Artemisia Gentileschi raises her paintbrush to the canvas, completely absorbed in her work. With her stained hand, her dishevelled hair and the muted shades of her dark green and brown clothing, Gentileschi refuses to let her body be perceived as ornamental. Rejecting the role of the idealised muse that women often find themselves playing in the art world, she allows the viewer to see her as she really is: a serious and dedicated painter who wishes to be admired for her artistic skill rather than her beauty.

 

 

Gentileschi’s Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1638-9) is the painting that greeted us as we entered the Tate Britain’s celebration of women artists from 1520-1920. The exhibition was called Now You See Us, but I couldn’t help thinking that ‘We Are Not A Muse’ would perhaps be a more apt title; the 100 artists on display remind us that, as the Guerilla Girls would say, women should not have to be naked to get into any gallery. Although some of the artists on display are more famous for sitting for male painters, the world of art history needs to acknowledge that women have contributed more to art than merely their beauty. Marie Spartali Stillman, whose mesmerising  portrait The Rose from Armida’s Garden (1894) was displayed in the exhibition, produced over 150 works, but today she is perhaps better known as the muse of Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Hopefully this exhibition will bring a greater level of recognition to the achievements of these women; there is certainly enough material for Spartali Stillman to have an exhibition that focuses solely on her paintings.

 

 

However, despite the suggestion of the exhibition’s title, the artists on display were not always unseen, underrated or overlooked. Angelica Kauffman was not permitted to attend meetings in the Royal Academy’s Council Chamber, but her skill was nevertheless recognised by the Academy when she was commissioned to paint four ceiling paintings for this room. Elizabeth Thompson’s The Roll Call (1874), which depicts an exhausted battalion during the Crimean War, attracted such excitement that the police were required to hold back the crowds and was ultimately bought by Queen Victoria. In a class photograph from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1905, the men are completely outnumbered; there was clearly a high demand for an art institution that offered all students education on equal terms. To view the story of women in art as one long struggle in the shadows overlooks the extraordinary professional successes of these remarkable artists.

 

 

There seems to be a tendency in exhibitions which feature female artists  to over-emphasise the challenges they faced as women. While the nineteenth century was certainly not the best time for women to be alive, it also saw the emergence of the Suffrage movement, the foundation of several women’s colleges and the opportunity for women to divorce their husbands under the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1957. The Tate Britain’s 2023 exhibition on the Rossettis cited Coventry Patmore’s poem ‘The Angel in the House’ as an example of contemporary attitudes towards women, but this extreme idealisation of female domesticity does not speak for the gender roles of an entire era any more than Andrew Tate can be cited as an accurate representation of attitudes towards gender roles in the twenty-first century. Elizabeth Siddal may be known today as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s mistress and the model for Millais’ Ophelia, but during her lifetime  even influential art critic John Ruskin, with his fastidious aesthetic standards and dubious attitudes towards women, celebrated her art as the work of a genius. However, what was marketed as an exhibition on the Rossetti family turned out to be yet another retelling of the story of Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a tortured genius, while Siddal was treated as merely a tragic chapter in her husband’s life with only a few of her artworks exhibited.

 

 

The news that three out of the four artists on the shortlist for the Turner Prize suggests that the contemporary art world is at least to some extent managing to escape from the shadow of gender inequality that has for too long dominated the sphere of art. Jasleen Kaur’s red Ford Escort, draped in an oversized doily, captures the aspirations of her father upon his move to the UK, while Claudette Johnson (whose works I was introduced to through the portrait of Stuart Hall that hangs in the Merton College dining hall) uses her strikingly drawn portraits to confront the marginalisation of Black people in Western history and to reject the pedestal on which art historians have placed certain white artists despite their troubling representations of race. Their works, while equally interesting, are vastly different in terms of style and method. To group them together in the same exhibition merely because they are both women would be completely reductive of their artistic achievements. However, this is a recurring theme throughout the history of art criticism. In the Tate’s Now You See Us exhibition, there were very few areas of similarity between many of the artworks, even when the artists themselves were biologically related; Vanessa Bell’s boldly coloured post-Impressionist painting Still Life on Corner of a Mantlepiece (1914) is vastly different from the softly-lit Pre-Raphaelite photographs of her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron. In exploring a subject as vast as the history of female artists, the exhibition did not have enough time or space to go into detail about the unique interests and style of these artists or to examine the development of their careers. The Tate’s exhibition on Sargent and Fashion overlapped with the Now You See Us exhibition this summer and I could not help but wonder why John Singer Sargent got his own exhibition when Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman, Julia Margaret Cameron and their peers were only represented by one or two of their artworks. In forcing these artists to become representatives of their gender, the exhibition often placed a greater emphasis on the social history behind the paintings at the expense of any discussion of the artists’ individual ideas or technical skill. This is not an isolated incident and nor is it exclusively one that affects visual artists; English students will be familiar with the anthologies of Renaissance Women Poets or Women Romantic Poets that throw together writers with vastly different interests merely because they happen to be the same gender and were alive at roughly the same time.

 

 

While the future seems bright for gender equality in the sphere of arts, the achievements of the women of the past are still neglected by contemporary curators and art historians. If they are to receive true equality with their male peers, it is time to consider them as more than a brief chapter in a wider history of gender roles. These women deserve their own exhibitions, or an exhibition which places them alongside artists who have more in common with them than their gender.  ∎

 

 

Words by Rowena Sears. Image Courtesy of The Royal Collection Trust.