Female self-portrait in painting

[23][24][25][26][27][28] The artists who appear in the "Top 5" of the works referenced above are Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Frida Kahlo, Angelica Kauffmann and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, followed by Rosalba Carriera, Lavinia Fontana, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Helene Schjerfbeck and Suzanne Valadon.

Although they produced very few self-portraits, the impressionists Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt are often cited, as well as the pioneering Catharina van Hemessen and the iconic Tamara de Lempicka.

These include Ulrika Eleonora of Denmark, Anne de Hanovre, Countess Lulu von Thürheim, Leonor de Almeida Portugal, Marquise of Alorna, Princess Caroline Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt, Princess Charlotte Bonaparte, Ernestine Charlotte of Nassau-Schaumburg, who portrays herself as Saint Casilda, Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern as a gardener, Lady Diana Beauclerk as a Terpsichore, Louise Hollandine of the Palatinate as an allegory of painting, Amalia Wilhelmina von Königsmarck and Duchess Maria Antonia of Bavaria with palette and brushes.

A simple example among many others, when the portraits and self-portraits of Jacques-Louis David's female students were considered particularly successful, the teacher was suspected of being the author, and the false attribution was then adopted by posterity.

[40] Like Paula Modersohn-Becker, the unhappy wife of the academic painter Otto Modersohn, Marie Bracquemond, an admirer of Renoir and Monet, was married to someone who did not appreciate her aesthetic aspiration, the artist Félix Bracquemond, a renowned engraver and ceramicist, vice-president of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts; of a touchy nature, he succeeded in making her abandon impressionism, and even all artistic production twenty years after her self-portrait as a young bride.

[41] There are many examples of women artists under deleterious marital influence in the history of art, and one of them is illustrated in painting by the self-portrait of Maria Cosway made in 1787.

He used the beauty and talents of his young wife - she held a salon, received all of London, sang her own compositions and played the harp and harpsichord - to make her his ambassador, more prosaically his advertising front.

In 1830, widowed for 9 years, she was able to write "If Mr. C. had allowed me to get a professional position, I would have made a better painter; but left to myself, little by little, instead of improving, I lost everything I had acquired during my studies in Italy."

In the portraits drawn by her husband, she is as he wanted the world to see her; in her self-portrait three years before their separation, she resumes her Italian turban, but not the lipstick or the cameo, which, a fervent Catholic in an Anglican country, she replaces with a cross.