Marietta Robusti, Tintoretto's Daughter

Marietta Robusti, la Tintoretta (death of her father, 31 May 1594)

Marietta Robusti was the daughter of a famous father, the Venetian painter Jacopi Robusti, more commonly known by his nickname, Tintoretto ("little dyer," from the Italian tintore--his father had been a dyer by trade).

A "self-portrait" long attributed 
to Marietta Robusti,
Uffizi Gallery

For all that Marietta Robusti was the daughter of a famous father, few details of her life are certain, not even the year of her birth. 

The earliest reference to her is found in Raffaelo Borghini's Il Riposo, published in 1584. The Florentine writer and art critic knew Tintoretto and his family, and in his discussion of art, artists, and art collectors, he includes a brief paragraph about the painter's daughter, Marietta, claiming that she is "known to all" as la Tintoretta. 

Borghini also indicates that, at the time of his writing, Robusti is some twenty-eight years old, which would make her year of birth about 1556.

The second early source for the life of Marietta Robusti is a brief chapter (just two pages) in Carlo Ridolfi's Le Maraviglie dell'arte: overo le vite de gl'illustri pittori veneti, e dello stato, published in 1648. 

Though he was writing decades after the death of both Tintoretto and his daughter, Ridolfi knew members of the Robusti family, from whom he obviously gained information about both Tintoretto and Marietta. According to Ridolfi's account, "the daughter of the famous Tintoretto" was thirty years old at the time of her death, in 1590, which suggests that her year of birth was 1560. 

But there seems little to support Ridolfi's claim. In his recent study of Tintoretto, published in 2018 to commemorate the five-hundredth anniversary of the Venetian painter's birth, scholar and curator Robert Echols claims that Marietta Robusti was born about the year 1554. 

And despite their references to Marietta Robusti, these works are really about her father, not Robusti herself. She rates a few small paragraphs or a couple of pages, no more. The most extended study of Marietta Robusti that I have found--and the only one dedicated to Robusti herself, rather than to her father--is Alicia Savage's 2018 M.A. thesis, "Marietta Robusti, la Tintoretta: A Critical Discussion of a Venetian pittrice" (available here); Savage indicates that Robusti was born in the early 1550s, probably in 1553 or 1554. 

Such discrepancies may not seem all that important, but they do show how little is known about Robusti. Her parentage is not entirely clear either--she was Tintoretto's eldest child, but her mother is unknown. While Tintoretto married a woman named Faustina de Episcopi about 1559, and while the couple had seven children, Marietta Robusti was not Faustina's child. 

Indeed, the circumstances of Robusti's birth may explain one of the more unusual aspects of her life, noted by Ridolfi--"Being small of stature she dressed like a boy. Her father took her with him wherever he went and everyone thought she was a lad" (translated by Savage). In Echols's view, the circumstance of Robusti's birth "probably helps explain" not only the cross-dressing but the fact that her father "trained her as an artist."

Description of "Marietta la Tintoretta,"
Il riposo di Raffaello Borghini (1584)

But Marietta Robusti's training at her father's hand was not unique, and the circumstances of her birth may have had nothing to do with her place in his workshop, for she shared that experience with most of the women painters I have written about in this blog. 

Female painters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regularly began their careers under their father's tutelage, working with and alongside members of the family--there were few other options for a girl who might have dreamed of being an artist. 

Like at least two of her brothers, Robusti was taught how to draw and paint, especially portraits in the manner of Tintoretto himself; Ridolfi compares her "brilliant mind" to her father's, claiming that she "also painted other works of her own invention" (translated by Savage). 

Aside from work she completed in the family bottega, she is also likely to have have assisted her father in some of his public commissions, for example in the program of decoration at the Robusti family's parish church, the Madonna del Orto. (The church contains eleven paintings by Tintoretto, including a "monumental pair" that were "probably painted in situ".)

In addition to painting, Robusti was a musician. Borghini notes that she played the harpsichord, the lute, and other instruments. According to Ridolfi, her singing and playing were very pleasing to those whom she painted. In addition to her musical accomplishments, Borghini mentioned Robusti's beauty and her grace. About her art, he says that she "paints very well" and that she has "done many beautiful works"--though he cannot say more about them, because he has "no detailed knowledge of her works" (translated by Savage).

But whether he has personally seen her work or not, Borghini indicates that Robusti had earned something of a reputation as an artist: 

And she did, among others, the portrait of Jacopo Strada, antiquarian of Emperor Maximilian II, and the portrait of she herself that, as a rare thing, His Majesty keeps in his room. And [Maximilian], as also King Phillip and Archduke Ferdinand, did everything to have this excellent woman with him and sent to ask her of her father. But [Tintoretto], greatly loving her, did not want her taken from his sight.

One of the few certainties of Marietta Robusti's life is her marriage. In 1578, she married a goldsmith and jeweler known as Marco-Augusta; German-born, he was living in Venice. For Ridolfi, the groom's residence in Venice is critical; Tintoretto chose his daughter's husband "so that she may always be nearby" because he did not want to "be deprived of her.” Notably, unlike most women painters who stopped working after their marriage, Robusti continued to paint. In Borghini's words, "having married, she enjoys its virtues and she does not fail continuously to paint."

The discussion of Marietta Robusti, in 
Carlo Ridolfi's Le Maraviglie dell'arte (1648)

For all of the uncertainties about Marietta Robusti's life--the identity of her mother, the year of her birth, even the date of her death (aside from Robusti's claim, there is no documentary evidence that she died in 1590), the greatest uncertainty surrounds the body of her work. 

The title of Rebecca Ann Hughes's very recent essay says it all: "The Lost Paintings of Marietta Robusti Are a Maddening Renaissance Mystery." As Hughes writes, "A black-and-white chalk drawing of the head of a portly man was recently sold at a Christie’s auction as the only work firmly attributed to Marietta Robusti, daughter of the Venetian master Jacopo Robusti, perhaps better known as Tintoretto." (On Marietta Robusti and the Christie's auction of "Head of a Man, after the Antique," click here.) According to the description, posted by Christie's, the drawing "bears a large inscription, likely her father’s, stating that 'this head is by the hand of madonna Marietta.'" (The drawing, also known as "The Head of Vitellius," sold for €100,000.)

