One day in Antwerp in 1548 a young woman painted a modest self-portrait in oil on a small oak panel.
Like a hall of mirrors, her painting is a depiction of herself in the act of painting: her left thumb is hooked through a small palette covered in smudges of paint and she holds five thin brushes. Her right hand rests on a mahlstick – a tool which, for centuries, painters have used in order to steady their brush when they work on details. She is pictured forever frozen in the middle of composing an image of a small head within the panel that is balanced on her easel, but she turns to look directly at us; it’s as if we’ve walked into her studio and interrupted her. She is pale and, although she faces us, the expression in her dark eyes is very far away; she’s obviously deep in concentration. (It is possible that she is playing a joke on us, treating us as the mirror she is looking at to paint herself.) She seems tired and is very young. The proportions of her body are awkward; it’s as if she’s still growing. She’s narrow and flat-chested, her arms seem a little too long and her large head has a very small chin. Her clothes are unusual for the studio; the conventions of the time would have demanded she wear a smock, but she has paid convention no heed. She is both modest and magnificent: resplendent in a fine, fitted dark brocade dress with decorated red-ochre sleeves and a lace headdress, her neck adorned with a delicate checked red collar.
A self-portrait is not only a description of concrete reality, it’s also an expression of an inner world. Paint gives the artist permission to express something that might not always be acceptable in words. Here, the young woman depicts herself not only as demure and well off but as someone interrupted in the midst of her creative work. That she is painting at all is, of course, unremarkable by today’s standards but, in the mid-sixteenth century, it would have been highly unusual. Women were wives, mothers and daughters, peasants, nuns, queens and abbesses. Only very rarely were they artists or writers. That she has depicted herself with the tools of her trade – her easel, her palette, her brushes – is significant. Each one of these objects is more than the sum of its parts: they are symbols of this young artist’s resistance to the conventions of her time.
Most artists worked on commission at that time; painting was, of course, a job, and, as such, self-portraiture wasn’t as prevalent as it was to become. Self-expression for its own sake is a very modern idea. However, there are precedents. In 1433 in nearby Bruges, Jan van Eyck had painted his majestic Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?), which is presumed to be the earliest known self-portrait in oil paint. He was one of the first artists to popularise the medium; its slow drying time allowed details to be reworked and layered and resulted in a surface that displayed a rare gloss and subtlety.I Travelling throughout Germany, by 1500 the twenty-nine-year-old Albrecht Dürer had painted his three great, Christ-like self-portraits. Further south, in Venice, Giorgione had portrayed his dreamy, enigmatic self in 1509–10, and in 1545 Tintoretto had followed suit with a haunting head-and-shoulders self-portrait. There are other examples, but they’re not always obviously self-portraits: there are numerous paintings in which artists have portrayed themselves as part of a crowd, say. One of the most famous is Michelangelo’s self-portrait as the flayed skin of St Bartholomew in his Last Judgement fresco in the Sistine Chapel in Rome (1536–41) – perhaps the first self-portrait as a caricature. But none are by women. And none depict the artist in the act of painting. An easel was an object that assisted the artist in creating a painting: it had not been considered a subject worthy of a painting itself.
We don’t know if this young woman in Antwerp had seen any self-portraits. We don’t know if she painted herself in secret. We don’t know if she sketched herself before attempting her painting – there were no paper mills in the Netherlands until the late sixteenth century and drawings weren’t as common as you might assume – and we don’t know where her painting of herself was hung when it was completed. We also don’t know if she knew of any other women artists or even how often she had looked at herself: in the early sixteenth century, mirrors were rare and expensive.
Unless you’re intent on creating an imaginative world, to paint a self-portrait, in the most literal sense – an image of what you look like – you need to be able see yourself. But seeing yourself isn’t a straightforward activity: to look into a mirror can result in as much deceit as understanding. The mirror tells the truth as often as the person looking into it lies – and its invention opened up new ways of looking at, and thinking about and representing, your own face and body.
Mirrors as we know them are a relatively modern invention; until the mid-nineteenth century they were a luxury item. The earliest ones, which were discovered in Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, date from around 6200 BCE and are made from highly polished volcanic glass obsidian: looking into one is like gazing into black water. (This is apt: still, dark water, as the tale of Narcissus looking at his own reflection in a pool attests to, could be considered the first mirror.) The oldest copper mirrors are from Iran and date from around 4000 BCE; not long after, the Ancient Egyptians began making them too; the Romans crafted mirrors from blown glass with lead backing. By 1000 BCE, mirrors – in various shapes, from different materials, and for different ends – were made throughout the world: by the Etruscans, the Greeks and the Romans, in Siberia, China and Japan. In South America, the Aztecs, Incas, Mayan and Olmec civilisations all used them, for both personal and spiritual use; in many cultures, mirrors were believed to be magical objects that granted access to supernatural knowledge. In Britain’s Iron Age – from about 800 BCE to the Roman invasion of AD 49 – mirrors were made from bronze and iron. When glass-blowing was invented in the fourteenth century, hand-held convex mirrors became popular. In 1438, Johannes Gutenberg opened a mirror-making business in Strasbourg; in 1444 he invented the printing press. There’s a symbolic connection between the two: both allow access to other dimensions, reflect the world back on itself and stimulate the expansion of knowledge. In a wonderful marriage of the looking glass and the printing press, by 1500 more than 350 European books had titles that referenced mirrors. In France, women of the court began to wear small mirrors attached to their waists by delicate chains, a fashion that was considered by some commentators to be so vain as to be depraved. In the sixteenth century, the island of Murano off Venice, long known for its glassware, became the centre for mirror manufacture. To put the ensuing craze for mirrors in perspective: in the early sixteenth century an elaborate Venetian mirror was more valuable than a painting by one of the giants of the Renaissance, Raphael, and at the end of the seventeenth century, in France, the Countess of Fiesque swapped a piece of land for a mirror. In 1684 the Hall of Mirrors was completed at the Palace of Versailles: it was comprised of more than 300 panes of mirrored glass, so that royalty could see their glory reflected seemingly to infinity. The Hall’s fame spread – and was copied – throughout Europe.
The first known oil painting featuring a mirror – and arguably the most famous – is Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait from 1434, which now hangs in London’s National Gallery. (It’s also the first portrait of people in a domestic setting.) It features a convex mirror in which you can see tiny reflections of the entire room, the backs of the couple who occupy it and two small figures standing in the doorway: quite possibly one of them is a minuscule portrait of the artist.
Leonardo da Vinci was, it’s fair to say, obsessed with mirrors, both as objects and metaphors. He advised that ‘the mind of the painter should be like a mirror which always takes the colour of the thing it reflects and which is filled by as many images as there are things placed before it’.
