Women have worked as professional artists in Europe for hundreds of years. Yet we are often told that, prior to the 20th century, those who did so successfully were rare exceptions – they were the lucky ones who had financial advantages, family connections or unusual bravery to defy social conventions. And while some of that narrative is true, it’s not the whole story.
Tate Britain’s new exhibition, Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520–1920, amasses over 200 works by more than 100 professional women artists. These artists lived and worked in Britain and many were as celebrated in their own time as their male contemporaries. That so few of them are remembered today says more about the biases of the last 100 years than it says about the realities of women’s art practice in the previous 400.
Women artists were often omitted from 20th-century art writing (the three principal mid-century surveys did not include a single female artist). Much women’s art is therefore misattributed, uncatalogued, unidentified or simply “lost,” making it seem as though female artists hardly existed.
