Despite the institutional and societal limitations women artists have faced, portrait art has long been regarded as a feminine preoccupation. Since ancient times, female artists have excelled in portraiture. While male portrait artists are more celebrated, women seem to excel in this over other genres of art.
This post was born after I read two essays: Linda Nochlin’s Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists and Frederika Jacobs’ Woman’s Capacity to Create: The Unusual Case of Sofonisba Anguissola. As Nochlin points out, due to the limitations of art institutions, women were prevented from ever becoming or being perceived as “great artists”. Though upper-class ladies were often encouraged to take up painting or drawing as a hobby, women were discouraged from pursuing an artistic profession, lest it distract them from their marital and motherly duties. We know that of course, some women did make a profession out of art, and out of those that did, many focused on portraiture.
Why have there been so many great women portrait artists?
But why is this? Although there is no all-encompassing explanation, there are a few ideas I have gleaned from sources I’ve come across in my studies. Many other genres of painting necessitated training that was almost impossible for women to obtain until the 20th century. Women were generally banned or limited from entering art academies, which made receiving artistic training difficult.
One of the most important aspects of painting is nudes, a hallmark of history painting, which is supposedly the greatest genre of Western painting. However, women could not attend life drawing classes until the late 19th century (and of course after this point, if women were present the model would have to be partially draped). Non-nude portraiture, on the other hand, required nothing but the presence of another person. No need for scandalous dishabille! With this genre, societal rules around propriety had less obstructive power, and academic training was less essential.
The aim of this post is not to explain the entire history of women portrait artists – I’m definitely not qualified for that. What I want to write about today is an overview of some of the most iconic portrait artists from art history. Of course, not all of these artists were strictly portrait artists, but most of those I have selected painted extensively within this genre. I also wanted to select artists whose work focused on women, and those who rebelled against patriarchal norms of academic art.
Iaia (c. 100 BCE)
Name-dropped in both Pliny’s Natural History and Judy Chicago’s Heritage Floor, Iaia was one of the few remembered female names from ancient art history. Iaia was born in Cyzicus, a Greek colony, at an unknown date. She was said to have been working in Rome during the reign of Marcus Varro. Having never married, Pliny said she was “perpetua virgo” (life-long virgin). She painted panels and ivories, and reportedly created many portraits of women, including self-portraits. Pliny claimed that she outsold many of her male contemporaries, and was one of the most skilled portrait painters of her time. Her ability to be successful as not only a Greek artist but a woman as well, in Rome at this time, is very surprising. However, little is known about her and none of her works survive to this day.
Guan Daosheng (1262 – 1319)
Although not primarily a portrait artist, Guan Daosheng is said to have been the most famous female painter and calligrapher in Chinese history. Born in Huzhou to a noble family, she was a poet and painter active during the early Yuan Dynasty. Guan subverted the strict gender norms of her Confucian society: she received an education typically reserved for male children, mastered the art of bamboo painting (a plant that was symbolically scene as masculine), and used masculine brushstrokes in her calligraphy, and gender neutral language in her poetry. She also outwardly expressed her love for her husband and opposed his taking a concubine. Her ability to gain a reputation at a time where women were encouraged to be modest and introverted further speaks to her rebellious nature, as did her female-dominated audience, which was perhaps an attempt to promote the influence of women at the imperial court. Her work was extremely popular in her lifetime, and continues to be so to this day, though few works are definitively attributed to Guan.
Lavinia Fontana (1552 – 1614)
Fontana is often considered to be the first woman artist: she relied on commissions for her income, and unlike many contemporary and previous female artists, was not part of a court or convent. Fontana was born in Bologna, and received artistic training from her father, who was also an artist. It is said that he decided to train her due to financial problems in her childhood, as female children were rarely educated. She later married a fellow artist, who became her assistant and helped her to manage their family. Fontana gained a reputation in early 1580s Bologna for her portraiture, but she also painted religious and mythological works. She worked primarily in Rome and Bologna, specializing in portraits of noble women, with whom she often had close relationships with. She was also possibly the first woman artist to paint female nudes, a topic of recent academic attention.
Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755 – 1842)
One of western history’s most famous portrait artists, Vigée Le Brun’s portraits of women are incredibly intimate and unique. Working in the Rococo style, with elements of Neoclassicism, she often depicted women and children in personal, lifelike portraits. Born in Paris in 1755, Vigée Le Brun began drawing at a very early age, encouraged by her artist father. She began working at a young age to support her family financially after her father’s death, despite lacking much training, and became a professional artist by the age of 17. She entered the Academy of Saint Luc at age 19. Soon, she began receiving commissions from many members of high society, including Marie Antoinette. Vigée Le Brun had excellent conversational skills as well as artistic talent, which ensured success in the time-consuming art of portraiture. Within her lifetime, she had gained a continent-wide reputation amongst nobility, and she is still an important artist today.
Katsushika Ōi (c. 1800 – c. 1866)
Sadly not as famous as her father Hokusai, Katsushika Ōi was an accomplished painter, printmaker and calligrapher. Katsushika was an Ukiyo-e artist working in the 19th century Edo period. Her first name is said to derive from the Japanese おい (“Hey, you!”), which is what her father called her. She was a painter, production assistant to her father, and printmaker, and excelled in handwriting and bijin-ga paintings (paintings of beautiful women). She reportedly had an eccentric, free-spirited personality, which she may have inherited from her father. Her artistic career seems to have been brief, as she had to care for her father in his old age, but some of his works (including The Great Wave off Kanagawa, made in this later period) were likely made partially by her. Although her renown is overshadowed by her father’s, her talent was acknowledged by her contemporaries. Her career has gained recent pop-culture interest through a documentary and anime film about her life.
Berthe Morisot (1841 – 1895)
Born in 1841 in Bourges, Morisot was an Impressionist and one of the few women to exhibit with the group. As a child from a bourgeoisie family, her and her sister had artistic training, as they both demonstrated strong talent. However, only Berthe continued painting into her adult life. She married Éduoard Manet’s brother, but continued to exhibit with her maiden name, already having artistic renown as Morisot. Her artistic style was trailblazing, perhaps even more unconventional and abstracted than her Impressionist peers. Morisot’s style was elegant and colourful, with light brushstrokes, but it often faced gender-based criticism. Her work depicted everyday subjects, including still-life, but she most often painted portraits of women and children. She also liked to paint outdoors, which invited scandal as women were expected to be chaperoned when outside the house.
Suzanne Valadon (1865 – 1938)
Just as Lavinia Fontana was the first woman artist to paint a female nude, Valadon was reportedly the first woman artist to paint a female and male nude in the same painting. The post-impressionist artist Valadon was born in 1865 in Bessines, France, to a poor single mother. Valadon was essentially a self-taught artist, and entered the art world as a an artist’s model. Her work contains vibrant, individualistic depictions of women, sexually liberated subjects, and bold colour and form. I’ve actually written an entire post dedicated to Valadon, so I won’t go into as much detail here.
Frida Kahlo (1907 – 1954)
To call Kahlo a portrait artist would be an oversimplification of her career, as she refused to be confined to a single label. Born in Coyoacán, Mexico, in 1907, Kahlo first experimented with art as a child while recovering from polio. She later revisited art after a bus accident when she was 18. Kahlo’s paintings find influence in Mexican culture, landscape, and identity. She also addressed general themes such as race, gender, sexuality, and class. Additionally, much of her work reflected her various health complications and life experiences. Her style is hard to define, but her work has often been described as a surrealist, magical realist, or naïf. She painted a number of self-portraits and portraits of people she knew. Despite her fame today, Kahlo was a successful but fairly unknown artist in her lifetime, living under the shadow of her husband Diego Rivera. She died at 47, but Kahlo was incredibly prolific, and may have painted upwards of 200 paintings. If you’d like to learn about Kahlo’s influence on Surrealism, I mentioned her in another post.
Mickalene Thomas (b. 1971)
The only living artist on this list, Mickalene Thomas is arguably present day’s most iconic portrait artist. Born in 1971 in Camden, New Jersey, Thomas was raised by her mother, model Sandra Bush. Bush encouraged Thomas to take art classes from a young age. Her work uses a variety of media, usually complex combinations of photography, painting, and collage, as well as installation, sculpture, and video. Thomas has largely focused on themes of race, gender, and sexuality, often depicting African-American women in larger-than-life, vibrant portraits. Her portraits are empowering and celebratory, inserting herself and her usually black, female, and often queer subjects into the predominantly white male art historical canon. In an interview, she said that “exploring self-portraiture prepared me to think honestly about what it means to be the subject of the image without being reduced to the object of the viewer”.