One of the greatest self-portraitists, Dürer, confessed that his paintings were ‘made out of a mirror’. Vasari distinguishes between self-portraits painted ‘alla sphera’ (with a convex mirror about the size of a saucer) and ‘allo specchio’ (either flat or convex but more likely to be made from metal). It’s fair to say that developments in mirror-making were directly reflected in developments in picture-making.
But still, despite their popularity, for centuries mirrors were difficult to make, poisonous (due to the mercury) and expensive. It wasn’t until 1835 that a German chemist named Justus von Liebig invented a process that allowed, for the first time, mirrors to be mass-produced.
What is rarely mentioned in cultural histories of the mirror is how liberating their invention was for female painters. It meant that, for the first time, their exclusion from the life class didn’t stop them painting figures. Now, with the aid of a looking glass, they had a willing model, and one who was available around the clock: themselves.
The young artist in Antwerp pictures herself illuminated in the midst of darkness. She has zoomed in on the upper half of her body; the painting itself, at only 31 x 25 cm, is not much bigger than a book. Despite the diffuse atmosphere, the tools of her trade surround her – they seem, in this faraway scene, reassuringly solid. Her easel is sturdy and steady, like a buffer between her and the world beyond; she holds her palette and a fistful of brushes as tightly as you might hold a dagger in a dark wood. In case anyone looking at the painting should be in any doubt as to who she is or what her intentions might be, she carefully inscribed some small words in Latin on its surface. Translated they read: ‘I Caterina van Hemessen have painted myself / 1548 / Here aged 20.’
To our twenty-first-century eyes, this small self-portrait could be dismissed as a charming, slightly clumsy curio, a dusty offering painted at a time when few women were professional artists. However, despite appearances, it is a radical and ground-breaking work of art: it’s widely considered to be the earliest surviving self-portrait of an artist of any gender seated at an easel – and Catharina is the first female Flemish painter whose work we know of. (As her own spelling of her name is inconsistent,II and as museums list her as ‘Catharina’, I’ll stick with that.) What perhaps makes it even more extraordinary is that this young artist wasn’t satisfied with just one self-portrait: like a twentieth-century conceptualist, she made two other versions of the painting in the same year. At a time when the contributions of women were rendered invisible, Catharina stubbornly painted herself again and again.
We have no idea if she knew how radical her self-portrait was. Writing at a distance of almost 500 years, at a time when millions of images of young women proliferate daily, it is near impossible to imagine a time when a particular image or pose had never been seen before. The art historian Frances Borzello suggests: ‘If it is true that this is the first portrait of an artist at work, it could be because she came from the northern tradition which specialized in depictions of St Luke painting the Virgin, and she had the wit to adapt this example of a working artist for herself.’
It’s possible, of course – but ultimately, we can never know what inspired this self-portrait. It can be read on many levels: as a reference to art-historical iconography (St Luke), a celebration of skill and social standing (her fancy clothes), and a declaration of independence by a woman who would normally be defined through her father, husband or children. I like to think of it as a form of protest: ‘I am a woman working,’ she seems to be saying, ‘and you can’t stop me.’
What we know of Catharina’s life is scarce. She is mentioned in passing by two sixteenth-century Italian art historians: Lodovico Guicciardini in his Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, altrimenti detti Germania inferior (Description of the Low Countries) of 1567, and a year later, by Vasari in his Vite (Lives) of 1568. As we don’t know when Catharina died, it’s unclear if she knew about her inclusion in these important books. At a time when females weren’t allowed to study anatomy or to be apprenticed – gruelling training which often began as young as nine years old – like so many pre-twentieth-century women who managed to become professional painters, Catharina came from an artistic milieu. As we will see, this was not uncommon. Most of the women who worked as engravers, painters, sculptors and embroiderers from the Middle Ages onwards were the wives or daughters of artists – this was the only way they had access to a studio. Other daughters of artists who became respected painters themselves include Rose Adélaïde Ducreux (1761–1802), a composer and artist whose father was Joseph Ducreux; Barbara Longhi (1552–1638), the daughter of Luca Longhi; Marietta Robusti (c. 1560–90), who dressed as a boy and was Tintoretto’s favourite child; Antonia (1456–91), the daughter of Paolo Uccello who became an artist nun; and Justina (1641–c. 1690), Anthony van Dyck’s only daughter. Many of their creations have been lost, destroyed or misattributed. The talent of some of these artists – such as Rosa Bonheur, Artemisia Gentileschi, Angelica Kauffman, Elisabetta Sirani and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun – ended up eclipsing, often by some distance, that of their fathers.
Born in 1528 in Antwerp, in the Habsburg Netherlands (now Belgium), Catharina’s father was the renowned painter, Jan Sanders van Hemessen (c. 1500–66). Her mother, Barbara de Fevre, died when Catharina was still young. She had a sister, Christina, who was possibly a musician – a painting by Catharina from 1548 of a young woman playing a spinet could be a portrait of her – and a much younger illegitimate half-brother, Augustus, who also became a painter, though little is known of his work now.
In the first half of the sixteenth century, Antwerp – under the rule of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Spain – was the richest city in Europe and the centre of foreign trading houses and banks. The world’s first stock exchange was built there in 1531. When banks boom, art blooms; Antwerp was cosmopolitan, its politics relatively tolerant and patrons were plentiful. As the city had, thanks to its thriving economy, only recently attracted important artists, it had no dominant pictorial tradition. This wasn’t a setback – quite the opposite, in fact. Such a lack of tradition allowed for a greater sense of freedom and experimentation than might have been tolerated in a city with a more illustrious past to live up to.
Catharina was trained in her father’s studio, accepted as a professional painter into the Guild of St Luke – one of the rare instances of a sixteenth-century institution accepting women – and had three students. She married Christian de Morien, an organist who worked at Antwerp Cathedral and early on found a supporter in Mary of Hungary, Regent of the Low Countries and sister of Charles V. When Mary returned to her home in Castille, Spain, in 1556, she invited Catharina and her husband to accompany her to the court of her nephew Philip II of Spain. It’s more than likely that she worked as an artist during her time in Spain, but only eleven small portraits and two religious paintings are attributed to her: a fire at the court possibly destroyed some of her work and it’s probable that other works by her are misattributed. When Mary died in 1558, she bequeathed the young artist a generous pension for life. Catharina and her husband moved back to Antwerp and then to ’s-Hertogenbosch, where Christian had work. But after 1561, the trail goes cold. It is not known when Catharina died – her death is usually listed as ‘after 1587’ – or if she had children, although becoming a mother may well be the reason her career stopped so abruptly.