And that's it. The painting most commonly attributed to Robusti is the "self"-portrait, reproduced in this blog post. Although the Uffizi labels this as her work, that attribution is questioned--not only based on the provenance of the portrait but, to quote Hughes, on "the mediocrity of the painting," with its "rudimentary foreshortening" and "poor anatomy." (Another art historian has recently called the portrait a "feeble work.") 

Perhaps the most poignant comment about Robusti's "lost" oeuvre was made by Germaine Greer in The Obstacle Race, her 1979 exploration of "the fortunes of women painters and their work: "Modern scholars attribute none of the work in the Tintoretto bottega to her, although she worked there more or less full time for fifteen years."

As the search for the surviving work of early women artists continues, many paintings have been hopefully identified as long lost work by Marietta Robusti. A quick online search will turn up quite a few example of such attributions, from popular sources (like WikiArt Visual Encyclopedia), general-audience publications (like The Florentine), and museum publications (like the Museo del Prado's online catalogue), to scholarly art-history journals (like Duncan Bull's "A Double-Portrait Attributable to Marietta Robusti" in  The Burlington Magazine). The best summary of the search for works by Robusti is in Savage, "Attributions and Collection History."

While attempts "to restore Marietta's reputation" are on-going, Hughes indicates that, without more "physical evidence" of Robusti's accomplishment, the effort cannot succeed. "For the moment," she concludes, "La Tintoretta, the legendary woman artist, remains just that--a legend."

Angélique-Louise Verrier and the Paris Salon of 1802

Angélique-Louise Verrier (born 25 October 1762)

Until recently, so little was known about the painter Angélique-Louise Verrier that the few printed references to her, as "Mademoiselle Verrier," were often considered to be misspelled references to a similarly elusive French painter, Marie-Nicole Vestier.

Not that Verrier was completely unknown.  As Germaine Greer notes in The Obstacle Race, "A Mademoiselle Verrier who exhibited work in 1786 became Madame Maillard, but of her career as a painter we know nothing more."

Greer published The Obstacle Race in 1979. Now, some forty years later, a bit more is known--the most accessible source of information about Verrier is found in Neil Jeffares's Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800. 

According to Jeffares, Verrier was born on 25 October 1762 in Paris, in the parish of Saint-Eustache. She exhibited a pastel portrait in the 1785 Salon de la Jeunesse, an exhibition of student work.* (She would have been about twenty-three years old.) 

Issue of the Mercure de France containing
the reference to Verrier's work in the
Salon de la Jeunesse**

According to a description of Verrier's work published in the Mercure de France, a newspaper and cultural journal, the portrait was of a woman wearing a straw hat. The writer describes the "tone of the color" in Verrier's work as "very good" and the drawing as "sensible and correct" ("Le ton de couleur m'en a paru fort bon; le dessin en est sage & correct"). The writer offered one bit of hesitation--the portrait seemed a bit cold--but then suggested that perhaps that was the fault of the model ("peut être est la faut de la modèle") rather than of the artist. In another contemporary review of this 1785 work, its color is described as "fresh and harmonious."

Verrier submitted another work to the 1786 Salon de la Jeunesse, though the medium is not identified. It too drew critical attention. The Mercure notes that her talents progress "each year," developing in "a very interesting manner." In this 1786 reference, Verrier is identified as one of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard's students.

One other portrait by Verrier is listed by Jeffares, a pastel of Louis-Charles, the younger son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette--the portrait is dated to 1789, the same year Louis-Charles became dauphin just after his older brother's death. If the French Revolution had not intervened, he would have become Louis XVII.

At some point, Verrier married Louis Maillard--their son, Louis-Auguste-Jean-Baptiste, was baptized on 27 July 1799, when Verrier would have been in her late thirties. Louis Maillard had died by 1801--an inventory after his death, requested by his wife, was made on 16 October of that year. 

Angélique-Louise Verrier exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1802 although, aside from mentioning this, Jeffares includes no further details. A Google search also fails to turn up any more information. But the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (which has provided many incredible resources as I've been posting on this blog) makes available all of the livret of the Paris Salons. 

According to the 1802 catalog, Madame Verrier-Maillard's exhibited work was a full portrait of "Mme. ***" and her son,” who is presenting to her his "verses on peace, which have won a prize" ("à qui son fils présente des vers sur la Paix, qui ont remporté prix"). In the catalog, Verrier is still being identified as a student of "Madame Vincent," Labille-Guillard's married name. 

Angélique-Louise Verrier-Maillard died in Paris on 29 July 1805.

I haven't been able to find any reproductions of her work . . . 

*In her essay on female self-portraits in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Marie-Jo Bonnet says of the Salon de la Jeunesse that it was "réservé aux élèves, qui dure une journée et se tient en plein air le jour de la Fête-Dieu, place Dauphine à Paris." ("reserved for students and which takes place in the open air on Corpus Christi Day at the Place Dauphine, Paris").

**Digitized copies of the Mercure de France are available via Le gazetier universel: Resources numériques sur la presse ancienne, which you can access by clicking here.

Update, 10 October 2019: In comments below, reader "Silverwhistle" adds not only information about an additional work attributed to Angélique-Louise Verrier-Maillard but--if you follow the link to recommended site, Nothing Gold Remains--you will be able to see a pastel image of one of her works. The site also adds some additional biographical information about Verrier-Maillard.

If you have academic access to the journal Annales historiques de la Révolution française, Silverwhistle also provides a link. (Even if you don't have access, there's a bit more information there in the article abstract.)  

