Against a picturesque windowpane, a young woman sits in her studio tracing a tulip flower in a drawing. It was made by the French artist Louise Adéone Drölling, who followed her father and brother into an artistic career.
When we think of women artists in early modern Europe, we are often told that they stood suppressed by their male counterparts and had no place in the artistic community. But in truth, from the Renaissance period onwards, women were able to express their creativity in many kinds of artistic spheres, and it is precisely the diverse work of these women that the exhibition “Making Her Mark” sets out to celebrate.
Traveling this year from the Baltimore Museum of Art to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the exhibition covers the period roughly between 1400 and 1800 in Europe and brings together works across a broad spectrum of media: ceramics, furniture, textile, printmaking, and, of course, drawing and painting.
These last two categories were long considered to be the work of professional male artists, who expressed their creative genius in commissioned works, while women were generally understood to have pursued drawing and watercolor for their own pleasure. But some, like Drölling, were able to receive a highly sophisticated artistic education that allowed them to convey a wide range of sentiments about what it was like being a woman in European society.
In Drölling’s painting, the young lady sits, well-dressed, by a window, painting not in a dirty workshop, but on the upper story of a high-ceilinged room furnished with a guitar, a classical bust, and a case of beautifully bound books. A portfolio with pages of drawings sits beside her, and signifies her status as a prolific and enthusiastic artist.
The Leading Star in Art
Across the early modern period, some women painters were in fact able to practice their art professionally, especially in the major centers of Italy and Holland. Judith Leyster (1609–1660) was one of them.
By the age of 19, Leyster had already been praised for her “good and keen insight,” and in 1633, she was admitted to the Haarlem painters’ guild. Later celebrated as “the true leading star in art,” Leyster made this self-portrait as an assertion of her artistic ability.
She looks out at the viewer, relaxed and confident, her arm assertively leaning on the back of the chair. Holding a handful of brushes and a colored palette, she appears momentarily interrupted from her half-finished work, which references a fiddler from her well-received recent painting “Merry Company.”
Ladies of Lace
The intricate lace that Leyster proudly wears reveals another aspect of feminine artistry. Lacemaking, a complex art of the thread, was widely practiced by women in convents and charitable institutions, and during its heyday, lace was one of the most valuable and fashionable textiles in early modern Europe.
By 1665, French aristocrats had spent so much on quality Italian and Flemish (Belgian) laces, that King Louis XIV had to pass an edict barring their import while establishing domestic manufactories across France by enticing foreign experts to train local women. The Republic of Venice saw this as espionage and decreed that lacemakers caught working abroad would be imprisoned or executed.
‘First Porcelain Painter to the King’
In other workshops, such as porcelain factories, some craftswomen did in fact leave their names. They were employed at each stage of production in both family studios and global enterprises, with roles ranging from clay preparation to modeling forms, decorating surfaces, and operating factories.
Marie-Victoire Jaquotot (1772–1855), a renowned portraitist in porcelain, painted the exquisite “Tea Service of Famous Women” at the Sèvres manufacture between 1811 and 1812. Originally designed for Josephine Bonaparte, Empress of Napoleon’s France, Jaquotot featured 16 prominent women from history, including rulers such as Catherine the Great of Russia and Maria Theresa of Austria, as well as cultural luminaries such as Joan of Arc and Madame de Sévigné.
Britain’s Renowned Designer
Like ceramics, the production of fabrics also required multiple steps in which women played a significant role. While most engaged in the time-consuming and physically intense labor of weaving, some rose to prominence as designers and industry leaders. In the mid-18th century, Anna Maria Garthwaite (1688–1763) became one of Britain’s most renowned and prolific silk designers, producing more than one thousand patterns that were transformed into textile.
Her style is characterized by elegantly curving vines with motifs of flowers from all over the world, including magnolias, palm trees, aloe, orchids, and hibiscus. Like the natural specimens that inspired them, these woven textiles also traversed the oceans, shipped from their East London workshops to ports as close to home as Dublin and as far as New York and Philadelphia.
This gown, currently preserved at Colonial Williamsburg, was made sometime around the American Revolution with the silk lampas that Garthwaite designed between 1726 and 1728. The textile was passed down in a colonial family for around 50 years and reused for three generations before being assembled into this wedding dress.
With manuscripts of cloistered nuns, engravings of female scholars, and paintings by Sofonisba Anguissola, Angelica Kauffman, and Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, the exhibition adopts a broad definition of “woman artist” and features a much greater diversity of materials than a short review can afford to recount. “Making Her Mark” provides a fascinating and holistic picture of the role of creative women in early modern European society, and for this it is worth seeing in person.
