Annette Standing Art Blog | Art, Drawing & Women Artists

The book that taught me art history

When I was at art college in the 1970s, one of the books we were taught from was E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art. (You can see my copy from Art college on the left).

It was — and remains — one of the most influential introductions to Western art ever written. I still have enormous respect for it. But looking back, something about it now seems extraordinary: where were the women?

I certainly didn’t sit in those classes wondering why there were NO female artists in the book..not ONE! . That was simply the story of art as it was presented to us. The great names were male, and we absorbed that canon almost without noticing.

That is one of the reasons I began my Forgotten Women Artists project. I’m not interested in blaming Gombrich, or in simply inserting a few women into an existing list of “great artists.” The more interesting question is why women disappeared from the story in the first place.

For centuries, women faced restrictions on artistic training, access to academies and life drawing, professional networks, patronage and the art market. Their work was more vulnerable to misattribution, neglect and changing fashions in collecting. Some achieved considerable success during their own lifetimes and were forgotten afterwards.

Artists such as Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, Rachel Ruysch and Rosa Bonheur were not waiting for the twenty-first century to discover that they were talented. Their contemporaries often knew it perfectly well.

So perhaps the question isn’t simply, “Why weren’t there more great women artists?”

A better question might be: “Why weren’t we taught about them?”

For me, that question began — although I didn't realise it at the time — in an art-college classroom in the 1970s, with The Story of Art open in front of me.