There aren’t many exhibitions that break down the story of Britain and its art. But this massive archaeological dig into the country’s cultural past from 1520 to 1920 does just that. It brings back many unjustly forgotten female artists, many neglected works, much more than can be mentioned in one review, and without rhetoric. Instead, wall texts are factual and informative; it just collects a lot of evidence. We see these now.
It starts with a bang. In Self-Portrait as an Allegory of Painting, Artemisia Gentileschi lunges forward, her eyes focused on the prize, completely focused on her task as she reaches out her bare arm to add some paint to the canvas she is feverishly working on. She is a formidable being with jet black hair, black eyebrows, green dress and dirty painting hand. But he is not alone. Not anymore.
Gentileschi’s involvement may come as a surprise. However, this remarkable Italian artist appeared on the stage in Britain in 1638 at the court of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. His father, who had already established himself there as court artist, was dying and was probably helping to paint the ceilings of the Queen’s “House of Pleasure” in Greenwich. It was here at the Stuart court that Gentileschi created the startlingly vivid, raw and precociously feminist Allegory of Painting.
You may think that’s it. Four hundred years ago women in Britain finally managed to become artists. However, in Gentileschi’s second painting in the exhibition, the changes in women’s art are brutally displayed. The painting Susanna and the Elders, painted for Queen Henrietta Maria in London and surviving for a long time in the Royal Collection, was misidentified and sent to stores. She only became known as Gentileschi in 2023. This is so surprising because his vision is so clear. The theme of a naked Susanna being surprised by two creepy voyeur men in her bathroom was one of his obsessions: he first painted it when he was a teenager.
This is proof that Now You See Us is a necessary exhibition. How can such a strong artistic personality be suppressed? It takes an army that belittles here, misattributes there, belittles there, somehow never records women’s art as carefully as men’s.
But Gentileschi was not the first woman to paint in Britain; She was the first woman whose only works have survived to this day. Flemish miniature painters Susanna Horenbout and Levina Teerlinc VIII. They worked at Henry’s court and were praised internationally. But so far it has proven impossible to match their reputation with any certainty of any attributed work. This exhibition brings together a handful of small, perfect portraits as potential candidates.
Artemisia fled Britain on the eve of civil war. But one artist who achieved this was Joan Carlile, who started as Henrietta Maria’s laundress and later used her familiarity with silk and taffeta to make a living painting women in beautiful dresses after the fall of the monarchy. His “Unknown Ladies” also wear similar shiny silver dresses. This look at the material reflects Dutch artists of the time. Art historian Svetlana Alpers called this Northern European obsession with visual reality the “art of description”: As a native British art developed, you might also call it the art of empiricism.
Women were successful in this regard. Some of the most fascinating works here are the botanical still lifes. Even though flower painting was considered a woman’s job, it was scientific. Clara Maria Pope’s charming early 19th-century peony paintings are on loan from the Natural History Museum, while Mary Delany’s Georgian works of green and purple flowers and herbs, made from colored paper cutouts, come from the scientific project Flora Delanica.
There are others that reward careful observation. Mary Beale, one of the first English-born portrait painters, captures Restoration women with easy intimacy and is even warmer in her depiction of her curly-haired young son. The 18th century was the golden age of English portraiture and clients had many famous painters to choose from. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was played by Reynolds and Gainsborough. But in 1782, a portrait of Maria Cosway flying through the air, her robes swirling above clouds of doom, became a hit.
Women were often depicted nude, from Anne Killigrew’s dreamy 17th-century mythological scene Venus Clothed by the Three Graces to Victorian Henrietta Rae’s even more classic-delightful A Bacchante. In the second, a naked woman touches some grapes. I don’t remember the last time I saw so many naked women in the Tate.
When Rae painted her erotic works, English women were attending life classes in art schools; This change was pioneered by the Slade school in London, which now accepted them as equals. Laura Knight went to Nottingham School of Art and this gave her the confidence to do great experiments. An intriguing wall of her early paintings suggests that she was comfortable enough with her abilities to play with new possibilities: we see women exploring a rocky seashore, alone or together, while Knight dwells on their inner lives, their quiet musings against the blue sea.
But women who dared to become artists in an ancient world where their social, economic and legal existence was narrowly defined stand here alongside modernists like Gwen John and Vanessa Bell. Portraits and depictions of nature have always been the work of English genius, a genius shared by many anonymous women.