The latest date for a surviving work attributed to Catharina is the exquisite Portrait of a Young Lady (c. 1560). In the twelve years that had passed since she painted herself at the easel, it is evident that Catharina had worked hard at her craft: as in her self-portrait, this elegant young woman, her identity unknown, gazes intently out at us from a monochrome background, but now all sense of timidity or clumsiness has vanished. She is dressed in extraordinarily elaborate clothes: sleeves of puffed black velvet and crisp white linen, embellished with blue ribbon, her collar lined with lace, gold buttons down the middle of her bodice, a heavy gold chain around her neck and waist, and a slim gold cap on her demure hair. She has a tiny waist and her hands are strangely large and soft, but her face is rendered with an austere, crystal-clear realism that gives the painting its power. Her steady, faintly melancholy gaze, so full of resolve and character, tells us that she is, despite the tight formality of her costume, very much her own person – a time traveller from more than four centuries ago who feels radically contemporary.
Although Catharina’s life was unusual for the time, she wasn’t entirely alone in her choice of career. Quite a few Flemish female artists were active in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries yet, as is the case with Catharina, very little of their work survives – or, if it does, has possibly been attributed to other (male) artists. For example, the prolific Bruges-born Levina Teerlinc (c. 1510–76) was the only female court miniature painter in the Tudor Court under four monarchs – Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I – and yet, as she rarely signed her paintings, very few works are now attributed to her. One of the few Flemish women artists of the time whose work is clearly attributed is the aristocratic history painter Mechtelt van Lichtenberg toe Boecop (c. 1520–98), whose Pieta from 1546 is in the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. It is tempting to think that Catharina signed her youthful self-portrait all those centuries ago because she had a premonition that if she didn’t, then her name might disappear – like so many women before and after her – from the history books. If only she had continued to do so, we might be aware of many more of her paintings.
We do not know to what extent the woman artists of the past knew about each other. Did Catharina ever hear about another trailblazing painter, only four years her junior, who was working hard at her craft in Cremona in Italy? Her trajectory was to echo, in some ways, Catharina’s – she too worked at the Spanish court – but there the story changes: the spirited and adventurous Sofonisba Anguissola was the most prolific self-portraitist between Dürer and Rembrandt and one of the most famous European artists – of either sex – of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Almost as soon as she died, however, she disappeared from view. She too pictured herself at the easel: but she gave the subject a twist.
Sofonisba Anguissola was born in Cremona around 1531 (the precise year is unknown) into an aristocratic, but not particularly wealthy, family from Piacenza. She was the eldest of six sisters and a brother; her father and mother, Amilcare and Bianca, encouraged their children in the arts. This was not unusual for noble families: in his popular Book of the Courtier (1528) – a handbook for etiquette and behaviour – the courtier, diplomat, poet, scholar and soldier, Baldassare Castiglione, describes what was expected of a lady at court: ‘I want this lady to be knowledgeable about literature and painting, to know how to dance and play games, adding a discreet modesty and the ability to give a good impression of herself.’
While first impressions might be favourable – young women are encouraged to learn – Castiglione’s book makes clear that such talents are attractive not because they give the woman pleasure, but because they please the men around her.
It’s a sign of her family’s support that, extremely unusually for the time, Sofonisba’s gender was not seen as a barrier to talent or success. When she was eleven, she was sent, along with her sister Elena (who later became a nun) to be apprenticed to the artist Bernardino Campi for three years. It was rare for two young girls to be placed in a household to which they had no blood relations, and for an artist to accept female pupils. In 1549 she studied again, this time with the minor fresco painter, Bernardino Gatti. Three of Sofonisba’s siblings, Minerva, Europa and Lucia, also became artists, because Sofonisba taught them, and then they in turn taught their youngest sister, Anna Maria. Alongside Sofonisba, only Lucia was to achieve a modest success, but she died before she was thirty. Vasari wrote that ‘dying, [she] had left of herself not less fame than that of Sofonisba, through several paintings by her own hand, not less beautiful and valuable than those by the sister’.
As a woman, Sofonisba was barred from the life studio, a restriction she side-stepped by using herself and her family as subjects. Her most famous painting, The Chess Game (1555), is a wonderfully vivid and affectionate portrayal of her sisters, accompanied by their maid, Giovanna, playing chess – a game considered to be both intellectual and strategic, attributes not often associated with women at the time. Bejewelled in gold and pearls and dressed in costumes more extravagant than the girls would normally have worn to play in a garden, it’s clear Sofonisba wanted to honour her sisters’ beauty and lively personalities, while demonstrating her own dazzling gifts. Perhaps she was also aware of how ground-breaking her homage was: she was the first artist to portray her family as a primary subject. Her younger sister, Europa, smiles broadly at Minerva to her left – in itself a radical gesture, as such levity was not considered decorous. Minerva is seen in profile, but her right hand is raised, as if in mock surrender to her superior opponent. To Europa’s right, Lucia, the older sister, looks directly out at us, faintly smiling; her right hand moves a chess piece, while her left holds a captured queen. The five hands we can see in the painting are all active: holding, moving, raising, touching. It’s a rare, playful image of girls employing their wits against each other and having fun. The scene is set in a garden to a backdrop of a misty, mountainous landscape. As the landscape around Cremona is flat, we can only assume that Sofonisba was dreaming of future journeys to distant lands.
Vasari wrote of The Chess Game that it was ‘executed so well that they appear to be breathing and absolutely alive’. His emphasis on the vivacity of the characters in the portrait is poignant. By the time he saw Sofonisba’s homage to her sisters, Minerva and Lucia had both died.
Not yet out of her twenties, Sofonisba’s fame was growing. At least twelve of her self-portraits survive and there are records of seven more. Her father Amilcare was so active in selling his gifted daughter’s work that he is considered to be one of the first dealers in self-portraits. In 1554 he wrote to Michelangelo, who was then working in Rome, asking him to mentor his precocious daughter. He included with his letter a sketch of a laughing girl. Michelangelo replied with a challenge: he would like to see her draw a crying boy, which to his mind was a more difficult task. In response, Sofonisba sent the famous artist a virtuoso drawing in black chalk on brown paper of her brother, who she had ‘deliberately made cry’ in order to sketch him. The little boy is comforted by his lively young sister, who is gently smiling. It’s a drawing full of life, affection, nuance; the children’s noisy, playful personalities leap from the page. Asdrubale Bitten by a Crayfish (c. 1554) apparently influenced Caravaggio’s famous painting Boy Bitten by a Lizard of 1593.
Michelangelo was so impressed with Sofonisba’s talent that, around 1554, she undertook the three-week journey to Rome from Cremona, where it is possible that the seventy-nine-year-old master informally taught the nineteen-year-old artist. On 7 May 1557, Amilcare wrote to Michelangelo thanking him for the ‘honourable and thoughtful affection that you have shown to Sofonisba, my daughter, to whom you introduced to practise the most honourable art of painting’.
