Uncovering Women Artists in the Collection of Early Modern European Art

When I stepped into my new role, my first objective was to understand the history and composition of the Museum’s early modern European art collection in order to develop strategies for bringing it into the future. During those first few months, I spent hours walking through the galleries, mining storage, and poring over our museum database to review the over 1,600 paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings that fall under the umbrella of early modern European art.¹ Guiding my process were three basic questions endemic to curatorial work: what do we have, what are we missing, and how can we fill the gaps?

In the course of my collection assessment, I counted no more than 11 works attributed to a woman artist: five miniatures, two full-scale portraits, two still lifes, one flower painting and one botanical drawing. To be sure, there were fewer women working as professional artists during the periods in question. As the art historian Linda Nochlin put it in her watershed 1971 essay, provocatively titled Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?: “The fault lies […] not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education […].”²

Before the 19th century (and well into it), institutional and social barriers overwhelmingly restricted women’s ability to train in the fine arts of painting, sculpture and drawing. Those who did manage to forge a career in these fields were largely white women of means who were born into artistic or aristocratic families. Even when accepted to the official Academies, women were barred from studying the nude body, which was a core requirement for specializing in history painting, the most highly regarded genre. As a result, many women turned to still life, flower painting, miniatures, illustration and portraits – all of which are represented by the 11 works in question.

In the painting Glass Tazza with Peaches, Jasmine Flowers and Quinces – on display in the Michal and Renata Hornstein Pavilion for Peace until August 2023 – Galizia imbues everyday objects with the drama and pathos of a narrative scene. Through a keen sense of volume and light, she harmonizes hefty fruit with nearly-floating jasmine flowers and the fragility of a delicate glass vessel. Hair-thin highlights articulate the contours of the jagged, curling leaves and a cut quince, masterfully observed, appears to brown before our eyes.

Her blended brushstrokes and skillfully calibrated palette convey the fruit’s fuzzy flesh, soft and ripe, and the cold smooth metal of the gleaming beaker. Though it is unlikely she knew the work of Galizia, mostly ignored until the 20th century, the two paintings seen together spark a dialogue across time.

Together, these 11 works offer a kind of microcosm of the issues at stake in collecting and displaying the work of historical women artists today. They represent genres and subject matter that were long undervalued and can therefore seem out of place in traditional histories of art. For instance, some might say that a botanical drawing belongs in a science museum rather than a museum of fine arts; or that miniature portraits, because they are portable and often attached to boxes or jewellery, should be classified as decorative objects rather than paintings. Yet these presumptions operate around an exclusive definition of fine art that was cultivated centuries ago by men seeking to make sense of and valorize their own accomplishments. Women were never part of that equation. Their absence was not seen as a gap.

So then, how to fill a gap whose size and shape is still being defined? In my view, we must not only highlight exceptional women who were able to rise in the ranks and rival their male counterparts, but must also question the conditions of the rivalry itself, and then set new terms. To build towards these goals, the Museum is currently preparing an innovative presentation of the collection introduced in this article. It is in this way that conversations about gaps and strengths can help us navigate larger issues about whose history is represented, whose is obscured, and how we can even the scales.