500 Years of Women’s Self Portraits
Most of us concerned with art realize that women have been highly undervalued. The infamous Performance Art Group, Gorilla Girls, posits that women are only 7% of the entries into our larger museums. Name ten painters, how many women did you name?
This is not any different from the 16th and 17th centuries where, although we now know how many brilliant women painters there were, only a handful, a single handful at that, are in the common discussion.
Women were not allowed to use live models, and certainly were not admitted to the Academy (Artemisia Gentileschi broke that tabu — checkout an earlier article on this website about her.)
Then, amid this segregation of talent, something strange and wonderful happened. The mirror. The earliest manufactured mirrors were pieces of polished stone such as obsidian, a naturally occurring volcanic glass.
During the early Europe Renaissance, a fire-gilding technique was developed to produce an even and highly reflective tin coating for glass mirrors. The back of the glass was coated with a tin-mercury amalgam, and the mercury was then evaporated by heating the piece. This process caused less thermal shock to the glass than the older molten-lead method. The date and location of the discovery is unknown, but by the 16th century Venice was a center of mirror production. Certainly by the mid 16th century, well-to-do households had a mirror.
Women artists, being confined to the house with children and chores, and not being allowed to use live models, did the logical thing: self-portraits using their household mirrors.
The first woman to actually have her self portrait hung in a museum, was hung in the Cabinet of Curiosities, rather than the Main Art Gallery. In 1747, the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna acquired a self portrait painted in 1554 by the Italian artist Sofonisba Anguissola. Because of its excellence in execution and beauty, it was perceived to be something extraordinary, unimaginable that a woman could actually paint it, therefore it skipped art and went right to curiosity!
No one is exactly sure when the first women’s paintings were done, and certainly not the self portraits. But what is commonly thought of as the very first occurred in 1548 in Antwerp. Here a young woman painted a small oak panel with oil paints and using a mirror she created her own image. It is indeed an interesting one, as it portrays a young woman of uneven proportions, very thin, perhaps gaunt, looking straight at her viewers as if we were the mirror. Her clothing was also a bit non conformist. At the time the studio attire would have been a smock over a blouse. Here she has no smock and is dressed rather smartly with the fashion of the day.
Two things stand out here. First, the painter was making use of a mirror, and second she was “making use of the mirror” for her own reasons. She had painted a non-realistic version of herself. She had painted the person she perhaps would like to be. She had freed herself from the every day, removed the conventions placed upon her, and broken what today we know as the fourth wall.
Furthermore, so as not to be mistakenly attributed to another artist (probably a man) she wrote on the painting, “I Caterina van Hemessen have painted myself, 1548, here aged 20”. From this small painting, about the size of a hardcover book, lies the beginnings of 500 years of women painting themselves, and sadly, hardly ever being recognized for their great talent and perseverance.
There are countless articles and books on women and self portraiture, all quite Interesting. The larger question perhaps is now knowing what we do, why are only 7% of museum hangings done by women?
