The Dowry of Talent
One woman changed what it meant to be a female artist. She did not just paint. She made a career out of it.
The Painter Heroine of Bologna
One of the first female artists to emerge from early modern Bologna, a city unusually open to women’s artistic talent, Elisabetta Sirani was one of the most extraordinary artists of seventeenth-century Italy. She was born on 8th January 1638, the first of four children born to Margherita and Giovanni Andrea Sirani. Her father had once been an assistant to Guido Reni. He did not produce much himself, but he took over Reni’s role as a teacher, and when illness left him incapacitated by gout, Elisabetta stepped in and began running the family workshop. By 1654, she was still young. But she was
Painter, Portraitist, Pioneer (Guest Post)
Guest Post from Erika Gaffney of Art Herstory - celebrating women artists of centuries past! Visit https://artherstory.net for more.
Painting the New Woman
Mary Cassatt spent most of her life in France. Yet she remained, in many ways, an outsider: an American among the Impressionists, a woman in a male artistic world, and an artist who deliberately built her life outside the expectations placed upon nineteenth-century women. Born in Pennsylvania in 1844 into a wealthy upper-middle-class family, Cassatt grew up surrounded by education, travel, and culture. Her father was a successful stockbroker, and her mother came from a prosperous banking family. For the Cassatt family, travel was viewed as essential to a proper education, and as a child she spent years moving across Europe,
Pray for the Paintress
A life shaped by constraint became one that quietly reshaped the possibilities of art.
