women's history Archives - New York City Art Museum Tours

10 Dec Women of the National Portrait Gallery

Posted at 09:55h in British history, courtesans, royal mistresses, scandals and secrets, Shady Ladies, Women's History by Professor Andrew Lear

London's National Portrait Gallery has a great collection of portraits of famous and important people from British history. If you ask the general public what that means, they would tell you it's a great place to see images of kings, queens, prime ministers, and other great people (mostly men). But actually, the National Portrait Gallery’s collection is much more fun than people realize. It contains a lot of portraits of people with really entertaining stories, and these stories often revolve around the one thing that can make historical people seem really relatable: love and sex. And many of the most interesting stories are about *women*.

[* Purchase Tickets To the Scandals & Secrets Tours of the National Portrait Gallery of London *]

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...

05 Jun The Queen of Courtesans, Imperia Cognati

Posted at 22:32h in art history, courtesans, Metropolitan Museum by jenni

Imperia Cognati (also called Imperia La Divina, meaning Imperia The Divine, or The Queen of Courtesans, 3 August 1486 - 15 August 1512), was a Roman courtesan. She has been considered the first celebrity of the class of courtesans, which was created in Rome in the late 15th century.

27 Apr The Scandalous Life of Duchess of Berry

Posted at 03:24h in art history, Metropolitan Museum, Shady Ladies, Women's History by jenni

The scandalous Duchess of Berry was born as Marie Louise Élisabeth d’Orleans on 20 August 1695 at the Palace of Versailles to Philippe II, Duke of Orléans and Françoise-Marie de Bourbon, who was a legitimized daughter of Louis XIV of France. She was near death several...

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 Marie Baltshirtseff: In The Studio

Posted at 09:08h in art history, Metropolitan Museum, Women's History by Professor Andrew Lear

[caption id="attachment_6066" align="alignleft" width="295"] Marie Bashkirtseff[/caption] The self-portrait is probably the most interesting tradition among women artists. Often women artists portray themselves as artists, or rather claim their status as an artist though self-portraiture; paintings of other women artists painting are a related tradition, involving a...

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