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  • Forgotten Women Artists
    • Forgotten Women Artists: introduction
    • Forgotten Women Artists: #1 Arcangela Paladini: The Rapid Rise and Fall of a Prodigy
    • Forgotten Women Artists: #2 Jane Loudon
    • Forgotten Women Artists: #3 Marie-Gabrielle Capet: Stepping out from the Shadows
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    • Forgotten Women Artists #5 Thérèse Schwartze and the business of painting
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forgotten women artists
By  Philip McCouat
introduction

Over the centuries, women artists have faced special obstacles in achieving successful careers and appropriate recognition for their work. There are a number of reasons for this. Without being exhaustive, these include the limitations on subject matter available to women arising from restrictions on their study of the human figure, or from confinement to the home; lack of adequate (or any) facilities for pursuing an artistic education; male appropriation of credit, particularly for a relative or partner’s work; early death, particularly in childbirth; lack of the financial independence which would give them freedom to indulge in serious artistic pursuits; social constraints against women working for a living, engaging in social movements, or even being eccentric; the treatment of female talent as freakish; and critical attitudes adopted by many males against anything produced by those whom they preferred to think of as the weaker or less-motivated gender.

For some women artists, a minority, these obstacles were able to be overcome, or had no significant effect. Rather, these artists’ obscurity arises from other occurrences, such as a small output, impoverishment or a change in artistic fashions.

In this series we deal with a variety of women artists for whom talent alone was not enough to achieve long-lasting fame:

~ the ill-fated 17th century Italian prodigy Arcangela Paladini
~ the multi-talented English painter/writer/futurist and horticulturist Jane Loudon
~ the 18th century French artist Marie-Gabrielle Capet
~ the long-forgotten 17th century artist Michaelina Wautier
~ the ultimate professional:19/20th century painter Thérèse Schwartze