Rosalba Carriera, the "Most Famous Pastellist"

Rosalba Carriera (born 7 October 1675)

Born in Venice, Rosalba Carriera was the daughter of Andrea Carriera, a government clerk, and his wife, Alba Foresti, a lacemaker. Carriera is thought to have begun her career making lace-patterns for her mother. It may have been the decline in the lace trade that led to her change of medium: Carriera began painting miniature portraits on snuff boxes.

Rosalba Carriera, self-portrait

The self-taught Carriera was also an innovator, using ivory as the ground for her miniatures. In 1705, at the age of twenty-five, she earned recognition from (and a special membership in) the Accademia di San Luca in Rome.

She had also begun experimenting with using pastels for portraits, her earliest pastel dated to 1700. The medium had been used for informal studies or preparatory sketches, but Carriera is credited with the use of pastel for "serious portraiture." While many women artists contribute to the development of the medium of pastel, Germaine Greer notes, in The Obstacle Race, that "the exploration of the possibilities of pastel portraiture was advanced most" by Carrera's work. 

After 1708, art historian Neil Jeffares writes, Carriera "devoted herself particularly to pastel." Of the 440 surviving works now credited to  her, "three-quarters are in pastel."

Carriera's reputation as an artist grew as notable visitors to Venice sought her out for their portraits, including Maximilian of Bavaria, in 1704; Christian Ludwig of Mecklenburg, in 1706; Frederick IV of Denmark, in 1708-09; and the prince elector of Saxony, later Augustus III of Poland in 1713, when the young man was making a grand tour. In addition to a portrait of himself (in oil), he commissioned a series of allegorical works: The Four Seasons, The Four Elements, and The Four Continents. (He would later acquire 150 of her pastels and filled a room in his Dresden palace with her work.)

Spring, one of The Four Seasons,
National Gallery of Ireland

Also visiting her studio was a notable collector, the French banker Pierre Crozat. In 1720, at his suggestion, Carriera traveled to Paris, where she spent "a triumphant year," receiving commissions for some fifty portraits, including one of Louis XV. She was  elected to the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in that year, as well as to the Accademia Clementina in Bologna.

  

After leaving Paris, Carriera returned to Venice, but in 1723 she left for Modena, where she spent five months at the Este court. Back in Venice, one of her great patrons was the British consul, Joseph Smith--later, the work he commissioned from Carriera was acquired by King George III.

In 1730, Carriera again left Venice, this time for the court of Vienna, where she spent six months and fulfilled a number of commissions for Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI, whose empress, Elisabeth Christine, became her pupil. But by 1737, her output began slowing--her sister Giovanna, who had traveled and worked with her, died, and her own eyesight began to fail. 

By 1745, Rosalba Carriera was blind. She lived in Venice, in Dosoduro, where she died in 1757, at the age of eighty-four. 

In describing Carriera's style, Jeffares notes her "distinctive vaporous style" and her "delicate and light palette." She was, above all, a "consummate artist."

Muse,
The Getty Museum

Jeffares's comprehensive essay on Carriera, in the Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, is readily accessible online (click here).

There is an excellent entry by Margherita Giacometti in the Dictionary of Women Artists. 

A catalogue raisonné of her work was published in 2007, in Italian, with black-and-white illustrations--used copies are occasionally available. But for once I might suggest you look at the Wikipedia entry for Carriera, which has a wonderful, expansive gallery of her work. You can search online and see her work in various collections--the National Gallery (London) the Victoria and Albert, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Getty, and the Uffizi, for example. 

Finding Michaelina Wautier

Michaelina Wautier (c. 1617-1689)

One year from today, on 1 June 2018, the Rubens House museum (Antwerp) will open the first survey exhibition of a "lost" Baroque painter, Michaelina Wautier. 

Self-Portrait,
Michaelina Wautier, 1649

Of course Wautier hasn't been entirely lost, though recognition of the painter has been very long in coming.

In her comprehensive survey of "the fortunes of women painters and their work," first published in 1979, Germaine Greer includes Wautier even while noting that only four works by Wautier were known to exist, one surviving only in an engraving (The Obstacle Race).

The situation today is somewhat improved. Almost nothing is known about Michaelina Wautier's life, aside from her dates of birth and death. She was probably born in Mons, capital city of Hainault, in 1617, lived and worked in Brussels, had an elder brother who was also a painter, and died in Brussels in 1689. Unique for seventeenth-century women painters, Wautier painted in all contemporary genres, including portrait, history, still life, and genre painting.

Four paintings by Wautier were commission by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1647 to 1656; a 1659 inventory of his collection includes one work with a mythological theme, The Triumph of Bacchus (1650), and three saints' portraits, St. Joachim Reading, St. Joachim with a Book, and Saint Joseph. (Today, the Triumph of Bacchus and two portraits, one of Joachim and the St. Joseph, are in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, while the portrait of Saint Joachim with a book, also in the Kunsthistorisches, survives only in an etching.)

But after her lifetime, Michaelina Wautier's name, if not her work, disappeared. As Julie Baumgardner notes, Wautier's surviving work was mostly misattributed, to her brother Christopher, for example, or to Artemisia Gentileschi.

Aside from the seventeenth-century inventory of Duke Leopold's collection, information about her work is still scarce. A cycle of five paintings representing the five senses is known from two nineteenth-century sales: "The five individual works on canvas date from 1650 and all (or most) of them are believed to be signed and dated. They share the same dimensions (68 x 58 cm or 70 x 61 cm) and were twice auctioned as a series in Valenciennes (France) in the nineteenth century. The series belonged in 1883 to the collection of a ‘M. de Malherbe’, from which they were sold in 1898 to a certain Jean-Baptiste Foucart." In 1899 this cycle of paintings was mentioned in a magazine for visual art (Zeithschrift für Bildende Kunst), but the paintings have since disappeared.

In 1905, Walter Shaw Sparrow includes a self-portrait by Wautier in his three-volume Women Painters of the World, but he identifies it as a "portrait (executed by herself) of Artemisia Gentileschi, who lived for a time in England and worked for Charles the First." (Today this 1649 self-portrait is held in a private collection.)

