Tate Britain's Now You See Us: 10 firsts of extraordinary women artists in Britain, abandoned by art history

When Mary Black charged £25 for a commissioned portrait in 1764 – half of what a man would expect to be paid – she was met by outrage from the sitter.

Despite her being a professional artist, physician Messenger Monsey bemoaned her request to be compensated in correspondence with his cousin in which they called “saucy” for asking for money, that her reputation would be sullied and ultimately labelling her “a slut”.

Tabitha Barber, Tate Britain’s curator of British art, 1500 to 1750, says, “It’s just a remarkable indication of how difficult it was for women trying to maintain this line between having a commercial career and being a gentlewoman.”

This is just one example of the many hurdles that women have faced in the centuries-long battle to forge a career in the arts. Balancing ambitions against societal restrictions, professional women artists – the first of whom can be traced back to the 16th century – were often seen as amateurs, associated with still-life paintings of flowers or fruits at best.

But slowly, over time, women were able to build careers in art, some were even celebrated: the first woman to practise painting professionally, Joan Carlile, was born in 1606; two women, Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, were founding members of The Royal Academy in 1768; in the period 1760–1830, there had been as many as 900 women exhibited in public exhibitions in London.

Indeed, the history of women professional artists is no straightforward story – with celebrated artists in their time being written out of history. But Tate Britain, with a new collection of 110 paintings by women artists from 1520 to 1920, aims to set the record straight.

It wasn’t easy. “This is one of the most complicated shows I've ever worked on,” saysBarber. “The research has been immense, utterly rewarding. But so, so complicated.”

Complexities arise from a number of reasons. First, the definition of an artist, particularly at times when it was not expected for women to pursue public careers; when, “women were expected to occupy the domestic sphere, and societal expectations placed limits on their ambition, what was private and what was public became blurred,” says Barber. Tate Britain has decided to focus the show on artists who pursued art as their profession and their livelihood.

Second, there’s the difficulty of locating work: despite records of artworks being included in various exhibitions, a huge number of women’s paintings have simply disappeared, many into private collections, deemed pretty but unimportant – sold at regional auction houses, often without proper documentation.

In some cases, even well-known women artists’ work has simply been impossible to locate; in others, just one or two paintings remain, dotted around the world. Many women painters have simply been forgotten.

How could it be that so many extraordinary female artists have been so abandoned by history? The story is not that professional women artists in Britain never made it: women built successful careers, campaigned for training and for membership to art institutions, and overcame not only their societal expectations, but hurdles of religious, racial and class nature too.

In fact, something happened in the 20th century when art history itself became an academic discipline. There was a focus on documenting male artists, and on the male cannon. The authors perceived women as amateurs, and so, despite centuries of profoundly important contributions to art, they were very literally written out of art history.

It means Tate Britain’s Now You See Us is really only the beginning. “This exhibition is a statement of intent,” says Barber. “The Tate is determined, in that we have a real focus in our acquisition policy of buying more work by women and making women visible on walls.”

To celebrate the advent of this extraordinary exhibition, here are 10 women artists who forged the path for their peers and successors.

Through written records, the first women artists to be identified are Susanna Horenbout (c.1503 – before 1554) and Levina Teerlinc (1510s – 1576), women from high-profile families of Flemish illuminators (Susanna’s father, Gerard Horenbout, was the court artist to Margaret of Austria), who moved to England and were connected to Henry VIII’s court.

Horenbout spent her life linked to royalty; records show she was associated with the courts of Henry’s wives Katherine of Aragon, Anne of Cleves and Catherine Parr. Teerlinc, too, is recorded as working as one of Elizabeth I’s gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber. In 1546 she was awarded a large annuity (a form of financial support) of £40 by the King – it’s unknown however whether this was related to her art or her other work.

While there are no surviving pieces of Horenbout’s artworks, there are records that show that Albrecht Dürer purchased an image of Christ she had painted in 1521; meanwhile, Teerlinc was deemed so skillful that she was invited by Henry VIII himself to his court. From 1559, Teerlinc gave her paintings to Elizabeth I as new year gifts (none survive).

No paintings by either artist can be unquestionably identified; attribution for possible work often oscillates between Holbein, Horenbout’s brother Lucas, Teerlinc and Horenbout.

