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Category: women artists

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Two women painters you’ve never heard of

Drama of Fall, Constance Cochrane, c. 1940, depicts Monhegan Island.
Sandy Quang ran across two women painters this week. It’s sad how little documentation there is of their lives and work.
Helen Louise Moseley was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1883. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago with Robert Henri, Hugh Breckenridge and John Christen Johansen. She regularly exhibited in the Midwest and Gloucester, MA. She died in 1928 in Boston.
Sailboats by Helen Louise Moseley.
Constance Cochrane’s life is better notated. She was born in 1882 at the US Navy Yard at Pensacola, Florida, where her father and grandfather were stationed. Motivated by her navy family, her work concentrated on the sea and shore.
Cochrane studied at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women and with Elliott Daingerfield at his summer studio in Blowing Rock, North Carolina.
Rocky Ocean Scene, Constance Cochrane, undated.
Cochrane was a founding member of the Philadelphia Ten, a group of Philly-based women artists. In 1921 to 1930, she purchased a summer home at Monhegan, where she painted extensively. She died in 1962.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me on the Schoodic Peninsula in beautiful Acadia National Park in 2015 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops! Download a brochure here.
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A true warrior queen

Zenobia in Chains, 1859, by Harriet Hosmer. The American sculptor Harriet Hosmer portrayed Zenobia twice. This version depicts Zenobia being paraded through Roman in Aurelian’s Triumph. It is impossible to read this statue retrospectively without considering it as a commentary on the dual American questions of the age: women’s rights and abolition. It just figures that when Hosmer showed it in Europe, many questioned whether a woman would have been capable of producing such a monumental work.
My friend K Dee recently put together a photostream of portraits of women to “help me remember, in case I ever start to forget, which sort of female image I find reflects a healthy civil society, and which I do not.” I’m not sure I’d call the collapsing Roman empire a ‘healthy civil society’ but Zenobia is certainly one of its heroines.
In the third century AD, the Roman Empire was coming unglued. Emperors were assassinated, a Persian revolt couldn’t be put down, generals were locked in power struggles, and the frontiers were open to attack. The governor of the eastern provinces chose to deploy his legions to defend his territory rather than fight with other Romans.
Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, modeled c. 1859; carved after 1859, by Harriet Hosmer. “I have tried to make her too proud to exhibit passion or emotion of any kind; not subdued, though a prisoner; but calm, grand, and strong within herself,” wrote Hosmer.
In the usual manner, he too was murdered.  His son, Vaballathus, was named rex consul imperator dux Romanorum and corrector totius orientis of the new Palmyrene Empire. That was a mouthful for a child who was barely walking, so the real power behind the throne was his mother Zenobia.
Zenobia was the daughter of a governor of Palmyra. While she claimed she was a descendent of the Ptolomies and Dido, Queen of Carthage, she was more likely a Romanized Syrian with some Egyptian and North African ancestry. She was well-educated and fluent in Greek, Aramaic, Egyptian and Latin. And of course—because she is a queen of legend—she was beautiful. It is probably true that she rode, hunted, fought, and drank like her male officers, or she could not have commanded them in the field.
Who knows how long the Romans might have ignored her had she contented herself with governing Syria and its surrounds? But by 269, Zenobia was on the move. She conquered Egypt and beheaded its Roman prefect. She proclaimed herself Queen of Egypt.
From that to the absurd: the Duchess of Devonshire dressed as Zenobia for her own Jubilee Costume Ball in 1897. Playing dress-up Zenobia has been popular forever, it seems.
Her victory was short-lived. By 273, Rome had reestablished enough equilibrium to challenge Zenobia. The Emperor Auralian arrived in Syria and crushed Zenobia’s army near Antioch. Zenobia and her son were captured along the Euphrades as they fled by camel.
Aurelian took Zenobia and Vaballathus as hostages to Rome, parading Zenobia in golden chains during his Triumph. Nobody knows whether Zenobia was executed or pardoned, for she disappeared from history at this point. Legend says she was married off and lived to bear several daughters.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Three Ladies of Spain