By the time that Greer included a paragraph about Wautier in her history of women artists--and the obstacles they faced in their pursuit of their art--the situation had not much changed. Greer included a small black-and-white reproduction of Wautier's 1646 Portrait of a Man and referred to an engraving of her painting of Don Andrea Cantelmo, from 1643. She also mentions the inventory of Duke Leopold, but noted that it included only "two religious half figures."

The Triumph of Bacchus,
Michaelina Wautier, 1650

Even today, even on the eve of the Wautier exhibition, the exact number of her surviving works isn't clear. Estimates vary from 26 to 29 to 30. But things are looking up for this "long-lost" artist. 

Her Portrait of Martino Martini (1654) was recently sold at auction for £318,000. Baumgardner reports having seen Wautier's Portrait of a Young Man with a Pipe (1656) at a booth at the European Fine Art Fair, where the gallery owner Sander Bijl "is selling (or sold, and quite hush about either way) the 'Smoking Youth.'"

The 2018 exhibition will not only display Wautier's work but will provide the occasion for a catalogue raisonné, prepared by Katlijne Van der Stighelen of the University of Leuven, who is also curating the Rubens House exhibition.

In view of the coming exhibition, there is currently a worldwide search for six of Wautier's "lost" paintings: the five paintings depicting the five senses, and a floral scene, Garland with Butterfly, last displayed in 1960. 

According to the notice posted by CODART, the international group of curators of Dutch and Flemish Art, "In 1985, according to the catalogue of floral still lifes by Hairs, the painting was part of the collection of Parisian gallery owner Benito Pardo. After 1985, however, the panel disappeared from view."

It will be interesting to follow the story of of the search for Wautier's works, in preparation for the 2018 exhibit.

A Swag of Flowers,
Michaelina Wautier, 1652

Update: Here's a link to the Rubens House Museum exhibit, "Michaelina, Baroque's Leading Lady"--luckily, there's a video posted online that "takes you through" the exhibit, and with any luck, it will remain online after the exhibit has ended. (The Rubens House Museum website no longer hosts the information about the exhibit, but it is all preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, to which I’ve linked you here.)

Update, 25 June 2018: A newly discovered painting by Michaelina Wautier! For the story, click here.

Update, 2 December 2022: The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, is currently hosting the first exhibition of Michaelina Wautier's work in the U.S., "Michaelina Wautier and The Five Senses: Innovations in 17th-Century Flemish Painting." The year-long show opened in November 2022. For Milton Esterow's excellent New York Times review, "For Centuries, Michaelina Wautier's Art Was Forgotten, or Credited to Men. No More," click here. 

And, clearly, the search for Wautier's five paintings of the senses has been successful . . . I missed this announcement, from 2021: "Michaelina Wautier's Five Senses Reunited in Boston"!

Update, 28 September 2025: More news about the "finding" of Michaelina Wautier in today's The Guardian, an article by European Culture Editor Philip Oltermann. The headline makes a bold claim: "Michaelina Wautier: The Female Flemish Artist Now Seen as an Old Master." I first posted about Wautier in 2017--what a difference these last eight years have made for the recognition of Wautier.

The piece provides a neat summary of these changes, quoting Katlijne Van der Stighelen, who is the art historian responsible for much of this change in Wautier's reputation. Von der Stighelen provides an excellent survey of what is known about Wautier's life, training, and work. The occasion of Oltermann's article is a new exhibition of the artist's work, opening 30 September 2025 at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which "for the first time gathers into one show all known works by an artist who is belatedly coming to be recognised as one of the old masters of her age." Included among the 35 works to be exhibited are her Five Senses.

I'll link you here to the museum itself--if you can't see the show, there are great resources to explore at the website. The show runs until 22 February 2026. 

Elizabeth Thompson and Not Making It into the Royal Academy

Elizabeth Thompson, Lady Butler (3 November 1846 -2 October 1933)

My son recently sent me a link to the first episode of Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, Revisionist History. Titled "The Lady Vanishes," this inaugural episode begins with Gladwell's visit to St. James's Palace in London, where he has arranged to see The Roll Call, a painting by the artist Elizabeth Thompson. Thompson's painting caused a sensation at the 1874 Royal Academy of London exhibition.

Thompson's 1869 self-portrait

After briefly introducing Thompson and her painting, Gladwell links the artist to what he identifies as "the strange phenomenon of 'the token'"--which he defines as "the outsider whose success serves not to alleviate discrimination but perpetuate it." 

Now I'm not at all sure of why Gladwell calls tokenism a "strange phenomenon"--tokenism certainly doesn't seem like a strange new concept to me. Rather, it seems all too unstrange and too familiar. 

And, indeed, Gladwell has found Thompson through a 1990 piece in the Women's Art Journal that, more than twenty-five years ago, identified Thompson as "a case of tokenism" (Paul Underwood's essay is titled "Elizabeth Thompson Butler: A Case of Tokenism"--in the podcast, Gladwell catches up with Underwood, an art historian, and the episode includes some of his comments.) So, tokenism is not such a "strange" new idea when it comes to Thompson.

But, before you can decide whether or not you agree with Gladwell about the "strangeness" of tokenism, he has moved from his examination of Thompson to the subject of "moral licensing." To define the concept, he cities Daniel Effron: moral self-licensing is when "past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral."

Indeed, for Gladwell himself Thompson is a token--her painting, exhibited by the Royal Academy, is his example of a "good deed," one that allows members of the Academy to continue to their behavior of denying most women artists a place in their exhibitions, Thompson's example thus allowing Gladwell the opportunity to focus on, illustrate, and explore the concept of moral licensing. (In other words, he uses her as a token.)

I do recommend listening to the podcast if you're interested in tokenism and the way that accepting a "token"--like a woman painter, for example, or a female political leader--ultimately "give[s us] permission to do something bad."

