10 Undersung Women Artists Across 500 Years

With the opening of the exhibition, Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe: 1400-1800, at the Baltimore Museum of Art, featuring the work of groundbreaking women artists across four centuries, we take a look back at artist and art critic Jennifer Higgie’s 2021 book The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution, and Resilience: 500 years of Women’s Self Portraits. The book features and takes a close look at women artists, some of whom are also in the exhibition such as Artemisia Gentileschi and Judith Leyster.

Throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, female artists like Lois Maillou Jones, Frida Kahlo, Leonora Carrington, Amrita Sher-Gil, and Alice Neel have continued to paint themselves and the world as they see it despite the barriers that have only more recently begun to erode.

Thanks to the work of diligent researchers like Higgie, the hidden talents of an eye-opening number of extraordinary female artists who have been, for too long, trapped in the shadows of their male counterparts, are finally exposed.

Here are ten female artists who unflinchingly painted their inner and outer realities over the last five centuries.