Picture a prehistoric artist making markings in a cave. What do you see?
Most of us picture a man. But archaeologists in Europe are now concluding that, judging by the size of fingermarks and handprints, as much as 75% of that continent’s cave art may have been created by women.
The history of bias in art goes all the way back, and most of us haven’t yet switched to new ways of seeing.
Some museums are starting to make a concerted effort. And concerted it is, because somehow even art by women who were revered in their lifetimes has ended up forgotten in basements, or covered in mold in storage.
In Paris, London, Amsterdam, Venice in Italy, Vienna in Austria and Belgium’s Ghent, archivists, curators and museum directors are digging deep to accurately credit work that has, for centuries, been ascribed to husbands or fathers, forgotten in storage, or left out of the story of art history altogether. Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944), now widely regarded as the world’s first abstract artist, for instance, is still part of a posthumous battle to see her credited as such.
As their canvases find room, the stories of the artists are also being retold. Some were raped by their tutors, then forced into long-drawn-out trials. Others faced fraud by the men in their lives; still others, violence, divorce and isolation.
Most somehow built careers in a world where “women were not allowed to handle money, sign contracts, join guilds or academies, and were excluded from academic gatherings, well into the 19th century,” as Aldeheid Gealt points out.
Gealt is director emerita of the Indiana University museum of art, and co-founder of A Space of their Own, an online database that showcases overlooked women artists from the 15th to 19th centuries.
Two other problems routinely reared their heads: women were accused of signing their names to works by men they were in relationships with; and accused of appropriating works by other artists. Essentially, medieval versions of: “She couldn’t have done that; just look at her.”
This was such a common problem that artists such as Elisabetta Sirani (1638 – 1665) in Italy conducted public demonstrations to prove they were painting their own canvases.
This week, we’re celebrating some of the women the art world forgot. Read on for the paintings and stories of: an early Renaissance master; a young woman likened to Caravaggio; an artist who travelled Europe painting kings and queens… and the museums and large-scale exhibitions that are finally now telling their stories.
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Forgotten master of the baroque era: Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – 1654)
She was producing commissioned work by the age of 15. Some of it was likened to the works of Caravaggio. Commissions poured in from across Europe.
Artemisia Gentileschi was the first woman member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence. One of the first successful women artists in Western history.
Before much of this, at 17, she was raped by Agostino Tassi, a friend her father hired as a tutor. Historical records indicate that her father, the prominent artist Orazio Gentileschi, then insisted on taking the case to court, forcing her to endure a seven-month trial.
After it was done (Tassi was found guilty and sentenced to five years of exile, but the sentence was later annulled), Gentileschi moved to Florence, where she built her reputation as an artist.
She became known for exquisite depictions of light and shadow, and of powerful female characters, often shown wreaking vengeance.
Perhaps her best-known work is an instantly recognisable Judith Beheading Holofernes (a scene from the Bible). We know the work and yet most of us still don’t know her name.
She delivers a Judith unlike any other, says art historian Letizia Treves, who curated a Gentileschi exhibit at the National Gallery, London, five years ago. “She spares us none of the horror and the violence,” she told CBC, Canada. “There’s truthfulness here… you can sense the sheer strength of brute force needed to carry out this really gory task.”
Gentileschi was born in Rome, lived and worked in Florence, Naples, Venice and London, earning commissions from the Medici family, and the royal courts of England and Spain.
Gentileschi died, possibly of the plague, in 1656.
The record on her legacy is still being corrected. One painting from her time in London, Susanna and the Elders, was recently found in Britain’s Royal Collection Trust (RCT), mistakenly attributed to a male artist.
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A pioneer amid the Renaissance: Sofonisba Anguissola (1532 – 1625)
Her journey into art was encouraged avidly by her father, the ambitious and progressive nobleman Amilcare Anguissola.
Sofonisba Anguissola began artistic training as a teenager in Cremona. Her early work was even praised by Michelangelo, who frequently corresponded with her father.
A drawing of her brother crying deeply impressed him and his encouragement proved transformative. She gained access to formal workshops and anatomical study.
Sadly, she had to restrict herself to portraiture because of the circles she moved in; she was at one point lady-in-waiting to Queen Isabel of Spain, says Aldeheid Gealt, director emerita of the Indiana University museum of art, and cofounder of A Space of their Own, an online database that showcases overlooked women artists from the 15th to 19th centuries.
In Portrait of a Canon Regular (1552), painted when she was just 20, critics see signs of what she could have done, if she hadn’t been thus restricted. Here, she shows an unidentified clergyman mid-lecture, hand resting on an open Bible, as an eagle rises behind him, reinforcing his spiritual authority. The clergyman’s face is rendered with gentle brushstrokes to resemble flesh, and the canvas is considered exceptional for its use of negative spaces and shadows.
Her fame at the Spanish court led to her being called, in later years, the first female master of the Renaissance.
She died, aged 93, in Palermo.
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Rebel, trailblazer, enigma : Michaelina Wautier (1614 – 1689)
She was forgotten for nearly three centuries. It was another woman who excavated her work.
Art historian Katlijne van der Stighelen was looking through the warehouse of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 1993 when she came upon a sweeping scene of pagan debauchery, with a drunken god Bacchus at its centre.
The Triumph of Bacchus (1655-1659) had been languishing in storage. And for most of its time ignored, it hadn’t even been attributed to the right artist.
Michaelina Wautier didn’t sign her masterpiece. Instead, she boldly cast herself as a bacchante, a priestess or devotee of Bacchus, the only figure meeting the viewer’s gaze.
