The visual arts

Two relatively essays that provide useful background on and interpretation of the state of research concerning early-modern women artists are Babette Bohn’s ‘From Oxymoron to Virile Paintbrush: Women Artists in Early Modern Europe’ and Sheila ffolliott’s ‘Early Modern Women Artists’. An unintended conceptual frame has seemingly circumscribed and limited a more comprehensive view of the presence and achievements of other early-modern women artists. Clearly the subject of early-modern women artists and landscape painting is an area of study in which negative assumptions need to be overcome so as to gain a wider and more accurate perception of what women artists could do. Beyond the field of painting, women artists worked in many different artistic media, demonstrating that virtually anything a man could do artistically, a woman could do as well. Due to social proprieties, women portraitists more frequently painted female sitters, rather than male, which could limit their commissioned work in comparison with a male portraitist.