ot many exhibitions turn the story of Britain and its art upside down. But this huge archaeological dig into the nation’s cultural past, from 1520 to 1920, does precisely that. It retrieves so many unjustly forgotten female artists, so many neglected works, far more than can be mentioned in a review – and all without rhetoric. Instead, its wall texts are factual and informative, simply amassing a vast amount of evidence. Now we see them.
Gentileschi’s inclusion may come as a surprise. But this remarkable Italian artist pitched up in Britain in 1638 at the court of Charles I and Henrietta Maria. Her father, already installed there as a court artist, was dying and she probably assisted with paintings for the ceiling of the Queen’s “House of Delight” in Greenwich. It was here at the Stuart court that Gentileschi created her amazingly alive, raw and precociously feminist Allegory of Painting.
This is proof enough that Now You See Us is a necessary exhibition. How could such a strong artistic personality get suppressed? It takes a disdainful army, misattributing here, belittling there, somehow never quite recording women’s art as carefully as men’s. Women excelled at it. Some of the most entrancing works here are botanical still lifes. Painting flowers was looked down on as women’s work, yet it was scientific. Clara Maria Pope’s ravishing early 19th-century pictures of peonies have been lent by the Natural History Museum, while’s Georgian studies of green and purple flowers and grasses, made by cutting coloured papers, come from her scientific project Flora Delanica.
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