Women Artists

H.W. Janson’s History of Art first published in 1962 contained neither the name nor work of a single woman artist.  “I have not been able to find a woman artist who clearly belongs in a one-volume history of art.” (Janson, 1979)

Not surprisingly, following a course she taught while at Vassar in the Spring of 1970, entitled “The Image of Women in the Eighteenth & Nineteenth Centuries,” Linda Nochlin published, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (ARTnews January 1971: 22-39, 67-71 [reprinted in Women, Art, & Power & Other Essays {Harper & Row, 1988}]).

However, over 100 years prior to Nochlin’s ‘groundbreaking’ essay, the critic & historian Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet, responded to what she perceived as a lacuna in contemporary intellectual history: ‘I do not know that any work on Female Artists – either grouping them or giving a general history of their productions – has ever been published’ when she wrote Women Artists in All Ages & Countries

Ellet (1818–77), also wrote about the founding “mothers” –  women who contributed to the American Revolutionary War, The Women of the American Revolution, published in 1845

Wettlaufer, Alexandra K.   Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting & the Novel in France & Britain, 1800–1860  Columbus, OH: Ohio State, 2011

Linda Nochlin “Consider the Difference: American Women Artists,” (YouTube) Smithsonian American Art Museum

“Neither Model Nor Muse: Women as Artists” – 2010 exhibition at the McNay, San Antonio