The Renaissance was a time when it was considered so unusual for a woman to excel at art that if she showed any talent whatsoever, she was praised as an aberration, a ‘miracle’, as Vasari famously observed. He rhetorically asked that if women ‘know so well how to make living men, what marvel is it that those who wish are also so well able to make them in painting?’ That Sofonisba never had children must, surely, have been cause for an extra level of astonishment: what was a woman if not a mother?
Despite the talented women artists who incontrovertibly flourished during the Renaissance, most aristocratic girls usually only had two options: marriage or the convent, something that was decided for them by the time they were in their mid-teens. But whichever route was chosen, a dowry would need to be paid – and the Anguissola family’s financial state was precarious. It’s not beyond the realms of possibility that the encouragement of Sofonisba’s father stemmed not only from pride in the skills of his daughters but from necessity: if their paintings could be sold, the family would prosper. The idea that a daughter could bring money in was highly unconventional: women at the time very rarely worked. Aristocratic women didn’t even breastfeed as it was considered taxing and demeaning.
But by all accounts Sofonisba was not someone to be held back by anyone. In 1556 she painted a self-portrait at the easel. Although we don’t know if the young artist was familiar with the work of Catharina van Hemessen or her painting of eight years earlier, the similarities between the two youthful self-portraits are startling: both women picture themselves softly illuminated in the darkness, as if nothing on earth could distract them from their art. Both appear interrupted in the midst of painting and are dressed demurely with small flashes of decoration, but neither is wearing jewellery. This lack of adornment is particularly noticeable on Sofonisba, who as a noblewoman would normally have worn, at the very least, a necklace and earrings. Perhaps she didn’t want anything to distract from the focus of the painting: as an image of herself as an artist, not as a temptress, she is emphasising her intellectual, not her physical, properties. Both artists hold a mahlstick, something that Sofonisba omitted in later self-portraits, possibly out of vanity (she was too good to need any help). The palette rests on the easel, its blobs of paint the only sign of disarray; the red, especially, animates the composition like a drop of blood. Sofonisba, however, goes one step further than Catharina in her inscription, with words that counter the restraint of her demeanour:
I, Sofonisba Anguissola, unmarried, am the equal of the Muses and Apelles in playing my songs and handling my paints.
Apelles was a renowned painter from Ancient Greece, who was praised by the classical historian Pliny the Elder and cited by Vasari as a standard-bearer; the Muses, of course, were the nine Greek goddesses who personified literature, music, art and science. That a young woman in Italy, during a period when women had few freedoms, could claim herself as the equal of the ancient gods is a clear indication of Sofonisba’s confidence in her talents. The fact that she is dressed in black – a colour which, at the time, was worn mainly by men – could also be read as a signal of the seriousness with which she took herself as an artist and her refusal to be defined by her gender.
Whereas the subject that Catharina pictures herself painting is vague – the beginnings of a head, most likely a virgin – the focus of Sofonisba’s self-portrait is clear: she depicts herself working on a particularly tender portrait of a Madonna and Child. Mary’s pose is youthful, human; she leans down, her face full of love and good humour, to embrace Jesus, whose face is upturned to his mother as if to be kissed. This painting within a painting is both a virtuoso turn and a clear statement of the artist’s religiosity and chastity, something that was essential for female artists to emphasise at the time. Despite some important woman patrons – such as Catherine de’ Medici, Queen of France (1519–89), who commissioned architecture as well as art, along with her rival, her husband’s mistress Diane de Poitiers (1499–1566), and Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua (1474–1539) – men were central to the success or failure of an artist’s career and they needed to be assured of the blameless character and decorous nature of the woman who was partaking in this radical activity for her sex: that of being an artist. Women who were serious about becoming professional artists often signified their chastity by painting – and depicting themselves painting – religious subjects.
In 1556, Sofonisba was to create her smallest painting – and one of the most mysterious works of the Renaissance: a tiny (8 x 6 cm) medallion self-portrait in varnished watercolour on parchment on cardboard. The artist portrays herself in all her youthful modesty: wide-eyed, she looks out at us with an unnervingly direct gaze. She is unadorned, seen from the waist up, her golden hair tightly pulled back, a demure white collar against a black robe and a soft, dark green background. Yet any sense of restraint is undermined by the sheer strangeness of what the young artist holds in front of her: a large medallion emblazoned with a mysterious monogram of intertwined letters that covers most of her body. According to the art historian Patrizia Costa, it’s a code that both expresses and hides a message: its meaning is accessible only to those who are clever enough – or intimate with the artist herself – to decipher. Interpretations still vary as to the monogram’s meaning: it could be an anagram of her father’s name, a reference to Michelangelo, either Sofonisba’s sister Minerva or Minerva, the patroness of artistry and learning, or a Latin phrase that asserts the young artist’s nobility. We may never know for sure. The Latin inscription around the edge of the medallion translates as: ‘The maiden Sofonisba Anguissola, depicted by her own hand, from a mirror, at Cremona.’ It’s a wonderfully restrained statement for such a mischievous picture.
In 1558, Sofonisba travelled to Milan, where – possibly thanks to an introduction from Michelangelo – she met and painted the Grand Duke of Alba, the Spanish aristocrat and advisor to Philip II, king of Spain, the most powerful ruler in Europe. Around the time of Sofonisba’s birth the Duchy of Milan, which governed Cremona, had become part of the Spanish Empire and her family had close connections to the Spanish court. Along with fourteen Spanish and five French women, she was invited to become a lady-in-waiting and painting instructor to the fourteen-year-old Isabel de Valois, the daughter of Henry II of France and Catherine de’ Medici, who was about to become Philip II’s third wife. In the 1568 edition of his Lives, Vasari writes effusively about this encounter, declaring that Sofonisba ‘has laboured at the difficulties of design with greater study and better grace than any other woman of our time’. We get an indication of her fame from a letter that the renowned poet and translator, Annibale Caro, wrote to Amilcare, thanking him for his hospitality and for the honour of meeting his daughters. He was happy to accept the offer of buying one of Sofonisba’s self-portraits: ‘Nothing do I desire more than the effigy of Sofonisba herself, so that I can simultaneously show two marvels together, the work and the artist.’ However, the painting was returned after seven months, as Amilcare never received payment.
One of Sofonisba’s more audacious paintings around this time is Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola (c. 1559). A remarkably inventive combination of portrait and self-portrait, the young artist pictures her teacher in front of an easel painting her portrait, although there is no record of him ever doing so. That Sofonisba painted herself looming over her teacher is telling: a sly joke that mixes faux reverence with bold ambition. Ostensibly she is acknowledging her debt to Campi – he is pictured in the act of creating her – but curiously, the picture was made almost a decade after she had stopped working with him. By the time she had painted it, he had long ago moved to northern Italy and so she must have rendered his likeness from memory and possibly from other portraits. Despite the assumption that the painting is a homage, Sofonisba makes very clear that she doesn’t need anyone to paint her picture as she can do it perfectly well herself. It has been suggested that the depiction of her teacher with a mahlstick is a dig at his mediocrity: a virtuoso painter would have no need of such a prop. Whereas Catharina had painted herself at the easel, Sofonisba literally inserted herself into the easel: its wooden structure is so close to her that it’s like an extension of her body.