Esther Inglis (c.1570 – 1624) produced more than 60 extraordinarily detailed manuscripts over her career. Born in France, Inglis’s Huguenot family fled religious persecution, and settled in Scotland in 1574. With her father a Master of the French School in Edinburgh, and her mother a talented calligrapher, perhaps it is not surprising that Esther would go on to produce dozens of manuscripts so exquisite that they would be given as gifts to royalty – her book of psalms was presented to Elizabeth I in 1599.

Heavily embroidered, covered in intricate calligraphy, some bound with velvet and adorned with pearls, the manuscripts were gifts that people would commission for special presentations. Inglis would paint her portrait inside of some of these extraordinary books, and in doing so produced the first known self-portraits by a woman in Britain.

In his 1658 publication Graphice, historian William Sanderson, in a section titled English modern masters, lists practising contemporary artists. Although just a short section of the publication was dedicated to women, there they were: “In Oyl Colours we have a virtuous example in that worthy Artist Mrs. Carlile,” he writes in the section squeezed between professional male artists and gentlemen amateurs.

Joan Carlile (c.1606 – 1679) lived an extraordinary life. A royal servant in the household of Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria (as was her husband, Lodowick Carlile) she developed painting as a skill. She and her husband did well at court, becoming financially stable. But the couple was forced to forge a different kind of career when, during the English Civil War, the court collapsed.

They moved to Covent Garden in 1653, then the centre of England’s art world, and Joan managed to build a career as a professional painter: her few surviving works depict women standing in the same pose, wearing the same dresses in similar-colours, indicating a commercial project.

“Carlile’s importance now lies less with these lost works but in her ambition to pursue art as a career,” says Barber, “Or as [the ejected Bishop of Salisbury] Duppa put it, to ‘raise up some fortune for her self and her children’.”

Easily the most famous name on this list, Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807) was a celebrated artist in her day – as she remains today.

She was indeed exceptional, says Barber, “but only in the degree of success and fame; many other lesser-known women pursued art as a career”. Nevertheless, as one of the first women to become a member of the Royal Academy, and the first woman to paint pictures of British history, Kauffman’s impact in this complicated history of women artists cannot be overstated. This spring, a retrospective of some of her most famous works runs at the Royal Academy.

Born into a creative, though not exceedingly wealthy family, Kauffman was exceptionally talented, known as a painter by the age of 12. In 1757, following her mother’s death, the family moved from Switzerland to Milan where she started to engage with Italian Neoclassicalism. She quickly built up a large network and was a well-connected and admired painter when she moved to London in 1766 aged just 24.

Of the 36 founding members of the Royal Academy, Kauffman and English painter Mary Moser were the only female inclusions. A major moment – “It was the leading art institution, and if you’re a member it gives you that professional cachet,” explains Barber – they were nevertheless restricted: kept out of the Academy’s council, and therefore excluded from committee meetings, life drawings classes and general governance.

At just 24-years-old, Mary Moser’s selection is slightly less self-evident. The daughter of founding member George Michael Moser, Moser would become a celebrated artist in her lifetime, particularly well-known for her exquisite depictions of flowers.

Despite this landmark moment in women’s history, both artist’s admission to the Academy can be seen as tokenistic: it would be another 150 years until another woman was elected to become a member: Annie Swynnerton became an associate member in 1922, then, finally, Laura Knight became the first female full Royal Academician in 1936.

A large part of Kauffman’s celebrity, and lasting success, derived from her capabilities as a painter of British history – a genre usually reserved for men.

“Above all, Kauffman identified as a history painter, tackling the ambitious narrative subjects that were widely regarded as the highest form of art. Her lofty themes challenged the notion of what a woman should or could paint,” the exhibition catalogue says.

Yet Kauffman was not only the first women artist to paint pictures of British history – she was also the first artist to wind together stories from classical history, ancient British history and literature. A truly stupendous record.

Edmonia Lewis (1844 – 1907), born in New York State, was orphaned aged five and was subsequently raised by her Ojibwe aunts. Showing artistic promise from a young age, she was backed by her brother (who had made some money in the Gold Rush) to attend at Oberlin College, though unfortunately her studies were cut short when she was accused of crimes, including poisoning, by her white peers, and she was forced to leave the school.