But, while the title of this podcast, "The Lady Vanishes," seems to suggest that Gladwell will make Thompson the painter reappear, I think it more or less succeeded not in restoring Thompson but in disappearing Thompson once again. She gets lost along the way to Gladwell's real interest, moral licensing. So here's a bit more about her and her career. 

Elizabeth's father, Thomas James Thompson, was born in Jamaica, the son of an Englishman and his Creole mistress; Thomas James inherited a huge fortune from his grandfather, Thomas Pepper Thompson, who owned three sugar plantations and, evidently, the slaves needed to make them profitable (see the entry in the University College London's Legacies of British Slave-Ownership database). After spending a year at Cambridge, Thomas James "dabbled" in politics and in art before marrying, as his second wife, the pianist Christiana Weller, who would become Elizabeth Thompson's mother. (For more on Elizabeth's parents, click here.)

Born in Switzerland while her parents were on a "grand tour" following Thomas James's failed bid for a parliamentary seat, Elizabeth was the first of two accomplished daughters born to the couple. Their second daughter, born the year after Elizabeth, was named Alice. Married to the journalist Alfred Meynell, Alice Meynell became a noted poet, essayist, and suffragist.

After the birth of their daughters, the couple continued their continental travels. Elizabeth developed an interest in drawing and painting, first receiving professional instruction in Italy (by 1862), then enrolling in 1866 the Female School of Art, then located in South Kensington. The London school had been established in 1842 for "young women of the middle class" so that they could "obtain an honourable and profitable employment." 

In her autobiography, Thompson would later write that she despised the kinds of "scrolls" and "patterns" she was given to copy as part of her instruction there--they represented the kinds of decorative arts that formed an "appropriate" curriculum for young women. Instead she filled the margins of her drawing paper with "angry scribblings of horses and soldiers in every variety of fury."

She took advantage of other opportunities while she was in London, for example attending a painting class in Conduit Street and exhibiting an oil painting, Horses in Sunshine, at the Women Artists' Exhibition (1867) and a water color, Bavarian Artillery Going into Action, at the Dudley Art Gallery. She also met the British art critic John Ruskin in 1868.

Thompson then rejoined her family in Italy, studying in Florence with Giuseppe Bellucci and then attending the Florentine Accademia di Belle Arti. By 1869 she had moved on to Rome, where she set up her own studio. There she completed The Magnificat, a large religious piece accepted for an international exhibition in Rome.

While returning to England with her family in 1870, Thompson traveled through Germany and France; in Paris, she saw battle paintings of Edouard Detaille and Jean Louis Ernest Meissonier. Ultimately these images helped to shape and develop her own interest in painting battle scenes.

Thompson's 1874 The Roll Call

After visiting army maneuvers with her father once the family had returned to England, Thompson began drawing the soldiers and activities she had seen.

She submitted her oil canvas, The Missing, to the Royal Academy in 1873, where it was accepted for display but "skied" (hung up high in a spot inconvenient for viewing). This painting depicted an imaginary scene following a battle during the Franco-Prussian war.

The next year a second painting, The Roll Call, a scene from the Crimean War, was also accepted for the Royal Academy exhibition, this painting becoming a sensation--ultimately acquired by Queen Victoria. Thompson and her work were widely--and wildly--celebrated

As art historian Paul Usherwood notes, one reason for Thompson's success was "her choice of the role of honorary male"--she was ambitious, and her choice of subject matter, unusual for a woman, "was governed by a desire to win the respect of those whose opinion counted at the Academy." (It was also a depiction of men that, Usherwood adds, was "flattering to the male egos that ruled the Academy.")

Calculated or not, Thompson devoted herself to painting battle scenes. The Twenty-eighth Regiment at Quatre Bras, completed the next year, also received critical praise and popular celebration if not the prominent display position that The Roll Call had received.

Still, this particular painting, depicting an encounter between British and French soldiers two days before the battle of Waterloo, received Ruskin's praise. In his 1875 Academy Notes he wrote that he had "always said no woman could paint." "But," he added,

it is amazon's work this; no doubt of it, and the first fine Pre-Raphaelite picture of battle we have had; -- profoundly interesting, and showing all manner of illustrative and realistic faculty. Of course, all that need be said of it, on this side, must have been said twenty times over in the journals; and it remains only for me to make my tardy genuflexion, on the trampled corn, before this Pallas of Pall Mall.

Further achievements followed quickly: a figure from her Tenth Bengal Lancers at Tent-Pegging was reproduced as a special supplement to the London Graphic, a weekly illustrated magazine, in 1876; in the same year, she painted The Return from Balaklava, and in 1877, The Return from Inkerman, for which was paid fifteen thousand dollars by the Fine Art Society, a London gallery that had the publication rights for The Roll Call. Her work was regularly exhibited at the Royal Academy.

But, while Thompson's accomplishments were manifest, and while her paintings continued to be the popular among those displayed in Academy exhibitions, she was not elected to membership in the British Royal Academy although she was nominated three times between 1879 and 1881--she would have been the first woman to become a fellow of the Academy. She came within two votes of election, and in order to avoid such a calamity, the institution deemed that since its rules said only "men of fair moral character" were eligible for membership, she was disqualified by her sex.*

In the mean time, in 1877 Thompson had married Major William Butler. She combined her career with marriage, motherhood, and extensive travel with her husband--he was posted in various places throughout England as well as in Egypt, the Sudan, and South Africa. In addition to continuing to paint and exhibit, she published three books: Letters from the Holy Land (1903), From Sketchbook and Diary (1909), and her autobiography (1923). 

Her 1924 submission to the Royal Academy was rejected--but it was rejected not so much because of Thompson's sex as because of changing tastes and artistic styles. After the Great War, her depictions of battle scenes had become anachronistic. While there is no doubt that her marriage (and giving birth to and raising six children) and travel had removed Thompson from the London art scene and affected the focus and attention she could pay to her own work, marriage and family had not ended her artistic career. 