What happened to Sofonisba’s wonderful riddle of a self-portrait after her death is symptomatic of the fate of so many paintings by Renaissance women artists. Despite her immense fame during her lifetime, Sofonisba only signed around ten of her paintings.III If only she had been consistent. When Bernardino Campi Painting Sofonisba Anguissola came into the collection of the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena in 1864, it was variously attributed to Paolo Veronese, Jacopo Tintoretto and Bernardino Campi himself. It was only thanks to the scholarship of the nineteenth-century art historian Giovanni Morelli who identified the painting’s subject, and the artist as Sofonisba, that it now hangs with its correct attribution. But without a signature, debates will always rage: recently, the art historian Michael W. Cole wrote about the dizzying inconsistencies in records of Sofonisba’s work; he even doubts her authorship of the Campi portrait, questioning, among other things, why she would paint her teacher ten years after leaving his workshop. This also goes the other way: because she was painting in a style that was popular at the court, some scholars are convinced that one or two unsigned paintings attributed to El Greco and the Spanish court painter Alonso Sánchez Coello are, in fact, by Sofonisba.
But this is all in the future. In 1559, at the age of twenty-six, Sofonisba travelled to Spain where she ‘drew a handsome salary’. (Her father must have been pleased, as he was paid 800 lire by the Spanish king for his daughter’s work.) We get a glimpse of her high spirits and audacious manners by contemporary reports of her opening the dancing at Isabel de Valois’s marriage to Philip II. Sofonisba became close to the queen and her two daughters and was to stay in Madrid for fourteen years during which time she created numerous portraits of the Spanish royal family and nobility and what are most likely five self-portraits. As well as her skills on the dance floor, she was apparently a popular courtesan, attributes that could only help in the male-dominated craft of painting.
It’s tempting to think of Catharina van Hemessen and Sofonisba meeting, although it’s unlikely: the Flemish artist had left Spain the year before the Italian arrived. Given the relative rarity of female painters working at court, we can assume that the young Sofonisba must have heard of Catharina, but no records of an encounter exist.
In 1568 the young Queen Isabel died giving premature birth; she was only twenty-three. Sofonisba was devastated; in a letter dated 4 October 1568, a fellow courtier Bernardo Maschi writes: ‘Lady Sofonisba says she no longer wants to live.’
Around 1570, the Spanish king arranged for Sofonisba – who, in her late thirties, would have been considered scandalously unmarried – to wed a Sicilian nobleman, Fabrizio Moncada. (Interestingly, only two of Sofonisba’s five sisters were to marry, a very unusual state of affairs for the time.) Moncada was apparently supportive of his wife’s talents. With a generous dowry and an annual provision from the Spanish king, the couple moved to Paternò in Sicily. After five years of married (and childless) life, Moncada was travelling to Spain when the ship he was sailing in was attacked by pirates off the coast of Capri and he was drowned. (The events surrounding his death are often referred to as ‘mysterious circumstances’.) Two years later, travelling to Cremona by sea, Sofonisba met and fell in love with the ship’s Sicilian captain, Orazio Lomellino, who was ten years her junior and considered socially beneath her. Without asking permission from her brother Asdrubale, who was now the head of the family and her legal guardian, or the approval of Philip II, they married in Pisa. They moved to Genoa, where they lived for three decades and Sofonisba became the leading portraitist of the city and then, around 1615, they moved to Palermo in Sicily. Sofonisba painted her final, unflinching, self-portrait in 1620, at the age of eighty-five.
Sofonisba was famous throughout Europe; she was also an inspiration to other women with creative ambitions. Apparently Irene di Spilimbergo (1541–59) and Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) reportedly ‘set [their] hearts on how to paint’ after seeing one of Sofonisba’s portraits. Lavinia, a Bolognese artist and the daughter of the renowned Mannerist painter Prospero Fontana, was to excel: she became the first woman to run a professional studio and the first woman to depict mythological subjects – including nudes.
Artists travelled from afar to meet and learn from Sofonisba. In 1624 the twenty-five-year-old Flemish painter Anthony van Dyck was invited to Sicily to paint the Spanish viceroy, Emanuel Filiberto of Savoy. (At the time, Spain ruled most of the territories below Rome.) Soon after the artist’s arrival, the island experienced an outbreak of the plague; with no one allowed to leave or enter, Van Dyck was forced to stay for eighteen months in the island’s capital, Palermo.
On 12 July 1624 he visited Sofonisba, now eighty-nine – although Van Dyck records her age as ninety-six – at the Lomellini Palace in Palermo, to paint her portrait. It’s worth quoting at length how he captured the encounter in his sketchbook, as it gives such a vivid portrait of the older artist: interestingly, it was the only meeting he wrote at length about. He observes that she still has:
… a very sharp memory and mind, being most courteous and although she was lacking in good eyesight because of her old age, she nonetheless found pleasure in placing the paintings in front of her and, with great effort, placing her nose close against the painting, she was able to make out a little of it and took great pleasure that way. In making her portrait, she gave me several pieces of advice: not to raise the light too high, so that the shadows in the wrinkles of old age would not grow too large, and many other good suggestions, and moreover, she recounted the part of her life in which she was recognised as a miraculous painter from life, and the greatest torment she had known was not being able to paint anymore, because of her failing eyesight. Her hand was still steady, without any trembling.
Van Dyck’s portrait of Sofonisba shows a steely old woman with fierce, hooded eyes and a resolute gaze. She is dressed demurely in black, with a crisp white ruffle; her head is covered with a white linen veil. As in her early self-portrait, she is surrounded by a dark background: she alone illuminates the void.
The painting is now in the National Trust collection at Knole, Kent. On their website is a brief line of description: ‘This portrait closely resembles the pen drawing, dated 12 July 1624 in Van Dyck’s Italian Sketchbook (British Museum) of the Italian artist Sophonisba [sic] Anguissola at the age of 96. Previously it was known as Catherine Fitzgerald, Countess of Desmond (d. 1636).’ Despite the fame Sofonisba had experienced in her lifetime, after her death even her own face was, for a time, misattributed.