In the aftermath, Lewis moved to Boston where studying sculpture under sculptor and writer Edward Augustus Brackett, before travelling to Rome. Her aim was to develop her skills, and work in an environment where she would not be solely defined by her skin colour. Incredibly, an interview with Lewis in the New York Times survives: “I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my colour,” she says.

Lewis found a home in Rome: she became part of a community of American women artists, and finally her Catholicism worked for her rather than against her. But things were never easy. She would sometimes sculpt her stunning marble busts, which drew on Neoclassical ideals, in front of crowds in order to prove that it was indeed her who had created the work. In 2011 it was discovered that she spent the last years of her life in London.

Anna Lea Merritt’s Love Locked Out is an oil painting of Cupid as a naked child, leaning on a locked golden door. Created for her late husband, Lea Merritt’s painting was very well-received, subsequently acquired for the British National Collection via the Chantrey Bequest – a fund left by English sculptor Francis Leggatt Chantrey dedicated to buying works for the nation.

Nudes, particularly nudes by women, were frowned upon at the time, but Love Locked Out was deemed acceptable. After all, this was no full-frontal scene. It was a child, and only the back of its figure was depicted. The acquisition brought American artist Lea Merritt, whose Quaker family moved first to Europe, then London in 1870, international fame.

“We can look back on acquisitions made by the Chantrey Bequest in the late 19th century – an era we regard as more prejudiced than our own – and feel perhaps a little humbled that it was in this era that important works such as Anna Lea Meritt’s Love Locked Out... entered Tate’s (and therefore the nation’s) collection,” says Tate Britain’s director Alex Farquharson.

In 1897, British painter Henrietta Rae (1859-1928) was aked to organise a section of the Victorian Era Exhibition, a major exhibition that was being held to celebrate six decades of Queen Victoria’s reign. Specifically, she was given the Fine Arts section in the Women’s Work section.

Rae decided that if there had to be a woman’s fine art section, it had to be complete. She argued that all women’s painting, sculpture and drawing works should be displayed together and managed to wangle it so that there were no women’s works displayed in the General Fine Art Section.

Naturally, some women artists – particularly those whose works were going to be selected for hanging with the men – were furious, wishing for others to “measure the result of their labours by the highest obtainable standard”. But Rae’s efforts were validated, and the exhibition received rave reviews, with one, a little gratingly, describing it as a “revelation”.

Barbara Bodichon (1827 - 1891) is best-known today for having co-founded Girton College, Cambridge, in 1869. Born into an unconventional family – her parents were not married – she is the sister of Arctic explorer Benjamin Leigh Smith.

Over the course of Bodichon’s life she published the influential, though not so catchy, Brief Summary of the Laws of England concerning Women in 1854, and the 1857 radical pamphlet, Women and Work: “Awake!’ she wrote: ‘Be the best that God has made you. Do not be contented to be charming and fascinating; be noble, be useful, be wise. Grasp the hand that points to work and freedom.”

There was backlash, though Bodichon did not become an “old maid” like her detractors alleged: she was married to a French Algerian and spent several months a year in Algiers.

Bodichon’s feminist campaigns overlapped with the thesis at the centre of this exhibition: that women had not only the skills, but an inherent right, to forge a career – be that as an artist or anything else. And something that Bodichon – who was independently wealthy – was successfully able to do.

During her lifetime, she became well-known for her watercolour painting, showcasing her work in both joint exhibitions at the Royal Academy, the Dudley Gallery and the Liverpool Art Exhibition – and solo exhibitions. She registered her occupation as ‘artist’ on her marriage certificate at a time when gentlewomen having an occupation was looked down upon.

In 1918, the Imperial War Museum, then just a year into its existence, asked Anna Airy (1882–1964) to paint a series of large works. The commission made the 36-year-old the UK’s first official female war artist. Her contract included strict terms that were not placed on her male counterparts, such as the committee’s right to refuse work, or not pay for a work, if they so wished. Nevertheless, it was a groundbreaking moment for women who had always been excluded from these kinds of projects. Airy, a prize-winning artist who had been educated at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, created five huge seven-by-six-foot canvases of munitions factories.

The works were created in difficult or dangerous conditions – Airy would sometimes make the work standing on railway lines or on hot floors that would burn her feet – proving her grit and ambition. Despite being described as “the most accomplished artist of her sex” – by a man, of course – she lectured about the lifelong prejudices she faced as a woman artist.

Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920; tate.org.uk