7 Remarkable paintings by women you need to see

Mary Cassatt (1844–1926) was one of just four women invited to exhibit with the first Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1874. She counted Camille Pissarro, Paul Gauguin and Edgar Degas among her admirers, the latter of whom became a mentor and lifelong friend.

Following Cassatt’s sister’s diagnosis with terminal kidney disease, Cassatt only painted her extended family in their private sphere. Woman and children were her special focus—critics dismissed them as the work of a “lady painter”, but Cassatt was hugely successful and her legacy lives on today.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and her husband’s arrest and death a year later, Zinaida Serebriakova (1884–1967) struggled to make a living as an artist. In 1924, she left her children with her mother in Russia and travelled to Paris for a commission. Little did she know that she would not return until 1965, due to a tightening of restrictions in Russia and, later, complications due to the Second World War.

Her paintings often featured landscapes near her family home in Neskuchnoye and her children going about their lives. A year after her return to Russia, her daughter organised a triumphant trio of exhibitions to celebrate her work.

Immediately recognisable for her striking features and penchant for bold colours, Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) began painting after a bus accident that crushed her spine, leg and collarbone.

Much of her work reflects her rich inner life, influenced by experiences such as three miscarriages and a marriage to fellow artist Diego Rivera that was soured by adultery. Her style is marked by bright colours and folklore influences, and the above Dos Mujeres was the first painting that Kahlo sold.

Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980) encapsulated the hedonism of the Art Deco era, having left Poland for Paris where she passed time “among its dukes, counts and poets in a blur of gin fizz and cocaine” (An Opinionated Guide to Women Painters).

She began painting to support her family and soon became a sought-after portraitist, with an art style that blended Neoclassicism, Cubism and Futurism.

After escaping Nazi Germany at the age of nine, Eva Frankfurther (1930–1959) settled in London with her Jewish parents. After graduating from St Martin’s School of Art she moved to London’s East End where she sought to immortalise Whitechapel’s population of orphans, rabbis, sex workers and street musicians through art, while working a day job at a teashop. The waitresses in the above painting may have been her colleagues.

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) was seemingly a leading young painter of her time in New York, part of the influential Artists’ Club and a participant in the 1951 Ninth Street Show that first presented Abstract Expressionism.

However, by 1959 she walked away from this scene and moved to France, where she lived in a home that overlooked a landscape Monet had painted. She could spend months on a single painting, saying, “The freedom in my work is quite controlled.” 

An Aboriginal elder, Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1909–1996) was one of Australia’s most important artists. Drawing on her experience making works with sand and batik as well as ceremonial body painting, she made her first painting on canvas when she was 79. Over the following eight years, she produced another 3,000.

One of these became the first work by a female Australian artist, and the first Aboriginal artwork, to sell for over a million dollars, while a solo show in Japan beat Andy Warhol to break audience records. Her paintings reflect her life as an Anmatyerre elder and her custodianship of sites of women’s “Dreaming” (an English word for Australian Aboriginal cosmology). 

An Opinionated Guide to Women Painters by Lucy Davies is published by Hoxton Mini Press