Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain 1520-1920 review – A frustrating look at neglected female painters

Laura Knight and Artemisia Gentileschi feature among a vast array of little-known female artists in this expansive survey at Tate Britain, but some of the work on display only underlines the restrictions society has historically placed on the female imagination

Artemisia Gentileschi, ‘Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (La Pittura)', 1638 (Royal Collection Trust / © His Majesty King Charles III 2024)

This scholarly exhibition on British women artists written out of history feels a shade late to the feast. The vogue for unearthing neglected artists from outside the white male Western mainstream peaked a good three years ago in the wake of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter moments. Yet what it lacks in timeliness it makes up for in quantity. While a handful of once stellar painters such as Mary Beale and Angelica Kauffman have been much talked about in recent years – the latter is currently enjoying a major exhibition at the Royal Academy – this show brings whole legions of near totally unknown women painters, sculptors, printmakers and photographers marching out of the shadows.

These weren’t talented amateurs daubing away in stately homes, but determined professionals who forged careers in the face of prejudice, financial challenges and outright hostility. Yet the question of how much of what we’re shown is truly original, let alone groundbreaking, looms large over the exhibition from the outset.

The choice of opening works sets the tone. On the one hand, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1638) by Artemisia Gentileschi shows the Italian painter, generally recognised as the first major woman artist in the Western tradition – who was briefly a resident of London – intent on her craft, paintbrush in hand. On the other, Angelica Kauffman’s Invention (1778) depicts a woman in classical garb with wings sprouting from her head, embodying a quality then seen as the province of men. Women were expected to content themselves with mere “imitation”, creativity, as we’d think of it today, being considered beyond their capacities. Kauffman’s painting may be viewed as a brave statement of defiance, but beside Artemesia’s earthy realism its insipid Neoclassicism is deadly.