but another, unsurprising reason might be that she was the daughter of the most important Japanese ukiyo-e artist in history, Hokusai, famed for his remarkable print design Under the Wave off Kanagawa, 1831, nicknamed ‘The Great Wave’: she was being viewed in his shadow. Ōi was Hokusai’s foremost collaborator and assistant (he greatly admired her). Nevertheless, observing the masterful control of line and fineness of pigment that continued to characterise Hokusai’s later paintings (which became enormously influential for European artists from 1870 onwards), scholars are now debating just how much help she did provide towards the end of his life.

A trained botanist, raised by her father of the same profession, prior to her photographic book, Atkins had been a prolific illustrator and published over 250 drawings of shells. Despite her innovations – and the 6,000 or so Cyanotypes of flora and fauna she left behind – Atkins was largely ignored after her death, until 1985 when her name resurfaced thanks to a reissuing of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.

And after a petition in 1859 demanding the admittance of women artists as students to the prestigious Royal Academy of Arts (with Laura Herford admitted in 1860), by 1893, women were finally welcome in the life room.

Although it is often referred to as the ‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’ (the group was initially founded by seven male poets in 1848), women played an active role within it. Not only did they sit for painters, influencing the male artists’ imagery through their unique physical appearances, but they, too, were ambitious and professional artists. Aware of their oppression in society, and of the passivity of their poses in the work of men, they often chose strong heroines of the past as their subjects, and depicted women as symbols of strength, humility and intellect.

Born into a working-class family, Siddal, fascinated by poetry since her youth, accessed the group via modelling. Beginning her artistic pursuits in 1852, she was mostly self-taught bar some training from Rossetti, who instilled in her his love of Gothic forms and medieval subjects. Drawing influence from historic and contemporary poetry, Siddal’s watercolours often featured dreamlike, romantic, chivalrous scenes. But, after suffering from depression, she died, aged thirty-two, from an overdose of laudanum. She had only exhibited twice. Although Rossetti buried her with a book of his poems, six years after her death he requested for it to be exhumed from her grave.

A friend and contemporary of Siddal, Joanna Boyce Wells (1831–61) was the most ambitious woman in the group. Born to a wealthy father, who financed and encouraged her training in Paris (her mother was less keen), unlike so many women, Boyce Wells was able to study anatomy, perspective and the nude from life, thanks to private tutoring. Sometimes considered ‘too good’ by the group, Boyce Wells was a master at capturing her subjects’ sculptural, three-dimensional physicality and inner psychological depth, as seen in Elgiva, 1855, a serene and sublime painting of the tragic Anglo-Saxon heroine. This was met with great praise when exhibited at London’s Royal Academy of Arts, John Ruskin, no less, aptly describing Elgiva’s expression as ‘so subtle, so tenderly wrought

Set against verdant backdrops, wearing floral headdresses, with long sweeping hair, Spartali Stillman was photographed in portraits which feel so fresh, so modern, they could have been taken today. First working a camera at the age of forty-eight, Cameron became one of the medium’s pioneers, and was instrumental in the development of portrait photography. (She brought to it a relaxed informality and intimacy, evidenced by her subjects’ expressions or the visible lines on their faces, whereas before figures often appeared stiff due to the subjects having to stand still for long periods of time.) Recording the intellectual elite in her distinct sepia glow, Cameron photographed Alice Liddell (credited as the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland) and Cameron’s niece Julia Stephen (mother to Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, p. 140).

On the eve of her seventeenth birthday, Evelyn de Morgan (1855–1919) wrote in her diary: ‘seventeen years wasted in eating, dawdling and frittering time away … Art is eternal, but life is short … I will make up for it now, I have not a moment to lose.’

This further coincided with artists beginning to abandon the hierarchies between artforms (embroidery, painting, architecture, sculpture, design) and embracing their unity – and the concept of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk (a ‘total work of art’).