There is a great deal of available information about Elizabeth Thompson and her work--unlike so many of the women artists I have written about on this blog, she did not, despite Malcolm Gladwell's title, "vanish." If she is less visible than we might expect, given both her critical and popular reputation, it may well be, as Germaine Greer suggests, "due to the downfall of her subject matter" and not because of Thompson's sex.

When Greer wrote about Thompson in her 1979 The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work, she claimed that no public galleries in England had her work exhibited and accessible for viewing. Now it appears that at least some of Thompson's work is publicly accessible--if not The Roll Call, which Gladwell arranges to see at St. James's in a private viewing, then at a number of museums and galleries, including the Tate (London), the City of Manchester Art Gallery, the Leeds Art Gallery, the Ferens Art Gallery (one of nine public museum venues in Hull), and the public gallery at the Defence Academy of the UK (which has several of Thompson's paintings). The Art UK website--"Welcome to the Nation's Art"--lists 17 paintings currently on view and illustrates their locations. (Paintings by Thompson are also exhibited publicly in Scotland, Ireland, and Australia.)

There is an excellent account of Thompson's life, training, and work in Jo Devereaux's The Making of Women Artists in Victorian England: The Education and Careers of Six Professionals. For online reading, I recommend Krzysztof Z. Cieszkowski's biographical essay of Thompson at The British Empire.

Given my constant bitching about the lack of women included in the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica, it should not surprise you that the current online edition does not include an entry on Elizabeth Thompson Butler, though older print editions of a supplemental dictionary of "arts, sciences, and general literature" contain at least a note (see the seven-line entry here, for example, from an 1893 edition).

Johann Zoffany's painting of the "first academicians" of the
Royal Academy, sort of including Kauffman and Moser--
they are represented by portraits (above right)
rather than in the room with the men (and a nude model)

*The Royal Academy of Arts, established in 1768, included two women artists among its "founders," Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) and Mary Moser (1744-1819), though neither woman was considered a "full" member, eligible for holding an office or lectureship and able to participate in so-called life-drawing classes--that is, figure drawing using live (unclothed) models. After the deaths of Kaufman and Moser, women were discouraged from attending the Royal Academy Schools. In 1922, Annie Louisa Swynnerton was accepted as an associate member. The first woman to become a member of the Royal Academy was Laura Knight, elected in 1936.

Barbara Longhi, Italian Renaissance Painter

Barbara Longhi (died 23 December 1638)

Although she lived--and presumably painted--until she was eighty-six years old, only fifteen surviving paintings are definitely attributed to Barbara Longhi.

Barbara Longhi,
St. Catherine of Alexandria,
presumed to be a self-portrait

Born in Ravenna in 1552, Barbara Longhi was trained by her father, the painter Luca Longhi. Very little is known about her life, though she is one of the few women mentioned, however briefly, in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, from Cimabue to Our Times (Le Vite de' più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori da Cimabue insino a' tempi nostri). 

Noting that he had met Luca Longhi while he was in Ravenna--and concluding, somewhat disparagingly, that Luca would have "become a very rare painter" if only he had "gone forth from Ravenna," where he "has always lived and still lives with his family"--Vasari adds, "a daughter of his, still but a little girl, called Barbara, draws very well, and has begun to do some work in colour with no little grace and excellence of manner."

Madonna and Child,
c. 1580-85,
Indianapolis Museum of Art

In addition to painting, Barbara Longhi seems to have worked diligently in her father's studio at least until his death in 1580--she was used as a model in her father's works, she assisted him in the workshop, she copied many of his paintings, and she would also have learned how to market her work to patrons. 

Vasari's observation that Luca Longhi's achievements may have been affected by his provincial location are echoed in Germaine Greer's assessment of his daughter's work. "Barbara's output was considerable," she notes, "all small pictures, remarkable for their purity of line and soft brilliance of colour." 

But the relationship of her work to her father's is "horribly muddled," and, in Greer's words, she is a "backward member of a provincial school." Her "picture-making" is "extremely conservative," though demonstrating "a simplicity and intensity of feeling quite beyond her mannerist father and her dilettante brother."

Although the poet and playwright Muzio Manfredi, himself born in Ravenna, would indicate in a 1575 lecture that Barbara Longhi was renowned for her portraits, most of the paintings attributed to her today are small depictions of the Madonna and child.

Madonna and Child with St. Joseph and St. Anne

Update, 30 July 2021: Liana de Girolami Cheney, Emerita Professor of Art History, University of Massachusetts, Lowell (among other academic titles) writes that she is completing a book on Barbara Longhi, to be published in fall 2021. She also says, "I wrote a pioneer article in English of this female painter": Liana De Girolami Cheney, “Barbara Longhi of Ravenna,” Woman’s Art Journal (Spring 1988), 16-21." 

I will add that Professor Cheney has published widely--here's a link to her Amazon author page. If you are reading this blog, you may be particularly interested in her book on the work of the painter Lavinia Fontana.

I have taken the opportunity offered by adding this note to update my original post, adding a link to an English translation of Vasari and to Vasari's assessment of Barbara Longhi. 

Update, 23 December 2022: Professor Cheney's Barbara Longhi is scheduled for publication in June 2023 (click here):

This is the first book to focus solely on Barbara Longhi (1552-1638) as an artist. The book presents an overview of the life and work of the artist, bringing together the information that is known about Longhi supplemented with recent findings from the author's own research, such as new discoveries about Longhi's domestic situation. It explores the world of painters from a region of Italy (Ravenna) not usually considered by art historians, as being outside the 'golden triangle' of Rome-Florence-Venice. In contrast to previous publications on the artist, which have taken an archival and connoisseurship approach, the focus in this book is on iconography and interpretation. The author examines the significance of Longhi's paintings in relation to her perspective as a female painter during the Counter-Reformation.

