nasty women

21 Dec Zoom Tours in 2020 and 2021

Posted at 00:02h in courtesans, fashion, fashion history, French women, Louvre Museum, nasty women, Paris, Paris tour, royal mistresses, scandals and secrets, Shady Ladies, Women's History by Professor Andrew Lear

At the end of this very real annus terribilis, I want to say a few words to you, our loyal readers and attendees. Above all, thanks! Thanks for keeping Shady Ladies Tours alive by reading our blog, attending our Zoom tours, watching our YouTube videos, contributing to our fundraisers—in short, for being a fabulously loyal community. When the pandemic hit the US, in March, it seemed likely to kill the company completely. Who would have thought that 9 months later, as the pandemic continued to rage, we would be putting on our 18th Zoom tour, with audiences regularly over 100, and have gathered over 28,000 views for our videos? It's been a hard year, but ours is a tiny, flourishing corner. And we have a lot more coming after the holidays! Want to find out more?

14 Aug Paris Women’s History in Père Lachaise

Posted at 00:18h in courtesans, French women, Louvre Museum, Metropolitan Museum, nasty women, Paris, Paris tour, Shady Ladies, Women's History by Professor Andrew Lear

Bold and sexy women must always have existed everywhere, but in history they seem to be a French specialty. There are a number of places where you can learn about them in Paris. The Louvre and Orsay museums are great, for instance, or the royal...

Hatshepsut, the Nasty Woman of ancient Egypt

21 Jan Nasty Women of History and Art

Posted at 13:46h in art history, Metropolitan Museum, nasty women, Women's History by Professor Andrew Lear

It seems unbelievably dated, but people are still calling ambitious, intelligent women "nasty women." As if that could hurt anyone's feelings in 2020! In fact, like many other outdated insults, it has the opposite effect. Many women today are are taking the term on (as lesbians took on the term 'dyke') and calling themselves "nasty women" in sarcastic protest.

23 Apr Watch: Virginia Hall America’s Most Successful Female Spy

Posted at 01:58h in nasty women, Shady Ladies, Women's History by jenni

Virginia Hall, a one-legged socialite from Baltimore whom the CIA Museum would later hail as the office’s most successful American female spy of the Second World War. She was the most highly decorated female civilian during World War II. Watch and learn more about this...

20 Apr Tapestry of Diane de Poitiers

Posted at 02:14h in art history, courtesans, nasty women, Shady Ladies, Women's History by jenni

Diane de Poitiers, represented on this wall hanging as the goddess Diana, was so powerful in France when she was the mistress of King Henri II that they often signed his correspondence with one word: HENRIDIANE. Find out more about powerful women in history on...

21 Aug Painter Mary Ann Alabaster

Posted at 09:49h in art history, Metropolitan Museum, nasty women by Professor Andrew Lear

One of the most important traditions among women painters is the self-portrait in which the artist claims her status as an artist. This is a 19th century English example, by the painter Mary Ann Alabaster, who shows you herself painting a portrait of herself (a self-portrait within a self-portrait) surrounded by her works in different genres.

21 Aug Seen at the Tate: Nameless & Friendless by Emily Mary Osborn 1857

Posted at 09:22h in art history, nasty women, Shady Ladies, Women's History by Professor Andrew Lear

Emily Mary Osborn was one of the most important artists associated with the campaign for women’s rights in the nineteenth century. The daughter of a clergyman, she was brought up in Kent and Essex until 1842 when the family moved back to London. It was here that she trained as an artist at Dickinson’s academy in Maddox Street and then at Leigh’s in Newman Street. During the 1850s Osborn established a reputation as a genre painter specialising in figurative subjects of ‘unpretending character’ – the most significant of which were pictures of modern women in pathetic situations, similar to works by Richard Redgrave and Rebecca Solomon. Home Thoughts, which was painted in 1856 and exhibited at the Royal Academy that same year, was followed by her most famous work Nameless and Friendless in 1857. A full-scale, squared-up preparatory design for the latter exists in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and a smaller version in oil in York Art Gallery.

21 Aug 19th Century Painter Rosa Bonheur

Posted at 09:00h in art history, Metropolitan Museum, nasty women by Professor Andrew Lear

One of the great animal painters of the 19th century, Rosa Bonheur, portrayed by her life-partner, the American painter Anna Klumpke. For once, Bonheur is wearing women's clothing, but her gown's monochrome simplicity and its jacket-like bodice, along with her strong features and lack of make-up, coiffure etc. certainly make her somewhat gender-ambiguous. In fact, it's hard to say what modern category (if any) Bonheur fit in. A trans activist recently suggested to me that she may have been intersex, which I consider interesting. Whatever the case was, however, she certainly was an early example of a modern, unmarried career woman—and the painting absolutely conveys her strength and independence.

31 Aug The feminist concept of the “male gaze”

Posted at 17:27h in art history, courtesans, Metropolitan Museum, nasty women by Professor Andrew Lear

The feminist concept of the "male gaze" is useful in art criticism. The concept originally comes from film studies, where it is used to discuss the fact that men traditionally controlled the camera, of which women were an object. Men certainly also controlled the brush...

20 Jun Nasty Women of the MFA Boston

Posted at 00:52h in art history, museum of fine arts, nasty women, Women's History by Professor Andrew Lear

The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is of course one of the world's great museums. It is also a great place for a women's history tour. There are very few of the courtesans or mistresses that make up our Shady Ladies tour in New York: I suspect that the Boston collectors of the 19th century were too prudish to buy pictures on themes they knew were racy. But the museum has a great collection of what we're calling (ironically) "nasty women"—feisty, ambitious women from many periods of history.