ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses that there remains a relatively small body of work in the history of Western art since the Renaissance that can, with any certainty, be firmly identified with specific women artists. Woman's place in the history of Western art is nowhere more clearly articulated than in Johann Zoffany's group portrait, The Academicians of the Royal Academy (1772). Marietta Robusti's social and economic autonomy would have been no greater than those of other women of the artisan class. Judith Leyster, one of the best-known painters of seventeenth-century Holland, was almost completely lost from history from the end of the seventeenth-century until 1893, when Cornelius Hofstede de Groot discovered her monogram on a painting titled The Happy Couple (1630) which had just sold as a Frans Hals. David, chronicler of the Revolution and painter to Emperor Napoleon, was France's foremost artist from the 1780s until his exile in 1816.