Louise Moillon and Still-Life Painting

Louise Moillon (died 21 December 1696)

Born in Paris in 1609, Louise Moillon was the daughter of the artist Nicolas Moillon (1555-1619), only one of whose paintings survives, a portrait. Nicolas Moillon is thought to have been a landscape painter as well as a portraitist because of three surviving engravings of landscapes. The family was Protestant, protected by the 1598 Edict of Nantes, thus enjoying spiritual, economic, and artistic security. Nicolas Moillon was a member of the Academy of Saint-Luc, functioned as a dealer at his own shop, the Franc Galois, and, later, owned several stalls in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés market. 

The Fruit and Vegetable Monger,
1630, Louvre Museum

Moillon may also have begun the process of training his children as artists--Louise's brother Isaac (1614-73) became a portrait painter at the French court--although there are also doubts about the extent of her father's influence, since he died when Louise was just ten years old. 

After Nicolas Moillon's death in 1619, Louise's mother, Marie Gilbert, married another artist and dealer, François Garnier, who undertook Louise's artistic training. The art historian Raphael Fitzgerald suggests that she may also have been "a pupil of Jacques Linard (1597–1645), another noted Saint-Germain still-life artist with whom Louise shared close stylistic similarities and with whom she collaborated on a 1641 painting."

In 1629, Louise Moillon's first work, a still-life painting of a bowl of peaches--was exhibited in Grenoble. It sold quickly. An inventory from 1630, on the occasion of Marie Gilbert's death, shows the extent of Louise's body of work--there were already thirteen paintings by Louise Moillon included among her mother's collection.

Impressed by accounts of the sensation caused by Louise Moillon's peach still-life, Louis XIII commissioned works from the young artist; by 1639, King Charles of England had five of her works in his collection. The French Minister of Finance, Claude de Bullion, owned twelve of her paintings, one produced for him by commission.

Still Life with Cherries, Strawberries, and
Gooseberries, 1630,
Norton Simon Museum

In 1640, Louise Moillon married a wealthy timber merchant. And like so many women, her work more or less stopped. Only one painting, from 1641, dates from the period of her marriage. After the death of her husband in 1648, Moillon did not resume her artistic career. 

Only in the mid-1670s did she begin to paint again; works from the decade 1674 to 1684 survive. Today about forty paintings are attributed to Louise Moillon, most of them belonging to the decade between 1630 and 1640.

Louise Moillon's life and renewed career fell victim to politics and religion, however, when the Edict of Nantes was revoked by Louis XIV in 1685. At age seventy-five, Moillon fled to England with two daughters, only to discover that her son had been imprisoned in the Bastille.

Eventually Moillon returned to Paris--Fitzgerald suggests she may have returned in order to avoid the confiscation of her artworks. She was compelled to convert to Catholicism, and received last rites on her deathbed in 1696.

(The Virtual Museum of Protestantism website entry on Louise Moillon details more of the family's experiences after the Revocation and indicates that she "remained faithful to the Reformed faith" until her death.)

Still Life with a Basket of Fruit and a
Bunch of Asparagus, 1630,
Art Institute of Chicago

Sofonisba Anguissola, "the First Great Woman Artist of the Renaissance"

Sofonisba Anguissola (died 16 November 1625)

Born in Cremona, Italy, probably about 1532, Sofonisba Anguissola was the eldest of seven children--six of them daughters--born to Amilcare Anguissola and his wife, Bianca Ponzone, both of whom were members of noble families.

Sofonisba Anguissola, self-portrait,
1552

Amilcare made sure that his daughters received an excellent humanist education, but he also recognized his daughters' creative gifts. Unusual for the period, when women artists followed their fathers or brothers into the studio, Sofonisba and her sister Elena were apprenticed to a local painter, Bernardino Campi, in 1546. As Germaine Greer writes, when he sent his daughters to study painting, Amilcare Anguissola "was setting an extraordinary precedent." 

While Sofonisba may have been recognized as a "prodigy," Greer notes that her father may also have had other motives in providing his daughter with training as a painter: he had six daughters for whom he would have to provide dowries. His son did not study painting, but his daughters "were encouraged to develop as many accomplishments as they could," including painting. The arrangement with Campi was not a usual apprenticeship, since he had no other students and the two Anguissola "apprentices" were "treated as paying guests in the household." 

In any case, as Greer concludes, the investment in Sofonisba Anguissola "was a wise one." She was not only able to earn a good living, but she also was able to teach her younger sisters, or at least three of them, to paint.* And after three years with Campi, Sofonisba continued her training with another Cremonese, Bernardino Galli. 

In 1552, Sofonisba traveled to Rome, where she was introduced to Michelangelo. Encouraged by Michelangelo, she was also informally advised by him--he sent her sketches to draw and offered his critiques and advice.

As a woman, Anguissola could not study anatomy or draw from life; instead, she focused on portraits which, as Greer clarifies, were deemed appropriate for women because "portrait painting did not imply any unbecoming breadth of experience." By 1558, she had gained enough of a reputation that she was in Milan to paint the duke of Alba--he, in turn, recommended her to Philip II of Spain. In 1559, Anguissola traveled to Madrid. She spent nearly twenty years as court painter and lady-in-waiting.

Anguissola's portrait of
Elisabeth of Valois, queen of Spain

There she also taught the Spanish king's third wife, Elisabeth of Valois, who was an amateur painter. Among the portraits Anguissola painted was one of the king's sister and regent, Joanna of Castile, whom we have already met. And she would also tutor Elisabeth of Valois' daughter, Isabel Clara Eugenia, who would be yet another Habsburg women to serve her family as regent.

After the death of Elisabeth of Valois, Philip II married for a fourth time, and Anguissola also painted a portrait of the new queen, Anne of Austria. (The 1734 fire in the royal palace destroyed most of Anguissola's paintings from her period in Madrid as a court painter.)