Sofonisba died in Palermo in 1625. Her husband inscribed her tomb with the words: ‘To Sofonisba, my wife, who is recorded among the illustrious women of the world, outstanding in portraying the images of men.’ It is widely quoted that Van Dyck said of his meeting with Sofonisba that he had ‘received more wise advice from the words of a blind woman than from the works of well-known painters’.IV
Between 1642 and 1651 more than 100,000 people, out of a population of only five million, lost their lives in the English Civil War. In 1649 the king was executed and when the blade fell, the regular order of things was upturned forever. Horror aside, it was a time ripe for change. Traditional ideas were, if not quite up for grabs, at least wobbling on their foundations. In the midst of carnage, it must have become clear to many that the accepted ways of the world weren’t necessarily the right ones.
Perhaps this is why Mary Beale, who was born eight years after Sofonisba died, gave herself permission to become one of the first women to work as a professional artist in Britain – and the first woman we know of who wrote about art.
In seventeenth-century England women were vocal and, despite their lack of voting power, political. In 1642 a group of women petitioned parliament about the economic effects of the Civil War; in 1643 they organised a peace march in London which resulted in some participants being beaten, arrested and killed. With the men off fighting, women were given responsibilities undreamed of in peace time: they ran estates and businesses and, in some cases, physically defended their property. King Charles I’s execution was a brutal challenge to the divine right of kings, which inevitably meant that assumptions about equality or a lack thereof – not just between rich and poor but between women and men – were ripe for reform.
What was Mary Beale’s childhood like? Did she know of any women who painted seriously? It wasn’t what a girl did. It wasn’t what a girl should aspire to. Yet, she persisted.
On 26 March 1633, Mary Craddock, who as Mary Beale would become one of the first professional female painters in Britain, was born in Barrow, Suffolk. Her family was Puritan: her father, John Craddock, was a rector and amateur painter; we don’t know much about her mother, Dorothy: she died when Mary was ten. Again and again, it is the father’s interest in art that opens doors for the daughters.
In 1651, at the end of the English Civil War, Mary married Charles Beale, a cloth and paint merchant and amateur artist who had wooed her with a poem addressed to the ‘Quintessence of all Goodness’. He described Mary’s beauty as ‘best arts Master Peece / More worth then Jasons Golden ffleece’. They had a son, Bartholomew, who died in infancy, and then two more, (another) Bartholomew and Charles. In 1655 the family moved to London’s Covent Garden where Mary worked at her painting; she and her husband became part of a lively group of artists and intellectuals. Mary became friends with, and was possibly taught by, the Dutch painter Peter Lely (1618–80), who had bought paint from Charles and was happy to lend his paintings to Mary in order to copy – and learn from. Lely was one of the most fashionable artists of the time. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, he was appointed Principal Painter to King Charles II.
Although female artists in seventeenth-century England were extremely rare, Mary wasn’t entirely alone. In the sixteenth century, the Flemish-born miniaturist Susanna Horenbout (1503–1554) – daughter of the artist Gerard Horenbout – was praised by Vasari, became a court painter to Henry VIII, and is considered to be the first woman to work professionally as an artist in England. (Famously, Albrecht Dürer bought her illumination The Saviour in 1521, writing in his journal: ‘It is very wonderful that a woman’s picture should be so good.’) In terms of home-grown talent, the portrait painter Joan Carlile (c. 1606–79), about twenty-seven years older than Beale, is widely considered to be the first professional female artist to be born in Britain, although only ten of her paintings have survived. Did Joan Carlile ever meet Mary Beale? We don’t know, although given how few women were practising as artists at the time, and how close they lived to one another, it’s hard not to imagine that she did. Joan’s home and studio was in Covent Garden (at the time, the epicentre of London’s artistic community) for two years from 1654 – Mary moved there in 1655 – and then again from 1665 in the parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields.
Although Mary worked hard at her painting from a young age, she didn’t earn anything from it until she was thirty-seven, in 1670. However, her talent was recognised early on. Twelve years before she became a professional artist, she was mentioned by the historian Sir William Sanderson in his book Graphice: the use of the Pen and Pensil or The Most Excellent Art of Painting as one of four women working as artists at the time: ‘in Oyl Colours we have a virtuous example in that worthy Artist Mrs. Carlile: and of others Mr[s]. Beale, Mrs. Brooman, and to Mrs. Weimes’. Who Mrs Brooman and Mrs Weimes were, however, we don’t know. There are no other mentions of their lives or work – just a tantalising hint that they existed.
One of the reasons we know so much about Mary Beale is because she was a writer as well as a painter. On 14 August 1663 she penned around 250 words on how best to paint apricots. Titled Observations by MB, it is the first known piece of writing about art by a woman and one of the earliest pieces of writing about art techniques to be published in English. It’s so full of technical advice that we can assume it was either to instruct her two sons, both of whom were to become artists (although one retrained as a doctor), or her students: Mary taught a group of young women, one of whom, Sarah Hoadley, became a professional portrait painter herself. Her advice:
Bury oker is by no means to bee left out in y painting of apricots, because it adds a naturallnes to y complexion of y fruite, and makes y rest of y Color worke abundantly better. Those apricots I painted before I made use of Bury oker were muche harsher colored & nothing so soft…
By 1665 the family had fallen on hard times – Charles had lost his job at the Patents Office and the Great Plague was decimating London’s population – and so they moved to Hampshire. For the next five years Mary Beale painted in a studio in their home. Their marriage was obviously a happy one; the mere fact of a woman not only being allowed but encouraged to paint was a testament to her husband’s support.
In 1667, Mary wrote a Discourse on Friendship, which she dedicated to her friend Elizabeth Tillotson. Very unusually for the time, in the text, Mary argues for ‘equal dignity and honour’ with her husband, along with more predictable avowals of piety. Friendship, she writes, is hard work and can only be fully experienced by those who ‘strive against and restrain’ their ‘owne imperfections’. She makes clear that support and encouragement were at the heart of any real relationship, something which was easy to perform ‘in a quiet sea’ but not in ‘tempestuous storms’. It’s advice that’s not out of place today.
The family returned to London in 1670 and opened a studio in St James. Mary’s husband worked as her assistant. He mixed her paints, prepared canvases, kept her accounts and ran the household. Thanks to the thirty notebooks he wrote about the daily life of the studio, we have a glimpse into Mary’s busy working life. Charles was also something of a scientist: from the age of sixteen he had kept a notebook titled Experimental Secrets found out in the way of Painting (c. 1647–1663). In it, he investigates the possibilities of accelerating the drying rate of oil paint, which at the time was very slow, and describes his experiments in creating the best pigments: for example, on 22 July 1659 he boils cochineal beetles and then mixes the ensuing liquid with ‘Spanish Cakes’ (chalk and alum) to see what might transpire. His experiments eventually resulted in a successful paint-selling business. Mary’s sons helped out with the studio, preparing and underpainting her canvases.
