Although Clara Peeters is recognized as one of the founders of still life painting, nearly nothing is known about her life, teachers, or patrons. Equally remarkable, the Prado Museum, nearly 200 years old, is holding its first solo exhibition of a female [...]
Self-Portrait, 1790. Oil on canvas, approximately 39" by 32". Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Marie-Louise-Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun (1755-1842) was born of humble parentage to Jeanne Massin and the portraitist Louis Vigee. Like Angelica Kauffmann, Vigee-Le Brun was a precocious artist whose [...]
Helen Frankenthaler not only pioneered color field painting but also enjoyed critical acclaim during her lifetime. That's unusual for any painter, let alone a woman during a time when female artists were still rare. Clement Greenberg (1909-1994), one of the most influential art critic [...]
Swiss-born Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807) was known as a child prodigy who, before the age of 15, was accepting commissions in portraiture and was assisting her father with church murals. In addition to speaking four foreign languages fluently, Angelica Kauffmann was renowned as a singer [...]
Although now considered famous paintings, works by Degas, Cezanne, Pissarro, Monet, and Berthe Morisot were rejected by juries of the Paris Salon (indeed, each rejected submission had a huge "R" painted on its reverse, spawning creation of the Salon des Refuses, an exhibition of [...]
Like many female artists, the life of Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was punctuated by a series of “firsts” and breaks from convention en route to creating her legendary, famous paintings. Berthe Morisot was the first female artist to exhibit with the French Impressionists, [...]
Although Sofonisba Anguissola (1532-1625) was one of the best known female painters of the Italian Renaissance, she is relatively obscure in today's art history. Here's a small start to changing the legacy of this pioneer among female painters, and recognizing her famous Renaissance [...]
Recognized now as one of the most significant female painters of the early 20th century, Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) studied at the Berlin School of Art for Women. She then moved in 1898 to Worpswede, an artist community near Bremen in northern Germany. After [...]
Although now known as one of the famous painters of the 17th century, the Dutch painter Judith Leyster (1609-1660) virtually disappeared from the history of painting after her death. Over 200 years later in 1893, the Louvre museum unearthed Leyster's unique monogram [...]
The dearth of famous paintings by female artists isn't art history news, but after recently seeing the Guerilla Girls poster, Do Women Have to be Naked to get into the Met Museum?, I was curious - which woman in art history was [...]