About 1573 (dates vary), Philip II provided Anguissola with both a dowry and a husband, marrying her to a Sicilian nobleman, Fabrizio de Moncada. (Although she was in her fifties, as an unmarried woman, Anguissola would have been a ward of the king, and marrying would have allowed her to "escape" that "filial role," as Greer indicates, though she would then have been a ward of her husband.)

Sources disagree about whether she relocated to Sicily or whether she remained in Madrid. In any case, after Moncada's death in 1579, she remarried in 1580, this time not to a husband of someone else's choice, but to a man she chose for herself, Orazio Lomellino, a Genoese nobleman. From 1584 until about 1616 or 1620, she lived in Genoa.

Anguissola's portrait of
Joanna of Castile

By 1624 the couple was in Palermo, where, on 12 July, Anguissola was visited by the Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck. He sketched a portrait of her (he thought she was ninety-six years old at the time [she was likely about ninety-two]), and believed that she was nearly blind (she suffered from cataracts). 

The entry on Sofonisba Anguissola in the National Museum of Women in the Arts Database notes that she is "arguably the first known woman artist to achieve international fame." (On this article, see update, below.)

Ilya Sandra Perlingieri's beautiful Sofonisba Anguissola: The First Great Woman Artist of the Renaissance is out of print, but you can still find used copies. I have used Germaine Greer's The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work here (and elsewhere, when talking about women artists). 

*Elena Anguissola ended her painting career, begun with her sister when the two apprenticed with Campi, when she became a nun. In addition to Sofonisba and Elena, Lucia, Europa, and Anna Maria also became painters--only Minerva did not. Europa and Anna Maria married and gave up painting. Lucia, born in 1536 or 1538, died before 1568. An early biographer thought that, had she lived, Lucia Anguissola would have become a better artist than Sofonisba.

Update (November 2019): Sadly, as of November 2019, a profile of Sofonisba Anguissola is no longer to be found in the NMWA database. I have nonetheless left in the quotation because I thought it an important assessment of Anguissola's reputation. An archived version of the NMWA profile is--at least temporarily--available here.)

Update, 16 December 2019: The Prado Museum (Madrid) is now hosting a special exhibition, "A Tale of Two Women Painters: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana" (through 2 February 2020). According to the museum's website, the exhibition has put together "a total of 65 works," including some fifty-six paintings, the art coming from "more than" a score of European and American connections: "the Museo del Prado is presenting a survey of the careers of these two painters, who achieved fame and renown among their contemporaries but whose artistic personalities became obscured over time."

In her splendid review of the exhibition for the New York Times, Deborah Solomon praises the show and the art, but adds, "The Prado show, which was curated by Leticia Ruiz Gómez, takes the form of a double feature, pairing two artists who flourished in the same era, in the same area of northern Italy, but who probably never met. Their works are made to mingle in the galleries in a pas-de-deux. But is this approach appropriate? It is hard to imagine that male artists would have to share the galleries quite this way, and you wonder if the curators at the Prado think that women need to team up to better confront the patriarchy."

Indeed.

Angelica Kauffman, Prodigy and Painter

Angelica Kauffman (born 30 October 1741)

If yesterday's "prodigy," Anna Maria Mozart (1751-1829), was denied a career that would allow her to develop her manifest gifts, her near-contemporary, Angelica Kauffman, by contrast, was able to have a fulfilling and successful career.

Angelica Kauffman, self-portrait

Interestingly, both young women were recognized for their prodigious talents by their fathers, trained by their fathers, and toured with their fathers. 

Also of interest—while Angelica Kauffman is now known as a painter, she was a noted performer as well, and at one point, like Maria Anna Mozart, she was described as a singer comparable to the best Roman "virtuosi."

Born in Switzerland, Kauffmann accompanied her father, the painter Joseph Johann Kauffmann, as he traveled throughout Switzerland, Austria, and Italy, working as his assistant. From her mother, Cleophea Lutz, she learned languages, adding Italian, French, and English to her native German.

Her travels with her father, particularly in Milan, Bologna, Florence, Venice, and Rome, exposed her to great art and, in turn, introduced her to many who could appreciate her accomplishments. She excelled not only in portraits but, more unusual for a woman, history paintings (a prestigious and lucrative genre). In 1765, she was elected to Rome’s Accademia di San Luca.

In 1766, Kauffman moved to London at the encouragement of Lady Bridget Wentworth Murray, wife of the British ambassador to the Ottomon Empire. In London, Kauffman gained great popularity. She became a founding member of the Royal Academy, where she would exhibit regularly for eighteen years.

Shortly after arriving in London, she married a man variously described as an imposter or a bigamist, a "bogus" count named "von Horn." She was also the subject of scandal and rumor for her relationship to the aging painter Sir Joshua Reynolds. As Germaine Greer notes, the "price Angelica Kaufmann paid for being the rage was a very high one." She became a "slave to the fashion that she herself had created," her "unenviable economic situation" demanding that she paint quickly and that she did not "fail to please."

The parting of Hector and Andromache

Although she lived separately from her unfortunate "husband" (to whom she may not have been actually married, since he seems already to have had a wife), Kauffman married a painter, Antonio Zucchi, and returned to Rome. There she continued to paint, and she also continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy. She continued, as well, to receive numerous commissions.

Kauffman died in Rome on 5 November 1807. Her catalogue raisonné (that is, the comprehensive list of all her paintings, drawings, etchings, and reproductions [engravings] of her work) includes 800 works and some 1000 engravings.

Penelope with the bow of Odysseus

There are several good biographies, but I like Angelica Goodden's Miss Angel: The Art and World of Angelica Kauffman.

You could hardly hope for more than the material available at the Angelica Kauffman Research Project: detailed biography, catalogue, bibliography. There is a gallery of 83 paintings at the Art UK website, which you can access by clicking here.

Update, 30 October 2016: If you are interested in Angelica Kaufman, who became a member of the Royal Academy, you may be interested in Elizabeth Thompson, who was not so lucky. You can read her story by clicking here.