Portrait of Elizabeth of Valois by Sofonisba Anguissola.
Elizabeth of Valois (1545 to 1568) was the eldest daughter of Henry II of France and Catherine de Medici. She was described as timid but close to her formidable mother.
Elisabeth was married by proxy to Phillip II of Spain at age 14, as part of the peace treaty that ended the Habsburg–Valois War. Phillip II was more than twice her age and already had been married twice.
The Departure of Elisabeth of France for Spain, after 1858 by EugĂšne Isabey, shows the young Elisabeth, dressed like a widow, swooning as she leaves for Spain. But this painting is perhaps less about Elizabeth’s reality than about 19th century European sword-rattling.
One can imagine how thrilled this young girl was to be handed off as war booty.  But it turns out that Phillip II wasn’t a bad husband.  He was apparently charmed by his bride and within a short period of time had given up his mistress. His sensitivity can be seen in his choices of ladies-in-waiting. These included the aristocrat Ana de Mendoza and the painter Sofonisba Anguissola.
Unattributed portrait of Ana de Mendoza, Princess of Éboli, showing her very rakish eye-patch.
Ana de Mendoza was distinguished by her intelligence and her eye-patch; legend says she lost her eye to an Ă©pĂ©e. She herself had been married at the age of 12 (but did not bear her husband children until she was eighteen). She lived in Elizabeth of Valois’ household until the young queen’s death in childbirth. 
Her later career gives some hint of her character. After bearing her husband ten children, she entered a convent upon his death. Three years later she returned to public life, getting herself involved in treason. She died after thirteen years of imprisonment.
Unlike many women painters, Sofonisba Anguissola was not the daughter of an artist; in fact, she was from a noble family. Her father encouraged his daughters to cultivate their talents. Four of them became painters and one a writer. At age twenty-two (and unmarried) Anguissola went to Rome, where she met Michelangelo, with whom she studied informally for several years.  
Self-portrait at the easel, 1556, by Sofonisba Anguissola.
By age 26, Anguissola was established as a painter. In Milan, she painted the Duke of Alba, who in turn recommended her to Philip II. He invited her to join the Spanish Court.
Elizabeth of Valois was herself an interested amateur portraiturist, and part of Anguissola’s remit was to teach her painting. After Elizabeth’s death, Phillip II paid Anguissola a dowry of twelve thousand pounds upon her marriage to Don Francisco de Moncada. The couple settled in Palermo, where Don Francisco died in 1579.
Portrait of Massimiliano Stampa, 1557, by Sofonisba Anguissola.
At the age of forty-seven, Anguissola met and married the considerably younger captain of the ship on which she was traveling (Orazio Lomellino). Her amassed fortune allowed her to paint, teach, and mentor other artists through her long and exceptional life.

Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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The high price of being female

We call this Paleolithic relief The Venus of Laussel but we really have no idea what it is. Perhaps it’s the world’s first self-portrait by an artist.
In the art world, it’s no big secret that there’s a high price to be paid for being a woman. The chart below was assembled before the recent $142.4 million sale price for Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucian Freud,” but the reality remains the same. Masterworks by female painters are consistently devalued in the marketplace.

Having participated in roughly a billion art shows, I can assure you that even if it’s getting better, it’s still very much a man’s world out there. On every level, paintings by male artists earn more money than those by female artists.
From the Economist, The Price of Being Female, May 20, 2012
I came of age during the Modernist era, which associated creativity with virility. It was not, in fact, until I was much older that I began to learn about great women artists like Artemisia Gentileschi, Rosa Bonheur, or KĂ€the Kollwitz. This shows you how pervasive was the myth that art is a man’s province. In fact, I would say that the question of whether women could even make good art was still an open one in the 1960s and 1970s.
A recent survey of Paleolithic stenciled handprints by Professor Dean Snow from Pennsylvania State University certainly undermines that view. After sampling a number of European caves containing Paleolithic artwork, he estimates that about 75 percent of the handprint art in them was done by women.
Handprints at El Castillo in Spain, among the world’s oldest art.
In human populations, there is general sexual dimorphism of hands—the most reliable part being that the ratio of the length of the second digit (index finger) to the length of the fourth digit (ring finger) is greater in women than in men. However, even this isn’t foolproof; in modern European populations, it is only true about 60% of the time.
“I thought the fact that we had so much overlap in the modern world would make it impossible to determine the sex of the ancient handprints. But, old hands all fall at or beyond the extremes of the modern populations. Sexual dimorphism was greater then than it is now,” said Professor Snow.
That in itself raises a fascinating question: what in modern life suppresses gender dimorphism? Is it our abandonment of traditional gender roles? That in turn comes back to the question of what, in fact, are our traditional gender roles?
A museum replica of cave paintings at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France.
Paleolithic cave art has been presumed by modern social scientists to be talismanic, bringing good hunting to its creators. Of course, hunting is a traditionally male activity in a hunter-gatherer society, which means it must have been made by men. But is it true that men were the predominant hunters in Paleolithic society? And was primitive man as singlemindedly religious as we’d like to believe, or is it possible that the cave artists were decorating those spaces for the sheer joy of it?
Analysis of the cave art really tells us more about our own biases than anything.
Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Maine in 2014 or Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!