Angelica Kauffman was without doubt a phenomenon. Forging a hugely successful artistic career at a time when that was not exactly easy for women, she not only determinedly promoted herself as a history painter, the most esteemed artistic genre, but reinvigorated it by bringing female protagonists to the fore. In 1768 she, along with Mary Moser, became one of only two founding members of the Royal Academy, the oldest art school in Britain. However that would prove to be a rare show of female solidarity for the Academy who refused to elect another woman for over 150 years.  

The Royal Academy’s attitude is one of many that stood in the way of the progress of female artists practising in Britain. Denied entry to art schools and forbidden from studying the nude, an essential skill if they were to portray the figure accurately in the highest genres of painting, they were only likely to gain the necessary training  if they had a supportive male relative.  And if they then tried to make a career from their art they faced social criticism for having the audacity to do so. Women who chose to channel their creative spirit into subjects deemed suitable for their sex and supposedly limited capabilities — floral painting, watercolours or needlework — were  patronised as mere amateurs. 

Kauffman’s Invention opens Tate Britain’s fascinating and enlightening exhibition ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520 – 1920.’ It is followed soon after by Artemisia Gentileschi’s powerful Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting. The two are often seen as rare exceptions, but the Tate wants to show us that despite having the odds stacked against them, many other female artists were determined to persevere with their chosen vocation. However, as visitors to the show will discover, those that did succeed have all too frequently been forgotten while others never achieved the success they undoubtedly deserved. 

It could come as a surprise to learn that female artists were practising professionally in Britain centuries before the arrival of the Royal Academy.  An early highlight is a late-16th century book of psalms with a frontispiece featuring the first known self portrait of a female artist in England, that of Esther Inglis. Levina Teerlinc was another artist known to have worked in Tudor England, but frustratingly there is disagreement over the attribution of her works so we cannot know for sure if the exquisite miniatures on display are truly by her hand.

The portrait painter Mary Beale, who found great success in the 17th century, is one of many who deserves greater fame today. She benefited from a supportive husband and her successful enterprise appears to have been a truly egalitarian family affair. While Beale painted her husband ran the studio and their two sons acted as studio assistants. Others, like Anne Kiligrew, felt constrained to hide their talent under a bushel, and not seek the ‘vanity’ of public recognition. The experience of Mary Black goes some way to explaining the reticence of women like Kiligrew. When she painted the physician Messenger Monsey in 1764  and raised the question of payment, her subject referred to her as a ‘slut.’

Faced with the risk of such a response, it would be easy to think that most women followed Kiligrew’s example rather than Beale’s, but when public exhibitions emerged in the 1760s, women were there from the outset. Their work could be seen at a number of venues including the Society of Artists, the British Institution and, from its foundation in 1768, the Royal Academy. The latter swiftly established itself as the go to destination with crowds swarming to its annual exhibitions. Katherine Read exhibited at both the Society of Artists, who made her an honorary member, and the Royal Academy. Despite not being born into an aristocratic or artistic family she was still determined to ‘top it with the best of them.’ She relied on her Jacobite networks to travel throughout Europe as an unmarried woman and built up a notable clientele when she returned to London to set up a studio.  

Having done so, she was clearly not going to want to remain anonymous. However, some women exhibitors did feel constrained to hide their identity, while those who might have liked the recognition all too often found themselves sidelined by the Royal Academy’s misogynist attitude. As they were not members they had no automatic right to exhibit and were therefore at the mercy of the exhibition’s selectors. If they were fortunate enough to be selected they frequently found their work hung so high as to be virtually unviewable, or stuffed unceremoniously into a corner. 

Even those who did manage to exhibit and win both public and critical acclaim failed to cross that final boundary of election to the Royal Academy. 

Margaret Sarah Carpenter’s talent for portraiture was regularly compared to that of Sir Thomas Laurence, the Royal Academy’s president. Her sublime 1834 portrait of Harriet, Countess Howe reveals both her gift for psychological insight and her fine way with fabrics.  Lauded with praise and regularly named as the best artist on show in the Academy’s prestigious annual shows, they still failed to elect her on two separate occasions.

Elizabeth Butler faced the same fate. Her painting The Roll Call, depicting the remnants of a Battalion of Grenadier guards, many clearly wounded and exhausted, caused a sensation when it was exhibited in 1874. So popular was it that a policeman had to be stationed in front of the painting to hold back the crowds. The critical response was equally rapturous. Yet despite Butler’s renown she also failed to be elected an Associate of the Royal Academy on two separate occasions.  It would be wonderful to think that in the long run these things didn’t matter, but who today has heard of either Carpenter or Butler? 

Perhaps it is no surprise that other female artists thought it more advantageous to channel their creative impulses into the artistic mediums deemed suitable for their sex, not least because by engaging with these gendered stereotypes they could often forge lucrative careers. Mary Knowles’ astonishing embroidered self portrait shows her at work on another portrait she had created, that of George III. A copy of an original work by Johann Zoffany, it  had been commissioned by Queen Charlotte who awarded Knowles an honorarium of £800 for her work.

Female botanical artists combined phenomenal skill with scientific vigour. No one looking at Mary Delany’s highly accomplished collages or Augusta Innes Withers exquisitely observed bunch of grapes would ever consider them amateur. Indeed, Withers’ skill meant she was in high demand as an illustrator for botanical publications. 

The emergence of the Slade School of Art in 1871, who from the outset admitted women on equal terms to their male counterparts, slowly began to turn the tide. Other female artists such as Louise Jopling took matters into their own hands and formed their own art schools. Yet still many of the extraordinary talents that emerged at that time are today unknown.  Jopling was phenomenally successful in her lifetime and both her compelling self portrait at an easel and sublime, genre defying painting of an artist’s model hanging up her elegant clothes after a sitting, make it easy to see why. That she, and many like her, slipped into obscurity is down to the neglect of the generations of scholars and curators who simply did not value the work of women in the way they did men. 

By the time we get to the early 20th century we feel women shaking off their shackles, even if things were hardly egalitarian; the Camden Art Group, founded in 1911 by Walter Sickert notoriously excluded women. 

We have the marvellously self assured self portrait by Gwen John and Vanessa Bell, Nina Hamnett and Dolores Courtney vigorously renewing the still-life for the modernist age. There are Sylvia Gosse’s depictions of the modern woman at work and the astonishing depictions of munitions production during World War I painted by Anna Airy, the first official female war artist. 

These are women embracing the new found opportunities that society, however reluctantly, was beginning to offer them. The kind of women depicted in the Nottingham Art School trained Laura Knight’s work.  Whether bathing naked or elegantly poised on rock while dressed in the latest fashions they revel in their new found freedoms. Times were changing. In 1936 Knight became the first woman to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy (Kauffman and Moser were technically invited to become members).

It would be wonderful to think that those changes gathered pace in the ensuing decades. But we know they did not. Women are still under-represented in galleries around the world, still fetch lower prices at auction. Which is why the Tate’s show is so vital. It would be wrong to suggest that every work in the exhibition is a masterpiece, or that every artist here is as worthy of recognition as Jopling, Carpenter or Butler. But in many ways this is art as social history. It is a curatorial choice that won’t please everyone though hopefully one that will leave the majority enthralled by new discoveries and enraged at what these women had to endure. 

Now You See Us: Women Arts in Britain 1520 – 1920 is at Tate Britain until 24 October 2024.