Women in Art

The representation of women in art is one of the richest threads running through the entire history of Western painting. From Renaissance Madonnas to nineteenth-century Impressionists, from mythological goddesses to portraits of ordinary women, the female figure has crossed the centuries as the favourite subject of painters — men for the most part, and increasingly women as history unfolds. This collection brings together all the works in VMuseum where women are at the heart of the composition: Venus and nymphs sublimated by Boucher or Titian, Impressionist bourgeoisies captured by Renoir or Manet, intimate scenes of motherhood painted by Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot, dynastic portraits by Van der Weyden or Botticelli. It also gathers the works of the rare women artists who, from Lavinia Fontana in the sixteenth century to Judith Leyster in the seventeenth, imposed their own gaze on an art world long closed to their talent. To look at these paintings with a careful eye — asking who paints, who is painted, and to what end — is to transform a simple aesthetic stroll into a journey to the heart of the representations our societies have made of themselves.