It was always clear it was Wautier in the piece, but, with only a surname scrawled in a corner of the piece, it was assumed the painting was the work of her brother, Charles Wautier, also a painter.
The debate resurfaced from time to time and, as recently as the 1900s, Gustav Gluck, curator of Flemish art at the Kunsthistorisches, declared in personal notes that it could never be the work of a woman. It was only in 2009 that analysis of style and signature confirmed it was Michaelina’s work.
Back in Vienna, Stighelen would uncover 25 more canvases by her, either ignored or misattributed in storage.
The museum displayed them in a special exhibition in 2018. “The overwhelming reaction to the show was one of total astonishment: how could an artist of that quality disappear and go into obscurity for so long?” says Julien Domercq, who curated a Michaelina Wautier exhibit at Royal Academy of Arts, London, from March to June this year.
Particularly prized today is the series of portraits titled The Five Senses, allegorical paintings of sight, smell, taste, hearing and touch. “These are astonishingly beautiful, humorous and also incredibly forward-thinking in the way that she chooses to depict these young boys from the street,” Domercq says.
Born in present-day Belgium, Wautier remains an enigma. “We don’t have a record of her birth. There’s still a question mark around the exact date. The works become the primary source of evidence of who she was,” Domercq says.
Her self-portrait seems to convey all that she wanted said: Wautier sits unsmiling beside an easel, surrounded by the tools of her trade.
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An early Impressionist: Mary Cassatt (1844 – 1926)
Born into a wealthy stockbroker’s family in Pennsylvania, Mary Cassatt described herself as “American, American through and through”, but she started off by grounding her art in the traditions of the old masters, whose work she studied on visits to Europe.
She then became an essential figure in the Impressionist movement in France, where she lived for about 60 of her 82 years. She was the only American, and one of only three women, allowed into the French Impressionist boys’ club led by Monet, Renoir and Manet.
Hers is a name many know, but not in the way they know the stories or the work of the others in that club.
That may finally change, 100 years after her death, as exhibitions being held at Art Institute of Chicago in September, at Paris’s Musée d’Orsay in October, and a show staged at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in April, pay tribute.
Cassatt was 24 when her Mandolin Player (1868) was accepted by Paris Salon, the official exhibition of the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts (Academy of Fine Arts). Nine years later, Edgar Degas visited her studio and invited her to join the Impressionists’ upcoming exhibitions. Her work changed greatly as a result.
She painted elegant young women receiving guests at home and enjoying themselves at the theatre; navigating bustling Parisian cafés and claiming public spaces.
“Cassatt took chances. She spoke boldly in her striking forms and vivid palette,” says Annelise K Madsen, a curator with the Art Institute of Chicago. “I think the act of trying something new, especially when the stakes are high, resonates with audiences today.”
Cassatt was outspoken in her support of young artists too, particularly women. She played a key role in later years as a consultant who helped direct wealthy collectors to the works of promising young painters. She died aged 82, at her country home near Paris.
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* In dialogue with the future: Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944)
Hilma af Klint led a double life as an artist.
By day, she created serene Swedish landscapes and detailed botanical illustrations, perfectly traditional works in style and subject. By night, she covered canvases in large geometric shapes, floating heads, whorls within whorls, and a range of other abstractions.
The Swedish artist is now regarded as a predecessor to pioneers of abstract art such as Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian.
In her lifetime, her abstracts were considered so radical and untethered that she asked they be hidden for 20 years after her death. When they finally began to be shown outside Sweden in the 1980s, the timeline of Modernism had to be revised.
Where Kandinsky claimed to have created the first abstract artwork in 1911, Klint had abstracts dated 1906.
Nearly half a century on, however, she is still left off lists and out of exhibitions.
In 2012, when New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) staged a show dedicated to abstract art, Klint was not included. Curator Leah Dickerman argued at the time that the artist did not define her mystical creations as secular art, and so they did not qualify.
MOMA has since acquired Klint works and, in 2025, staged a solo exhibition. A major show in France sought to contextualise her work this year, through a massive retrospective at the Grand Palais from May to August.
Born in Stockholm to a naval commander from a noble family, Klint was one of the first women admitted to the city’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and graduated with honours in 1887. She had a successful career as an artist, and served briefly as secretary of the Association of Swedish Women Artists.
Her abstracts reflected her engagement with new ideas of spiritualism and mysticism then sweeping Europe. She died aged 81, following a traffic accident in Sweden.
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Granted, then denied, the spotlight : Elisabetta Sirani (1638 – 1665)
At 19, Elisabetta Sirani took over her family’s painting and printmaking workshop, making altarpieces, historical canvases and portraits for elite patrons in Bologna. Her father has been stricken by gout, and she had three siblings to help support.
She would only live another eight years, dying at 27 from what was likely a ruptured ulcer. But in that brief time, she produced over 200 paintings, 15 etchings and hundreds of drawings.
Her reputation soon overshadowed that of her father and two sisters, who were also painters. She was so prolific that people didn’t believe she was creating all the art she put her name to. So she conducted demonstrations, painting in public to prove what she could do.
She became something of a celebrity, and was eventually buried in the same tomb as Bologna’s famous baroque painter, Guido Reni, who had also been her father’s teacher.
Sirani kept meticulous records of each of her works. They are now spread out around the world, from the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. Nationalmuseum in Stockholm and Florence’s Uffizi Gallery.
(Click here for more art by these and other forgotten women artists)