The Beales’ circle of friends and patrons included aristocrats and clergymen, lawyers, artists and writers. For her business to succeed, however, it was essential for Mary to be known as a woman of blameless character: this she had achieved not only through her status as a wife and mother, but by a written testament. In 1667 the painter Samuel Woodforde – who had married Charles’s cousin – published his Paraphrase upon the Psalms of David. In it, he somewhat mysteriously declared that four versions of the Psalms were by ‘M.M.B.’. In his preface he revealed the identity of the mystery writer as: ‘that absolutely compleat Gentlewoman […] the truly vertuous Mrs. Mary Beale, amongst whose least accomplishments it is, that she has made Painting and Poesy which in the Fancies of others had only before a kind of likeness, in her own to be really the same’.
As she was publicly declared ‘virtuous’, it was now perfectly respectable to sit for Mary Beale: a massive boon for her career. She was finally a professional artist and was commissioned to paint portraits – especially clerical portraits, a clever move which cemented her respectability. She also made intimate studies of friends, family – and herself.
In 1675, at the height of her popularity, Mary painted her Self-Portrait Holding an Artist’s Palette. It’s a small work – only 45 x 38 cm – but has immense charm. The artist has pictured herself looking younger than her forty-three years; her skin smooth and unblemished and her loose and abundant hair, unmarked by grey, lightly reflecting the rich red of her dress. Her lustrous blue cape forms a throne, of sorts; she is in the midst of what appears to be a grand room, framed by a pillar and some drapery. So far, so conventional. But the painting is quietly subversive: in her left hand, Mary’s thumb is looped through a small palette, covered in blobs of paint, and she is holding a small cluster of brushes; in her right hand she holds a thin mahlstick in front of her, like an offering. She stares out at us, her eyes dark and steadfast, a very faint smile lingering on her lips. She is lovely, sensual, demure – and a working woman: an artist surrounded by the wealth her talents have afforded her. The painting was intended to be displayed alongside a small portrait she had made around the same time of her husband. He, too, looks younger than he would have been; if hung to the right of his wife’s self-portrait, he would be looking towards her, his face amiable and warm, while she looks out at us. Despite its obvious affection, the double portrait reverses the traditional marriage roles of the time: Mary looks out at the world, while her husband – whose face is visibly affected by warts – gazes at his wife: the breadwinner.
Mary became very successful; her works are now listed in sixty-nine galleries and museums, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and Moyse’s Hall in Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, which owns twenty-six of her portraits. In 1677 alone she had more than eighty commissions – which, when you take into consideration that each sitting was about three hours long and took four or five visits over a two-month period – is a staggering amount of work.
Mary Beale died in 1699 in Pall Mall, and was buried at St James’s, Piccadilly. A memorial plaque in the church states that her tomb was destroyed by the enemy bombs that rained down upon London in the first phase of the Blitz, at 7.54 p.m., 14 October 1940.
Given historically low literacy rates, we are lucky that so many women artists could also write; our understanding of their lives is now all the richer for it. In 1873, at the age of fifteen, a young noblewoman declared in her diary: ‘What am I?… Nothing! What do I want to be? Everything!’
One hundred and fifty years after Mary Beale’s death, on 12 November 1858, Marie Bashkirtseff was born in Gavronzi in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine). Despite dying a month short of her twenty-sixth birthday from tuberculosis, she was briefly to become one of the most famous women in Europe, renowned not only as a painter, sculptor and musician but, like Mary, as a writer, too. When a heavily edited version of the eighty-four notebooks she left behind was published posthumously in 1887 in France as The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, and then in 1890 in England, it became an instant bestseller. In an article published in The Fortnightly Review in 1890, one writer declared, ‘It is this Journal with which the world is now ringing and which it is hardly too much to say is likely to carry the fame of Marie Bashkirtseff over the face of the civilised globe.’
A street in Nice, where she spent her last days, is named after her, and her tomb in the Cimetière de Passy in Paris has been proclaimed a historical monument by the French government. For a young and uncompromising woman to be so admired – despite her early death – was unprecedented.
From an early age Marie had travelled with her doting mother (who was also called Marie) throughout Europe; her parents had separated when she was still young, and her father, Konstantin, remained in Russia. The family had about them the whiff of scandal; Marie’s mother had left her father and her uncle Georges had been in and out of prison; as a result, when they moved to Nice, they were socially ostracised. By the age of thirteen, Marie was fluent in Latin and Greek (as well as French and Russian) and was reading widely – she loved Dante, Homer, Plutarch and Zola. Around her fourteenth birthday she began keeping an extraordinarily witty, uninhibited and occasionally rambling diary; she wrote her last entry eleven days before she died. Filled with life, fury, opinion, humour and ambition, her journal gives us a rare glimpse into the uninhibited musings of a nineteenth-century artist – she is as frank about her artistic ambitions and sexual desires as she is furious about the inevitable exclusions her gender imposes on her. In 1879 she writes:
What I long for is the freedom of going about alone, of coming and going, of sitting in the seats of the Tuileries, and especially in the Luxembourg, of stopping and looking at the artistic shops, of entering churches and museums, of walking about the old streets at nights; that’s what I long for; and the freedom without which one cannot become a real artist. Do you imagine that I get much good from what I see, chaperoned as I am, and when, in order to go to the Louvre, I must wait for my carriage, my lady companion and family?
By 1884 her fury still hadn’t abated: on 31 May she writes: ‘Had I had a sensible education I should be very remarkable. I taught myself everything.’ On Wednesday 25 June, re-reading her diary, she is exasperated: ‘As a man, I should have conquered Europe. Young girl as I was, I wasted it in excesses of language and silly eccentricities. Oh misery!’ Earlier in the year, on 5 January, she had visited a Manet exhibition at the School of Fine Arts and describes it as ‘incoherent, childish and grandiose’. Although she believes that some of his works are ‘perfectly crazy’, she concedes there are ‘splendid bits’ and ‘given a little more, and he would be one of the great masters of painting’.
Marie had decided to become an artist in 1877, at the age of nineteen. Her ambition to be a singer had been thwarted by a misdiagnosis of chronic laryngitis – in fact, she had tuberculosis. She enrolled at the Académie Julian which, founded in 1868 by the artist (and former wrestler) Rodolphe Julian – who was married to the painter Amélie Beaury-Saurel – was one of the few institutions in France to accept female students and, radically for the time, it also allowed them to study from a nude model. (I wonder how much pressure Amélie – who took over the directorship of the school at her husband’s death in 1907 – placed on Rodolphe to accept women?) By comparison, the pre-eminent academy at the time, the École des Beaux-Arts, didn’t allow women into its hallowed halls until 1897. Thanks to the Académie Julian’s indifference to language requirements – other art schools had strict policies about fluency in French – it attracted a host of international students. Marie excelled in this lively environment: a wonderful photograph taken of her at the school shows her working intently at her easel, draped in a voluminous black cape, painting a portrait of a young woman.
There is a sombre urgency to Marie’s Self-Portrait with Palette (1880). The young artist stands before us, looking directly out. Her expression is something of a challenge; it’s almost as if she’s up for a fight. She seems to know that she’s worth looking at – and perhaps, too, she has a premonition that she doesn’t have long to do what she has to do. Although not properly diagnosed with tuberculosis until 1882, she had been unwell for four years. (On Tuesday, 19 October 1880 she wrote sadly in her diary: ‘Alas! All this will end, after dragging out a few more years of miserable existence, in death […] I am like those too precocious children who are doomed to an early death.’)
Despite her privilege, Marie is casually dressed and unadorned, in black, as if mourning her future. Her untidy hair is pulled loosely back. There is a palpable defiance to her stance; her black eyes stare at us with a directness that borders on fierce. She holds her large palette in her left hand like a shield. She does not let us see what she is painting, but the gleam of her white ruff is echoed by the startling smudge of white paint on the palette, the only bright spot in a gloomy studio. Behind her is a harp, a nod, perhaps, to her earlier musical ambitions; it could also be a symbolic – and pre-emptively elegiac – allusion to heaven, which, throughout art history, has been pictured as populated by angels playing the instrument.
In 1880, Julian commissioned Marie to paint a portrait of students working in his academy. The result is In the Studio, a large painting that gives us an unusual glimpse of the working conditions for women at art school. Writing about the painting in her diary, the young artist observes: ‘As for the subject, it does not fascinate me, but it may be very amusing […] A woman’s studio has never been painted…’
She completed the painting in 1881: a portrait of fourteen women artists of various ages, and one small boy holding a staff, who is modelling for the class, in a cramped room, filled with easels, chairs, lights, drapes and a skeleton, its walls covered with sketches. The artists are painting or wielding brushes; one girl’s hand rests on a mahlstick; one girl looks at another’s work, another glances out at us looking at her; others are deep in thought, concentrating hard. The central figure – apparently a self-portrait – is sitting on a low stool, dressed in a dark blue smock and an oyster-shaped hat. She is scraping her palette with a knife but has no easel before her; perhaps her class has just finished. She turns as if to converse with an older woman, who holds a sketchbook and a brush and looks at her a little sternly. We will never know what their exchange was: this is a glimpse into a world, not an explanation of its details.
In late December 1882 it was confirmed that Marie, who much to her horror had gone deaf, also had consumption. Despite her fear, she was bleakly optimistic: ‘If ten years are still left to me, and if during these ten years I get love and fame, I will die content at thirty.’ She refused to slow down and instead focused on her painting. She was studying with the French Realist painter, Jules Bastien-Lepage, who was also suffering from tuberculosis. They became very close and were to die within three months of each other in 1884; he was only thirty-six. His Realist influence is clear in Marie’s best-known work, A Meeting, which was exhibited in the Salon of 1884. The painting, which is rendered with an icy clarity, depicts six young boys, the three faces that we can see clearly being full of character. With their ragged clothes and worn-out shoes, they are obviously poor; huddled together, they discuss an object the older boy is holding, but his back is towards us and we can’t see what it is. They are framed by a shabby wooden fence; in the distance, a girl walks away. It’s an enigmatic scene, and an unusual subject for a young aristocrat. The painting garnered so much acclaim, it was rumoured that Marie was not the sole author of it – surely she was aided by a man. Marie was not awarded a medal. She was furious.
Marie was not someone who did anything in half measures, not even dying. In 1883 she wrote, with her usual mix of wild self-confidence and self-doubt:
No, I shall not die until I am nearly 40 […] And my will! It will be limited to asking for a statue and a painting of Saint-Marceaux and of Jules Bastien-Lepage, in a chapel in Paris, surrounded by flowers in a conspicuous place; and on each anniversary to have masses by Verdi and Pergolesi sung there and other music, on each anniversary in perpetuity by the most celebrated singers. Beside this, I will found a prize for artists – male and female. Instead of doing this, I want to live; but I have no genius, so it is better to die.
Marie died a year later, on 31 October 1884. She left behind around 230 paintings, drawings and sculptures – an extraordinary achievement given her youth and chronic illness – although a good many were later destroyed by German bombs in World War II.
Marie’s mother more than fulfilled her daughter’s last request: her tomb was built in division 11 of the Passy Cemetery in Paris, where the artists Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot also lie, but in relatively modest plots. Marie’s final resting place puts theirs in the shade: an enormous chapel designed by Émile Bastien-Lepage that houses a recreation of the artist’s studio, complete with her furniture, books, a palette, and the titles of her paintings inscribed on the wall. In the centre of the room is a bust of Marie by René de Saint Marceaux; it’s flanked by those of her parents. Against the far wall hangs the young artist’s final, unfinished painting: a gloomy study of women saints. In recent years the tomb has fallen into disrepair, despite having been declared a historic monument by the French government.
Her mother also fulfilled another of her daughter’s desires. On 1 May 1884, Marie had written: ‘What is the use of lying or pretending? Yes, it is clear that I have the desire, if not the hope, of staying on this earth by whatever means possible. If I don’t die young, I hope to become a great artist. If I do, I want my journal to be published.’
In 1887, three years after her death, her mother published Marie’s journal. It was, however, heavily edited to tone down the young artist’s radicalism. Marie’s feelings of frustration at a lack of gender equality were modified and her mentions of repeated visits in 1880 to the apartment of Hubertine Auclert, the leader of the militant women’s suffrage group Le Droit des Femmes (The Rights of Women), were excised. Her mother also edited out her daughter’s financial support of the socialist and feminist journal La Citoyenne (The Citizen): using the pseudonym Pauline Orell, Marie had published several reviews and, on 20 February 1881, a searing opinion piece railing against the restrictions placed on women artists.
That said, The Journal, even in its expurgated form, was explosive and was admired by the most unlikely of readers, including, among others, the British prime minister Gladstone, who declared that Marie’s diary was ‘a book without parallel’. The playwright George Bernard Shaw and writers including Katherine Mansfield and Anaïs Nin declared themselves fans, and Marie’s amusingly flirtatious letters to Guy de Maupassant, who she never met, were also published in 1891. In recent years an unabridged edition of the complete journals – all sixteen volumes – has been published in French, and excerpts from the years 1873–6 have been released in English, edited by Katherine Kernberger. The edition’s apt title is a direct quote from Marie’s journal: I Am the Most Interesting Book of All.
It’s a testament to her ferocious, multifaceted talent that Marie is remembered less as a great painter than as a great writer. But for all her fluency, words were never quite enough. Look into her face and her fear, her impatience, her hunger for life are all there, both plain to see and yet rich with enigma and symbolism. I imagine her – so heartbreakingly young and yet so near death – tossing her pen aside and striding to her studio in order to wrestle with her self-portrait as if paint were the alchemical substance that might keep her alive forever.